Off on Holidays
I’m taking a week off to go hiking in some of the amazing back country that California has to offer. Assuming I don’t get eaten by a bear, I’ll see you all around Sep 6….
Back in the US, and Daniel’s interview
Misc: So I was travelling last week — a very productive trip to the UK visiting the main work dev office, and getting a little socialising in too while I was at it. A pretty good trip overall, especially since I seem to have figured out how to use my frequent flyer miles effectively to get great seats! ;)
Here’s a good interview with SpamAssassin PMC chair, Daniel; well worth a read if you want to see what we in SpamAssassin think about the state of the onion in spam-filtering.
In not-so-good news, it seems Charlie McCreevy has managed to push the software patent directive through, despite massive EU Parliament unhappiness. Third time around at the Fisheries meeting, naturally; and there’s some serious questions about the legitimacy of the procedural rules invoked by the Commission in refusing to take the directive off the A-item menu. Now that’s what I call democracy…
It can still be defeated, but it’s an uphill battle now — for it to be thrown out in the second reading at the European Parliament, it’ll need a two-thirds majority of all MEPs (not just the MEPs present), reportedly.
In the meantime, thanks to the FF and PDs’ bullying tactics, Ireland’s small but growing pool of homegrown software developers are being ignored, and the Irish software industry looks more like a lame import operation for the likes of Microsoft. Our reputation is dragged through the mud for a few multinationals, and the rest of Europe resents us for it. Wonderful.
BTW, even if it does pass, there are ways to fix it — directives must be implemented into national law in each country. This means that Ireland could still write their implementation of the directive to exclude software inventions (even the ones where it’s supposedly a patent on hardware like ‘a CPU connected to a hard disk, with such-and-such software running on the CPU’). However, given McCreevy’s obvious bias in favour of getting this specific text into place, how likely is that going to be?
Tags: cpu, directive, meps, misc, parliament, patent, software, spamassassin, trip, week, work
EU Software Patent tricks — very fishy antics
Patents: This is really absurd — according to this ZDNet UK article, it now looks like the EU Council is considering railroading the EU software patent directive through, by hiding it as an ‘A-item’ in a Fisheries Council Meeting the week before xmas:
Laura Creighton, the vice-president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), is concerned that the EU Council could be contemplating passing the directive without discussion in an unrelated meeting.
‘Before today it was possible for generous people to look charitably at this text (the proposed patent directive) as an example of a tragic mistake, not malice,’ said Creighton in a statement on the FFII Web site. ‘But not with this last-minute manoeuvring.’
‘Only the most committed opponent to the democratic process would believe that the proper response to the widespread consensus that there is something profoundly wrong with the Council’s text is to race it through with an A-item approval the week before Christmas in a Fisheries Council Meeting. The bad smell coming from Brussels has nothing to do with the fish.’
Reportedly, A-items are dealt with by asking the assembled councillors if they have any objections to any of the outstanding items. They’re not listed in detail at the meeting, so this way the directive can be passed in what is effectively a submarine (boom boom!) manner.
Related: Alan Cox has not been invited to the UK Patents office’s public meeting on software patents tomorrow.
In a Talkback to ZDNet UK’s earlier story highlighting the issue, Cox wrote: ‘I too was mysteriously overlooked despite having written to my MP and received an answer.’ …. Cox, who has previously been invited to speak on software patents at the EU, said the Patent Office apparently fears ‘every word I have to say about their plans’. He went on to add: ‘Unfortunately with all the underhand game playing both in the EU council of ministers and in UK government and patent circles it isn’t the slightest surprise.’
Also related: Jason Schultz (EFF) on the Commerce One web-services patent auction last week:
Here, the patents at issue were less valuable to companies that actually produce Web services products than they were to firms that produce nothing but lawsuits and licensing threats. In other words, patents like these have become worth more as weapons than as protections for companies competing in the marketplace.
Many have compared these new patent licensing firms to terrorists, and in some ways, the analogy is apt. When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the biggest worries was that rogue military personnel might sell off one or more of the USSR’s nuclear missiles to a terrorist group. Securing those weapons became a top priority. The reason was fear – fear that the terrorists, who had little to nothing at stake in terms of world peace and national stability, would use the missiles to extort or manipulate the world political climate. Unlike the United States or China, which could be retaliated against and which had a stake in stability, terrorists were essentially immune from attack, and thrived on instability.
With the patents of bankrupt dot-coms, the dynamics are similar. Rogue licensing firms buy up these patents and then threaten legitimate innovators and producers. They have no products on which a countersuit can be based and no interest in stable marketplaces, competition or consumer benefit. Their only interest is in the bottom line.
While profit itself is often a worthy objective, it is not always synonymous with innovation. Every dollar a tech company pays to patent lawyers or licensing firms is one less dollar available for R&D or new hires. Thus, many companies that offer new products end up paying a ‘tax’ on innovation instead of receiving a reward. When this happens, it’s a signal that the patent system is broken. Forcing companies to pay lawyers instead of creating jobs and new products is the wrong direction for our economy to be headed and not the result our patent system should be promoting.
Tags: council, cox, directive, ffii, item, meeting, patent, patents, software, text, week
Lara Doody Smith
Life: Luke writes:
Lean and I were joined by Lara at 6.10pm on Saturday 28th September. Lara is a little (8lb 7oz, so not _that_ little) girl. And she is gorgeous. Of course.
Congrats! I’ll be dropping in on the three of them next week, looking forward to it…
Tags: congrats, course, girl, life, saturday, september, week
Olympic commentator stupidity
‘Papers!’ and the Hass
Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.
Then I had an 11-hour transatlantic flight, stuck in the middle of a 5-seat row with pointy elbows on both sides; then, best of all, arrived at US Immigration and found myself fingerprinted and had my photo taken, in accordance with their new policies under the US-VISIT program.
Apparently the biometrics equipment providers are a company called Cross Match Technologies. Fingers crossed (arf!) they have better false positive rates than their competitor, Identix.
I’m looking forward to seeing similar false-positive-prone usage of biometric data, for US visitors to other countries in response. (With hilarious results!)
Aside: I wonder how href=”http://use.perl.org/%7eMatts/journal/18915″>Matt’s cooking-related-program-activities injury will affect his biometric profile?
Also of relevance — apparently Boston are introducing random spot-checks of passenger’s papers on their metro transport.
It’s interesting that travel by train requires a passport, driver’s license, or similar heavyweight documentation — but one can zip around the country unimpeded by road. Of course, all of this is moot, seeing as the 9/11 hijackers had perfectly-in-order documentation, including driver’s licenses, and travelled extensively under their real names and passports. One wonders what exactly all this has to do with the War Against Terror, given that.
Funny: Knight Foundation, featuring a downloadable David Hasselhoff Paper Plane! Don’t forget, the song ‘Hot Shot City’ is particularly good.
Tags: camper, culture, documentation, driver, flight, hour, middle, semi-detached, transatlantic, travel, week
More on the Stallman talk
Ireland: So I forgot to mention who’s running the Richard Stallman talk in TCD next week.
It’s IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation, with some help from TCD Netsoc apparently (so there’ll be a nominal 3-euron charge for the room from them).
Latest news on their news page…
Tags: free, help, ifso, ireland, irish, news, organisation, software, talk, tcd, week
taint.org got NTK’d!
Meta: NTK this week linked to my closed-group filesharing roundup — thanks!
One I’d missed — Shinkuro. Looks very interesting, although pretty proprietary at a glance. It remains to be seen what their availability and prices will be like…
Tags: availability, glance, looks, meta, ntk, roundup, shinkuro, week
Megalithomania!
History: 
Megalithomania is an incredible
website ‘originally dedicated to Irish megaliths, but now expanded to
include all sorts of antiquities that are of importance/interest.’
The author visits sites each week, writes up brief reports, takes photos, and logs the log on this excellent website; every site is added to a map, and there’s a whole load of ways to find sites by location, by clicking on a flash map, by date of visit etc.
It’s a triumph of usability, very pretty, and who knew there was a kist in Dublin Zoo’s tapir enclosure?
Hope everyone had a good Paddy’s Day! (PS: note: most definitely not ‘Patty’s Day’.)
Tags: author, day, history, importance, interest, log, map, megalithomania, site, website, week
Local e-Voting Screw-up
eVoting: Craig passes on this link: apparently thousands of Orange County voters were given the wrong ballots in last week’s election. The result is that in 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. It gets better — apparently the voting machine vendor has said it will be impossible to figure out how many ballots are invalid as a result. It’d be funny if it wasn’t such a big deal…
Tags: cast, deal, election, evoting, link, machine, result, vendor, voting, week
ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS
Back
Back from a great week-and-a-half in Ireland. Lots of fun (and Guinness) was had, Luke and Lean were successfully married, Ireland is officially the most beautiful country in the world, weather was amazing, got to meet up with virtually everyone, and I’m now back at the computer catching up.
Of course, some git has joe-jobbed both myself and a mailing list I’m on, so there’s thousands of bounce messages as a result and the server is slow as a wet week. Argh. But at least the SoBig onslaught has died down a bit.
Interestingly, I reported some spam to SpamCop a week or two before the joe-job. I wonder if the two really are connected — ie. report spam, and the spammers will decode the listwashing tokens from their mails, figure out your email address, and add you to their ‘enemies list’?
This is the first time I’ve reported spam to SpamCop in a long time, and the first joe-job I’ve been victim of. It seems like more than a coincidence, IMO.
Tags: country, everyone, fun, guinness, spam, spamcop, time, weather, week, world
On hols
I’m in Ireland for my friends’ wedding for the next week and a half, so blogging will be infrequent. ;)
Back again
So I’m back — I was up in Sunnyvale last week, on a work trip. Met up with Dan Kohn for the first time, which was great, and also had an impromptu SpamAssassin summit with Craig and Dan Quinlan — and got to meet the newest arrival in the Hughes family, the very cute Evan Alice.
I was hoping to meet up with a few more people, but didn’t quite organise it in the limited time there. Maybe next visit!
ObLAvBayAreaComment: Amazing how much better the drivers are up there, too. ;)
Still averaging about 68 SoBig.F virus mails, at about 100Kb each, for a total of about 7Mb per hour. That means my ‘reject’ mailbox is at 412 megs since Friday afternoon. Beats Charlie Strosser’s figures ;)
It’s all getting quietly bitbucketed, but the side-effects are still nasty. Take a look at this, for example; someone at adjv503ry3ec.ab.hsia.telus.net (142.59.69.220) has been spewing SoBig.F’s at the FoRK list, using my address, non-stop for weeks. Argh.
Patents: Richard Allen MP tackles the thorny software patents issue. It’s great being able to follow his thinking on these lines — more politicians should consider starting a weblog along these lines. True transparency.
Much better than Arlene McCarthy’s railing against ‘The Misinformation Campaign … by the Free Software Alliance’, whoever they are… I particularly like this statement from her PR:
If we were to follow the demands of these lobbyists then we would be handing over inventions to US multinationals and getting no return on our R&D investments in the field of computer implemented inventions. This will sound the death knell for our brightest and best European inventors, whilst the US and Japan will demand licence fees from European companies for the use of their patents. Without patent protection there will be no financial incentive for our most creative industries to develop genuine inventions.
… but — given that (a) software patents cannot currently be enforced in Europe, and (b) that 77% of the (currently-unenforceable) EPO software patents are registered already to non-EU companies, the only way for the US and Japan to ‘demand licence fees from European companies for the use of their patents’ would be if McCarthy’s proposed directive was passed, allowing those patents to be enforced in the EU. Oops — own goal!
VR: so I don’t lose this, Jaron Lanier’s 11 reasons why Virtual Reality has not yet become commonplace.
History: Came across the original SpamAssassin pre-release ‘try it out’ mail:
after quite of while of thinking about it, I’ve finally rewritten the spam filter I’ve been using for a while, and released it as free software.
It’s called SpamAssassin, and it’s a mail filter to identify spam using text analysis. Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam, which it then tags for later filtering using the user’s own mail user-agent application.
Tags: met, sobig, software, spamassassin, summit, sunnyvale, time, trip, week, work
Snopes: Urban Legends Urban Legend
Brilliant. From this week’s b3ta newsletter via the forteana list comes this work of one-liner UL genius:
Snopes conspiracy: ‘ Snopes was set up in early 1995 by the CIA as a way to debunk popular conspiracy theories, Companies and individuals can now pay to have their urban legend denied on the site, a prime beneficiary being Richard Gere.’
Spam: Hackers Hijack PC’s for Sex Sites (NYT). Good article about a (suspected) Russian spam ring using hijacked PCs and reverse proxies to host spamvertized websites.
Ceramics: Anyone who’s been following the IRTF’s Anti-Spam Research Group mailing list recently, will have come across Mark McCarron’s ‘proposal’ regarding an anti-spam system that has something to do with everyone paying 5,000 UKP, ditching end-to-end SMTP, stopping any non-human-initiated e-mail, and energy from the Pyramids of Giza (I think).
Surprisingly enough, The Reg wrote some unkind words, and now Mark exercises his right to reply. Unmissable, mainly for the details of his reign of terror during school and his ‘jack of all trades’ abilities.
Great fun, in a kind of ‘watching a car-crash’ way.
Tags: brilliant, conspiracy, forteana, list, newsletter, snopes, spam, way, week, work
European Software Patent amendments contd.
Arlene McCarthy is the MEP proposing to amend the operations of the European patent office, and permit software patents in Europe.
Last week, the Guardian printed this story by Nick Hill and rms setting out the free software position on why software patents should be avoided.
Now, McCarthy’s response:
We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not ‘free’, but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.
No comment…
Tags: guardian, industry, mep, office, patent, position, response, software, story, week
The Today Programme
The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 has been my main news source for several months (at least since I moved to somewhere with decent broadband, and didn’t have to contemplate getting up at unearthly hours to listen to it ;) .
In the past week or two, they’ve broken a major story, the ’sexing-up’ allegations against the UK government’s Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier (yes, that’s ’sexing-up’.)
There’s transcripts of the interviews here and on the Times website (thanks to P O’Neill for the pointer to the latter). Well worth a read, if you enjoy hearing evasive politicians getting skewered by a skillful interviewer. ;)
Tags: bbc, broadband, news, programme, radio, source, story, the, today, week
Cat Murderer
My cat has turned into a murderer. For the last week, he’s been going out and bagging 1-2 wild animals per day; mostly rabbits, but some voles and a finch too.
It’s really wrecking my head. I don’t have the nuts to kill a half-dead rabbit in cold blood, so I wind up leaving them in the bushes to die; and I’m sure that’s exactly what happens to most of ‘em. The other day I had to fish out a dead baby rabbit, put it in a plastic bag, and dump it in the bin.
Maybe I should leave them out for the hawks. There’s a pretty big peregrine and red-tailed hawk population around here.
Alternatively, maybe some cat
transformation sets would help… at least around the house: ‘The cat
which became a hood figure is likely to have a broom at any moment, and is
likely to begin cleaning.’
Bonus: via jwz:
Tags: baby, blood, cat, day, finch, fish, head, murderer, rabbit, week
Northern Ireland policing: imploding
Wow, the policing situation in Northern Ireland is undergoing meltdown (again).
First off, ‘Stakeknife’ has been named. He was a very high-up member of the IRA (’head of security for the IRA’s northern command’ apparently), and a double agent for the British Army’s FRU division. The Sunday Herald coverage is here. This is seemingly due to some revelations by a double-agent turned whistleblower.
He’s not a nice character by all accounts:
‘It would be tantamount to being exposed as running a Latin American-style murder squad if the truth came out,’ one said. Unlike Nelson, Stakeknife sometimes did the killings himself. He is also supposed to have arranged for republican targets to be in the wrong place at the wrong time so loyalist hit teams could ‘take them out’. An intelligence source added: ‘This guy was licensed to kill and he killed very many people — or arranged their deaths.’
So, last week, Castlereagh barracks — where files on the agent were kept, and ’supposedly the most secure security force barracks in western Europe’ – was broken into by a team from British Army intelligence. From that article, it seems pretty brazen; they used army passes, went directly to the room where the papers were moved, knew that security teams were not operational, took exactly the right files, and left:
One former FRU source said: ‘There was no way it was paramilitaries – they couldn’t pull it off. The branch couldn’t do it as they’d get spotted by their own pals in the RUC and MI5 just don’t do rough stuff like this. There’s no one except an intelligence corps CME team who could do this and there is no other motive for them doing it than protecting Stakeknife.’
More NI stuff: Martin McGuinness transcripts: Cryptome again. Surprisingly interesting, mostly for the relaxed chats with Mo Mowlam!
- Mo: ‘Ahem, the second thing I was gonna say was that I was gonna go to AMERICA and if I’ve got it I’m still gonna go for a couple of days, this week. So I won’t be around much and then I’m on two weeks holiday.’
- MM: ‘Right’.
- Mo: ‘So, it was really if there was anything, ahem?’
- MM: ‘Your holiday plans and mine are colliding then.’
- Mo: ‘I’m going 26th for two weeks’.
- MM: ‘So am I, 26th for two weeks.’
- Mo: ‘Your not going to TURKEY I hope?’
- MM: ‘No I’m going to Kerry.’
- (Both laugh)
Tags: agent, army, barracks, british, gonna, intelligence, security, source, stakeknife, week
‘Crows shall feed on Gordon Brown’s pancreas’
Ben Hammersley links to these two works of comedic genius: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s new column in the Grauniad:
Earlier in the week I watched as joyous Iraqis celebrated our triumph by pulling down - with the help of defecting American soldiers - Baghdad’s only statue of actor Robert Donat as Mr Chips. I understand it was quite a good film, but we have no need of your imperialist icons now. Saddam has freed us from your oppressive rule, so we are saying goodbye to your Mr Chips. Ha! I have made myself laugh! I will not gloat further over this thrilling but predictable defeat which vindicates me so completely.
Also, a blog here. Brilliant.
Tags: actor, al, column, genius, grauniad, help, iraqis, statue, triumph, week
Artprice/artlist: winners of the address-scraping spammer speed record
Wow. A spammer has already scraped my blog and caught that one-use cdt_comment_go address I posted a week or so ago. That has to be a record. Ah well, Bayes and the SBL are catching it nicely…
The spammer in question is artprice.com, aka. artlist.com, aka a bunch of unrepentant spammers who’ve been out-and-out spamming for years, from France. Nothing worse than a full-time spamhaus. My consolation is that if they do this after August, I can prosecute them for it, since France is in the EU ;)
Just for reference, if anyone finds this on a Google search: the address was a one-use disposable job, for comments on a survey, posted once, and never used for sign-ups or even to send a single mail message. This is 100% spam, through and through.
Tags: aka, bayes, blog, cdt, com, comment, record, sbl, spammer, week
Saddam Hussein’s top tips for tourists
Newsflash! Irish local newspapers come through with bizarre-ness yet again:
Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East. In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra …
‘All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10′. I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’
They said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.’
Tune in next week, when Saddam helps out with some tricky carpet-buying negotiations…
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:21:19 +0100
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: And on the lighter side…
http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=429949
Irish farmer is ‘a cut above the rest’
Paper Clips: A round-up of the weekly press
By Tony Bailie
MOST of the north’s regional papers again carried stories last week giving a local perspective on the war in Iraq, but the most remarkable was in the Impartial Reporter.
Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East.
In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra to take up a lecturing post.
He told the paper: “I had just flown into the country and landed at Baghdad airport in the dead of night. I took a taxi to the bus station to make my way down to Basra which was about 60 kilometres away.
“All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do.
“Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and
said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you £10′.
“I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All
the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them
afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’
and they said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.”
According to the Larne Times the borough council found itself in an awkward position because of the war.
The town, which is due to host Iraqi athletes during the Special Olympics in June, had put up a sign declaring: “Larne Host Town to Iraq”.
However, according to the paper the wife of a serving British soldier, currently in southern Iraq, objected and called for the sign to be taken down.
The paper reported: “She said she felt the wording of the sign and the timing of its erection was ‘inappropriate’.”
“Others took more direct action, however, spray painting the head of the town sign ‘No Way’.” A few days later the words “Ulster Says No” where added.
According to the Larne Times the sign was subsequently removed, a decision described by Larne Borough Council chief executive Colm McGarry as “common sense”.
The soldier’s wife who lodged the objection stressed that she had no objections to the Special Olympics.
“It was the wording of the sign that annoyed me - I nearly crashed my car when I saw it,” she told the paper.
However, Larne’s mayor, Councillor Bobby McKee, told the paper that while he sympathised with the objectors he believed the sign should have stayed up.
“The war is against Saddam Hussein and his regime, not against disabled people. I find great difficulty in getting my head around any opposition to people with a disability,” he told the paper.
– Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk
Tags: city, interview, man, offering, paper, saddam, schoolteacher, taxi, way, week
Robin Cook’s viewpoint
Robin Cook, who resigned from the UK cabinet last week:
… If you take a response to 9/11 as being a driving force of the American approach to international affairs, I would strongly argue that one of the greatest assets that came out of that was the extraordinarily rich and powerfully diverse coalition against international terrorism.’
That coalition, according to Cook, has now been shattered on the altar of pre-emptive diplomacy. America has long planned to attack Iraq and splits in the UN, Nato and in the European Union were a price worth paying.
‘Now, I’m not an American politician but if I was I would be inveighing against the extent to which the Bush administration had allowed that terrific asset to disintegrate,’ Cook said.
‘Instead the US is left embarking on military action from a position of diplomatic weakness, unable to get any major international organisation to agree with it. We are heading for a very serious risk of a big gulf between the Western and Islamic world. That seems to me to have thrown away a powerful asset for the US which relates to its number one security concern.’
Also, some history (thanks to Dan Brickley for forwarding this): Ireland as the pivot of a league of nations, written by Michael Collins in 1921, shortly after Ireland’s declaration of independence from the UK:
Into such a League might not America be willing to enter? By doing so America would be on the way to secure the world ideal of free, equal, and friendly nations on which her aspirations are so firmly fixed. Ireland’s inclusion as a free member of this League would have a powerful influence in consolidating the whole body, for Ireland is herself a mother country with world-wide influences, and it is scarcely to be doubted that were she a free partner in the League as sketched the Irish in America would surely wish America to be associated in such a combination. In that League the Irish in Ireland would be joined with the Irish in America, and they would both share in a common internationality with the people of America, England, and the other free nations of the League. Through the link of Ireland a co-operation and understanding would arise between England and America, and would render unnecessary those safeguards which England wishes to impose upon Ireland and which by preserving an element of restraint might render less satisfactory the new relations between the two countries.
It’s incredible to consider how much has changed in world politics since those words were written 82 years ago.
And finally, some humour: Power Phillips Home Page:
Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.
The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn’t be caught dead in a courtroom.
Litigation lawyers are the type who will lie, cheat and steal to win a case and who can’t complete a sentence without the words ‘I object’ or ‘I demand another extension on that filing deadline.’ Many people believe that litigation lawyers are the reason all lawyers are held in such low esteem by the public. Powers Phillips, P.C. is pleased to report that only three of its lawyers, Trish Bangert, Tom McMahon, and Tamara Vincelette are litigation lawyers, and only one of them is a man.
And it gets worse from there on.
Tags: approach, asset, cabinet, coalition, driving, force, league, response, week, world
A sextet of ales!
subject line of the week — sounds like the spammer’s been listening to Homer’s Vocabulary Builder tape:
Subject: < Hi Jm, I am Bella, concupiscent youngster >
Tags: builder, concupiscent, line, spammer, subject, tape, vocabulary, week, youngster
Er, um, fundamentally
The Guardian: Word of the week: “basically”:
“Perhaps you are one of those strong individuals who manages to resist the use of meaningless adverbs, but others will have recognised, guiltily, one of their own favourite words appearing as a verbal tic in a widely broadcast statement this week. On Friday, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, accused of attempting to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami, introduced a slice of South London syntax into the Boston court where he is being tried. Questioned by the judge about his intentions, he declared: “Basically, I got on to the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane.” …
Tags: broadcast, favourite, friday, guardian, plane, shoe, statement, use, week, word
(Untitled)
(Untitled)
Matthew Leeming describes his unnerving encounter in Afghanistan with the murderers of General Massoud:
This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed, disguised as a woman in a shapeless burqa, over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of people who, by English standards, were decidedly weird … so the two Moroccan journalists with whom I shared a house in the Panjshir seemed almost normal. It was not until after they had killed themselves and General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Afghan anti-Taleban forces, a week later that I realised I had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 14:25:20 +0000
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Breakfast with the killers
Breakfast with the killers
Matthew Leeming describes his unnerving encounter in Afghanistan with the murderers of General Massoud
‘Every year there’s one place in the globe worth going to where things are happening,’ says Basil Seal to his mother, immediately before stealing her jewels to fund such a trip. ‘The secret is to find out where and to be on the spot at the time.’
This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed, disguised as a woman in a shapeless burqa, over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of people who, by English standards, were decidedly weird — one man asked me if it were true that in England women could marry their dogs — so the two Moroccan journalists with whom I shared a house in the Panjshir seemed almost normal. It was not until after they had killed themselves and General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Afghan anti-Taleban forces, a week later that I realised I had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.
Foreigners in Afghanistan tread a fairly well-worn path, usually a triangle between the acting capital in Faisalabad, the Panjshir valley and the government’s military base, Khawja Bahauddin, in the north. Transport is either by Jeeps that cost $200 per day, or — for the really reckless — the government’s ropy, Russian-built helicopters.
I had heard that if there is a Shangri-la it is the Panjshir in August, a narrow, fertile valley surrounded by arid mountains from which the Afghans have for centuries shot at their invaders. It ends at Kabul, which is now one of the main battle-fronts between the government and the Taleban. I arrived, after a torturing road journey from Khawja Bahauddin, between the mulberry and grape harvests, and as I walked along the road groups of men and children invited me to join them for lunch. It was a sponger’s paradise.
I was an official guest of the government, and now my guide, Qhudai, took me to the government guest house, opposite the government’s helicopter base, before leaving me to recover. I was woken before dawn every morning by the shriek of helicopter engines starting up, and would take my breakfast watching soldiers embarking for the flight to another front. No expense has been spared on the house itself, nor on the bill for staff, and I was comfortable for the first time in a month. (I had been sleeping in chai khanas, which are a cross between a night shelter for the homeless and a boarding school.) For two days I was served enormous meals of mutton and rice, alone in a dining-room designed to seat 30. This changed when the Moroccan journalists arrived.
I first saw them pacing up and down in front of the house. They did not return my hello. That evening I was served dinner on the floor of my room as the Moroccans made free with the dining-room. They spent all the next day in their bedroom with the door open, lying on their beds and staring at the ceiling.
On Qhudai’s return, I delegated him to make inquiries from the staff. ‘They are Arabs,’ he reported, with some disgust. ‘They are very unfriendly.’
The next day I determined to break the ice. ‘I’m not eating in my room,’ I told the major domo. ‘I shall eat with the journalists.’ At eight p.m. sharp I presented myself in the dining-room. Both journalists had already started on the bread. There was a definite hierarchy between them. The first sat at the head of the table. He was large and dark, but his most curious feature were two blackened indentations on his forehead, which looked like the result of torture with an electric drill.
I asked him where he and his companion came from and he said Morocco, but they lived in Brussels. I tried to have a polite conversation about holiday destinations in Morocco, but he was unforthcoming. There was something about his manner that prevented me from asking exactly where he lived in Brussels. His companion said nothing, but ate his way through the rice and mutton with a hearty appetite.
The next day the senior Moroccan saw me using a satellite phone, and he became a good deal more amiable. Satellite phones are status symbols but also basic necessities for travel in Afghanistan, and mine had got me out of a number of scrapes already. He approached me, and asked if I had the phone number of Bismillah Khan, the military commander of the Panjshir. I did, and volunteered the services of Qhudai to help.
‘We are doing a television documentary about Afghanistan, and we need to get on a helicopter to Khawja Bahauddin,’ he told me.
The person to arrange this was the commander of the Panjshir, Bismillah Khan. As it happened, I had met him several days before and knew his telephone number. But he didn’t answer.
‘Do you have General Massoud’s number?’ asked the senior Moroccan. I was slightly staggered.
‘No. I don’t think he gives it out. You see, the Russians can find out where you are from a satellite phone and send a missile in to kill you. That was how they got Dudaev.’
Qhudai looked slightly menacing.
‘Why do you want to meet Commander Massoud?’ I asked the Moroccans. I remember them exchanging glances.
‘For our TV film,’ he said.
Afterwards Qhudai said to me, ‘I think they are spies.’
‘But everyone’s a spy in Afghanistan,’ I said. ‘You’re a spy.’
‘But they are Arab spies.’ There seems little love lost between Persian speakers and Arabs, so I put this down to racial prejudice.
We left shortly afterwards, and gave no further thought to the Moroccans, except occasionally to speculate that they were probably still waiting in the Panjshir for a helicopter.
A week later we heard that Massoud had been fatally injured in a Taleban attack, but it was only after we had crossed the border into Pakistan and saw a newspaper report that two Moroccans posing as journalists were responsible that we realised the identity our companions. Qhudai reproached himself for his stupidity. I was horrified that we had spent five nights sleeping next to a room full of several kilos of explosives.
After talking on the phone to some of Massoud’s lieutenants we managed to piece together an account of what had happened. While Massoud’s security was tight in many ways, he was always prepared to see journalists. He was a charming, well-educated product of a French lycée and journalists were always happy to see him. Access was controlled by a sidekick we had come to loathe — Engineer Asim — who was obstructive until he was offered money. Asim let the Moroccans into Massoud’s room.
According to our sources, Massoud immediately realised that there was something wrong (the torture marks on the forehead?), and shouted to Asim to get them out. At this, the senior Moroccan exploded the bomb hidden in his camera. He and Asim were pulverised. The second Moroccan (the one who ate more) escaped and jumped into the river Oxus, from which he was fished by guards and shot. Massoud — still living — was flown to Tajikistan for treatment. The Taleban immediately claimed that he had been killed outright, and most press reports supported this, but it seems more likely that he hung on to life for nearly a week and died without regaining consciousness.
In retrospect, one can see that the murder of Massoud was a deliberate first step in a carefully planned series of atrocities. Massoud represented the only credible military threat to the Taleban. Known as the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’, revered by his men, he had defeated the Russians 15 times and almost certainly could not be displaced from his stronghold in western Afghanistan. Many people — including Massoud’s younger brother, Wali, the Afghan ambassador in London — have been urging the West for years to arm the Northern Alliance properly to ensure the Taleban’s defeat, but to no avail. Now the man who may go down in history as one of the great generals of irregular warfare, who, with proper support, could have defeated the Taleban in a year, is dead and the West is desperately looking for credible and committed Muslim allies with whom to fight the Taleban.
Tags: ahmad, moroccan, number, osama, panjshir, place, salim, summer, week, woman
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Before coming over here to Australia from Ireland, I put my CV (ie. resume) up on http://jmason.org/ (I initially assumed I’d be looking for work over here — it’s since turned out that my Irish employers are happy to keep me on, even when I’m on the other side of the world.)
I’ve been getting loads of job offers (about 3 a week, by email and phone) from companies and recruiters in the US, since I put the CV up.
I think I’ve just figured out why… a search for “unix cv resume” on Google returns my CV as the first hit!
No wonder. Any half-awake recruiter who wants someone who can “do UNIX” will try a Google search. Better figure out some way of fixing it to get a lower ranking…
Tags: email, google, ireland, job, search, side, unix, week, work, world
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Apparently, a replica of Michelangelo’s David has caused a bit of controversy in Lake Alfred, Florida (pop 3,890). A quote: “I work six days a week. And we do live in Lake Alfred… you know? What we look at is raccoons and rattlesnakes. To me it was a naked man on the side of the road.”
Tags: bit, controversy, man, michelangelo, pop, quote, replica, road, side, week
