Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The Canadian judiciary has issued a report into the treatment of a Canadian Muslim arrested in New York, deported to Syria and tortured. I have yet to see any coverage of this story in other American news sources. CNN this morning has this story about the treatment of a detainee, though it should be [...]
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Under the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution, no person can be compelled to provide evidence that would incriminate themselves. Sine the testimony of those involved in crime is often required to secure the conviction of other criminals, all jurisdictions in the US routinely offer immunity from prosecution in return for testimony that will [...]
Monday, September 18, 2006
This column in the Washington Post comments on whether CIA interrogation techniques amount to torture. Currently a live political issue in the US, since the matter is under debate in Congress. It doesn’t seem to be an issue that bothers people outside the beltway.
Monday, September 18, 2006
This comment on the government’s plans to restrict rights of appeal is intelligent, and fills in many details of the current law of which I was not aware.
The government has said it does not want prisoners released on ‘technicalities’ - proper paperwork not filed, search warrants not properly obtained and so forth. This, however, [...]
Monday, September 18, 2006
Google’s various services raise numerous copyright law issues, and the reason their news service is still in beta is in part because of them. A Belgium court has condemned the service and other law suits are pending.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
I do not have access to a Linux box, and will not for some time, which means I am unable to experiment with fvwm-crystal. It got a review on slashdot, but more interesting to me than the ‘eye-candy’ that they were interested in, is the fact that it is a desktop environment based around [...]
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Back when men were real men, women real women, small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri and the internet a young and shiny thing understood and used by the small number of people able to write their names in hexadecimal while sleepwalking to the fridge, people became interested in the prospect of protecting privacy and anonymity. Unlike in real life, where a letter dropped into a letterbox is difficult if not impossible to trace to the sender, communication on the internet is, by default, neither secure nor anonymous. Communication, here, does not merely mean email, but every piece of data sent over the net. The website you are viewing knows, if not who you are, then at least where your computer is. Almost by definition, it has to.
Read on for more.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Not so long ago, a function called MD5 was at the core of much computer security. Successful attacks upon it have prompted a migration to something called SHA-1, but this much more secure hash function now looks vulnerable to attack. A similar, and more secure function is SHA-256, but as its name implies [...]
History and the war on terror
A historian comments on comparisons with 1930s appeasers that have found their way into contemporary political discourse.