another week and another 16 miler! and a narrow escape from the dreaded runner's trots!

the new "get your war" is out and as irreverent as ever.

Is SSL safe?

"Czech security researchers this week claimed to have uncovered weaknesses in SSL that might permit crackers to decypher transmissions over supposedly secure links."

""The real risks to personal data are the large databases at the endpoints, not the communications between them. I wouldn't discard SSL as being irrelevant, but neither would I worry very much if it could be attacked. Security is only as strong as the weakest link, and SSL is nowhere close to being the weakest link," he writes."

in response to my request regarding rss readers and basic authentication, olivier "webvoice" travers was nice enough to alert me to the fact that radio userland supports the feature by url-encoding the username and password according to the following scheme: http://login:password@my.site.com/filename.filext. this then reminded me that all rss readers employing a self-respecting user-agent can fetch an rss feed protected with http basic authentication. indeed, netnewswire will also fetch protected feeds using the same url-encoded mechanism [ in hindsight this is head slappingly obvious and i should probably be flogged for not thinking of it straight away ]. i haven't tried amphy , but i'm sure it'll work as well. i'm none too keen on exposing passwords in urls and neither is jim roepcke as evidenced by his netnewswire feature request , but i could live with it if i could find fetch feeds over ssl, which i know that netnewswire doesn't support currently.

when i get a spare minute i'll have to crank up amphetadesk again, since i strongly suspect it basic authentication over ssl.

anyone know of any rss readers that support basic authentication?

When Teaching the Ethics of War Is Not Academic :

"In the spring semester following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the start of President Bush's "war on terror," I gave an unusual assignment to my students. I asked them to write essays detailing exactly why they are different from terrorists. The midshipmen were to spell out as clearly as possible how the roles they intended to fill as future Navy and Marine Corps officers are distinct in morally relevant ways from that of, say, an Al Qaeda operative. They dubbed the assignment "creepy," but gamely agreed to do it. After they had read their efforts aloud, I gave the project a twist. I had them exchange papers, and told them each to write a critical response to their classmate's paper, from the point of view of a terrorist. Then I had them read those responses aloud.

The midshipmen found the entire exercise very disturbing because it forced them to reflect on that thin but critical line that separates warriors from murderers."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

E-mail reveals real leaders:

"Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard.

The researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to."

get your war on. White House: Military campaign has begun.

i need to extract non-boring words from an arbitrary string of text. any ideas? this would seem like something that morbus , aaron or les might be into. basically i want to create a topical list of words and phrases from arbitrary text. i know the cia has been working on this for years, but there has to be a poor man's version of this somewhere.

i'd like to take text from a chat room application and construct a custom list of topical keywords based on the chat histories. these will get fed into jwz's webcollage which will create a composite of images fetched based on conversational topics. i've got most of it running right now, but there's a load of noise based on mundane words like "if", "and", "but" etc.

right about now, i'm wishing i comments enabled. i know it's a hard problem but any ideas are welcome.

of course, i'll release the code once i make some basic design decisions.

i agree with much of jason's generalizations about the war rhetoric coming from both sides. the antiwar movement is constantly as risk of being marginalized by accepting and promoting erroneous terms of debate:

"Just as unconvincing as Bush's flimsy arguments for war have been the arguments from the other side for peace. Talk about preaching to the choir. Your "blood for oil" and "give peace a chance" signs are as ridiculous and unconvincing as Bush's "well, they're evil" argument. War is bad. Duh. Any ideas as to alternatives? Praying, marching, and hoping for peace isn't going to get it done alone. Bush and the peaceniks are both equally at fault for not working hard enough at having a meaningful dialogue on Iraq, each side settling for lobbing rhetoric over the wall. Bush looks like a chimp. Great...now tell me what the fuck that has to do with anything. Blech."

as much i might disagree with the tactics of cheney and others, i'd be willing to bet that they're happy to keep the opposition thinking that it's about oil, because it's easy to disprove.

did i mention just how much fun it is to run a full linux desktop on os x via x11 from the comfort of my easy chair thanks to 802.11b and ssh? magic i say, pure magic.

Report says Intel's 'Centrino' is too costly:

"The overall impact of Intel Corp.'s Centrino product line is expected to be minimal, despite the company's massive and costly marketing push for this technology, according to a report from WR Hambrecht + Co. LLC here this week."

it's a good old fashioned war of the marketing dollars over the truth.

not that i'm trying to turn the vast wasteland into a warblog, but "Lies, Damned Lies, and Ultimatums" tests the veracity of last night's bush speech paragraph by paragraph and comes up with "20 defections from truth". but hey, what's a few white lies when there's a greater good to be served? [ via dangerousmeta ]

relatedly: What Makes W. Tick?

i find myself curiously muddled in my feelings about the impending war. from where i'm standing meg seems to possess an admirable clarity of thought.

since i have the luxury of playing backseat pundit, i predict the war will be over in short order. 3 months max and 3 weeks min. ossama bin ladin will be captured early in the conflict vying for news cycles. the one-two punch of a quick war and the capture of enemy number one, combined with night after night of images of cheering iraqis in the streets will quell the protests and boost the stock market.

the administration will be embolded.

by august north korea and iran will be above the fold in the dailies.

rachel corrie, the american student felled by a bulldozer in gaza was a student of my alma mater, the evergreen state college. that there were - and still are - are many more rachel corries at evergreen makes me proud. i don't think i've been anywhere that attracted such a great number of people filled with passion about their convictions. sure, some where complete wackos, but at least they were articulate and educated wackos.

rachel sounds like a fine woman and i'm sure she's missed in oly.