by Chris Barrus
Remember a couple of months ago when Peru was considering to mandate the use of open-source software in all government agencies?
Well, guess where Bill is at the moment? In Lima, where he presented Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo with a briefcase full of Microsoft petty cash – well, $550K worth of money, software, and consulting actually.
Neat profile of Dr. Donald Olson, a researcher at Southwest Texas State University, who pinpoints the time and place of paintings, photographs, historical events, art masterpieces, through astronomy.
Then head on over to phinished.org and commiserate.
Next time you’re around a group of people, take a look around. Doesn’t matter if you’re at work, in class, at the grocery store, standing in line for a movie, at a party at someone’s house, or at a concert. Now imagine that one of people there is a snitch, recording your every move.
Feel safer?
The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.
The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report “suspicious activity”.
Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the Patriot Act, there is potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens.
…
Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.
A pilot program, described on the government Web site www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage. Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people.
[via Ambiguous]
My favorite High Weirdness site of the moment. All the hallmarks of primo-paranoia are here: gratuitous exclamation points, secret documents the government doesn’t want you to know about, oddly bolded and italicized text, trillions (TRILLIONS!) of unaccounted cash, the requisite product for sale, claims about the one-world government and how income taxes are unnecessary. Read now (if you can) before he gets disappeared by the Feds.
It’s labeled as a beta 1, but this is production level as far as I’m concerned. NetNewsWire is a RSS feed reader that pretty much blows away any of the other RSS readers I’ve tried.
Best of all, it’ll import Radio’s news subscription files directly.
Perplexed by the number of corporate scandals? The Economist runs through the players and tells you who’s a crook, who’s “overly optimistic”, and who’s cooking the books.
[via Red Rock Eater]
We interrupt this ‘blog for a commercial announcement…
I’m auctioning off some Apple-related t-shirts and posters and a bunch of paperback horror – mostly H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, couple on John Shirley and K.W. Jeter obscurities.
Oh yeah, and the first DVD box of The Prisoner and the last issue of Mondo 2000.
Wondering what to do after you finish law school? Get into white-collar crime!
“You definitely have a need for advice from criminal lawyers,” said Robert Sims, a Latham & Watkins partner and white-collar criminal specialist hired in February from San Francisco’s McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen. “Over the last few years, you’ve seen increased government focus — and resources being focused — on sophisticated financial crimes.”
Los Angeles-based Latham is just one of a handful of law firms that have bulked up on criminal defense lawyers in recent months. Other firms that have hired white-collar crime specialists are Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich; L.A.’s Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, and Chicago’s Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal.
“Almost every firm is getting into that in some fashion,” said Walter Brown Jr., a white-collar crime specialist who joined Gray Cary in March from New York-based Thelen Reid & Priest.
[via Red Rock Eater]