Tag Archives: News

FISA and Bush

I guess justice isn’t blind after all …

A federal judge ruled today that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

– Judge orders end to NSA wiretapping — Baltimore Sun

In her ruling, Judge Diggs states:

“In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained.”

[tags]FISA, spying, easedropping, bush, national security[/tags]

Wait Wait Podcast

1 Reply

One of my favorite radio shows, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me now has a podcast. It’s available here.

Of course, it doesn’t stack up to attending a taping live.

NPR has been creating a lot of podcasts recently … they can be found here.

[tags]NPR[/tags]

Developer Liability

Security expert Howard Schmidt wants coders to be held responsible for vulnerabilities in their code, but others say their employers should be held to account

– Developers ‘should be liable’ for security holes – CNET

Yeah right … blame the programmer … not the company.

Um, folks, who’s responsible for NOT doing sufficient QA on the code?

Program bugs are inevitable … that’s the nature of things. Those bugs, however, should be caught before the code is released. That’s what QA is all about.

[tags]Software, Bugs, Security[/tags]

News Media

The authorities maintain that the 42-year-old blogger, Joseph E. Duncan III of Fargo, N.D., took Dylan Groene, 9, and Dylan’s sister, Shasta, 8, from their rural Idaho home shortly before their 13-year-old brother, their mother and her boyfriend were found bludgeoned to death on May 16.

– New York Times article

What is he again? The 42-year-old North Dakota man? The 42-year-old suspected killer? No, he’s the 42-year-old blogger. The 42-year-old blogger supposedly kidnapped two children and murdered their mother and her boyfriend. The blogger bludgeoned the girl’s brother to death.

– strip mining for whimsy.

(via Ryan)

This is a pretty good example of how the media paints very broad strokes on things they have an imperfect understanding of.

Another good example can be found whenever the news sources make reference to settlements in Israeli territories … they almost always refer to them as “Jewish settlements” … not “Israeli Settlements”. What makes them unique is not the fact that the residents are all jewish … but they are all Israeli.