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December 16, 2004, 7:47 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Russian music download site is cheap, smart, and may even be legal: AllofMP3.com charges by the megabyte to download songs or full CDs -- from one to two cents per megabyte. That means a song costs between three and five cents, a CD about 45 cents.

You can choose the format -- MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3), Windows Media Audio (WMA), Ogg Vorbis (OGG), MusePack (MPC) MPEG-4 (AAC) -- and quality (bitrates of 128 kbps - 384 kbps). The catalog contains more than 300,000 songs. To organize them, you can download AllofMP3 Explorer there, or at ZDNet and other file download sites.

The site, which you access with a web browser, is in Russia, and says it operates within Russian law:

"Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation 'On Copyright and Related Rights'. All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting."

So is it legal outside Russia? One of the best sources of information and instructions on using the site is Fadmine, which analyzes this at length, and concludes that it is:

I have analyzed this question on three levels: the legality of ALLOFMP3 in Russia; the legality of ALLOFMP3 in the U.S.; and the International legality of the site.

I'll start with my most definitive proof of the site's legality: the RIAA itself. For those who do not know, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) does not like file sharing. As was splayed on the front page of The New York Post , this is the organization that sued a 12-year-old girl living in public housing in New York City. Yet, when the RIAA cracked down on Spanish site PureTunes.com, which was also offering very discounted price for songs, they themselves acknowledged the legality of ALLOFMP3. PureTunes was targeted because they were reselling songs from ALLOFMP3, which was legally selling them for personal use.

According to a Guardian UK article:

However, some customers began to notice odd things. Many of the files downloaded from the site had ID tags from the Russian legal music service www.allofmp3.com. The German site Heise Online counted at least 16 of those files, suggesting they may have been copied. Mediaservices, the Russian company behind Allofmp3.com, today confirmed in an e-mail that “we do not contribute to Puretunes and do not allow for content redistribution.”

Forums have been alive with this discussion for ages. Let me present some of the arguments from I discussion I participated in on FatWallet.

“Actually, in terms of the law in the U.S., this is rather interesting. You are, in this case, importing legal songs (importing since it's Russian based). Now, just because this service is illegal in the USA, that does not mean that using it is illegal. Why? MP3's, OGG's, etc are not illegal in the USA and therefore can be imported. There is also no law against importing music from other countries (including Russia). And because you are buying this legally in Russia and then importing to the USA, this should be 100% legit. For example, assuming that Russian Vodka is illegal to buy in the USA on Sunday, but you buy the Russian Vodka in Moscow on Sunday, then you import it into the USA, you have done nothing wrong. Again, this assumes that 1) it is illegal to buy Russian Vodka on Sunday in the USA 2) it is legal in Moscow and 3) it is legal to import Russian Vodka.” ...

Museekster.com, a Netherlands site, as part of it search for the ideal music service, reviewed AllofMP3 extensively (check the links on the left for tips and more) and interviewed Vadim Medved'ev, content manager of of AllofMP3.com in January:

Museekster: The number one question for everyone that hears of Allofmp3 is: "Is this really a legal service". Can your clarify the situation on copyrights in Russia?

Allofmp3: We work in compliance with ROMS (Russian Organisation for Multimedia and Digital Systems) license (www.roms.ru/romseng/). All the materials at Allofmp3.com are available for downloading through the Internet in compliance with the license number LS-3M-03-79. Further use of the downloaded materials is possible only for personal purposes.

Museekster: Are artists compensated for the downloads and how does this work in Russia?

Allofmp3: We pay monthly deductions to ROMS. The distribution of the royalties to the authors fully depends on ROMS. ROMS (as well as RAO [Russian Authors' Organisation]) distributes the royalties based on sales amount.

Museekster: How does Allofmp3 obtain the music, do you buy and rip albums yourself?

Allofmp3: We buy official compact discs ourselves. We store audio materials in compliance with chosen quality norms. Our users may send us audio tracks (and get for that a recompense) if these audio materials match our quality requirements.

(MuSeekster also interviewed Sergei Arsentiev, director a similar site,MP3Search.ru, last month.)

The Register (U.K.) says that a falling out between ROMS and RAO leaves such sites technically 'unlicensed' -- but protected by legal loopholes. There's more point and counterpoint, and an opinion from an Australian barrister in the mix.

The Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald tried AllofMP3 and reviewed it. The piece ends,

We can't see any legal or moral objection to using the site. We're using the material for private use, there is no restriction in this country on the parallel importing of recorded music and none of the artists seem to have been deprived of their rights. While we suspect the recorded music industry would like to earn more from their music, we're in no position to judge the arrangements they might have made with Russia.

Nevertheless, the prices we're paying to satisfy our increasingly obsessive passion for music tend to make us a little nervous about whether we're engaging in a spot of bargain-hunting or a form of digital burglary.

We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.

His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"

Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."

How do you pay? You prepay a few dollars in advance -- Visa MasterCard, Diner's Club accepted -- and nothing is subtracted from your account till the download is complete and on your local machine. In an interview with Tech News World in June, the creator of AllofMP3.com, MediaServices CIO Vadim Mamotin, addressed credit card safety.

TNW: Many users in the United States are leery of using their credit cards on International sites, because outside the U.S., there is no direct way to appeal against credit card theft or identity theft. How are you working to assure users that their information is safe?

Mamotin: First of all, the security of any transaction depends to a large extent on the payment-processing company. If it is banking company and it has international certificates from Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club and so forth, the probability of user's information leakage is insignificant. We use such a company -- CyberPlat -- for our financial transactions with international clients.

In fact, we do not directly access the information from user credit cards. We get only notifications about successful transactions. We know that many people are leery of buying anything on Russian sites or are leery of using their credit cards on the Internet at all. It would be ineffective to try convincing these kinds of users of our honesty.

The Sydney reporter and bloggers who have used the site experienced no problems with their accounts. G4TechTV reviewer notes,

Not so sure about giving your credit car number to a Russian company? So are we. But we couldn't find one complaint or claim of fraud on the Internet. In fact, what we mostly found were testimonials on Allofmp3's great service.

A testimonial at Gizmodo sums up what's fascinating about being able to tap in Russian music prices:

AllOfMP3 Took My Money (And I'm Cool With That)

I just noticed I've spent $55 at AllofMP3 since I discovered it about 6 months ago or so. Excepting live music, that's more money than I've spent on music in years. Yeah, yeah, I'm a filthy artist-hating pirate, whatever. All I'm saying is, I'm willing to spend money when I can download what I want at a price that I consider reasonable.

For the record, I bought about $20 worth of music from iTunes over the same 6 month period, "stripped" the DRM using HYMN/Playfair (so I could send it to some friends, if you must know), and then was saddened to discover that later updates of iTunes not only "un-stripped" the DRM, it broke the files so that I can't reauthorize them and listen to them now. That's fine; I broke their rules, they broke my files. But I'm not buying anything that I want to keep from them anymore, either.

That better mousetrap line from Emerson -- Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door -- may be apocryphal, but the Russians at AllofMP3.com certainly seem to have made its principles their own.

Have you tried it? Please let me know your experience with Allofmp3, and/or a similar site, MP3Search.ru. Your name need not be published.
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Pierced Eyeglasses: A Texas artist named James Sooy has a piercing through the bridge of his nose, and has used it to hang eyeglasses off. There are no bows to his specs. (The interview is at a piercing site whose other pages are definitely not safe for work.)

BME: What’s it like actually wearing it? What does it feel like?

JAMES: They feel exactly like a regular pair of glasses, actually. I put the nose pads on to keep them from swinging around, so all the pressure is placed there, just like any other pair of glasses. Since they have no frame on the side I can wear them while I sleep and still roll onto my side.

BME: Good thinking; so the piercing is more of a balance point than something structural. Does that make it more than just a “show piece”, and into something that you wear for real?

JAMES: I’ve only had them for about a week now, but I’ve been sleeping and showering in them. I hadn’t taken them off in four days when one of the brackets cut me while I was asleep; I’d forgotten to sand the edges and they were still razor sharp. They’re back on now and seem reliable enough to take on a two week trip over the holidays; I doubt I’ll need to take them off during that time. Taking them on and off is a bit of a hassle, as it involves taking a tiny screwdriver and unscrewing them while they’re on my face — about a 5 to 10 minute process — which I suppose is about what you’d spend with contacts....

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City pulls plug on home in drawbridge: Fascinating Chicago Sun-Times story about Robert Dorsay, a 36-year-old homeless man found living comfortably in an apartment he created inside a drawbridge.

...the 36-year-old homeless man was evicted by police and city officials -- who were stunned to find he'd been living for at least three years in a little wooden village built into the beams and girders of the bridge's intricate underbelly.

Dorsay and several of his "neighbors" were able to enter through a slim, almost unnoticeable opening in the median of the double-decker bridge's lower level. They then crawled to their lair, which was replete with creature comforts and nearly invisible to anybody on the river.

Dorsay tapped into the bridge's electricity to power a space heater, television, PlayStation video game and microwave.

If he had to bathe, he might slip upstairs to the usually vacant -- and sometimes unlocked -- bridgetender's office and wash off in a sink.

Authorities were amazed not only by his elaborate setup, but that he had managed to survive so long inside a bridge that, in the warmer months at least, regularly rises and lowers, shifting gears and tons of steel.

But to Dorsay, that was just part of the pace of his life below, which included watching Bears games and sharing a few beers with friends.

When the bells rang, signaling the arms of the bridge soon would ascend, he braced for a ride and cruised with the bridge as it slowly pitched him forward. If he was sitting down, he'd soon be standing.

"The first time it was scary,'' Dorsay said in an interview. "After that, it was almost like riding a Ferris wheel.''...

As the story ends, Dorsay had been charged with a misdemeanor, criminal trespass to property, and his father had arrived to take him to his home.
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Arts project Moving Image Contest Finalists: The Center for the study of the public domain at Duke University Law School has movies for you to watch:

We are happy to announce the finalists in our Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. Many thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who helped spread the word about the contest. The judges are selecting three winners from among these finalists, and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2005.

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December 15, 2004, 7:05 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Slashdot debates: What Do Court-Ordered Internet Bans Really Mean? The discussion at the giant programmers' site touches on some of the issues raised by today's Journal story, A home confinement sentence is no walk in the park (reg.req.), about the terms of TV newsman Jim Taricani's home lockdown. (The Channel 10 investigative reporter was sentenced to 6 months probation to be served as home confinement for refusing to divulge the source of a secret FBI videotape, which showed a top City Hall official taking a bribe.)

The Slashdot crowd would be astonished at this comment by Barry J. Weiner, chief U.S. probation officer for Rhode Island:

Under another of the conditions added by Torres, Taricani is prohibited from using the Internet. Weiner said, "In my experience with white-collar type offenders, we have always gained the cooperation of the offender and his family to take the Internet out of the house, and I don't expect this case will be any different."

Nobody in the homes of other offenders had to do homework, Christmas shopping, send email or pay bills?

I expect the probation department may have to confront the needs of other family members very soon.

The Slashdot consensus is that this ban is unenforceable.

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Iranian band on tour: Arian -- a band of both men and women -- just played in England, and will hit Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the first few days of the new year:

After the country's Islamic revolution in 1979 it was made a criminal offence to own or play pop music and women were banned from singing in public. But one group is trying to change that. Arian is the first officially sanctioned mixed gender pop group to come out of Iran.The nine-piece band have permission to play, to tour and to publish their music in their native country and are now touring Europe to spread the message of their music abroad.

Music and video clips, photos and a tour schedule at Arian's site.
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Added to the Garden Blogs list: Laurie's Garden is in Portland, Oregon. Laurie has what many think is a dream job -- she's been a nursery professional for seven years, and blogs about how that goes, as well as about plants.

Last week she took on poinsettias. (She calls them "points") I didn't know they came in purple:

...Over the top, more delicate than a new girlfriend's feelings, cold sensitive and reacting to drafts with an instantaneous shudder-and-wilt. Leaves start dropping off about ten seconds after they leave the greenhouse, where they are grown in such rigidly climate controlled environments that NASA scientists swoon with envy at the thought.

Up until now, the points have come in classic red, white, burgundy, pink, red streaked with white (much like an errant seagull was somehow trapped in the greenhouse, doing what we know seagulls overhead do) and a soft, creamy, peachy-pink. These are all bred cultivars, and if Mother Nature never exactly intended for them to grow in these colors, as least she didn't make it genetically impossible, either.

But this morning when I got to work, what to my wondering eyes should appear but Painfully Purple Poinsettias. Not a gentle color either, but a sickly, vivid, Easter-Egg-on-steroids, you'll-poke-your-eye-out purple. And get this---it's sprayed on!! Yup, like your 8-second, European-style spray on tan, and just as appealing and natural looking, too. From what I'm told the product used is similar to what they decorate cakes with, but these plants are rendered anything but appetizing. And don't get me started on the ones sprayed Urine Yellow. I'm not *even* going there!!

Blockbuster waves goodbye to late fees: Yes, I'd heard a little about this. But Ars Technica tells me the part I need to know:

...Instead of imposing a late fee on unreturned rentals, Blockbuster will charge customers for the "full price" of the tardy movie or game after a one-week grace period expires. If the customer suddenly realizes that he now owns Police Academy 5 and would rather not, he has 30 days to return the product for a full refund minus a "minimal" restocking fee....

...it's a shrewd move by Blockbuster. The reality is that they have little to lose by making this move. Even if they forego some revenue from late fees, they will still make money off of people who are just too lazy to return the movies -- in the form of sales or restocking charges. It also erodes one selling point for NetFlix: no late fees. Of course, NetFlix doesn't charge you full price for the movie if you don't return it.

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Just Letters: It's just a bunch of colored letters on a whiteboard that might be your fridge. They seem to be moving. You drag one and start to make a word. Just as you get the second letter dragged into position, the first one skites away. There are other people dragging letters around "your" fridge.

If there's a pattern, it's anti-collaborative. If a word seems to be emerging, the mob scatters the letters; if someone is making a pile of X's, someone else is shattering the tower.

Oddly addictive, until you realize the pointlessness.
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OhmyNews interviews Dan Gillmor: OhmyNews, the wildly successful Korean citizen journalism site, interviews Dan, who's leaving newspapers for an as-yet unnamed citizen journalism project. Here's a snip:

In your opinion, what is the difference between OhmyNews and blogs in America?

There are so many differences. The top difference is that your publication takes responsibility for what it publishes. The closer to the top of the page an article gets, the more editing I know you do. And you are a publication that (citizen reporters) can be a part of.

But bloggers are individuals, scattered around the world and most have no editing at all. Blogging is a very individualistic medium. From the people I talked to when I visited Korea that were contributing to your publication, it was clear that part of the reason why they did it was to be part of OhmyNews. I think bloggers just want to be who they are rather than part of something else.

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Michigan Congressman calls for FBI investigation into Ohio election: AP reports,

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee asked the FBI on Wednesday to investigate an Ohio election worker's concern that a software company employee could have tampered with election results when working on machines before a ballot recount.

The company provides vote-counting software used in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan sent a letter to the FBI office in Cincinnati and Hocking County Prosecutor Larry E. Beal asking them to immediately confiscate election machinery in the southwest Ohio county.

According to a sworn statement from Sherole Eaton, the county's deputy director of elections, a representative of TRIAD Governmental Systems Inc. told her on Friday he wanted to inspect the county's tabulating machine. The TRIAD representative told Eaton he wanted to check the computer and go over "tricky questions" that attorneys might ask them about the recount started this week by county election boards at the request to two minor party candidates, she said.

The representative told her that "the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone," she said.

"He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information to input into our computer," Eaton wrote in the affidavit.

Conyers wants an FBI investigation of the workers' actions because election tampering is a federal crime. ...

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December 14, 2004, 7:26 p.m.

OpenCD: High quality free and open source software, from the OpenCD Project.

We have made a small collection of only the highest quality OSS for Windows, easily available on a CD. When you insert the disc into your computer it automatically launches a browser which will guide you through the contents of the disc, presenting the various programs, and allow you to easily install them. The programs are carefully selected to ensure stability, ease of use and a clean install and un-install from your computer. This CD is intended as a first introduction to the world of OSS, but it is our hope that you will later go on to explore other projects, and at some stage you may even want to try a whole new operating system such as Linux. In the Further Resource section of this disc we provide a list of other major OSS projects with links to their web pages. There is also a selection of essays about Open Source which should give you some more insight into the history and philosophy of OSS.

Among the fine offerings are OpenOffice (the alternative to MS Office), AbiWord (alternative to MS Word), PDF Creator, CDex (which can rip CDs and turn the tunes to mp3s), Celestia (a simulation of the entire universe), games, screensavers and many more. (Of course, Mozilla Suite and the standalone Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client make the list.

You may download the files to a recordable CD (CD-R), rewritable CD (CD-RW) or DVD, and even sell the CDs as long as you don't change a thing. From the project's FAQ:

Q. How much does it cost?
A. No charge. Download it, burn it, and it's yours. You have to pay for electricity to power your computer, and for access to the Internet. Oh, and you have to have a blank CD to burn it onto. If you don't have a CD burner, or if your connection is really slow, you can order a copy.

Q. What do I do once I've downloaded the files?
A.Verify the integrity of the ISO file using the provided MD5 sum. This step is optional, and if you don't know how to do it, we have more detailed instructions for you.

Burn the ISO onto a blank CD. If you have never burned a CD from an ISO image before, you may find it helpful to refer to these instructions from e-smith.org.

If you don't have a CD burner, and cannot get access to one, you may still get the files from the ISO image using an image reader program such as ISObuster. ISObuster is free of charge, but is not open source. If you know of an open source alternative to ISObuster, please contact us.

Q. How many computers can I use this software on?
A. As many as you want. Not only that, you can give copies of all this software to your friends, your boss, or anybody else. In fact, please do!

Related: OSSwin project offers many more open-source programs for Windows -- including software to burn the CD (which should have come with the drive that can write CDs).

As always, you want an antivirus program checking your downloads -- at home I use the free AVG AntiVirus, and like it. (It updates daily in the background without interrupting your browsing, and you don't have to reboot to activate the daily upgrade.) It's not open source, but it works for me.

If you've been using AVG version 6.x, they're discontinuing it and its nightly updates at the end of this year. There's a new 7.0 version that's also free to which you'll need to upgrade.
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Health Secretary Nominee May Cut Programs: AP reports,

WASHINGTON - Michael Leavitt, President Bush's choice to be secretary of Health and Human Services, may have to cut billions of dollars from the government's mammoth health programs for the elderly, poor and disabled to pare the budget deficit.

The Medicare and Medicaid programs, consuming nearly $500 billion a year and growing quickly, could be vulnerable in the context of last year's $413 billion budget deficit, the ongoing war in Iraq, costly domestic security commitments and administration plans to revamp Social Security without raising taxes.

Bush selected Leavitt, the Environmental Protection Agency chief, on Monday, filling one of the last two openings in his second-term Cabinet. Bush praised Leavitt as a "fine executive" and "a man of great compassion ... an ideal choice to lead one of the largest departments of the United States government." ...

Um... a man of great compassion may have to cut programs for the elderly, poor and disabled so we can fight a war, cut benefits for granny and not raise taxes?

For whom does he demonstrate this compassion? The firm of Scrooge and Marley? Merry Christmas, you tired, you poor, you huddled masses...

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A grieving son's journey comes to a crossroads: L.A. Times reporter Mark Arax's 30-year search for those who murdered his father in his Fresno nightclub in 1972. After he published a book about it (In My Father's Name), someone was convicted of the crime. Mark -- and the lead detective on the case -- aren't sure this is the real killer.

Oddly, he stops. Maybe his need for this focusing device ran out of gas. The clues he leaves are enough to "solve" what probably happened, but he doesn't quite connect the dots himself:

Even today, as a 47-year-old man, the role of Ara's boy, "Markie," still comes as easy to me as the role of husband or dad. But playing that grief-stricken 15-year-old kid is no longer befitting. Dead is dead. My mother would be happy to know that I have made a life apart from the murder. I write and tend to my fruit and vegetable garden. My sister and brother honor our parents in their own way. Michelle teaches at a Fresno middle school and Donnie is the head football coach at our high school alma mater.

They both wonder, for my sake, if I have put it away. Maybe I have.

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Look up in the sky: My Canadian correspondent, Eric Lilius, points to the sky, to the Geminid Meteor shower. Last night and tonight are prime viewing. From NASA (the link goes to this page),

Where should you look? Anywhere. Geminids streak all over the sky. Trace some backwards: they all lead to a radiant point in the constellation Gemini. This year the radiant lies next to Saturn--a beautiful coincidence. Gemini and Saturn are high overhead at midnight, easy to find.

Related: Announcing Comet Machholz -- a new one, detected this summer by amateur astronomer Don Machholz for whom it is named. On January 7, 2005, the comet's tail brushes the Pleaides cluster, which should make it easy to spot.

It looks pretty bright right now, actually.
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But will a bank take it?, asked PBS's Marketplace Friday, blurbing,

Tired of worrying about the falling dollar? Maybe it's time to invest in another kind of money: NONEY! Robin Amer reports on a popular alternative currency created by an American artist that continues to grow in value.

At noney.net, you'll find that "Noney is a new currency, with each note being a hand drawn, hand printed and hand signed piece of art. Each note can also be traded for things. Like all money, Noney is for people to circulate. The result is a combination of public art, performance art and printmaking. Obadiah Eelcut draws prints and issues Noney."

WHAT'S NONEY? Noney notes are cultural tender for the payment of any amount, anywhere.

NEED NONEY? Noney notes are available here... by offering a trade for your goods or services. Transaction proposals are welcome from anyone around the world. For ideas, see the trade wish list. Send your proposal to Noney P.O. Box 1013 Providence, RI 02901 or email it to obadiah@noney.net

On the wish list are Vintage hats (men's size 7 1/2) and a peppermill, as well as art.

Turns out I blogged these guys April 19, 2002:

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and YOU? "ART AS MONEY OR MONEY AS ART? From April 15 to June 1, 2002, the Providence Ekistics Guild is seeking contestants who wish to be on Noney - the People's Currency. Noney (it rhymes with funny) is a new form of cultural (not legal) tender, which the Providence Ekistics Guild will screenprint as bills and issue in fall 2002. Each Noney bill is a signed piece of art. Each bill is also tradable (sic) for things..." Contestants (greater Rhode Islanders only, apparently) need to send, by snail mail or email, a photo and the names of their favorite bird and favorite vegetable. After choosing 10 winners, the guild plans to screen print 10,000 Noney bills this summer and then release them in the fall. More info. Thanks to Ian Donnis for the link.

Another unique Christmas gift. Thanks to my colleague Mike Foran for the Marketplace news.
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Raw links:

Google Magazine Search? At InternetNews.com.
The Best Web Comics of 2004: "Chosen by The Webcomics Examiner Advisory Board" . Peanuts they're not. Definitely not The Family Circus.
The 4th Annual Year in Ideas: NYT Magazine. "An annual compendium of ideas from A to Z. (Or at least Y. And, frankly, also missing J, O, Q, R and X.)"

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December 13, 2004, 7:38 p.m. -- Last week's weblog

Journalist Gary Webb dies at 49; he linked CIA to crack sales: Robert Parry, who covered Iran-Contra for AP and Newsweek, writes in depth about the most controversial work of the California journalist who left a note on the door for the movers Friday morning that read, "Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance." Webb was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head.

Webb wrote a series in 1996 that David Corn in the Nation today called, "a famous--or infamous--1996 series for the San Jose Mercury News that maintained a CIA-supported drug ring based in Los Angeles had triggered the crack epidemic of the 1980s." The book that followed is called Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Corn noted that Webb had botched a part of it, but added,

In 1998, a CIA inspector general's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners while supporting the contras. A Senator named John Kerry had investigated these links years earlier, and the media had mostly ignored his findings. After Webb published his articles, the media spent more time crushing Webb than pursuing the full story. It is only because of Webb's work--as flawed as it was--that the CIA IG inquiry happened.

Parry's take -- America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb -- is much longer, and worth a read. He tells the whole story.

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.

On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons....

...The Los Angeles Times’ cover-up has now continued after Webb’s death. In a harsh obituary about Webb, the Times reporter, who called to interview me, ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA’s inspector general findings. Instead of using Webb’s death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb’s allegations. [Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004.]...

I can't say anything profound. It's sad.

More can be found by putting Gary Webb's name into Google and Google News.
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What's that song? is a web jukebox that thinks it's a game. Want to hear some music right now? Put in the name of the band or artist you want to hear, they may serve you four song clips and call it a game. Get ideas from the last 50 requests. I've heard Electric Flag, Jeff Beck, Lucinda Williams, Dylan, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Ferlin Husky, Millie Small, Etta James... even local artist and Grammy nominee Sugar Ray & The Bluetones.

Related: If you want to hear piano music, check out Only Piano Radio at OnlyPiano.com:

On the Web twenty-four hours a day! Only Piano Radio features jazz, new-age, classical and pop piano recording artists like Thelonius Monk, Dave Brubeck Quartet, George Winston and David Lanz!

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The Geffrye Museum Advent Calendar: Quite charming holiday images from the London museum's collection emerge, one a day. Click on the small image for an enlargement and information about the object pictured.

The image here is a Twelfth Night Cake, "traditionally served on the 6th of January, the end of the Christmas season." It's the image for Dec. 12.
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Alek's Christmas Lights Webcam: Back in October, I blogged Alek's Halloween Decorations Webcam, which he describes as

Alek Komarnitsky of Littleton, Colo. is the man behind it all. He'll tell you all about it. Every last detail.
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What equations look like: My mind does not make these leaps on its own. In the NYT Magazine:

It's hard to imagine that these plaster forms, so starkly beautiful, were originally used to teach advanced students trigonometry. Called stereometric models, they were manufactured in turn-of-the-century Germany to help scholars grasp complex mathematical formulas. Last year, the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto shot each object, the tallest of which is less than a foot high, from below at close range so that they appear monumental. His series of photographs, ''Mathematical Forms,'' reimagine these scientific models as things of wonder. They embody Sugimoto's belief that art is possible even without artistic intention.

The beautiful cone below is "described" by the equation below it:

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Searching for the Twenty Top Software People in the World: At one of the ugliest blogs I've seen -- it leads with a giant sponsored-link paragraph -- a contest to choose the Top 10 software people offers a crib sheet to the history of modern computing in a semifinalist list of 20 of its its leading lights.

In voting so far, here are the top five:

Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel

Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++

Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project

Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and coinventor of Unix

Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web

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A Canary's-Eye View: My dishwasher has been leaving soap residue and sometimes dried bits of food and grit on "clean" dishes. Tired of rinsing glasses under the tap after they came out of the dishwasher, I went looking for a fix. and ran into a passel of information about nontoxic household products from someone who reacts violently to most of them.

Here's how the site got its name:

A Canary's-Eye View

Years ago, coal miners took canaries down into the coal mines with them, because canaries are more sensitive to the poisonous coal gasses than human beings are. When a bird started acting sick, the miners beat a hasty retreat.

Today, those of us with chemical sensitivities often think of ourselves as canaries — not only because we’re more sensitive to chemicals than other people, but also because we know that if chemicals keep getting into people’s bodies as they do now, then many more besides us will suffer.

This site is for supporting my fellow canaries, and for informing all you temporarily able-bodied folks of the growing danger to you, too.

I did buy some of the dishwashing products she recommends at Whole Foods -- a powder, a liquid and a rinsing agent. I'm not sure they'll stop the deposits, but they may keep us from ingesting chemical junk. I'll let you know what happens.
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