Subterranean Homepage News

By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

Fair and balanced, too!

September 26, 2003 7:22 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

If electronic voting risks rigged elections, hire the hackers and challenge them to break it. (They'll try anyway.)

I'm going to try to stay on top of the Black Box Voting situation (see yesterday's summary), and electronic voting in general. Today's update: DMCA Used to Shut Down Blackboxvoting.org; the letter from Bev Harris ISP's attorney citing Diebold as the complainant is reproduced on the BBV site.

In a mass email this afternoon, BBV's webmaster, David Allen, said that, after negotiations today, Harris now has access to her files but the ISP declined to reinstate the blackboxvoting.org site. (Allen's blackboxvoting.com site is in use for now.)

Voting Revolution is a little Flash movie with attitude at Take Back the Media, an in-your-face beginner's guide to the Diebold issues. Its soundtrack is The Beatles' Revolution.

More resources:

A Vote Against the Computerized Ballot: We're nowhere near ready to hand over the core of our democratic process—voting—to electronic systems by Marc Rotenburg (executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC.) at MIT Technology Review.

Report Raises Electronic Vote Security Issues, John Schwartz, NYT

Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say, John Schwartz, NYT, (July 24), 2003

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George Plimpton: A life "lived all the way up" comes to a sudden end. (Times obit)

Thanks for the Paris Review, and its promise that bohemia may have moved to Paris but it really lives in your head.

At NPR, last month's George Plimpton and 'The Paris Review', and Monday's Plimpton's 'Paper Lion' at 40.
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Appeals Court Smiles on 'Do Not Call' List: It's back. Judicial pingpong -- what a sport!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court said on Friday it would likely approve an anti-telemarketing measure that two lower courts had blocked days earlier, adding a further twist to what has been a rollercoaster week for the popular program.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver denied a request by telemarketers to halt the federal government's "do not call" list and said it would likely rule in favor of the measure when it soon hears the case.

The telemarketers "have failed to establish a substantial likelihood of success on the merits," a three-judge panel said.

The decision has no immediate effect on two lower-court rulings that sidelined the list earlier this week, meaning that consumers who placed some 50 million phone numbers on the no-call list will likely still receive telemarketing calls after Oct. 1, the original start date.

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The Blues, Martin Scorsese's seven-part homage to my favorite genre, starts Sunday night at 8 on WGBH. Set your recorder... (Scott Galupo at The Washington Times hates it.)

A 13-part radio series, called The Blues: The Radio Series -- thirteen hour-long programs hosted by Grammy Award-winning bluesman Keb' Mo' -- will be broadcast during Blues on WGBH, beginning Saturday, Oct. 11, it says here.

But the first episode is already up on the site, so you can listen now. And there are "supplemental" web-only interviews with Scorsese, Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana and Taj Mahal.
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National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
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Art commode: This LED seat and cover comes in lots of colors.

Open the cover and the light slowly comes on; if you leave the cover up, it turns off after a half-hour, so it's no good as a nightlight.

It's a bit high-maintenance, though; its three AA batteries last a week.
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Book-banning this week: Four parents of high school sophomores at Science Academy in Mercedes, Texas wanted Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land removed from the advanced placement curriculum. (Literature could be banned / Parent: Books may lead to ‘inappropriate sexual arousal of young teens’)

Fortunately, the South Texas School Board decides to keep books "while giving parents more control over their children’s choices by requiring principals to automatically offer an alternative to a challenged book," according to the Valley Morning Star of Harlingen.
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Mark Pilgrim (Dive into Mark) usually writes on web design and programming and usability issues, but when he wrote this,

We went to scope out a local daycare center this evening. We basically took the tour and heard the speech and left without asking many questions. What questions should we have asked?

His readers offered 58 comments -- and they're still coming in.
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Weekend links: I'm about out of words for the week, and these don't need many.

First Draft by Tim Porter is a smart journalism blog by the former editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold. For pedants everywhere, from The Vocabula Review.

Electronic paper reaches video speed: Colour movies might soon be playing on single sheets. At Nature.

Space Art in Children's books 1950's to 1970's. Just the graphics.

Jurassic pot plants on sale soon: Heirloom seeds, indeed. From the BBC.

Side effects from Internet service prompt rethinking on Net oversight: Verisign might have to give back the Net. AP.

The Worst Jobs in Science: "From fart sniffer to postdoc, the most torturous ways to make a living in science." At Popular Science.

Dyson Telescope Game: An online game from a British firm that makes "telescoping" vacuum cleaners and a washing machine. Interesting.

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September 25, 2003 7:55 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Black Box Voting update: It looks as though King County, Wash., elections chief Dean Logan is taking a very close look at Diebold, Inc.'s electronic voting software. The Seattle Times reports (Elections chief tightens vote security),

King County's newly appointed elections chief has taken steps to reduce the possibility of computerized vote-tampering while he studies questions raised about possible security flaws in software the county uses to tally election results.

Dean Logan, who became director of records, elections and licensing services this month, said yesterday he has tightened security by restricting employee access to a key election software program and removing other software from the elections computer.

Logan also said he will ask for a formal response by Diebold Election Systems to claims that the company's vote-counting systems may be vulnerable to tampering.

....Logan said he decided election security was a "legitimate issue" after internal company e-mail was posted on the Internet and discussed in a Salon.com article Monday. (An open invitation to election fraud)

The Seattle story is worth a read -- especially since King County is the home of Bev Harris, author of the book and website Black Box Voting. And it's a quick way to get up to speed on the issue.

Times reporter Keith Ervin writes that, "The memos appeared to support reports by Renton (Wash.) Web journalist and author Bev Harris that election results on Diebold's GEMS software could be altered by someone using its underlying Microsoft Access software without leaving a trace in the GEMS audit log."

I reported yesterday that blackboxvoting.org, Harris's site, had been replaced by a notice that the site had been disabled due to a dispute with Diebold. (blackboxvoting.com has been pressed into service to tell the tale.)

A fascinating discussion in the comments section of blogger Dan Gillmor's item on the takedown at the San .Jose (Calif.) Mercury News includes, among other reports, a note from Harris's webmaster, David Allen:

I'm Bev Harris' publisher and the webmaster for blackboxvoting.com. Diebold's lawyers told the ISP that unless we were shut down, they would go to court and shut the entire ISP down. The plug was pulled rather fight this.

We don't blame our ISP, we don't expect them to lose money because of our invetsigation into this scofflaw corporation.

David Allen Publisher, CEO, Janitor
Plan Nine Publishing
1237 Elon Place
High Point, NC 27263
http://www.plan9.org

In emails in response to my queries today, Bev Harris wrote,

Diebold, of course, demanded shut down of http://www.blackboxvoting.org (see London Inquirer article, “Diebold takes down blackboxvoting.org”) because we published a link to another web site. More on this here (http://www.blackboxvoting.com), and you'll find the letter from the Diebold attorney here (http://www.thoughtcrimes.org) -- and for a small hoot, please notice that the letter, which is not copyrighted, INCLUDES THE LINK (three times) which they object to, and therefore republishing the letter(.) Telling people not to publish the link actually serves to publish the link.

We’re working on replacing the site.

In response to queries, Harris added,

They not only did a take-down of the site, they confiscated over 300 pages of our material and all of our programming. All this over one link contained on a public forum, which we did not post.

... No, Google doesn't have them cached. The library database was in an SQL database. And the programming was the hard part -- hours and hours of programming, because the site was kind of "self serve" with people coming in to meet and swap letters to legislators etc.

The Seattle Times contacted Diebold for comment:

A call to Diebold's public-relations department yesterday was not returned. Company spokesman Mike Jacobsen, who is on leave, was reached at his home last night. He said the memos were stolen from Diebold and the company wants them back.

Jacobsen said Harris also stole company property when she circulated numerous company files she found on an unprotected Web site. The files included source code for the company's touch-screen voting machines, which have recently been bought by election officials in Georgia, Maryland and other states.

The Times story adds,

Critics of high-tech voting have questioned the propriety of Diebold Chief Executive Walden O'Dell's role as a prominent fund-raiser in President Bush's re-election campaign. O'Dell, whose company is marketing voting machines to its home state of Ohio, wrote to campaign contributors last month that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Related:

• Baltimore Sun: Voting system found to have election risks: Independent study says Md.'s touch-screen device is vulnerable to tampering; State believes flaws can be fixed; Work to ensure security starts; plan proceeds to use machines in March

• Diebold press release on the study: "The thorough system assessment conducted by SAIC verifies that the Diebold voting station provides an unprecedented level of election security." -- Thomas W. Swidarski, president of Diebold Election Systems.

• The study: SAIC (Science Applications International Corp) Report On MD. Diebold Voting Machines: Executive summary • Full report (pdf)

There'll be much more on this.
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Nigerian Woman Avoids Stoning Death: Amina Lawal, convicted of adultery in March 2002 for having a baby 10 months after a divorce, is free. AP reports,

Katsina, Nigeria -- An Islamic court overturned the conviction of an illiterate mother sentenced to be stoned to death for having sex out of wedlock, easing pressure on the Nigerian government in a case that has drawn sharp criticism from around the globe.

...A panel of five judges in white turbans and black robes ruled 4-1 in Lawal's favor, citing procedural errors and arguing she was not given "ample opportunity to defend herself."

Lawal was described as,

Wrapped in a light orange veil and sitting quietly at the front of a small, sweltering courtroom, the 32-year-old at the center of the controversy appeared emotionless throughout the hearing, staring down at the floor, cradling her nearly 2-year-old daughter.

Several online news outlets, including the Guardian (U.K.) and ABC News, ran the AP story without the final three paragraphs. Newsday preserved it. They may explain why Lawal was not jubilant:

...Many in Katsina denounced Thursday's verdict.

"There was no justice. The Quran was ignored," said Masaud Kabir, a 24-year-old student.

Nura Ibrahim Aliyu, a 26-year-old civil servant, said he would "gladly" carry out the stoning himself.

"She has already confessed to her crime," Aliyu said. "That's enough for me."

Watch your back, lady.
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Judge Who Backed Telemarketers Is Deluged: Judge Lee R. West's phone is busy. He's the Oklahoma City federal judge who briefly stopped the Do-Not-Call registry yesterday because, he ruled, the Federal Trade Commission lacked authority to create and operate the registry. The House overruled him today, 412-8 , and the Senate is expected to follow. (The eight who voted against the bill were: Ron Paul, R-Texas; Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.; Kendrick Meek, D-Fla.; Tim Ryan, D-Ohio; Ted Strickland, D-Ohio; Lee Terry, R-Neb.; Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Chris Cannon, R-Utah.)

According to AP,

Shortly after the House vote, West rejected the FTC's request to block his order while the agency appeals. He said the FTC did not provide any evidence beyond what he already had considered.

"The judge in this case is dead wrong and I'm sure his decision will in turn be overturned," said Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said during floor debate on the bill. "We should probably call the bill 'This Time We Really Mean It Act' to cure any myopia in the judicial branch. The bill leaves no doubt as to the intent of Congress."

The bill says the FTC may operate the list, which was approved by Congress earlier this year and is scheduled to take effect Wednesday. The Senate was expected to pass similar legislation as early as Thursday evening.

If the bill passes both chambers and is signed into law by President Bush, that does not automatically nullify the court order. West still must dismiss the case brought by telemarketers for the list to take effect.

Back to the judge: AP reports,

OKLAHOMA CITY -- U.S. District Judge Lee R. West's telephone has not stopped ringing since he sided with telemarketers seeking to block a popular national do-not-call list.

Egged on by talk show hosts and angry Web sites, people have flooded West's office and home with calls and faxes, apparently trying to show him why they wanted to ban unsolicited sales calls.

"They are just calling to tie up our lines," said Rick Wade, operations manager at the district clerk's office. "They just keep calling to harass us, like the telemarketers harass them, I guess."

This might have something to do with it: Last night, according to AP, Jay Leno said,

"The judge says the telemarketers can call you whenever they want," Leno said. "You know what we should do? Let's all call this judge tonight at home during dinner."

The Daily Oklahoman (reg. req) ran the AP story. Couldn't they have rung his doorbell?
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Skype: putting the hype in VoIP. At the Register (U.K.),

Reading interviews with the (file-sharing software) KaZaA founders and looking at their new web site, Skype, we think that their second revolution has a chance of being even bigger than their first. Perhaps it's called Skype to rhyme with Hype.

The idea is to use peer-to-peer networks to give free voice over IP telephone calls to the masses, and not just calls to a special instant messenger-like registry of friends, but to virtually anyone.

It's not there yet, but...
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En garde! Let the foie gras fly: President of the United States George W. Bush is the King of Diamonds in a card deck depicting "the 52 most dangerous American officials" It's sold by the French group Reseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network), AP reports.

The translated caption under photograph reads,"Head of a baseball club and director of Salem bin Laden's oil company (brother of Osama). Designated President of the United States by friends of his father at the Supreme Court before the vote count showed that he lost the elections."

Reuters notes that Rumsfeld Is Ace of Spades in French Deck of Cards:

"We've already sold some 2,500 decks. That's not bad considering we couldn't find anyone who was willing to print them at first," said Thierry Meyssan, president of the Paris-based Reseau Voltaire group.

"We were shocked by the indecency of the cards distributed by the U.S. military. It was as if arresting people was some kind of game," Meyssan told Reuters on Thursday.

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Panel to Close Pentagon Terror-Spy Office: AP reports,

WASHINGTON - House and Senate negotiators have decided to close a Pentagon (news - web sites) office that was developing a vast computerized terrorism surveillance system and bar spending that would allow those high-tech spying tools to be used against Americans on U.S. soil.

But they left open the possibility that some or all of the high-powered software tools under development might be employed by different government offices to gather foreign intelligence from foreigners, U.S. citizens aboard or foreigners in this country.

The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program was conceived by retired Adm. John Poindexter and was run by the Information Awareness Office that he headed inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was developing software that could examine the computerized travel, credit, medical and other records of Americans and others around the world to search for telltale activities that might reveal preparations for a terrorist attack.

Done.

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"We Media" in html: From J.D. Lasica (who blogs a lot of interesting news today that I won't steal, just go there),

Shayne Bowman over at Hypergene Media has formatted an HTML version of the New Directions for News report "We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information." Previously it was available just in PDF form.
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September 24, 2003 6:45 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

At Stencil Revolution: seen on the streets by 00260881-X. Galleries, tutorials, stencil fonts to download and more. on the cutting edgeare an early art of childhood: Using Glass Wax and later, the harder-to-remove Spray Snow, we made classroom windows Christmasy. (Glass Wax was made until January, when Reckitt Benckiser stopped production.) Designer stencils make do-it-yourself wallpaper borders, and my father's army trunk from WW2 had his name stenciled in a font called Army. But stencils in the hands of creative adults do something else. Ephemeral art, just passing through, on sidewalks, dumpsters, blank walls: Art at a glance.   Seen on Sidewalk has a small collection, including Maggie the Cat here, which got around widely. OneTermPresident.org has a pdf of the stencil to download. Hand, above, is one of the really nice images at Berlin Stencils. The San Francisco Bay Guardian last year described a neighborhood full of guerrilla art: A girl on a motorcycle died and still receives flowers in the median on Dolores Street. There are mysterious storefronts in my neighborhood where nothing in the window is for sale. For years my housemate and I discussed the identity of a street artist named Shy Girl, whose work appeared on pavement and the sides of buildings. Much later someone started creeping out at night to draw outlines of the shadows dropped by parked cars. A huge one marked the passing of an SUV with the words "Go back to Texas." Lately someone has been talking back to the Simpsons viewer who stencils "monkey knife fight" on the sidewalks; now the phrase "junky wife bite" quietly waits for company, like the second line of an exquisite corpse in rhyme. Now What? by Torrinha Head Paris Photo by Tristan Manco is the stunning Stencil Graffiti Archives. I've pulled out some examples of stencils for street use here, with links to the sites whose owners made them, photographed them, or found them. Consider it inspiration. Elephant by Tristan Manco, Bristol; Photo by Jeffrey Otterbeck   Go for it, but use chalk or water-based paint. IBM was fined $100,000 by the city of San Francisco after it used real paint -- the permanent stuff -- to put Linux symbols on the sidewalks in July 2001. And you might avoid this altogether if you're a business: Mother Jones magazine huffed that "IBM's sidewalk-graffiti ads mark another step forward for the commercial colonization of public spaces." If you search Google using the word "stencil," lots of text ads will point you to commercial download sites. Or, if you just want to make Halloween sidewalks with the kids, Spooky Sidewalks will do it for you for $1.99.   Stencil Wall, Bristol Photo by Jeffrey Otterbeck Bonuses: an amazing German page full of banana-themed art, including a bus, a room divider screen and far stranger. Links... • StencilArchive's Online Chat with ECCE • A form of self-expression • Blek • London calling • Stencils: The Art of Negative Spaces • Pop art ethos comeback • The State of Public Art (2001) • How To Make Stencils: pdf • html • Banksy is the U.K.'s most famous stencil artist: Street art's new design for life (BBC); The Guardian has more Banksy images. Yet more are here. Stenciled on sidewalks during the fall, 2002 antiwar demonstrations in Ireland Others: Cleansurface.org, Acamonchi Thanks to a January 2003 item at Gothamist for many of these links. And many thanks to projo.com designer Beth Heaney for helping me make this hodgepodge of text and photos work. Duncan Cumming in Scotland offers photos of 246 stencils. Link to this item | Comment

In its place:

NOTICE

Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause visitors and journalists to the blackboxvoting.org site and hope to have this matter resolved shortly.

In the interim, send questions or information requests to bev_blackboxvoting@yahoo.com.

Here's Google's cache of how the homepage used to look.

Here's more background on the electronic voting, the players and the susceptibility of machines to being hacked, from Newhouse News Service: Election Reforms: Paper or Electronic?
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Court Finds F.T.C. Exceeded Authority on Do-Not-Call List: Just as you were looking forward to uninterrupted dinners,

A federal district court has ruled that federal regulators overstepped their authority in establishing a national do-not-call registry, a decision that would appear to block the registry — containing 48 million phone numbers — from taking effect on Oct. 1. Under federal rules, telemarketers could be heavily fined for calling those numbers.

The ruling, issued on Tuesday in the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma and made public today, found that Congress had not given authority to the Federal Trade Commission to establish the national registry.

"Admittedly, the elimination of telemarketing fraud and the prohibition of deceptive and abusive telemarketing acts or practices are significant public concerns," wrote District Judge Lee R. West. But, he said, the power to regulate such a public interest must be grounded in a grant of authority from Congress. "Absent such a grant of authority in this case, the court finds the do-not-call provision to be invalid."

Who is Judge West, and why?

Reaction:
FTC Head:Court's Do-Not-Call Ruling 'Clearly Incorrect'

Comments at CNN Money lead with,

"The court should not be interfering in the FTC 'Do not call' list. The voting public has spoken with over 50 million people registering for the list.

The Federal Trade Commission is appealing the ruling.

Updated Thursday, 1:25 p.m. / House Approves Do-Not-Call Legislation at the Washington Post:

The House of Representatives today voted 412 to 8 to overturn a federal court ruling that would have halted the government's plan to allow Americans to block telemarketing calls to their homes beginning next week.

The Senate, also working at unusual speed for the closely divided Congress, may vote on similar legislation this afternoon.

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Mnemonic device for banned book titles: Reader Adam Crane of Matunuck took Monday's list of the most frequently banned books from the American Library Association and ran with it. Here's his email:

This is one of those things that just pops into your head and you do it but you don't know why.  Lord knows I could have spent the hour or so doing almost anything more constructive (or work related ;-)  So, I condensed the top 25 Banned Books into one (very) short story so it will be easier to keep track of them for all those book burning nuts.  (sorry for any grammar/typos)

If I were independently wealthy I also think it would be cool to write an entire book using the Banned Book titles as Chapter Titles.  Wouldn't that just drive 'em crazy?

Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it.

Here's Adam's books and baseball story:

"It’s Perfectly Normal"
"What is?" I asked.
"Goosebumps," Alice replied.  We were sitting in the stands watching the baseball game.  Tonight's game featured the Earth’s Children from Erie taking on our own Fallen Angels of Chepachet.  No one thought this sub-Single A-level baseball league could survive... especially since it was started by Timothy Leary's family, but who knew the games would all be so exciting?
"But should I have goosebumps for this long?  It's been 2 months and My Brother Sam is Dead"  I protested.
"It hasn't been 2 months.  And your brother isn't dead, he's The Catcher in the Rye, N.Y. farm system.  Who's The Giver?"
"Pitcher."
"Whatever." Alice brushed it off.
"Hopkins." I replied.
"The Great Gilly Hopkins?"  She cooed.
"No, he died in the Seven-Day War or Gulf War or The Chocolate War or one of them.  Crap, they have a stupid name for all of those things.  This guy's Tommy Hopkins, Daddy’s Roommate in High School."
"Hey, speaking of Daddys, did you know Heather Has Two Mommies?"  Alice said in an excited voice.
"I know, I heard that.  Talk about Scary Stories."
By now everyone knew the story of Heather.  Turns out her first mom had Sex one night In the Night Kitchen of their home in Cumberland.  Not feeling completely, ummm, satisfied she left after father number one passed out.  She headed down to a bar, going over the Bridge to Terabithia, and picked up some other random guy. This guy, as luck would have it, had been drinking Forever and was easily persuaded into another tryst. Tests could never prove who Heather's real dad was.
"Of Mice and Men" she quipped.
"Oh, you're bad." I said, smiling and giggling.
A friendly silence fell between us as we watched the game unfold.  The Children were winning 1-0 and the Angels were up to bat.  Harry Potter, who was hitless in the last 12 games, stood waiting for the pitch.  I could almost make out the welt, now The Color Purple, through his pants where he got hit in the first inning.
Alice got up from her bench seat.
"I'm going to get a doughboy."
"Ewww," I said, my face in A Wrinkle.  In Time, she'd remember I hate those things.  She had learned, finally, that I was a vegan.  I couldn't wait for A Day No Pigs Would Die.
While waiting for her to return, a sandy blond-haired boy from our school came over to me.
"Where's Alice?"
"Why?"  I didn't think these two had ever talked before, why did he need Alice?
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"  he said.
"Oh.  Well, she'll want to know. It's been killing her."  I pointed towards the concession stand.
"Thanks." He turned and bounded down the bleachers.
The summer air hung soft over the spectators.  On the lawn near the outfield, I could faintly hear a family's radio as they sat on a blanket and watched the game.  The husky female voice escaped the speaker.
"Go Ask Alice, when she's ten feet tallllllll."

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September 23, 2003 7:55 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

One more day's delay on the stencils item I promised; it has a lot of images, and I've run out of time to make it all display properly. Tomorrow.

Mark himself was recently in a bit of a tussle with Jeff Jarvis after Jarvis published his email interview with Glaser before Mark's story came out. Tellingly, this time Glaser used the phone.

The piece is well done -- and I don't say that just because I'm a source. Here's the intro:

Newspapers represent all that is old and moldy about journalism: printed on dead trees, distributed by underpaid teens, and read by an aging audience. Weblogs represent all that is edgy and hip about journalism: written in a personal voice, encompassing divergent modes of thought, and distributed on a global platform. But is the commingling of newspapers and blogs like chocolate and peanut butter, or chocolate and pine tar?

It's too early to tell, but one spectacularly successful case was in Sacramento, Calif., where the Sacramento Bee got political columnist Daniel Weintraub blogging just in time for recall madness. While his blog, California Insider, became a place for regular scoops on recall news, Weintraub's posts were sent to Mark Paul, deputy editor of the editorial pages, right as they were being posted. After a recent controversial post about Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante -- "If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher" -- the Bee decided that all site content would go to an editor first -- a process explained by the Bee's ombudsman.

This in turn set the blogosphere atwitter, with screeds by Slate blogger Mickey Kaus to "Free Weintraub!!!" and others calling for a boycott of links to the new sacbee.com group Weblog run by its editorial board. But Paul doesn't see a sea change in the editorial process for Weintraub's blog. "It's only a slight difference operationally," he said. "The process will be just about as fast as before, and this doesn't represent that much of a change."

Paul read the flames in various blogs about the move, especially those saying Weintraub would be muzzled now. He asked the columnist/blogger jokingly "Where's your muzzle?" when he first saw Weintraub in the office this week. In a statement to me via e-mail, Weintraub echoed his editor's assessment on the brouhaha. ...

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An open invitation to election fraud: Salon interviews Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting: Ballot - Tampering in the 21st Century, the book and website. The subhead: "Not only is the country's leading touch-screen voting system so badly designed that votes can be easily changed, but its manufacturer is run by a die-hard GOP donor who vowed to deliver his state for Bush next year." (Free admission if you watch an ad.)
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Search by location at Google: You're looking for nearby sashimi in a strange city, or you can't remember the name of the pizza joint a few blocks away. Here, you can restrict your search to a geographic area (a city or a zip code), and Google will deliver a map with your results marked on it.
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Spam ban: California Moves to Ban Unsolicited E-Mail. At the New York Times,

... Gov. Gray Davis of California signed a bill today that outlaws sending most commercial e-mail to or from the state that the recipient did not explicitly request. That is a far more wide-reaching law than any of the 35 other state laws meant to regulate spam or any of the proposed bills in Congress.

``We are saying that unsolicited e-mail cannot be sent and there are no loopholes,'' said Kevin Murray, the Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who sponsored the bill.

The law would fine spammers $1,000 for each unsolicited message sent up to $1 million for each campaign.

As the nation's most populous state and the home to many large Internet companies, the California bill could well have a significant effect on spam. The bill puts the burden on the sender to determine if the recipient resides in California.

The marketing industry vehemently opposes the law, saying that it will only restrict actions by legitimate marketers and not the rouges who send the most offensive spam. ...

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The biochemistry of hangovers: Ant stings ragin' 'round your brain is just the beginning, says The Guardian (U.K.)

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Doc Searls is a master of one-liners:

Proof that blogs are the duct tape of journalism. Or: whatever.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Kazahkstan has (is?) a blog.
Perhaps related: Blogalization.

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Working the future: Blogger and programmer (Burningbird) Shelley Powers' book Practical RDF is reviewed at Slashdot by Brian Donovan, programmer and blogger (MONOKROM), with a cast of thousands commenting. Shelley is gracious about the review on her book's blog.

Here's Donovan's intro, which helps explain what RDF is:

"World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Director Tim Berners-Lee and his compatriots would like to transform the current Web into a 'Semantic Web' where 'software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users' using 'structured collections of information and sets of inference rules.' The Resource Description Framework (RDF), designed as a language for expressing information about resources on the Web, and allied technologies are the result to date of ongoing efforts at the W3C to furnish Semantic Web proponents with the requisite tools. While it's far too early to predict whether TimBL's grand vision will be realized, RDF/XML (the XML serialization of RDF) is already in widespread use, having been incorporated into a surprising array of applications."

Publisher O'Reilly offers a sample chapter of Practical RDF and code examples; there are more reviews at Amazon.
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Geek Eye for the Luddite Guys: The experiment: Let loose three tech experts in an average family's home. The result: gizmo nirvana (well, almost). It's at Fortune:

You know them, maybe. Maybe they are you: the kind of family who, when they want to go online, strings a long, gray phone cord in a sagging waist-high arc from the back of their computer in the den to the jack 15 feet away in the kitchen. So the first order of business for the Burkes—as for anyone joining the digital era—was to get high-speed Net access. Before descending on the house, the geek team arranged for Verizon to install DSL.

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Tonight Show circus: Ninety of the 135 candidates for governor of California in the recall election showed up for the taping of last night's Tonight Show. If you missed it, The San Jose Mercury News covers part of it. Each candidate got 10 seconds to sum up his or her platform. But they all got the same 10 seconds, so unintelligible babble was the result.

Unexplained in the stories I've seen: Jay Leno said the lawyers had ruled that the only way they could focus on individual candidates was if they insulted them, so selected candidates got face time and barbs. Among them was a used-car salesman (an easy target) and Mary Carey (Mary Cook), adult-film star, who responded to a lewd insult from Leno by flipping a bird -- which was electronically masked, but unmistakable.

It's too bad some serious candidates didn't get a chance to speak. The show treated them all as a joke.
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Sound bite: "Three million Muslims have come to this country from Asia and the Middle East. They didn't come because they were afraid of our values. They came because they wanted to live under them." -- Wesley Clark, quoted in the N.Y. Times.
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September 22, 2003 7:10 p.m.

Tomorrow: I'm working on an item about stencil art -- the stuff people might use chalk dust and water to leave on sidewalks. Sometimes it's political, sometimes not. If you're into this and can help point to some great stencil sites, I'd appreciate it if you shoot me an email.

These book taught me the power of words and to appreciate classic horror, at an early age. The stories may seem a little graphic for children, but I have no problem with giving them to my own if I decide to become a father someday.

Here are the top 25 "troublemakers":

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

Related: Libraries Report Being Asked for Records: At TalkLeft.

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Ouch! Former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, writes an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined Mistakes of Vietnam repeated with Iraq. It ends,

The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.

Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.

Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.

--Max Cleland, former U.S. senator, was head of the Veterans Administration in the Carter administration. He teaches at American University in Washington.

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Couldn't he find somebody to quote on that one? Dan Weintraub, a rightish journalist blogging the California recall at the Sacramento Bee, is in hot water after writing that:

(California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante) "certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher."

Further, he alleged, "it's indisputably true that the Legislature's Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California, in the name of ethnic unity." The caucus protested in a letter to Bee Publisher Janis Besler Heaphy.

The paper has now decided that his blog will be supervised by the editorial page editors.

Mickey Kaus at Slate writes,

If Weintraub's too much of an anti-liberal blogger, add a liberal blogger! Don't supress them both under a smothering blanket of bureaucratic timidity!

J.D. Lasica has links to other journalist-bloggers who've weighed in.

My take: Weintraub's comments about Bustamante are the sort of words you might hear in a bar. If Weintraub wants to pop off with unsubstantiated personal slams like that, add a comments capacity to his blog and give his readers equal opportunity to publicly challenge him. (The best comments format I've seen has them appearing just below the item in a slightly smaller text size, part of the blog, not hidden behind an optional popup window.)

Related: If you're reading this Monday night, at least 90 recall candidate are to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonight.

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4-D Rubik's Cube: Click on different parts of this -- it's an art engine even if you have no interest in making your head ache by using it as its creators intended.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com