bruceb news

This article has a nice collection of links to online information about the Bay Area freeway collapse – newspaper articles, Google satellite images, suggestions for alternate routes, and more.

This has nothing to do with technology – it’s just a fascinating, thought-provoking story.

The Washington Post arranged for violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to play in a DC subway station during the morning rush hour, like any other street musician, and filmed the reaction. Joshua Bell is considered one of the best classical musicians in the world; he played beautiful (and difficult) music that morning on one of the most valuable Stradivarius violins ever made.

He played for three-quarters of an hour. Seven people stopped to listen for longer than a minute. Twenty-seven people threw in a total of $32, most on the run. […] continued

On March 9 the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed that the FBI has been systematically abusing its expanded power to issue “national security letters” and obtain private information about US citizens and residents from telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit providers, and other businesses.

Between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands, without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval, to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. That number was significantly underreported to Congress each year.

Among the problems identified by the report are sloppy and inconsistent recordkeeping by the FBI, which resulted in substantial under-reporting of errors; NSLs that were signed by unauthorized personnel; confusion among recipients of NSLs that resulted in disclosure of private information to which the FBI was not entitled; and a pattern of fabricating “immediate threats” to justify the demands. […] continued

The Pentagon’s plan to allow betting on terrorist acts through a quasi-stock-market will likely die an early death. Before it’s gone, take a look at the Policy Analysis Market web site set up for the program. Despite your instincts and the appearance of the site, this is not a joke. (According to the New York Times, some specific descriptions of potential betting events – hijackings, assassinations, and the like – were removed from the site yesterday morning.)

Admiral Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office and proponent of the Policy Analysis Market, has, umm, interesting ideas. Last year the same office proposed a sweeping electronic surveillance plan as a way of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial records about all Americans. […] continued

Every day the online magazine Slate presents a wonderful selection of articles on politics, news, and culture. It’s one of my daily stops. One of its best features is Today’s Papers, which analyzes and compares the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

I just learned that you can visit MSN Newsletters and sign up to receive Today’s Papers in your e-mail inbox. There’s a long list of other newsletters as well, mostly nonsense, but you might see something you like. (Plus I was able to unsubscribe myself from a couple that my name had gotten onto somehow.) The only problem is you’ll have to go through Microsoft’s “Passport” process, which I find incredibly confusing. […] continued

Robert L. Park is a physics professor at the University of Maryland, and the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness To Fraud. He has written a wonderful short article on how to recognize scientific nonsense – an important skill for all of us in these confusing times.

“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist’s antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum.

[…] continued

More interesting reading: this Slate article casts a jaundiced eye at the “National Strategy To Secure Cyberspace” pushed out by the Bush administration last month. Part of a broader strategy to fill the airwaves and the public consciousness with FUD – “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” this time by painting a picture of computer-savvy regimes ready to knock out our electricity and phone lines and electric blankets from their remote terminals. Except that the purported incidents in the past are misrepresented or overstated, the threat in the future appears to be remote, and the proposed solutions are lame. (Well, some of them might be effective if the federal government can construct a working monolithic data warehouse cross-indexing every activity in the daily lives of every US citizen and a fair number of people in other parts of the world – a computer project so huge and difficult it dwarfs anything ever before attempted. […] continued

CNET Radio (AM 910) has been my constant companion for the last year or more. It’s delivered technology news and talk all day, every day – and now it’s closing up the radio station on January 31. Sad news for anyone who had stumbled on its wonderful programming in the San Francisco area, or nationwide on XM Radio. (Rob Black’s commentary on investing and the stock market is addictive.) Driving around goes back to being dull. Sniff.

An article in today’s Washington Post reviews some of the major decisions the Federal Communications Commission will be making in the next few months, moves that could fundamentally rewrite the rules for the broadcast media and Internet service providers. The likely result is that a handful of mega-corporations will control virtually all aspects of our entertainment and our online experiences. There is no reason to think that this will be an improvement for consumers; instead, there’s a strong possibility that prices will rise, new tolls will be charged at every opportunity, and restrictions will be placed on your ability to access “competing” content. […] continued

With the raging popularity of the Nigerian e-mail scam (see my writeup and links on October 24), a new sport has sprung up – Nigerian fraudster baiting, leading the scammers on the road to ridicule.

Here’s a wonderful example – an exchange of e-mails between “Dr. Graham Douglas” in Nigeria, and gullible victim Norman Bettison. As the Nigerian fraudster gets more and more excited, “Normy” makes his messages more and more ludicrous, until the story ends with Normy purportedly locked in a Houston hotel room with a dead prostitute, awaiting documents from Nigeria. Funny stuff.