In these post-9/11 days, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been one of the staunchest supporters of Big Brother type initiates: Homeland Security, expanded phone and Intenet taps support, the Patriot Act and so on.

He didn’t always feel that way.

Back in 1997, when he was then a Senator from Missouri, he penned a position paper decrying the Clinton administration’s position on encryption and such.

The paper, ironically enough (given his current inclinations), was titled “Keep Big Brother’s Hands Off the Internet”.

An excerpt:

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.

Is this the same John Ashcroft we’re all familiar with?

Thanks to Kottke for the pointer.

OK, call me a Luddite, call me an anti-MS partisan (neither of which, I think, are true), but it’s just getting too freakin’ scary to use IE.

Or is it just me?

Hey, as I type this, a Symantec virus scan is running in the background; over the weekend this program caught three attempted exploits on IE.

Between the security issues and Spam, I can understand why Joe Six-Pack doesn’t really care about the Web. It’s a bit unsettling.

If you haven’t read Joel Spolsky’s recent rant,

Joel on Software – How Microsoft Lost the API War, well, why not?

Microserf/MS blaster or not, this is a must-read.

Espeically for developers: Procedural, OO, application, Web…

Honest.

By integration issues, I’m of course not getting all political on you.

I refer to meshing data – imports, exports and all that.

With the possible exception of collecting cash over the Web (and all the proxies and so on that requires), integration is the issue that, well, is the biggest issue for any tech operation.

And just about anyone runs into this to some degree:

• Merging EDI data (such as payroll) with in-house data (think Excel spread sheets) so reports can be run.
• Third-party data, such as feeds of tax rates, loan rates, recent news stories
• Legacy data (VAX, AS400) to Web-based platforms.

Yeah, I could go on forever.

But it’s always a pain – which is why RSS and XML (especially) has made such a splash (though the adoption rate of both – especially for enterprise apps – is surprisingly low).

So it’s one-off parsers, most written with the parser’s helper: Perl and the Perl DBI.

Amazing stuff.

Someone buy Larry Wall a beer or two…

A good day to read Ulysses (OK, it’ll take more than a day, that’s for sure), wouldn’t it be?

OK, that’s never going to happen for most of us, so how about another Joyce quote, this time from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

Sure, I knew you’d like that….

The man could write…must have been all the Guinness.

In my time zone – CDT – it’s about two hours early – late in the day/night June 15th here – but better early than forgetting, ja?

Happy Bloomsday – June 16th.

It’s the 100th anniversary of that fateful (fictional) day when Leopold Bloom boogied around Dublin, and his wife Molly, well, boogied around something else.

Tough book. Worth it.

Liquid poetry in so many dimensions.

Here’s the News.com story.

This would be a good thing, in my mind. Let the standards (RSS and Atom) compete in the same spaces, and let the best standard(s) win.

And it makes Google a neutral party again. By electing to go with Atom and not support RSS, it definitely was a choice. It’s not like not supporting Netscape v1.1 anymore or anything like that.

Let’s hope this works out.

Needless to say, Dave seems happy about this development…

Yes, the message “e-mail is broken” has been bandied about for some time with the rise of spam and other almost-spam messages.

E-mail has fundamentally changed over the last few years. You really can’t argue about that. E-mail used to primarily be for communication between known parties. This is not the case anymore.

While e-mail is still – in my mind – the killer app of the Internet, it is getting less and less useful every day.

For example, I used to use the “leave messages on server for X days” very liberally, just in case I accidently deleted something. Then I could get it back via a different client/Web-based e-mail tool. I used to leave stuff on for 10 days. Now I’m doing either 1 or 2 days. The volume is just to high to do it more than that. It nukes my site space allowance.

I did a (very rough) calculation of e-mail I’ve gotten over the past couple of weeks, and I am getting roughtly 96% spam. It all goes in a spam bucket which is so well trained I haven’t had a false positive for weeks, but still…that’s nutty.

Ninety-six percent.

E-mail is broken.

Actually, it was a good weekend. Went to the first art fair of the season, and the weather cooperated perfectly. Was a good show; I got some stuff. Most of it is hanging already.

On the tech side, made some progress with the Perl Image::Magick module. While the documentation for this PM is poor, I was able to do what I wanted (finally). Thank god for folks on the Internet who post code samples. Saved my butt!

Quick reaction to a bunch of stuff I’ve recently encountered, in one way or another. Very random; meaning…whatever you want.

Good:

• Blogger revamp (yep, feeding the hand that…uh, feeds me for free…)
• vi
• Unices in any flavor. Windows makes the hard pretty but not easy (often, virtually impossible). UNIX is ugly but unbelievably useful (if you know the secret handshake).

Bad:

• Flooding (Chicago area; from drought to…uh, non-drought
• The War on Terror (© ?? The TumbleWeeds), and all that that has inflicted on everyone
• Dinging Moveable Type for (GASP!) charging for a brilliant piece of software (not necesarily the code, but the concept…)
  

Unclear:

• There is a lot of action in the Telcom/Internet area. Understandable and not new, but heating up. Hmm.
• Microsoft’s Longhorn seems more distant every day (caveat: I’m more into Unices now). What does this mean? Is there a disturbance in the force?