After serving between 553 and 693 days in military and civilian prisons, the five draft resisters, Haggai Matar, Noam Bahat, Adam Maor, Shimri Zameret and Matan Kaminer have been officially informed that they are hereby released from the ranks of the army.


You can use the e-mail addresses at http://www.refuz.org.il/ContactUs.html to congradulate them.

The essence of british cusine -
Take a good idea from somewhere you colonized and make it into a gu.

I guess some blogs do have an audience greater than 3.

In just under 100 hours, we have smashed through our one million download campaign--with 6 days still to go! This is the fastest adoption rate we have ever experienced, higher than every previous Firefox release. But it's not time to relax our efforts. How soon can we break through 2 million? We'll have more information on a new campaign on Monday.

The BBC reports:

Some 30% of people have their best ideas in bed compared to just 11% who have them at their desk, according to research by the East of England Development Agency (EEDA).

The conclussion? According to the researchers, install beds in offices.
er, sorry, but maybe people are tyring to tell you something - like that their work is so dead boring, they are more creative sleeping?

What do you get if you run windows on a mobile device? A mobile virus.

Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam.

(I just learned the origins of spam).

For a few years now, political pundits have been talking about how we can't gut our civil liberties in order to beat the terrorists. There's another danger afoot. It's time for critics to start speaking up against gutting our notions of good art in order to beat Bush.

Charles Taylor, In a Salon review of Spike Lee's She Hate Me.

Aug. 28th is Software Freedom Day.

The Onion reports:

Kerry unveils one-point plan for better America

WICHITA, KS—Delivering the central speech of his 10-day "Solution For America" bus campaign tour Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.

and a good plan it is!

According to the NY Times, IBM plans to contribute its Cloudscape code to Apache. Cloudscape is a pure Java DB. Apache is an open-source foundation.

Another nice example of open-source gaining grounds in the commercial world. Although I must say I find IBM's valuation of the code at $85 million a bit, ur, creative.

BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).

They also have a few other nice Mozilla extensions.

http://prezgeorgew.typepad.com/

HASHD aims at developing civil society in Palestine through supporting a popular grassroots campaign for peace and democracy. HASHD focuses on empowering the people by initiating a common vision for a future peace. [...] A future Palestinian state, living alongside its Israeli neighbor, needs to be envisioned and built by its people.

We have a creature living with us. Been here for a fortnight or so. It lives in the fridge door. Every time I open it, it purs Fuweeeed me.

The name's starter. Sourdough starter.

Bruce Sterling's Hacker crackdown came up over coffee. While looking for it, I stumbled across Sterling's blog, which led me to LA GRANDE DANSE MACABRE DES HOMMES ET DES FEMMES.

Join the March along the fence

The ISM movement (The International Solidarity Movement) is calling Israelis and Internationals to join a joint three week march along the route of the walls and fences starting from the north to east Jerusalem.

The march will begin on Friday the 30^th of July in Zbuba. Its length is around 10 to 12 kilometers a day for a total of 200 kilometers.

For more details about joining one of the march days from Israel contact Raz: 050-7946044

From http://taayush.tripod.com/new/20040730-ismmarch.html

Some Sh!£head hacked my Wiki. I never had anything interesting there. Just the odd note I took, bookmarks and such. The reason I never bothered to put any protection on it was:
a. As I said, it not that thrilling. Didn't expect too much trafic.
b. What's the challange in hacking a Wiki? And a personal one with no exposure?

Well, aparently, when you're not smart enough to do any serious hacking, you settle for whatever you can get.

A theme of the nineteenth-century rhetoric of technology was that

technology would annihilate time and space. It did. And so today, "we are

learning what it means to have no time and no place" (Albert Borgmann)

Bembo's zoo. Oh sooo cool.

This just came in the mail:

In a demonstration of strength in the belief that “there is someone on the other side to talk to” more than 220 teachers and educators from Israel and from Palestine met this past week for an encounter and teacher training seminar. These teachers are taking part in the Peace Education Program of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (http://www.ipcri.org) which is being run in more than 50 high schools in Israel and more than 30 in the West Bank.

The higher you build your barriers
The taller I become
The further you take my rights away
The faster I will run
You can deny me
You can decide to turn your face away
No matter 'cause there's

Something inside so strong
:
:
Labi Siffre, Something Inside So Strong

I.'s class sang this song at their leavers assembly. I was moved to tears. I wish I'll see the day its translated to Hebrew & Arabic and sung back home.

p.s.
Labi Siffre says a lot of other stuff on his site which I wish he didn't, but that doesn't make this song lessworthy.

Forget Butler. Read the SWISH report.

I bought a T-shirt at the Marxism2004 conference. Well, not really. They've put up a booth with promotional material outside the IOE. I passed it on my way from the nursery to the office, and decided to stop for some entertainment.

The outfit looks like a goods stand at a rock gig. Complete with socialist worker party mugs, lighters and pens. CDs labeled stop the war fundraiser ft. Ms Dynamite, Billy Bragg and Asian Dub (I bought one, a real bargain for a fiver). And of course, loads of T-s. Most of them where so in your face, I couldn't ware them even as a joke. Finally I found one - its got a rough photo of Malcolm X, holding a rifle. The inscription reads By any means necessary.

The guy at the counter said, in heavy Glasgonian, Wer reealy pushin the sob scib sauns this weeek. You gait yr free copy an also a compeemantry socialist party girl magazeene. I said his methods don't seam very marxist to me, to which he answared by quoting my new T.

Diane sent me a link to Lev Manovich's "DATABASE AS A SYMBOLIC FORM" on Cristine Wang's on-line exhibition Defining Lines: . As usual, I read around. As usual, I wish I had the time to really look into this stuff.

The rich get faster cars, the poor get less rice.

Wash with warm water.
Use mild soap.
Dry flat.
Do not use bleach.
Do not dry in the dryer.
Do not iron.
We are sorry that Our President is an idiot.
We did not vote for him.

Tim Bihn laptop bags.

About time

Internet Explorer has been officially declared a virus. Windows in general has been declared a carrier.

"the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), the official U.S. body responsible for defending against online threats. The group on Friday advised security administrators to consider moving to a non-Microsoft browser among six possible responses."

"There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to" IE, the advisory stated. "It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites."

The advisory noted that Internet Explorer has had a great many security problems in several of its key technologies, such as Active X scripting, its zone model for security and JavaScript. However, the group pointed out that turning off certain features in IE increases the security.

"Using another Web browser is just one possibility," said Art Manion, Internet security analyst with the CERT Coordination Center, which administers US-CERT. "We don't recommend any product over another product. On the other hand, it is naive to say that that consideration should not play into your security model."

CERT also noted that people who opt for non-IE browsers but who continue to run the Windows operating system are still at risk because of the degree to which the OS itself relies on IE functionality.

http://asia.cnet.com/my/0,39002192,39185013,00.htm
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2648149
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/28/ie_is_complex/
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1155868