Words of Waldman

What every stalker needs this Christmas

Lover Spy software, will let you see exactly what your partner (or for that matter anyone else) is doing on their computer simply by sending them an e-card. Quoting from their site:

Through our service, you compose and send your lover a normal-looking "Greeting Card" saying "I Love you" or a similar message. Because the e-mail appears to be a regular greeting card, the recipient will open the e-card and LoverSpy will be automatically and silently installed!.... It records and sends you all e-mails they view, including Hotmail, Yahoo, and Outlook emails.....All the Passwords they type into their web browser are also recorded and sent to you. Every single Chat conversation they have on the internet. In fact, every Key stroke they type into the computer is recorded and sent to you in an organized report. Every single web site they visit....EXACT copies of every Hotmail e-mail viewed, Yahoo, Excite, AOL, and even Outlook emails. All these e-mails are Forwarded to you in the background, in real-time! After they read their email, you will have a copy of it - seconds later.

Are they mad? CNet reckons its illegal, which is absolutely right. It's also a thousand times more likely to be used by stalkers than wronged partners. In the meantime...I'll be ignoring all those e-cards I get from people telling me they love me.

Wiki news

Drawn to this by Kottke: a news front end to the Wikipedia. It's the sort of idea I've heard people propose a lot...but rarely deliver on (like the whole Wikipedia project, in fact). Very neat. Here's the about page if you want to know a bit more.

The speech Tony Blair should give

From David Aaronovitch

Of course it's embarrassing for me that we haven't turned up a bunker full of anthrax. No, not embarrassing - disastrous. I thought there was stuff there, so did the spooks, so did one D Kelly. And Cherie's astrologer still says there's a chance there's something out there. Joke, by the way.

Ecstasy use soars in the UK: a possible solution

The Observer today has a pretty informative piece on what it calls 'The Ecstasy Epidemic', which manages to avoid some (but not all) of the usual cliches and looks about the link to the Triads. fuelled partly by the news that ecstasy use has doubled in the last five years: apparently a UN report reveals that around 730,000 people in the UK aged between 16 and 60 now take the drug (it doesn't say how often).
Of course, 730,000 people is about the size of a decent sized city, and there's probably a pretty decent age and demographic spread among that groups. So, I suggest the Government contain the problem, by giving the country's ecstasy users say, Manchester, letting ecstasy and cannabis be decriminalised there, and leaving them to it.
The city's pratically half way there....wouldn't take too much effort to remove the few remaining people not taking E in Manchester out to Milton Keynes (where will feel at home among all the Man Utd supporters).
Would be be rather like a day glo version of the 'Free State of Christiana' in Copenhagen, and infinitely more likely to be successful than waging another war on drugs.
Could also be the start of some slightly more reliable research into the long term effects of the drug.

Music for your ears

I Am Kloot remain one of my finds of the last few years. and their second eponymous album is well worth getting hold of, especially if you liked Natural History. Northern, acoustic, smart lyrics. You know the sort of thing. Like a slightly less ravaged, Mancunian version of the Shack.
Alfie appeared around the same time (on my CD rack, at least) and their second album Do You Imagine Things is also well worth grabbing.
(Interestingly: it also shows in these days of Google = everything, the benefits of having a distinctive name...am sure Alfie and The Shack must have a site...but it's impossible to find through Google, therefore they might as well not exist.)

OJR on Google News winning 'Best News' Webby

Interview with Krishna Bharat, Google's Chief Scientist on a first year of Google News. See, if newspapers had 'Chief Scientists', perhaps everything would be much simpler. [via PaidContent ...I daren't not credit]
Oh, and full list of Webby winners in case you missed it..

Story stealers beware....

The normally mild mannered Rafat Ali threatens death and disembowelment and public disgracing to anyone who steals his stories without crediting him .

The eyes have it

Three days after surgery...and todays' the first time my eyes have felt completely natural. It is quite an incredible feeling...just waking up and seeing things in focus. Makes me think I must have gone to sleep with my lenses in. Still got a few days before I can stop putting in drops every couple of hours..but so far...touch wood, fingers crossed, etc etc...all seems very good, indeed.

Electronic paper reaches video speed

Electronic paper is one of those things that's always 'three years away'. There was a huge frenzy over E-ink a few years ago, and in May, in partnership with Philips, they released a first 'advance paper-like display'. This way, we're led to believe, lies the future of books and newspapers.
Anyway, Nature carries a story today saying that they have invented the technology to let electronic paper carry video.
Fills you with images of the reprogrammable, video newspaper in Minority Report...but three questions: when? when? and when?

Surprise: The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields - nothing

As reported in today's Guardian

An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to discover a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulating in Washington and London..... "It demonstrates that the main judgments of the national intelligence estimate (NIE) in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false."

Who would have thought it?
2 Oct Update Interim report by David Kay reveals

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. "