Prometheus 6

We first asked BT about its relationship with Phorm in July 2007, when it was widely known as 121Media, a firm deeply involved in spyware. BT denied any testing and said customers whose DNS requests were being redirected must have a malware problem.

It wasn't until 14 February this year, when the deals between BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse to pimp customer web browsing were announced, that a cover-up was revealed. You can read the original story here.

BT's belated confession that it secretly used its customers' traffic to test the safety of ad targeting technology can only add to the distrust around Phorm, whose executive team includes a former BT Retail CTO. Several security firms have confirmed plans to classify Phorm's cookies - both for opting in and opting out of Webwise - as adware.

BT admits misleading customers over Phorm experiments
By Chris Williams
Published Monday 17th March 2008 09:52 GMT

BT has admitted that it secretly used customer data to test Phorm's advertising targeting technology last summer, and that it covered it up when customers and The Register raised questions over the suspicious redirects.

The national telecoms provider now faces legal action from customers who are angry their web traffic was compromised.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Debra L. Dickson, a Popline manager, wrote. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”...

Under the rule, Popline ignored the word “abortion,” just as it ignores terms like “a” and “the.” Ms. Sorrough and a colleague, Gloria Won, reported their experience on an electronic mailing list, and librarians protested the restrictions.

“We sent this out on a listserv, and it just exploded,” Ms. Sorrough said. “Eliminating this term essentially blocks access to reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. Unwanted pregnancy is not a synonym for abortion.” 

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February.

Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.

US to avoid UN Durban meet on racism
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 05:53:25

The US says it saw "no reason” to attend the 2009 UN conference on racism in South Africa amid fears of Zionist regime condemnation. 

As I said, the white guys did not ask for the honor of being the target demographic. They know it’s a minefield. As Paul Vitello reported Friday in The Times, they couch every negative comment about Barack with a preface pointing out that this isn’t about race. And I cannot tell you how many Obama men I have run into who begin every discussion by noting that Hillary is an excellent senator.

Could you please stop? Anyone who can't see white males are the dominant political force in this country is too stupid to vote. ESPECIALLY if they are white. 

White Guys Are Back
By GAIL COLLINS

It was probably inevitable. The historic contest between a woman and an African-American for the presidential nomination is now all about white men.

Not that the white male voters asked for this. They’ve been uncommitted, supporting Hillary in one contest and Barack in the next. But all that hemming and hawing has turned them into the deciding factor in the big upcoming primary in Pennsylvania.

The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time.

There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS.

If I recall correctly, it has been legally established that the guy who compiles a database (of whatever sort, from whatever source) owns said database.

It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored).

Which means the feds don't need a subpoena. They can buy a copy of the data.

The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users
By ADAM COHEN

In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.

It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.

I figured if I comment on two of their posts per day I'd catch up, but I think they put up like five today.

I am going to comment on all of them, but I may chunk them up. I'm in another one of those "got a lot to do" phases. I'm reading Houston Baker's book carefully, I actually have to review a tech book, Enterprise Ajax too, and roughly half of tomorrow is scheduled for non-blog stuff. Beyond that, believe it or not, I haven't given up on Intrapolitics.org.

For tonight, I think all the MLK stuff today is getting under my skin. I wasn't going to write anything because EVerybody else is doing something. But maybe I will.

I saw a neon sign in a deli recently advertising something I though HAD to be a joke. But it wasn't. It sounded so gross, I'm linking a page of reviews before I even tell you what it is.

I guess you'd call it a mixed drink. Clamato...that's clam juice, the fluid extracted by crushing a rather slimy living being, mixed with tomato juice...and Budweiser beer. In one can. I think there's lime in it too, at least the neon sign had this greenish section. They call it Chelada, which I discover is short for Michelada. And I know folks get funky with their brewing; there a couple of Sam Adams varieties for which I keep a ten foot pole around that I use not to touch them.

But clam juice?

Is there a human on the planet that can make fresh clam juice and drink it? Why would you put that in beer? Even Budweiser.

Mr. Krugman is getting sneaky, hiding his Hillary support behind Mrs. Edwards.

[T]here’s no reason to believe in these alleged cost reductions. Insurance companies do try to hold down “medical losses” — the industry’s term for what happens when an insurer actually ends up having to honor its promises by paying a client’s medical bills. But they don’t do this by promoting cost-effective medical care.

Instead, they hold down costs by only covering healthy people, screening out those who need coverage the most — which was exactly the point Mrs. Edwards was making. They also deny as many claims as possible, forcing doctors and hospitals to spend large sums fighting to get paid. 

Voodoo Health Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Elizabeth Edwards has cancer. John McCain has had cancer in the past. Last weekend, Mrs. Edwards bluntly pointed out that neither of them would be able to get insurance under Mr. McCain’s health care plan.

It’s about time someone said that and, more generally, made the case that Mr. McCain’s approach to health care is based on voodoo economics — not the supply-side voodoo that claims that cutting taxes increases revenues (though Mr. McCain says that, too), but the equally foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone.

As Mrs. Edwards pointed out, the McCain health plan would do nothing to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to those, like her and Mr. McCain, who have pre-existing medical conditions.

And damn near a third are either rich or retarded.

Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer.

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

Ms. Quinn said that the practice of appropriating money to fictitious groups grew out of a bookkeeping maneuver dating to at least 1988 in which the Council, during the budget process, established holding accounts to keep money in reserve for community programs or other needs that came up in the middle of a given year.

Ms. Quinn, who became speaker in January 2006, said she found out about this practice, absent the use of ghost organizations, in the spring of 2007 during her second budget process and immediately ordered it stopped....

Despite the investigations, Ms. Quinn said she believed that the money allocated to phantom groups was ultimately spent on legitimate programs.

Phony Allocations by City Council Reported
By RAY RIVERA and RUSS BUETTNER

The New York City Council has appropriated millions in taxpayer dollars in recent years to organizations that did not exist, Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn disclosed on Thursday.

The maneuver, in which funds were set aside for fictitious groups like the Coalition of Informed Individuals and Senior Citizens for Equality, allowed Council members to spend the money later on community programs they supported without obtaining the mayor’s approval.

The practice dates to at least 2001 and encompasses the tenures of the previous two speakers, Peter F. Vallone Sr., and Gifford Miller, according to Ms. Quinn.

Darth Juan speaks.

But when Barack Obama, arguably the best of this generation of black or white leaders, finds it easy to sit in Rev. Wright's pews and nod along with wacky and bitterly divisive racial rhetoric, it does call his judgment into question. And it reveals a continuing crisis in racial leadership.

Yes. One must wonder why racial leaders for white people (like Darth here) insist on forcing a politician into a role he explicitly denies.

What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church.

Darth, you slander Jesus.

Jesus hung out with all the problem people of his day. And he, unlike your Conservative brethren and decorative female supporters, would act based on an understanding of the present, rather than a longing for times long past.

The View From Room 306
By DAVID BROOKS

Building the social fabric after the disruption of that period has been the work of the subsequent generations — weaving the invisible web of family, neighborhood and national obligations so that people stay in school, attend to their kids and have an opportunity to rise if they play by the rules.

Too bad Black folks were STILL left out of all that.

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public.

How's that working for you?

Not YOU, Brooks. We know you and your ilk like us passive. But realistically, you can't get WHITE people to act that way. And note your own words:

King was in crisis when he was gunned down.

"We've made progress! We've made progress!"

Spelled out by Color of Change  

As John McCain heads to Memphis on the anniversary of Dr. King’s death, it’s worth noting his record on the issue of a holiday in King’s honor. When he was a Congressman in 1983, McCain voted against creating a federal Martin Luther King Holiday and his home state rescinded recognition of the holiday in 1987. While he has claimed his position has ‘evolved’ and that his original vote was ‘wrong’ his record of support for racist individuals, and his consistent votes against civil rights legislation belie that claim. And he has employed controversial individuals on his own campaign whose own nasty comments about Martin Luther King undermine McCain’s claims of inclusivity and evolution.

McCain’s Contorted Position on Federal King Holiday

McCain Voted Against Creating Martin Luther King Holiday. In 1983, McCain voted against a motion to suspend the rules and pass a bill to designate the third Monday of every January as a federal holiday in honor of the late civil rights leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The motion passed 89-77. [HR 3706, Vote 289, 8/2/83; CQ 1983]

Watch these clips and tell me how Black folks should respond. You see, white liberals include Black folks' responses to blatant racism and hostility when talking about our reactions to them.

Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed his assassination....

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on "big government," the defense of states' rights, and the scorn for "liberal judicial activism," "liberal do-gooders," "liberal elitists," "liberal guilt" and "liberal permissiveness" were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded. 

When Liberalism's Moment Ended
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 4, 2008; A23

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation's capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

A shrewd politician named Richard Nixon sensed the direction of the political winds. When President Johnson's commission on urban unrest released its report in early 1968 and blamed the previous year's rioting on "white racism," Nixon would have none of it. The commission, he said, "blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots." He urged "retaliation."

Nixon knew that his call for law and order was drawing working-class whites away from their alliance with the New Deal and the Great Society. "I have found great audience response to this theme in all parts of the country," Nixon wrote to former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Lot of stuff inspired by the 40th anniversary (strange word to use) of Dr. Martin Luthor King, Jr.'s assasination. This one is more biographical than polemic. I may let it go at this.

The Other Side of the Mountaintop
Scholars Assess Nation's Progress -- And an Icon's Rougher Edges -- Four Decades After Assassination

Back in Memphis on April 3, the night before he was killed, King decided to skip a rally at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. The weather was stormy, there were early reports of a thin crowd, and King was not in the best of moods. He sent a close friend and adviser, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, to speak for him.

But when Abernathy and other King aides arrived, and felt the energy in Mason Temple and the mounting anticipation by sanitation workers of a King speech, Abernathy phoned King and told him to get over to the rally quickly.

Some of y'all already know, but Skeptical Brother declines to support Obama in the NC primary. He has NOT endorsed Mrs. Clinton.

This works for me. I would remind all and sundry of my own position: that on policy all the Democratic candidates were too close to worry about, so I chose based on secondary effects. I have additional issues now, issues of honesty and the spinning of MY issues through the eyes of people who've declared themselves my active enemies.

And I would also remind you all I feel Obama straight mishandled the generated controversy about Rev. Wright. That, in fact, is SB's issue. In my own analysis, all things considered, Obama is not so much my choice as he is the last man standing.

Chris Matthews had a BET representative on whose job was to seed the "Jews don't like Obama" rumor. Mr. Matthews busted her.

We would like all the talk show host to bust all their guests when they get out of pocket. 

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

But

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use.

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
By SANDRA AAMODT and SAM WANG

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The Clinton Firewall
The New York Senator’s last-ditch efforts to win the Democratic nomination could rely on the “Race Chasm” and the trampling of democracy.
By David Sirota

Google the phrase “Clinton firewall” and you will come up with an ever-lengthening list of scenarios that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has said will stop Barack Obama’s candidacy. The New Hampshire primary, said her campaign, would be the firewall to end Obamamania. Then Super Tuesday was supposed to be the firewall. Then Texas. Now Pennsylvania and Indiana.

For four months, the political world has been hypnotized by this string-along game, not bothering to ask what this Clinton tactic really is. The “just wait until the next states” mantra has diverted our attention from the firewall’s grounding in race and democracy. But now, with only a few months until the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the firewall’s true composition is coming into focus. Whether Obama can overcome this barrier will likely decide who becomes the Democrats’ presidential nominee.

While I'm reading stuff at TPM I noticed a post titled Why the Clintons are bigger racists than the unshaven drunk tossing around the n-word (the accuracy of which I leave to your individual judgment), and I got cold-cocked by some of the comments.

Obama's campaign has constantly said they did not want to make the election about race. That's what they should have done -- ignored racism if they saw, shrugged off questions about Clinton's comments and focused on the big picture of winning in November. But they couldn't stop themselves (oops, racial gaff about .. something) and it's going to cost us the election.

...which one guy thought was pretty brazen. Hillary attacks and Obama loses the election for Democrats by responding.

There's an awful lot of biological determinism in this post.

Key to the power of the speech, of course, is who Obama is.

He reminded us that he is the child of a black immigrant father and a white midwestern mother. He spent his formative years abroad, and he later embraced the African American community in a major political and cultural center of that community: the South Side of Chicago. Ta-Nehisi rightly pointed out that there is controversy about Obama's blackness, but I think that Obama has sought to speak at different times from different identities. Though many will disagree with me, I think he can plausibly portray himself as a player on many teams--Black, White, Mixed-Race and Immigrant America--and this can give authenticity and insight and thus power to his words.

Enough that I'll never, ever be able to accept his internal processing. And this

This is Clinton's base...from my perspective, little different from McCain's base.

This is why the Clinton campaign has been making such strange and credibility-destroying arguments in the past couple of weeks: because those arguments are "credibility-destroying" only among high-information voters. Here, by contrast, are the firewall voters; these are the people the campaign is talking to and depending on. People who might be convinced that Barack Arrogant Obama wasn’t really a real law professor like he says he was. People who can be convinced that Obama thugs are trying to prevent them from voting and participating in our great American democracy. People who think Hussein Obama X is Muslim and that Jeremiah Wright will burn this mother to the ground. And, not least, people who fear that Obama will turn them into a llama.

In a series of meetings that lasted 14 months, beginning weeks before the 2004 presidential elections, President Bush and 10 senior advisers made personal appeals to The Times not to run the article. In mid-December 2004 the editors initially decided not to run it because of concerns about national security.

But in the fall of 2005 Mr. Risen told the editors that he was thinking of including the story in his own forthcoming book, and they began to reconsider. It was now clear, Mr. Lichtblau writes, that the administration had lied to The Times in describing the scope of the program and in claiming that administration lawyers unanimously supported it. Mr. Lichtblau’s reporting revealed that there were deep divisions about the program’s legality at the highest levels of the administration. And when Mr. Lichtblau learned that administration officials had discussed seeking an injunction against The Times, just as President Richard M. Nixon had tried to enjoin the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Nixonian tactic helped seal The Times’s decision to publish the article and to post it first on the Web, so that the presses literally couldn’t be stopped.

Behind the Scenes of Secret Surveillance and Its Public Unmasking
By JEFFREY ROSEN

Eric Lichtblau is used to being cast as a hero or a villain for his reporting about the war on terror. This year Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, predicted that “some Americans are going to die” because of the public debate that resulted when Mr. Lichtblau and his New York Times colleague James Risen disclosed the existence of the Bush administration’s secret surveillance program; for the same articles Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Now Mr. Lichtblau has produced a book about his experiences, “Bush’s Law.” It is a gripping account of Mr. Lichtblau’s efforts to expose various forms of secret surveillance and the Bush administration’s Nixonian efforts to retaliate against him and other critics: “All the President’s Men” for an age of terror. But this book offers much more than a journalist’s well-earned victory lap. Mr. Lichtblau also documents, with scrupulous detail, the broader costs of the Bush administration’s excesses for innocent victims and for the rule of law.