May 4, 2002
“Truck firebombed at poultry company
Undetonated incendiary devices recovered from under two other trucks”

BLOOMINGTON, IN – An early-morning explosion that damaged a truck at a wholesale poultry plant was deliberate, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms said Friday.
– www.hoosiertimes.com

here’s a link to a mailing list posting of the article, and here’s a link to the article in the context of the original publication.

Tip o hat to Spencer Sundell.

UPDATE: the lead story on May 10, 2002 involves the long overdue arrest of an individual on murder charges in Martinsville, the town halfway between Bton and Indy, to which, since the murder, 33 years ago, the stink of the Klan has clung.

While it’s time to resolve this matter, I have to point out that received wisdom had it, when I was a sprat, that Martinsville was the source of all evil in Indiana, and that the Klan had sprung from there, reborn, in the wake of D. W. Griffith’s monstrous 1920’s triumph, “Birth of a Nation”.

In fact, what was going on there was my homestate scapegoating a small city. Martinsville had a rep as the worst place Indiana to be black or Jewish in when I was growing up. Maybe that ‘s true. But it was no piece of cake in Bloomington either, and the whole state elected a Klan government in the 20’s.

Yow! Lotsa stuff in the real world last week!

Item:

Minnesotan art student runs amuck, pipebombing mailboxes for no apparent reason.

Alice in TV Land has more, including a link to a mirror of the kid’s band site (they are called “Apathy”).

Here’s what I’d like to know: why is John Walker Lindh such a lighting rod compared to this this kid? My only slightly informed opinion of the bomb kid is that he’s sort of hapless, which is somehow reinforced by his choice of band names.

Here’s what’s interesting to me about this: we don’t actually have any evidence at all that Lindh ever hurt a fly. He’d been trained, sort of, and had chosen a religious belief system that became highly unfashionable in the American press in September, granted.

But I’m hard pressed to recall a clear, unambiguous blowing-up-a-mail-carrier’s-hand incident associated with Mr. Lindh.

So:

Luke Helder, associated with injuring six people via pipe bomb, a hapless art-nebbish whose concerned parents have helpfully illuminated his troubled mind in the media.

John Walker Lindh, associated with our gummints’ enemy du jour, a hapless religious nebbish whose concerned parents have helpfully illuminated his trobled mind in the media and whose head is slated for pikeage by pundits and represtatives of the US government as well.

UPDATE: (CNN.com) “Police: Suspect planned smiley face bomb pattern”

Okay, maybe that explains it. Or maybe the kid just read “From Hell” and “Watchmen” a couple too many times.

Check the map. Looks like he’d gotten the left side of the smile started.

So, is this a junior thesis for art school? It may be the world’s largest work of geographically specific art.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/24/business/24ENRO.html

“When shown records that laid out the details of the financial returns during his testimony several months ago before the S.E.C., Mr. Skilling was said to have grown agitated as he described his opinion of the information. Had he known the magnitude of the profits, Mr. Skilling was said to have told the regulators, he would have immediately summoned Enron executives involved in the dealings and given them 24 hours to justify such outsize results.”

WhhaAATTT! Why, THESE PROFITS are an OUTRAGE! EXPLAIN YOURSELVES or face the WRATH of… KENNY BOY!

After all, that’s what CEOs do, right? Call employees on the carpet for reporting absurdly high ROI? Yup, that’s why they make the big bucks.

A few days ago I noted that Micorsoft had quietly laid their online Persona project to rest, as detailed in the NYT, because of partner resistance to data-sharing and dependency. In short, potential commercial partners with Microsoft were reluctant to cede adminstrative and (in all probablity) legal control to our buddies in Redmond.

Well, endless source of hilarity that it is, As The Apple Turns covers continuing Microsoft interest in providing this service. But in this incarnation, the client is the gummint! This Seattle Times story has the details. To read AtAT’s always entertaing coverage, go here and search for scene number 3697.

I think this is a fascinating issue, and Microsoftian paranoia aside (worth a laugh, but not a way of life), Redmond is actually right on the money. Whether or not it’s in our best interests as citizens and consumers is another issue entirely: current privacy legislation actually mandates the creation of a centralized privacy profile for each discrete consumer of online services, which that consumer has direct, unmediated online access to, and which would grow and change as the consumer moves through the net.

It’s not that the laws spell this out, but because an online sevice by its’ nature must adhere to the varying regulations of multiple geographic jurisdictions, the effective regulatory space is the end-result of the overlap between these juridictions. It’s a giant pain. The regs that are in place are generally good ones which have as their intent the defense of the individual citizen from legal or commercial abuses; but the sum effect of the regs is to essentially guarantee violation by any online provider that collects personal data.

I spent a long time thinking about this from the perspective of online marketers a couple of years ago, and it was my conclusion (strikingly similar to that of Microsoft) that the solution was to provide a single online profiling service to which online services would subscribe and which would serve as a single point of access for personal data on the part of the consumer.

Adam Engst of TidBITS and others initiated an independent service to provide this sort of thing, XNS.org, which includes the all-important concept of a non-profit organization as the primary custodian of the data. While this is what I believe will eventually emerge as the long-term resolution of this issue, Microsoft’s active pursuit of this function as a governmental service reflects current political realities with great accuracy. In our current political climate, new functions which would legitimately be governmental are most likely to be developed, delivered, and maintained by non-governmental entities.

PREDICTION: we will see the development and passage of quite satisfactory central online profile services and regulations which will be both a prerequisite for certain online activities (such as keeping log info that includes IP numbers, setting cookies, or using forms) and will require the use of certified service providers (something like the effective rquirement for valid security certificates).

While these services will satisfy the needs of business, government, and privacy advocates, they will be priced at a level which will effectively lock out non-capitalized organizations, thereby creating a restricted business environment which will more effectively permit the consolidated giants of the online world to dominate the market, while at the same time denying the benefis of the dataspace to NGOs such as unions.

It’s a win-win situation, unless you happen to be among the losers. Or is that “lusers”?

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, spam is OUT OF HAND, and getting worse. Here’s a NYT story about Yahoo’s recent decision to run the old switcheroo on user privacy preferences.

If you are registered with Yahoo as a client, you recieved a notification email sometime in the past couple days concerning the change. Missed it? Me too. ALL THAT SPAM kinda made it tough to find.

Not to worry, though: one of the Napster geeks is busy working on a way to apply our collective ability to recognize spam for what is, and apply that in the aggregate at the network level!

It’s an interesting way to apply peer-to-peer decision making to a real problem in day-to-day life. Here’s a link to a New Scientist story about it. I first saw this one, um, someone’s blog, but forget where. THey use word “probabilistic” a bunch, which amused me.

Folsom, we’re on your side!

NYT: Microsoft Has Shelved Its Internet ‘Persona’ Service

excerpt:

“There was incredible customer resistance,” said a Microsoft .Net consultant, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. Microsoft was unable to persuade either consumer companies or software developers that it had solved all of the privacy and security issues raised by the prospect of keeping personal information in a centralized repository, he said.

Huh, imagine that.