In “What About Lessig?” Joshua Allen does a few logical backflips. Dave Winer manages to extract a useful nugget of wisdom from the peice, but what strikes me so odd is that Joshua is mixing Lessig views on open source with his views on copyrights with his views on the End-to-End’ness of the Internet which I am under the impression he keeps seperate. I haven’t read his views of (open) source code access, and I have to agree with putting an upper bound on copyrights. (life of author plus X where X < 10? whatever), but I was in agreement with Lessig during his talk at microsoft about the end to end issues (which is the arguements Lessig was making in the article Joshua torn apart). I remeber asking lessig what he thought about the idea of some protocols being available in a RAND fassion. He didn’t knee jerk say that it was bad, but reminded me that sometimes the reasonable part of RAND could be very expensive, so it depends on that. This is not the Lessig Joshua paints at the end of his rant about “the Collective”.

Ordinary people, extraordinary evil. What kind of person can attack, mutilate and kill a total stranger or even a neighbor? A scholar talks about the dark potential in all of us.

“It’s easier for me to sleep at night if I think that perpetrators of genocide and mass killing are lunatics or insane or only found in cultures like Germany. I don’t blame people for jumping to those explanations. But for me it begins with the issue of numbers. We know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, but very seldom do we step back and ask the question: How many people does it take to kill 6 million people? We know that 800,000 Rwandans died in 100 days, but again, how many people does it take to kill 800,000 people?” [Salon.com]

Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology [PolicyReview]
Extreamly intresting motive insight, semi-wacko conclusions.

MSN cuddles up to OS X. Snaring newbies [The Register]

Nondiscretionary Controls: can’t live with ’em, can’t… [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]

Ray Ozzie does a good job explaining the motivations for something like Palladium. Something to remeber about palladium (from what I understand) is that it’s first deployment will be corperate PCs to keep internal data, internal. The success of such a technology is not wrapped around hollywood and consumer PCs, but rather it’s success of keeping a group of people’s data secure inside the group.

Doesn’t Do Windows
Lindows is an operating system for Microsoft haters and cheapskates. Its flaws make Windows seem like a genuine bargain. [Forbes/Yahoo!]

Learned a tiny little bit about Event Tracing last night. The command “Logman Query Providers” gives the first glimnce of this feature. The details about how the feature works and what APIs are use it are available on MSDN.

Microsoft to Issue Fewer Stock Options, Gates Says [Bloomberg.com]

Coming up next: Ambushed on “Donahue”!
More dangerous than Grand Theft Auto 3 — a defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here’s what he really wanted to say. [salon]

Switcher’s remorse. An Episcopal priest goes from Windows to Mac but then has second thoughts. Is her computing soul at risk? [Salon.com]