The Null Device
2001/11/3
Business plan idea of the day: cybersquatting domains named nuke(name-of-country).com, for each country the United States may conceivably go to war against (i.e., nukeiraq.com, nukecuba.com, nukecanada.com), with a view to selling flag-covered, sweatshop-made crap to jingoistic rednecks in the event of hostilities.
Insert your own joke here: A 17-year-old boy was suspended from his school in Michigan for coming to the school's Halloween fancy dress ball in an anatomically-correct vagina costume. (via onepointzero)
Seen on a mailing list: France's language bureaucracy (in particular, the "commission on technical terms and neologisms") has finally found an appropriate French term for "hacker". The word is "fouineur", which apparently translates roughly as "snouter" or "nose poker".
Hmmm... maybe if Hollywood and the DVD CCA ask nicely, Bush will let them take their rather unwell-looking DeCSS case to the National Security Court. (You know, the secret court answerable only to the administration that has sole jurisdiction over the new Office of Homeland Security.) They may be somewhat more sympathetic to the national-security needs of protecting the content industry from copyright terrorism.
Strange bedfellows: Disney buys Christian/"family"-oriented cable channel from Rupert Murdoch -- and it comes with a perpetual contract with Pat Robertson. Yes, that Pat Robertson; the one who said that the WTC attack was the fault of gays and feminists, and called for boycotts of Disney because they were supporting how-mo-sexuality. Anyway, Disney and Robertson's 700 Club show are now bound together until the Rapture does them part. Oh, the irony of it all... (via Plastic)
I picked up the new Spearmint album today, after hearing some songs from it on 3RRR; it's pleasant enough, in a themed kind of way. Anyway, I've written up a review for Records Ad Nauseam.