Matthew Gifford

Paul Stephenson, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (From Times Online):

We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder. This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.

President Bush:

The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.

…

But obviously, we’re still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in. It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.

…

The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers.

Spreading fear kind of defeats the purpose of a “war on terror”, doesn’t it? Of course, if people would bother to stop and think for a minute or two, they’d realize that this fear is totally irrational and wouldn’t be affected by the tactics of the terrorists or those charged with defending us.

As usual, Ze Frank says it best.

I doubt that this news will directly affect any of my regular readers. However, when a company breaches the trust of its users on this scale, it needs to be disseminated as widely as possible.

AOL must have missed the uproar over the DOJ’s demand for “anonymized” search data last year that caused all sorts of pain for Microsoft and Google. That’s the only way to explain their release of data that includes 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users.

The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period this year, as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the result page.

If you searched for something on AOL this year, you might want to think about what keywords you used and which links you clicked on.

The following quotes are from CNN (via Gabe).

On uncollected corpses:

[FEMA chief Michael] Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, “We have bodies located here or there,” I’m just not going to speculate.

Evacuee [Raymond] Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.

On hospital evacuations:

Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.

On civil unrest:

Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.

CNN’s Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street.

President Bush on FEMA chief Michael Brown (via Noded):

Again, I want to thank you all for — and, Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job. The FEMA Director is working 24 — (applause) — they’re working 24 hours a day.

Yes. A heck of a job (via Scripting News).

From Macworld (via Gabe):

An Austrian hacker earned the dubious distinction of writing what are thought to be the first known viruses for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system. Written in July, the viruses take advantage of a new command shell, code-named Monad, that is included in the Windows Vista beta code.

What exactly has Microsoft been working on over the past few years? Their first beta of IE7 seems only marginally better than IE6. And it only takes 8 days for someone to write viruses for Vista, an operating system that supposedly takes security seriously. I’ll admit to not liking Microsoft. But I was really hoping that they might start doing the right thing. Developers suffer when most people are using a browser that doesn’t play by the rules. Everyone suffers when most people are using an insecure operating system.

My Albertan friends will be glad to know that keystroke logging has been declared illegal in Alberta. (via Slashdot)

I’d heard that WEP encryption is weak before. But this demonstration on how to crack it in ten minutes is surprising. (via MAKE)