The War on Drugs has a long casualty list, but recent relaxation of the ban on cannabis in the UK has claimed some unexpected victims, according to The Guardian.

Much to my becrogglement, I just learned that my short story collection TOAST is, like, going to the printer tomorrow.

More details as and when they become available. Okay?

Feorag's made the Independant on Sunday, this time. (Scottish edition, again.)

I suppose I should explain.

We're members of the Edinburgh naturist swimming club, abunch of people who, well, hire a swimming pool so they can swim around with no clothes on.

A month ago, for a laugh, a couple of members of the club committee proposed doing a 2002 calendar. Being a naturistclub, obviously the club calendar would have to featurevarious members -- wearing lots of clothes.

In the fullness of time, the Evening News (who had previously run a feature about the club) send a photographer round, for a laugh and a human interest story. Feorag was among the club members who showed up.

Then The Sun picked up on the story and ran with it ("Naturist club calendar cover-up"). Then the Indy picked it up.

Where's it all going to end?

In 1949, playwright Harold Pinter was attacked by neo-nazi thugs on the streets of London.

Newly declassified Home Office documents covering the investigation show that the government of the day was more worried about the Communist Threat than about nazi thugs beating up its own citizens; his complaints to the police were dismissed as nonsense and the Home Office spent more time investigating the National Council for Civil Liberties for 'subversion' than dealing with violent thugs in their own capital city.

So I trust you'll take me seriously when I say that right now, as I speak, Feorag is all over page three of The Sun.

(At least, the Scottish edition -- she's not in the English version.)

Note for non-UK readers: page three of The Sun is reserved for topless bimbos. Just what she's doing there wearing a t-shirt, leggings, and sunglasses I leave to your imagination.

All will be explained tomorrow ...

For the last year, The Register has been tracking the entertainment lobby's attempts to get CPRM copy prevention built into all ATA standard hard disk drives.

The music and film industry is in big trouble, and they've got a vested interest in preventing digital copying because it drives the cost of their core commodity towards zero. (Forget the fact that 80% of the revenue from films comes in the form of merchandise and spin-off rights; these guys are totalitarian in their outlook, and none more so than the music industry who have neatly set things up as a supply-side monopoly and don't want cheap MP3 copying to disrupt the money pipeline.)

This article, by Hale Landis, is still valid, and it explains exactly what the core of the MPAA/RIAA strategy is: the total destruction of the general-purpose computer as we know it.

PC's are just too damn flexible to coexist with distribution monopolies, it seems, so the strategy is to push the big manufacturers towards making closed boxes (like the early Macintosh -- thank you, Steve Jobs) and bundling closed 'secure' (for whom?) operating systems on top of them. Software patents and 'trade secret' lawsuits can then be used to sue those pesky free software people into shutting down the sites that distribute their software, and closed hardware architecture will make it impossible for mere users to get at the underlying devices and use them for things like unrestricted and unfiltered data i/o.

This whole plan is completely insane, but there are worrying signs that it may be working. Remember: what they can't steal by stealth, they'll steal by passing a law to say that it isn't stealing (and trying to hold on to your rights is depriving them of their legally mandated source of income).

Feorag's started a blog. Okay, it's actually an online version of her 'zine, Pagan Prattle, which she's published irregularly for the past 15 years or so (and which is neither pagan nor prattle, if you ask me). If you're into Loony Fundamentalist Nonsense, as Feorag is, go read.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation campaigns almost entirely on US legal issues relating to civil liberties and the internet. Why am I, living in Scotland, a member?

Some of the answers are here, in this article by rusty on Kuro5hin, the thinking geek's uber-Slashdot site. But those only cover what the EFF does, not why it's important to non-Americans.

The reason is important, but not exactly simple: what passes into law in the USA seems to get echoed at the next WIPO treaty session in the form of an international agreement, which gets passed into law in the EU and then the UK shortly thereafter. Because UK citizens don't generally get consulted about international treaties while they're being negotiated, we have a lot less chance of avoiding bad agreements once they've been passed by WIPO than we do if they're blocked there, first. If a law gets rejected by US legislators, the odds are that it won't get passed by WIPO -- at least, not easily.

We are already living under a de-facto world government; it's a free trade system controlled by international treaty organisations, and it's not a democracy. The only people who can afford to lobby their 'representatives' are big corporations or lobbying groups who can afford to fly around the diplomatic circuit at will. I view political lobbying in the US as being a pre-emptive strike against bad legislation in the UK. This situation sucks, but short of applying for US citizenship or tearing down the whole treaty system (returning the world to the state it was in in 1933) there's no obvious way to change it.

So, even if you're not American, think hard about supporting the EFF. Who knows? It may be your interests they're defending, tomorrow.

Cory Doctorow's written an editorial on O'Reilly.net in which he discusses the root causes of corporate disillusionment with the internet, and where the next revolution will come from. Provocative and worth reading even if you think you know it all. Elevator summary: the internet is unreliable, this doesn't fit with corporate assumptions about marketing, so the old-fashioned businesses have caught cold. (New businesses that can cope with unreliability and peer to peer equality are a different matter.)

... is one of these.

Unfortunately they're just a theoretical possibility at this stage, but when you take the old HitchHiker's catch-phrase "brain the size of a planet" seriously and start extrapolating towards the limits of computation achievable using nanotechnology and the energy of a single star, this is what you get: a Matrioshka Brain is a Dyson Sphere on steroids.

If you buy Hans Moravec's estimate of the computational complexity of a human mind, and assume that mind uploading is possible, a single Matrioshka Brain gives you the ability to host as many human-equivalent minds as you'd get if every single star in our galaxy had an inhabited planet with the population of the Earth in 2001 orbiting it. Alternatively, a single MB could re-run the life and consciousness of every human being who has ever lived in simulation in about half an hour.

Of course, a Matrioshka Brain is a piss-poor computer when compared to a neuron star (no, that's not a typo), but we don't really know how to structure strange matter yet. Doubtless when we've built an MB it'll figure it all out in the first ten minutes or so.

I'm just astounded that these concepts haven't caught on among SF writers yet. Maybe they're too big, or something?

They Fight Crime!

I have been parodied.

Eek!

I should have seen this coming.

(Exits, stage left, in search of a cold shower.)

An urban legend sweeping the Arab (and western neo-Nazi) press alleges that the Israeli security apparatus warned jews to stay away from the World Trade Center on September 11th.

Note: not Israeli citizens -- jews. Turns out that anti-semitism (of a level that would have been familiar to Germans in the 1930's and 1940's) is sweeping the Middle East: Mein Kampf is at #6 in the bestseller list in the Palestinian Authority area, and a big-budget dramatization of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is due on Middle Eastern TV screens next year. Islamist fundamentalist movements have lapped up the old 1930's propaganda and recycled it for their own consumption. And they're exporting this ideology: when the Zimbabwean government starts blaming the Jews for their economic ills, it looks like the traditional scapegoat is back in fashion.

Whee! On top of all the other problems the west faces in dealing with the Middle East, we now have a de-facto resurgence of Nazism to get to grips with. I am so looking forward to this bright new century ...

You've probably seen the news about a group of twelve British and two Dutch plane spotters who were arrested while on a plane spotting trip to Greece, and charged with espionage (carrying a 20-year maximum sentence). They've now been released on bail and the main charges dropped, replaced with minor ones.

The following message was posted to the (public) scoopgen mailing list on Sunday by Chris Fudge, one of the released members of the plane spotting party, and I think it bears reproduction here because of what it suggests about the way the media has handled the whole affair, especially in the current climate of paranoia about terrorism.

Dear all

Just starting to plough through 5000+ Emails and realised the amount of attention that I have been attracting.

[ snip ]

Just a few points about our arrest (if you can keep a straight face !)

• I was arrested for taking pictures at an airshow. I don't have a camera!
• We had an invitation to the Greek airshows from a Brigadier-General in the Air Force
• The faxed invitation from the Air Force magically disappeared for four weeks.
• The eight original charges against us have all been dropped as they were based on lies.
• The court charged us 300 pounds each for every visit we made. The EEC (e.g. the British tax payer) paid $40 each per day for our accommodation ($40 x 14 people x 36 nights). It's a money making scam especially as we were sleeping on the floor.
• A retired Greek Air Force General, a senior Greek Intelligence Officer, plus others have offered to appear in court in our defence.
• The Greek Government is still saying that we took photos four weeks after the charges were dropped!

You will pleased to know that there is no evidence against me but It is claimed that I offered 'psyological support' to the group! They are unlikely to drop the charges as we will then be able to prosecute them for wrongful arrest etc. The British MEP's are also looking at the legal aspect with a view of a prosecution through the European courts.

Back to Charlie:

What we have here is an innocent (feh!) money-making scam by some bureaucrats that backfired and has turned into a full-blown international incident between the UK and Greece -- one that promises to occupy most of the agenda of an EU Foreign Minister's summit later this month.

But just try to imagine for a moment what the news coverage would have been like if the plane spotters had included any arab or middle-eastern faces. Or if Greece was operating under the proposed legal regime US Attorney General Ashcroft wants to introduce, or with the detention provisions that UK Home Secretary Blunkett has just pushed through.

Here's a new acid-test for anti-terrorism laws: "imagine that a corrupt cop decides to turn you into their pet revenue-generating scheme. Under the new proposed law, are you (a) better off, (b) much the same, or (b) less able to defend yourself?"

The Taliban get a lot of stick in the west for their disgusting attitude towards women.

But they're not the only ones who believe in the patriarchal control of women, as the case of Shamsa al-Maktoum's bid for freedom and subsequent alleged kidnapping suggests.

There's a charitable way to view this situation (concerned father taking security precautions to protect fractious adolescent), and an uncharitable way. The fact that the police are treating it as kidnapping leads me to believe that the uncharitable view is more plausible -- that for cultural or religious reasons, the crown prince of Dubai thinks his daughter is his property rather than an independent adult.

(I'd like to be proven wrong on this point, but I'm not holding my breath. "You are now entering the Middle East: please set your watches back four centuries ...")