In sum, the AUMF, the USA PATRIOT Act and the FY2012 NDAA claim US military jurisdiction over the entire planet.

Fuck you, Taco, you fucking sellout.

http://hbgary.anonleaks.ch/ted_hbgary_com/7722.html

Note the sender, David Wilson at NEK Advanced Security

services such as

and

.

Old but good, in view of recent events.

What contract would that be, I wonder?

This comment seems genuine.

The intelligentsia, such as it is, really is being radicalized by first world governments too stupid to understand this is really their own power base they're attacking.

The proletariat in proto-capitalist countries really are organizing.

Stand by for permanent revolution.

In other news, I have yet another 10 modpoints to spend, which makes it 30 for the week so far. I don't know how usual this is for others, but for me it's a first. I used to hardly get any.

http://www.thelocal.se/17020/20090119/

The website of the Swedish prosecutors contains a statement from Marianne Ny alongside some carefully-chosen facts about how and when someone could be extradited from Sweden to the USA . Apparently it can't be done if the UK doesn't agree to it as well.

The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense and it can't stop.

Now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have, and must have, the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all night on New Year's Eve. The State, like the householder, is sane if it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies may not even be right; but such remedies are endurable as long as they are admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of food in a besieged city; the official disavowal of an arrested spy; the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law; the cutting of communication in a plague; or that deepest degradation of the commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.

We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment; often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people propose to reform them by a little more of it. We see it in panic legislation like that after the White Slave scare, when the torture of flogging was revived for all sorts of ill-defined and vague and variegated types of men. Our fathers were never so mad, even when they were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere --- because their minds were fixed on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of her back-biting," or "Some of these faggots would do your Cousin James good, and teach him to play with poor girls' affections."

Now the name of all this is Anarchy. It not only does not know what it wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers. When this new sort of New Englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are pouring into the pit.

A final instance, which can be sketched much more briefly, can be found in this general fact: that the definition of almost every crime has become more and more indefinite, and spreads like a flattening and thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes. Cruelty to children, one would have thought, was a thing about as unmistakable, unusual and appalling as parricide. In its application it has come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the poor, who generally can't help them, and not in the rich, who generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the horror and heavy punishment, attached in the simplest tribes to parricide, could now be used against my son who had done any act that could colourably be supposed to have worried his father, and so affected his health. Few of us would be safe.

Another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of libel. Libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger against the man who bore false witness against his neighbour than "cruelty" cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that hated their own flesh. A libel case has become one of the sports of the less athletic rich --- a variation on baccarat, a game of chance. A music-hall actress got damages for a song that was called "vulgar," which is as if I could fine or imprison my neighbour for calling my handwriting "rococo." A politician got huge damages because he was said to have spoken to children about Tariff Reform; as if that seductive topic would corrupt their virtue, like an indecent story. Sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his business; in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer slanders the grocer opposite. All this, I say, is Anarchy; for it is clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction, or sense of proportion, by which they can draw the line between calling a woman a popular singer and calling her a bad lot; or between charging a man with leading infants to Protection and leading them to sin and shame. But the vital point to which to return is this. That it is not necessarily nor even specially, an anarchy in the populace. It is an anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates --- voices of the governing class --- who cannot distinguish between cruelty and carelessness. It is the judges (and their very submissive special juries) who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20024776-281.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody;1n

Here's my conspiracy theory, for what it's worth:

What Assange is doing, unfortunately, is not journalism or info-war, but info-revolution (despite his claims to the contrary).

He is setting himself and his followers up, quite carefully and deliberately, for martyrdom. All he does is calculated to provoke the governments of the world (the US especially) into over-reacting, in the hopes that they will thus mobilize and radicalize enough people for a global Intifada to happen in a generation or so.

Have any of you considered what would happen if Assange is declared a terrorist by the US? Suddenly everyone in the US or abroad who ever helped him, supported him or gave him money will become a terrorist too in the eyes of the US government and their bodies, property and even identities will be forfeit. We're talking hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people who would suddenly find themselves on a no-fly list at the very least. Some would doubtlessly get all-expenses paid trips to Gitmo or sunny Afghanistan.

Most of the people who would be disappeared have families. All those families would start thinking really seriously about blowing stuff up and toppling governments.

Ars Tehnica reports that Romanian antivirus makers BitDefender, along with many others, may find themselves in a spot of hot water over Microsoft's recently granted patent no.7376970 which apparently describes the workings of a pro-active heuristic antivirus operating in a virtual environment.
The patent was filed in the name of one Adrian Marinescu, who came to Microsoft as a result of the deal by which Microsoft acquired the antivirus division of Gecad, another Romanian company. Only time will tell if Microoft intends to use this patent offensively or defensively.
Prior art, anyone?

Apparently, Romanian console gamers are being punished for the deeds of Romanian card fraudsters by being denied access to the online stores and other for-pay online services of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft alike. This (unstated) policy has drawn the ire of the Romanian gaming community, which is looking to the EU for redress.

BD+ content is here now and causing headaches for customers, just as expected. The WSJ reports that older Blu-Ray Players made by Samsung and others can't play new Fox content which includes BD+ copy protection "features". It's nice to see the WSJ taking notice.