And on Tuesday, nothing of importance happened.

[wombat_socho]

Not compared to yesterday, anyway...when I got home around 8 PM after dropping phoenixalpha off at her place and then getting myself a steak at Outback, the parking lot was plowed, the sidewalks had been cleared, and the hot water was working again. Yay!

Today I had 67 pages of AU closures to wade through; the good news is that 62 of them weren't on my system and the remaining five pages had nothing biled to them yet, so I could just close them without having to chase people down and ask them whither they wanted their charges moved. I also had the usual deluge of billing files, but those went smoothly as well.

This gave me time to do a little blog reading, in the course of which I discovered that Google has apparently decided that what's good for the Chinese is good for the US as well. and taken the axe to The Peoples' Cube, a pseudo-Communist site that lampoons the Left. Apparently Google is unhappy with them over hidden text and links on the site, which is kind of dorky considering that all of those are duplications of openly displayed links further up on the page, and also a mite suspicious - usually if you commit an unknowing or ignorant TOS violation, you get a warning instead of being immediately flushed down the memory hole. You can still find the site fairly easily through Yahoo and other search engines, but given how central Google has become to a lot of peoples' experience of the Internet, it doesn't look very good. More deep thoughts on the issue here. Via Michelle Malkin.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Interception of foreigners' phone calls has always been legal, and the technology is a side issue.

In many cases, the other person on the phone was a US citizen. In those cases, I am deeply concerned that due process wasn't followed. I happen to agree with Bruce Fein, who is quoted here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy

If you respect Bruce Schneier's opinion on 99% of crypto matters, you respect him a whole lot more than I do. ;-)

---RS

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

So the other caller was a US citizen? Tough beans for them, but it's still legal for the NSA to check the call. There's case law on this going back to the First World War.

Ah, you noticed I was careful to restrict my approval to crypto. :)
I think he's right on some computer security issues and dead wrong on others, but fortunately those aren't likely to get anyone killed.