In Florida, phone calls telling people to vote on Nov 10th!.

They made the mistake of calling the head of McBride’s campaign: MIAMIThe chairman of the state Democratic Party asked U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on Saturday to launch an investigation into possible dirty tricks in the final weeks of the governor’s race.

Asking Ashcroft to investigate dirty tricks by Jeb Bush supporters seems pointless to me, except for the media coverage maybe

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US Diplomat Is Killed by Gunman in Jordan.

A veteran US diplomat was killed this morning in the driveway of his Amman home as he walked from the front door to a carport, shot at least seven times by a masked gunman who fled on foot.

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Freenet keeps file-trading flame burning

A new version of the Freenet software, a program based around wholly anonymous Net publishing and distribution, is due out Monday after long silence from its mostly volunteer developer community. <And anonymous means just that, you can’t be trackedf period…>

Freenet has long been a kind of peer-to-peer promised land, with its developers promising technical features far beyond the simple file-swapping of networks like Napster or Kazaa. Its ambitions have kept it squarely in the development stage for years, with few nontechnical devotees, while simpler rival networks have attracted millions of users.  [Privacy Digest]

You will probably also need to download the free Sun Java Runtime module which is required to run FreeNet. Warning, this is serious geek stuff, i.e. cryptic and powerful, so it takes a while to learne FreeNet, plus, with this new version, everyone is on FreeNet at once, so patience is a virtue.

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San Francisco

After a weekend in SF, I see why people love it.

Usable public transporation. Subways, buses, and trolleys can get you anywhere in the city, and they run frequently (unlike here in LA).

Real neighborhoods with real neighborhood stores. No mini-malls. That’s right, no mini-malls. They aren’t allowed. Which is a major reason that neighborhood stores and neighborhoods can exist.

Lots of parks. Wonderful views. Water on three sides.

Lots of political activism, arts, culture, loonies. In short, the place has atmosphere, with each area noticeably different than the others.

Ok ok, so now I see why they view LA as a smog-choked wasteland of cultural illiterates and mini-malls. I’d move there except for the heart-stopping rental and real estate prices. Makes LA look cheap. I priced one condo in a so-so part of town. One bedroom. $375,000. Fees of $400 a month. So, you’d be paying close to $4,000 a month for a palatial … 452 square feet. Ouch.

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Weblogs as a useful police tool

The Boston Globe:  This is amazing.  Billions are being poured into the FBI and other governmental organizations and they can’t even get the basics right.

The FBI in Washington state interviewed a witness last summer who said that John Allen Muhammad, now one of the sniper suspects, was trying to obtain a silencer for his gun and spoke of killing police officers, law enforcement officials said yesterday.

This can be corrected very easily.  Give every agent a laptop (shoot, they gave every student in Maine a laptop for Christ’s sake!).  Put a weblogging tool on that laptop.  Require that they write up a synopsis of every tip or interview they do in their weblog.  Have them publish that weblog to a central Intranet.  Put a Google appliance on that Intranet.  Let it index the pages. 

How simple is that?  A couple of simple search routines could have netted this information.  After that, it would only be a matter of ruling out suspects — which could have been left to local police.  A couple weblogs, sorted by region could have been set up to disseminate the most likely leads to local police.  Don’t tell me it is more complicated than that.  It isn’t.  In fact, anything that would make it more complicated than that would likely cause the system to fail given its size.

Total software costs:  a couple of million $$.  Savings in human life:  priceless. <Via John Robb’s weblog>

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FBI theory on anthrax doubted

A significant number of scientists and biological warfare experts are expressing skepticism about the FBI’s view that a single disgruntled American scientist prepared the spores and mailed the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people last year.

These sources say that making a weaponized aerosol of such sophistication and virulence would require scientific knowledge, technical competence, access to expensive equipment and safety know-how that are probably beyond the capabilities of a lone individual.

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Mexico won’t back US Iraq resolution.

Why is it that all of Bush’s international “friends” are abandoning the US?

Because he’s alienated all of them, that’s why…

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Leftie becomes President of Brazil in a landslide

Brazil exit polls pointing to Lula victory. 

Early exit polls in Brazil’s runoff election Sunday indicated that voters in South America’s largest nation had chosen a former metalworker and leftist as president for the next four years.

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Green party contingent, SF, Oct 26

Peter Camejo, Green candidate for California Governor way in background on a pickup bed. He spoke at the rally, as did Barbara Lee, member of the House from California and the only one to vote against authorizing Bush to use force against anyone associated with 9/11 (a mighty big brush indeed).

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