Tara Smith comments on Olivia Judson’s piece in the New York Times about the wonder of living organisms and the evidence for evolution at Aetiology. Judson is the author of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, a book that describes some of the wide variety of sexual practices in nature, some of which make the wildest human perversions look tame by comparison. An excerpt from Judson’s op-ed: Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams. ...

In a New York Times followup about the Bush-approved program to engage in interception of email and voice calls to international destinations without warrants approved by the FISA Court, it is stated that The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said. ...

Think Progress has a list of politicians who received $10,000 or more in Jack Abramoff-related contributions and how they are associated with Abramoff. A few of these are probably a bit concerned now that Abramoff has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion and agreed to cooperate with federal investigations. Abramoff is expected to plead guilty next week to fraud in the SunCruz casino boat case in Florida–the list of politicians associated with that case includes Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT), Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), and Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) (and his former chief of staff, Neil Volz). (Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars, which has further commentary on how this is business as usual for Congress.)

The Windows Meta File vulnerability, a problem that seems to be particularly bad in Windows XP, is without an official patch from Microsoft until next week. There is an unofficial patch which is available from the SANS Internet Storm Center, which I would recommend only for organizations that have the ability to install and uninstall patches on user desktops in an automated manner, as the unofficial patch will have to be uninstalled before installing the official patch. For ordinary users, it is an extremely bad habit to download patches from unofficial sources in response to an announcement of a vulnerability like this. It’s a habit that is likely to be exploited in the future to get people to install malicious software, so it should be discouraged. An alternative remedy is to unregister the vulnerable DLL, shimgvw.dll, until the official patch is out next week. This remedy will prevent the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer from being started when you click on an image that is associated with that application. The WMF vulnerability is currently being exploited through the web, email, and instant messaging, but so far it looks like the main use has been to install spyware and adware on vulnerable machines. It could, however, just as easily be used to install bots or other more seriously damaging malware.

Over the next two years, $2.5 trillion in U.S. mortgages that are based on adjustable rate mortgages will reset to higher interest rates. There is little question that many people who have been using creative financing to speculate in the real estate market are going to have some serious financial difficulties as a result. More at Ben Jones’ Housing Bubble blog.

Jeff Shallit has an interesting comparison of Stephen Wolfram and William Dembski, and their shared apparent unwillingness to admit mistakes. Over at Recursivity.

Charles E. “Chuck” Carlson (not to be confused with convicted Watergate conspirator turned evangelical prison ministry mogul Chuck Colson) runs something called “Strait Gate Ministries” and assorted websites (including one called “Al-Jazeerah”) which seem to focus on arguing that the U.S. should not be supporting Israel. He has a history of advertising these websites by sending unsolicited bulk email, also known as “spam." He has clashed with a number of anti-spammers, which has led to multiple terminations of online services that he’s used–his DSL connection as well as web hosting. He has characterized this as mugging and assault as well as censorship. (Here is a list of some of Carlson’s domains blocked by rhyolite.com for sending spam.) In August, he filed a lawsuit (PDF) in Arizona Superior Court (CV2005-052008) against Robert Poortinga, his own providers who had terminated service, and Missouri Freenet Corporation. In his complaint, he argues that Poortinga and others have defamed him by calling him a “spammer” and accusing him of sending “spam,” on the grounds that his emails do not meet the criteria in the CAN-SPAM Act. “Missouri Freenet Corporation,” named as a defendant in Carlson’s suit, doesn’t actually exist–the person he’s intending to sue is Alif Terranson (on whose site the above lawsuit complaint PDF is hosted), who is a well-known anti-spammer and formerly ran the abuse team at Savvis. Terranson has supplied Carlson with information about how to properly name and serve him. Carlson’s complaint appears to me to be without merit. His argument based on CAN-SPAM fails because that act does not define the term “spam,” which is a well-known term of art in the Internet world, not a legal term. “Spam” originally meant bulk postings to Usenet newsgroups (an action associated with a couple of immigration attorneys also based in Scottsdale, Arizona), but quickly came to mean unsolicited bulk email (UBE)–email that is both (a) not explicitly requested by the recipients and (b) sent to multiple recipients. Although the most common form of UBE is unsolicited commercial email (which is what CAN-SPAM regulates), UBE and “spam” are broader than UCE and can include religious spam, insane spam, etc. Internet RFC 2505 endorses this broader notion of “spam,” as does this definition from Spamhaus. Although there are no legal penalties for spam that falls outside of what is regulated by federal and state laws (or laws in other countries), most online providers have stricter guidelines than what the law requires as part of their Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs). Customers of online providers are contractually bound by those AUPs, and can find their service terminated for violations even if they haven’t violated the law. This has been the case since long before CAN-SPAM went into effect. Another form of social penalty for spam is having one’s email blocked by those who operate mail servers on the Internet–companies, organizations, and individuals have a variety of tools which can be used to block the vast quantities of unwanted email being spewed out daily by compromised machines as well as by those operating in a more aboveboard manner. Included in those tools are the ability to block by domain name or using IP-address-based blocking lists. What Carlson calls censorship is really just the owners of private mail servers setting rules by which their property may be used by others. (The issue is a bit more complicated in the case of an ISP, but so long as the ISP accurately informs its customers of what they’ve signed up for, they can apply filters consistent with their service. In general, ISPs want their customers to receive what the customers want to receive, as blocking wanted email leads to complaints.) I’ll keep tabs on this suit as it progresses (if it does). ...

With all the attention to the War on Terror/Struggle Against Violent Extremism, looks like we forgot to celebrate the victory and end of the War on Drugs back at the beginning of 2002. Happy fourth birthday to virtually drug-free America! (Hat tip: The Agitator.) Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): Awesome!Now all the families of the countless DEA agents and other police who've died fighting those evil bad guys in this war can rest assured that they didn't die in vain.Hooray! ...

The current (December 24, 2005) issue of The Economist features a story, “Wealth from worship," summarizing a paper by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, “Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?” Gruber claims that regular religious participation leads to better education, higher income and a lower chance of divorce. His results (based on data covering non-Hispanic white Americans of several Christian denominations, other faiths and none) imply that doubling church attendance raises someone’s income by almost 10%.The summary points out that ethnic density can make a group worse off (“ghettoization”), which Gruber controls for by looking at “the density of ‘co-religionists’” not of the same race. He says that “a 10% increase in the density of co-religionists leads to an 8.5% rise in churchgoing” and that a 10% increase in the density of co-religionists leads to a 0.9% rise in income. In other words, because there are lots of non-Polish Catholics in Boston and a few in Minnesota, Poles in Boston both go to church more often and are materially better off relative to, say, Swedes in Boston than Poles in Minnesota relative to Swedes in Minnesota.If this is accurate, what’s actually going on here? Suggestions offered in the Economist summary: Churchgoing increases one’s network of connections, making business dealings smoother; churchgoing provides a form of insurance against social or economic setbacks; churchgoing promotes an increase in education; churchgoing reduces the stress of life. The first two of these, and perhaps the last, strike me as plausible; whether or not churchgoing promotes education likely depends a great deal on the particular sect or denomination. ...

Blairwatch has published the text of memos from Craig Murray, UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which complain about the U.S. giving aid to the country after accepting sham improvements in human rights, as well as collecting intelligence information obtained via torture. Some excerpts: I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging). […] We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror. […] I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as “From detainee debriefing.” The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured. […] I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact. ...