Alex's Journal

“On the 28th of February, 2008 while everyone was paying attention to the WIKILEAKS.ORG censorship case, another Wikileaks domain, WIKILEAKS.INFO, was unlawfully locked and seized. The censoring company was domain name registrar eNom, Inc of Bellevue, Washington. eNom is the second largest registrar of domain names with 8.6 million internet domains names under its “control”.

eNom was also cited in the March 4, 2008 edition of New York Times this week for censoring a Spanish travel company with flights to Cuba.

[...]

In addition Wikileaks has discovered a previously unreported eNom proposal from last year to bulk-release customer records to government agencies. The plan is to convert the entire internet domain system to into “Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement”, a big-brother scheme redolent of the NSA CLIPPER chip fiasco.Not content to roll over eNom customer records when asked, eNom has apparently realized it can decrease subpoena processing costs by giving away domain holders confidential information to government agencies en-mass. eNom’s idea is to encrypt registrant’s confidential information and attach it to every public “whois” record. This would allow law enforcement, or anyone else with a decryption key, to obtain all confidential records automatically. Not content to undermine the 1st amendment, eNom apparently has plans to do away with the 4th as well.

What follows is the Wikileaks case against and call for a global boycott of eNom and its parent company Demand Media, Inc. of Santa Monia, California, and all associated holdings and resellers. “

More information, including evidence, about it: http://wikileaks.org

Some miscellaneous Mark Twain quotes that I found amusing:

“Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away”

“Familiarity breeds contempt — and children”

“The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

“None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.”

Version 1.1.1 of ScratchPad has now been released! This is what is new in the new version:

• Japanese localization added.
• German localization added.
• Go to Page Number window now remembers its last position.
• Fixed a problem with the bundle identifier — users will be prompted again to check for automatic updates.

You can download either by selecting “Check for Updates” in the application menu or by downloading it here.

Well, unfortunately it would appear as though my harddrive in my 12″ Apple Powerbook is on its last leg. The symptoms that always occur such as random clicking coming from the harddrive and the entire system locking up while it’s busy doing that are becoming frequent events. The other major symptom is that occasionally when I boot my computer, no bootable drive can be found and I have to restart again. That normally takes care of the problem, but I don’t know how much longer that will take care of it.

I have backed up all of my data and I’m being very careful as to what else gets put on it. Normally a crashed harddrive would not be a big deal for me if I’m forewarned about it such as in this case because I normally have more than one computer readily available to take this one’s place. The problem, however, is that I am in Germany and will be here until late this summer and this is my only computer.

As I said in my last post, I am considering moving to Linux anyhow. As such, I’ve been doing research about Linux and as I was looking around, an idea came to mind. I realized that, in the event that my harddrive fails, I could just use a Linux live disk and still be able to access the internet and my e-mail. This would be very limiting as to what I could do with my computer, but it is much better than nothing. I’ve decided on using Fedora 8, as it is one of the only major distros that still support the PowerPC platform. We’ll see how it goes.