DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

CATIC, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, was established shortly after 2001-09-11. It issues bulletins to police about forthcoming events, including political marches and rallies. The implication: by participating in your government, you are a terrorist.

Fortunately, surveilling political gatherings is illegal in California, and AG Bill Lockyer is fighting back. The Chron reports: Lockyer backs ACLU on privacy; He agrees to ban surveillance of political activity

You can read more about CATIC here. The press release notes that CATIC has issued 224 terrorist threat advisories. As far as I remember — please correct me — exactly zero of those have turned out to be true. Hmmmmm.

Pictured is my wife’s suggestion for lunch today — an assortment of peppers from the garden. I can only hope the arrangement was unintentional.

Tulip Computers, which owns the Commodore brand name, plans to relaunch the brand to take advantage in an upsurge of interest in the obsolete Commodore 64 (C64) computer and its 1980s-era games.

The C=64, as we used to call it, came out twenty-five years ago. It does not take much imagination to picture how far computer games have advanced in 25 years… so you have to wonder why anyone would want to play those old dinosaur titles, like the original Castle Wolfenstein and GridRunner and Neutral Zone and, I don’t know, Zork.

I typed those titles from memory — the C=64 was my first computer. I learned to code on that thing. I played a few games, too. Those memories run very deep.

And yet, I have no interest in buying a re-released Commodore 64. But I guess I was never a very dedicated gamer. (I don’t imagine the driving factor behind Tulip’s business plan is a perceived desire on the part of 40-year-old nerds to spend nights and weekends fervently coding in BASIC for the Commodore’s built-in interpreter.)

I agree with Tulip that the C=64 was an advanced machine, years ahead of its time and superior to all its competitors. I had friends who disagreed with this obvious truth; they started out on the Apple ][ and the Atari 800. Both those guys are now in prison.

Heh, just kidding.

Remember Ken Hamidi, the disgruntled ex-Intel employee who retaliated by spamming up to 35,000 Intel employees with emails critical of corporate policy, triggering lawsuits and ACLU meddling and PR stunts and etc.? I wrote about it in late 2001, when some journalists (incorrectly) characterized the dispute as “david vs. goliath,” when in fact it had more to do with the implied responsibility of delivering email. Read more at Hamidi’s site, intelhamidi.com, but beware the disturbing “free speech” slant.

Common sense, and Intel’s case, suffered a setback last week: The state Supreme Court boosted free speech over property rights in cyberspace, denying Intel’s attempt to stop an angry ex-employee from using the company’s e-mail system to send messages to thousands of workers.

Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar is quoted as opining, “[Hamidi] no more invaded Intel’s property than does a protester holding a sign or shouting through a bullhorn outside corporate headquarters, posting a letter through the mail, or telephoning to complain of a corporate practice.” This appears to me to be incorrect. If a protester holds a sign in the driveway, Intel pays nothing, and 99% of employees don’t notice. If a protestor sends a letter, a single employee is engaged for a few minutes, but this is the cost of doing business. The same applies to the handling of a telephone call.

But Hamidi sent tens of thousands of emails. Werdegar and the other justices of the majority failed to grasp the difference. Werdegar’s opinion needed to have said, “[Hamidi] no more invaded Intel’s property than would 35,000 protesters holding signs or shouting through bullhorns outside corporate headquarters.” She didn’t say that, because (in my opinion) such a disturbance would be considered an invasion of property. If 35,000 people showed up to protest, would Intel have invited them into the foyer? I think not. Intel would have invited cops with rubber bullets to defend the company against siege. Barricades would have forced protestors to back off of Intel property. Nobody would have claimed that Intel needs to accept the protest without comment. Extrapolating from Werdegar’s opinion, Intel would not only need to allow 35,000 protestors up on the lawn, but would have to send out for lunch, too. “Hi, this is Sally at Intel. We’re having guests for lunch. Can I get some kung-pao chicken delivered right away? Yes, with steamed rice for 35,000.”

Another troubling aspect of the case was Intel’s failure to show damages. It appears that had Intel been able to prove that Hamidi’s flood of email caused outages or hardware failures, the claim of invasion would have stood a better chance of success. This is troubling because it’s the IT department’s job to withstand floods. Networking experts regularly design systems to withstand 2x or 5x or even 10x spikes in throughput. According to the state Supreme Court, building scalable systems provides a tacit invitation to outsiders to abuse those systems, at least within the systems’ tolerance for abuse.

So, for example, if I build a wall around my property, I can’t sue graffiti artists, because clearly the wall is there to be defaced, right? If I didn’t want graffiti, I should not have built the wall. This seems to be the essence of the judges’ opinion. (Forgive me for not using the word “justice” here.)

Now that Hamidi has a legal right to spam Intel’s entire staff with his diatribes, what’s the next step for Intel? If the company were to filter inbound email to prevent Hamidi’s spam from reaching employees, would the ACLU be back on the case demanding that Intel guarantee delivery of every inbound message?

The ACLU calls this “censorship,” but I just don’t see the argument. AOL discards inbound email based strictly on volume — and AOL doesn’t wait until there is real risk to the system, as Werdegar demands. AOL does not even publish the conditions that trigger such blacklisting. When AOL blacklists a sender, all subsequent inbound messages are silently deleted. Neither the sender nor the recipient is notified. Will the ACLU battle AOL too, with the effect of giving spammers the legal right to force AOL to deliver every message? This is a dangerous road, because nobody wants to go where that road leads.

It’s just not a free speech issue. Intel does not protest Hamidi’s right to have a website where he can express his opinion. That would be a free speech issue.

I get flak from friends at mealtime because my preferred diet appears to be so restrictive. In reality, there are only a few types of foods I don’t eat, but because those foods comprise about 85% of the regular American diet, it’s common that I can’t find anything on a restaurant menu that I’m willing to order.

Recently I went out for pizza with a group of omnivorous friends. My entrée included a side salad, which I requested be made without onions, not so much because it’s one of the foods I’ve grown to find revolting, but because onions don’t agree with me.

Ordering the entrée was slightly more complex. This was my first restaurant pizza since my recent decision to stop eating cheese on pizza — the last application of dairy I made regular exceptions for. So I tried to brace the waitress. “I’d like to order a pizza, but it’s going to be strange,” I said, “because I don’t want any cheese.” She took it well. Often, especially outside California, I get an incredulous look, like opting out of cheese is like opting out of oxygen.

We worked through the restaurant’s peculiar ordering approach, which apparently allows for customized pies but requires nonetheless that the order begin with something on the menu. In other words, I couldn’t order “tomato sauce, tomatoes, basil”; I had to order “The #2 except without parmesan, mozzarella, or cheddar, with basil and sliced tomatoes.” I was tempted to find the most elaborate, top-heavy pizza on the menu and then individually subtract every topping in reverse order, leaving a bare crust upon which to construct my vegan masterpiece, e.g. “I’d like the saffron-chive-prawn and bacon pesto / roasted potato rosemary havardi egg combo pizza, except without the rosemary, egg, roasted potatoes on the one half or the saffron-chive-prawns or bacon or pesto on the other half, with a little marinara sauce and sliced tomato and basil, thank you” and then watch with a bemused grin while the waitress dutifully copied down paragraphs of pointless exceptions, just to prove the idiocy of the exercise.

Finally she moved on to the next person’s order. It came in one word: “supreme.” I had to laugh. The next order took only two words: “me, too.”

I laughed again later when my instruction-manual pizza was delivered exactly as requested, whereas the one- and two-word supremes, like my side salad, all had no onion. So much for ordering simply.

The odd thing is, I can’t order so easily in California either, not because I need to cross-examine the chef about hidden meat products, but because the granola restaurants I frequent offer lots of choices, specifically to accomodate neo-non-ovo/lacto-pescatarians, Soy Zonians, McDougall/Atkins/Hollywood dieticians, and even those most curious of all, the people who eat chicken on waffles.