This post from John Robb reminds me of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. I wonder when life will stop imitating Clancy's fiction??

Brits to form new deep black counter-terrorism unit (The Times).  A dedicated special forces unit is being assembled alongside the SAS and SBS to infiltrate and destroy Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.  The unit, nicknamed the "X-men", has already begun recruiting and is expected eventually to comprise some 600 men and women from all three armed services and the intelligence agencies. Much of the core of the unit will be made up of undercover surveillance operators who have honed their skills fighting terrorists in Northern Ireland.  More than 150 members of the 14th Intelligence and Security Company, have already left Northern Ireland and are forming the nucleus of  the new unit.  Particular efforts will be made to recruit people of Arabic appearance in addition to members of ethnic minority communities and Muslims. The unit would be expected to operate around the world as well as to counter the terrorism threat in Britain itself. (source: http://jrobb.mindplex.org/2004/07/27.html#a5155).

John Robb follows up on this with this:

Mediathink has a White Paper on RSS. Everyday RSS is becoming more and more mainstream. Good reason to get yourself a KosmoBlog.

RSS is in its infancy--the earliest stage of its adoption--but the velocity and mass of its adoption confirms it to be one of the most important developments in the distribution of media content in a number of years. We strongly believe that RSS is the web's Next Big Thing. It is potentially most disruptive to email and applications relying on email, though it is important to understand that RSS is not at all likely to replace email. New media rarely ever replace old. Indeed some RSS aggregators need a traditional email client to function. RSS adoption will aid in the active, real-time, automated filtering of an ever-growing supply of content. Smarter content filters will drive up the value of prospect access. As consumers take more active control of the messaging and content they consume, reaching them gets tougher. Concurrently, as Search Engine Optimization looses its mystery, popularity and relevancy vie for dominance as content searches become more automated and span a number of different communication channels. RSS presents a huge opportunity to create communication efficiencies inside the enterprise by usurping the politics that bog email down and expediting the process associated with team communications. Additionally, mass adoption of RSS will challenge marketers to increase the value and quantity of the content built to influence prospects.

Maybe I'm just thick but I don't see how UseBestMail helps anyone in the fight against spam. All it does is prevent myself from sending spam from my own email client. Unless of course everyone on the planet is using UseBestMail and all SMTP servers are validating stamps which just isn't going to happen.

The Long And Short of It UseBestMail relies on a remote computer we operate to issue stamps that attach to and validate the email you send out and receive from others. To get free stamps your email software has to pause after sending each email. To send stamped email without the pause, one has to purchase stamps. Most people will use the service free of charge, since the pause between emails is small, not even noticeable for small volumes of mail. Large volume mailers, however, will find the delays are a problem. They will purchase stamps as a means of avoiding the delay and sending their email through a spam-free channel. Spammers are defeated because the cost of stamps makes their business unprofitable and the delay (that increases as the volume of mail sent increases) makes sending large amounts of mail impractical. This is the Delay or Pay system.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

I first read about these kinds of devices in John Alexander's 1999 book Future War (Non-Lethal Weapons In Twenty-First-Century Warfare). Anyone interested in this kind of stuff should definitely pickup this book.

HERFs, or high energy radio frequency weapons (particularly microwaves), will become the weapon of choice for many global guerrilla operations (see Homemade Microwave Weapons for more). There are signs that these weapons are just starting to make it into the mainstream. David Giri, of ProTech, is currently building HERFs for the Marine Corps and the LA Police department. Here is more on the device, which has trialed at up to 50 meters away (source: Global Guerrillas)

I might have to pickup his newer book:

Further update to Bloglines New Look, Mark Fletcher and company at BlogLines have already re-instated the font preferences.

Well, it seems like they must have reset something yesterday at approx. 4:15pm. Totally flatlined at that point until I reset the modem at 4:45. Been pretty good since then but again not normal but useable. Still 2% packet loss over the last 3 hours. I suspect they haven't really resolved this just yet (probably never will).

Just fired up Bloglines and all of a sudden I'm hit with a new look and feel. Not sure I like it but maybe it is just a matter of getting used to it. Bloglines has always continuously added useful features but it looks like with this one someone came in and said this looks too plain, we've got to jazz it up and make it look slick. I liked it plain and lean. Now its got the kindergarten Windows XP feel to everything. Bigger fonts, unnecessary tabs, hokey colors that don't do anything for me etc. Be nice if I could at least configure a few things like fonts and colors.

We'll see how it goes but so far its damn annoying. Maybe I"ll load up the iPAQ version of the page on the desktop from now on.

Update: No more than an hour after my post I see this as part of the Bloglines announcement:

Update: We've already received some great feedback. One thing we'd like to mention is that we will be adding back the font size preference. Until then, both IE and Mozilla provide the ability to change the font size of a given page. Look in the View menu of your browser to set this.

Down most of yesterday afternoon and so far this morning from around 8am.

Called in today and spoke with Ben who was decent. He said he doesn't have a rep number however. Not sure what that is about. Maybe a new policy of not giving out rep. numbers. I just wanted to check on the outstanding ticket numbers (WFR00265194 and WSR01252611). He pulled up the WFR one and said there were tons of entries on it. Said it still wasn't closed and after putting me on hold to read more of the items he came back and said there were even a couple of entries for around 8am this morning. He also mentioned that a lot of departments are involved and good note are being added. They seem to be monitoring the issue and actively doing stuff. Not sure how this is supposed to make me feel since things don't seem to be getting resolved. But for the first time in 2 years it seems like something is actually happening for once. But we'll see.

Justin Mason sums up the timeline on this paper and various responses between the authors and the DSPAM developer. I'd put Cormack in the top 3 professors who taught computer science when I attended Waterloo.

Spam: or, 'SlashDot spam drama'. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I'd been sent -- it's a great paper, and I'm not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well -- it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)

The results have been pretty incendiary. ;) Here's a timeline with links, in case you were wondering where we are right now:

• I forward A Study of Supervised Spam Detection Applied to Eight Months of Personal Email, Gordon Cormack and Thomas Lynam, to the SpamAssassin-dev mailing list for some quiet review. ;)

• it hit Slashdot (that was quick) entitled 'Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 In Anti-Spam Shootout'. A bit over-the-top, but that's Slashdot for ya.

• The DSPAM author responds with a SlashDot post entitled Response to Gordon Cormack's Study of Spam Detection, linking to 'an appropriate response to Cormack's technical errors' -- with a few errors of its own.

• Some follow-ups: Henry Stern's, my own, and Lynam and Cormack's.