Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue: Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens. Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC) Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists. The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for. Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country. I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed. ...

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment says, it was indeed the “Balanced Bill payment plan where you wind up spending some 11% more over the course of the year for the privilege of knowing that your bill will be 1/12th of a fixed amount. There is (apparently) a different equal payment plan which is comparable to what we had with Duke Power. However, it’s not the money maker that the Balanced Bill program is and so it is not heavily advertised. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find details of the plan online. The closest I can get is here, which seems to be lacking in specifics. ...

It was a rough night to try to get any pictures of last night’s total lunar eclipse. For long durations of the evening, you couldn’t even see the moon for all of the cloud cover. I did manage to get a few pictures. Most of them were slightly blurred because of the long exposure time and the 900 mm of focal length. However, some came out quite nice. The general process I used was: ...

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use. ...

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text. And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: sans or serif. On my own blog, I find that particularly annoying. I’ve got, what I think, is a nice clean looking theme that reminds me of a Victorian-era journal (except perhaps not that fancy). But all of the titles and dynamic content are plain text. ...

About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that person in the right direction. Beyond that, my only real contact with him has been some minimal email communication, usually after I’ve pointed someone new his way. ...

The ISP move went reasonably well. There were a couple of minor glitches. One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky. I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks. Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time. ...

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues: arbitrary version changes with no notification random breakage due to “security upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl random lockouts of service insults from the security “guru because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around etc. The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this. ...

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up! “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it. “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it. “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy. “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French. ...

So, John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primaries today. It’s a shame. In one sense, I was more excited about Obama or Clinton as president(ial candidates). Their candidacies would be a) history making for their race/gender respectively; and b) about freaking time! Hell, Turkey and Pakistan have had female heads of state for well over a decade, it’s just embarrassing that the United States hasn’t had a viable black or female candidate until now. ...