I find it a bit amusing that you can no longer order TM 31-210 through the government printing office online. This is the official Army "Improvised Munitions Handbook" on how to make bombs, etc. I got my copy a few years back just to prove how senseless it was to censor the internet. I guess they finally deemed it irresponsible for the government to be providing this info to its citizens. But never fear. There are countless book resellers who can still get you a copy, and at least one enterprising individual has put the whole series of US Army bomb making publications on CD.

The reason this came up was because I was checking out the current availability of the most subversive text on the Internet. The infamous deCSS program which allows a Linux (or other non-Windows) computer to play a DVD. In a historic decision last year the courts ruled that it was illegal to even provide a link to this article of free speech. Luckily many of us saw it coming and squirreled away copies in advance.

So you can find out how to build a bomb (even an atomic one). You can watch teenagers having sex with various farm animals in real time. You can get satellite reconnaissance imagery of the power and water grid feeding every major city in the world. You can even easily get to sites that promote racial hatred and generally advocate murder and mayhem, rape, child molestation; show you how to create computer viruses that can affect the worldwide internet; whatever. Even build a sub-machine gun out of commonly available components. But heaven forbid if you want to watch a movie (that you paid money for) on an open source operating system. That's where they draw the line of good vs. evil.

What's wrong with this picture?

And the reason that all of this came about was an employee memo today that Dr. Bell, the chief scientist for intellectual property rights at Time-Warner and the infamous inventor of DVD regional encodings, is to speak to AOL technologists next week about the state of the art w/r/t intellectual property rights in the digital age. I thought seriously about showing up in a Napster t-shirt, but the meeting is in Virginia.

And don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Napster. Anybody that forces your computer to be a Napster server (even through a firewall) and opens your hard disk to the internet with no way of turning it off completely (short of un-installing the software in question) likewise doesn't strike me as having much consumer sense. Imagine my horror when the default installation, through which I tried to locate a couple of discontinued Les Paul/Mary Ford recordings; setup my computer such that for the next 24 hours anybody could download my private mail files, through the firewall and without telling me that it was being done. And a few hundred folks did just that. Didn't find out until I saw the modem light blinking and the hard drive light on my (supposedly protected) PC blinking at the same time. That's pretty friggin' evil if you ask me.