the tindog coffeehouse

Source.

The downside: You have to pay $150 to check your luggage.

The upside: You get a free physical.

Previously:
A frustrating glimpse inside Homeland Security
Winning the war on liquids

According to Mashable, the first non-Latin domain names have been issued by ICANN. The three issued domains are all in Arabic.

Screenshot from Mashable:

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I was working at Microsoft at the time. Usually I’d listen to the radio on the way to work, but for some reason on the morning of September 11, 2001, I didn’t.

I showed up for work a little before 8:00 AM, and the office was still pretty quiet. I walked down the row of cubicles to say hi to my friend Larry, and I found him staring at his monitor. “Did you hear about this?” he asked. Of course I hadn’t. “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.” Oh my God! How awful!

I got back to my desk and pulled up any news website I could get, trying to find out what happened. Normally, there were TVs at the end of the rows permanently tuned to MSNBC, but none of them had been working for a week or so. And now I couldn’t reach any of the major news sites (msnbc.com, cnn.com, etc.) as they were all flooded with traffic. I was able to get some information on the Dallas Morning News site, though, and kept reloading it over and over to try and get the latest updates. This was a terrible accident!

Then came the news that another plane had hit the other tower, and we understood that it was no accident.

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Back in April, Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe introduced two bills, 773 and 778, which would’ve essentially given the President the unilateral ability to shut down any services on the Internet — even those from the private sector — in the case of a “cybersecurity emergency”. But the bills didn’t stop there. They would’ve also given the Commerce Department “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.”

As Wired points out, S-773 has been revised significantly since then, removing much of the controversial language and replacing it with more sensible (albeit general) guidelines for dealing with with cyber attacks on the U.S.:

(2) [I]n the event of an immediate threat to strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network—
(A) [the President] may declare a cybersecurity emergency; and
(B) may, if the President finds it necessary for the national defense and security, and in coordination with relevant industry sectors, direct the national response to the cyber threat and the timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network;
(3) shall, in coordination with various critical infrastructure industry sectors, develop detailed cyber emergency response and restoration plans for each critical infrastructure industry sector;

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Two Senate bills, 773 and 778, introduced by Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe would, if passed, give the federal government virtually unrestricted control over the Internet, including private-sector Internet services, applications, and services.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

The bill does not only add to the power of the president. It also grants the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” This means he or she can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws. …

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that granting such power to the Commerce secretary could actually cause networks to be less safe. When one person can access all information on a network, “it makes it more vulnerable to intruders,” Granick says. “You’ve basically established a path for the bad guys to skip down.”

The bill’s scope, she says, is “contrary to what the Constitution promises us.”

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After less than 3 days on the job, President Obama has effectively surrendered in the War on Terror.

With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the “war on terror,” as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the U.S. government in battling its enemies will not be limitless. …

Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

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