Saturday, June 18

Mez: Gentlemen of
Leisure Edition (3#) -

A movie screenplay writer couldn't have
come up with a better ending to this case.

A bunch of criminals tell the Amanda Knox
appeal court contradictory stories.

Next week, more witnesses will testify. And Rudy Guede will be summoned to appear in court. Perhaps, he will be informative; but, perhaps not.

:: Barbie Nadeau - TDB ::

:: Andrea Vogt - SPI ::

:: Nick Pisa ::

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Books: Furtive Encounters (5#) -

An interview with the Italian author Roberto Saviano who wrote Gomorrah about the Naples Mafia syndicate and has been living under heavy police protection for the last three years by Alastair Smart at the Telegraph.

# A magic-touched police procedural set in contemporary London: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. It's been getting some word-of-mouth buzz.

# A new collection of French
short stories translated into English by
Helen Constantine is called Paris Metro Tales.

# A bit of a memoir by Jhumpa Lahiri
about how she became a writer. [NYer]

# Adam Woog's monthly Mystery Picks.

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Friday, June 17

Under The Black Flags (4#) -

Anarchists are being blamed for the rioting in
downtown Vancouver after the Stanley Cup Final.

The mayor said there was a lack of forewarning about "anarchists and thugs" planning to bring hammers and Molotov cocktails to a public party.

Police said some of the rioters also took part in the anarchist protests during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Police Chief Chu said that many of the rioters came downtown armed with masks, goggles and gasoline.

He described the rioters and looters as a group of angry young men, hell-bent on violence, the vast majority of whom were not from Vancouver but, rather, from out of town.

Property damage is expected to run in the millions of dollars. Some police officers even suffered human bites.

:: Vancouver Sun :: - - - :: CTVBC ::

# Barefoot Bandit:
Colton Harris-Mooreis expected to
plead guilty Friday morning in a Seattle court.

# Five prison convicts will testify on behalf of Amanda Knox's Defense as part of her appeal case, Nick Pisa reports. The next scheduled hearing is set for this Saturday, June 18th, I believe.

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Wednesday, June 15

Grand Jury Not LOLing - (4#) -

The manic uptick in LulzSec hacking havoc may
have something to do with Grand Jury activity today.

David House, a friend and visitor to Bradley Manning, invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify earlier today before a Grand Jury convened in Alexandria, Virginia, to investigate the WikiLeaks organization.

The 24-year-old M.I.T. computer scientist
is represented by attorney Peter Krupp.

LulzSec is reputed to be sympathetic
to the WikiLeaks outfit.

:: CNN :: - - - :: Bloomberg ::

:: FoxNews :: - - - :: AFP ::

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Manic Dubois Churning Hacks (5#) -

Bin Drinkin' too much
energy juice today, Mr Dubois?

It kinda sorta looks that way . . .

Mischief-makers LulzSec raiders have been on a spree lately, invading other people's computer game worlds and now, the public access front page of the CIA. Although they claim they are taking hack requests, they have also admitted on their Twitter page that they are redirecting some of that phone traffic to World of Warcraft customer support. Oy, what a headache for WoW!

This group, which seemed to have emerged from 4Chan's bastard child Anonymous, has been factionalizing into internecine rivalries, thrashing others as "moral fags" when the target damage threatens to become too serious, which may be why Hactivists did not follow through on their Iran Op advance promotion.

I hope we don't have occasion to eventually discover that they are actually a bunch of very bored middle-aged male CIA agents who usually pose as lesbian bloggers in their spare time.

Better get off that energy drink stuff, Mr Dubois! I hear that too much of it can lower your sperm count and cause massive hair loss.

:: BBC/tech :: - - [Atlantic] - - [TheReg]

:: Cnet :: - - - :: nextweb ::

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Blogging in Drag (3#) -

A second Lesbian Blogger
has been exposed as a man . . .

Paula Brooks from the blog LezGetReal turned out to be a 58-year old construction worker from Ohio. Mark Steyn has written a funny piece about it:

We’re one lesbian away
from a bona fide Fleet Street "trend."

# Also in the news: LulzSec's latest hacking antics include an attack on the website of the US Senate, John Leyden reports.

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Monday, June 13

Forty Years of Papers (4#) -

Marking the 40th anniversary of
the publication of the Pentagon Papers, they are
unclassified and fully released to the public today.

There are stories we tell ourselves in an attempt to understand what is happening in the world around us and stories about how we experience these events even while we struggle to make sense of them.

:: wikipedia: Pentagon Papers ::

:: Graham Greene: The Quiet American ::

:: Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American ::

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Sunday, June 12

Lost in Cyberspace II (4#) -

The Syrian Blogger was a hoax!

Blogger was actually a
40-year-old American man.

"The problem there is that those [real] people just aren’t dramatic enough. He gave us a better story, a better character. He had a great narrative arc going."

:: Start HERE; then HERE;
:: MORE for background.

# Hey, Maxwell Smart!

*Shadow Internet in a Suitcase*
for dissidents in Iran and similar situations.

I still have one persistent Iranian reader
who might be interested in this ;-)

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Lost in Cyberspace (4#) -

An alluring mystery
blogger in Damascus . . .

disappears, leaving many questions behind.

Was the blog an elaborate hoax?

:: Esther Addley :: - - :: Jillian C York ::

# Silent marches have been called for today, to mark the second anniversary of Iran's disputed presidential election, while Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest.

# Google is manipulating the search results
you see, a new report explains . . .

The "personalisation" of information being made available to you is under the control of Google, which is not really accountable to anyone. If anyone challenges Google, they can always claim the "secret sauce" defense: their technological methods are a trade secret.

The writer describes how some of this power works, but I can tell you about my experience, too:

Although I have been regularly providing commentary and analysis on the Amanda Knox Case, for example, Google does not list my blog entries on this topic.

They have not deleted my blog from their servers; instead, they have rendered it invisible in their search results.

If you go to Google Blog Search, you will not find my entries among those listed, because "personalisation" is just a fancy technological euphemism for censorship.

:: Read more by Eli Pariser.

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