This is a technical post regarding something approaching a technical Holy War; if you're here for the internet stuff, please ignore the following.

Paul (Snively) says, This is the part I find baffling: someone as smart as Roland finds REST "harder to understand" than RPC! I'd be very interested—no sarcasm, as Dave would say—in hearing some comments about that, as I want to gain a better understanding of the issues so that my own ignorance doesn't become self-defeating in RPC and REST discussions. (Check the context if you're really interested in following this.) I had been conversing a bit in his comments, but I wanted to get this more out in the open.

LA Times - Analysts fear government and private efforts to sabotage federal Internet sites. [Privacy Digest]

Believe it when you see it. The press is throwing cyber war warnings everywhere it can. . . most of them are quite unimportent. These threats always come to effectively nothing, even when the CIA or FBI issues them.

Remember, if it was that easy, it would be happening. It is that easy, and it is happening. Every day. Most of us don't notice. Sometimes a site we care about gets hacked; the backup tapes roll, the patches are applied, and life goes on. Threats of escalation are mostly empty posturing.

Kevin Fanning: "It seems like everyone is taking the Spring off from his or her website. At first I was weirded out, but now I see that it's probably a good thing. I mean let's face it."

[diveintomark]

Yeah, I wish that was the reason. Try "end of semester homework". . .

'I've added a new feature to the home page of my weblog: automatic linkbacks to people who are linking to specific posts.'

This in a pretty interesting idea. The biggest problem with the weblog community is the difficulty of noticing people (trying to) conversing with you, if they aren't on your normal reading list. Interesting approach.

Help! Help! My Internet connection is failing!

Upshot, no posts.

I don't have time to code this right now, but here's an idea for a Google API app. It's just the sort of thing webloggers would go for, a vanity macro.

• Scrape your referers pages, extracting all google queries and extracting the "q" parameter.
• Run these through the Google API, looking for search terms that you're in the top 10 for.
• Store all of these.
• Every so often (6 hours, or maybe every post), pick one of these results, and create a Google box to upload to your page. (Remove the result if you're no longer in the top ten.)

In which I receive a non-response and an incorrect response to a query about the CBDTPA [Erehwon Notebook]

Regarding my earlier post about the grass-roots denouncement of the CBDPTA being essentially non-news, this provides some good, albiet anecdotal, evidence that supports my feeling that way.

'The European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to oppose the use of "blocking" as a way of regulating content on the Internet.

'The vote (460 in favour, 0 against and 3 abstentions) this morning means that ISPs will not be forced to restrict access to Web sites....

'[Ms Gosling] added that blocking is "technically difficult, democratically questionable and undoubtedly inefficient" and believes that there are far better ways to deal with content issues, such as using special hotlines and ratings systems.'

This is an anti-blog-post. This story is totally unimportent. Thanks for anti-reading.

'The idea seemed simple: figure out who the good guys are, give them easy-to-recognize and hard-to-counterfeit ID cards and let them breeze past airport security.

'Everybody would win, advocates say. Holders of the "trusted traveler" cards would save time. Screeners would have fewer bodies to inspect — there were 1.8 billion in 2000, according to the Transportation Department — and could concentrate on identifying potential terrorists. And passengers would feel safer.