Charlie's Diary

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Thu, 25 Sep 2003

Off to P-Con

I'm off to P-Con in Dublin tomorrow morning for the weekend. Normal service will be resumed when I return (next Wednesday).

[P-Con ] [ Discuss Conventions ]



posted at: 20:50 | path: /fandom | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 24 Sep 2003

Sanity prevailing in one small arena

It looks like there's been a minor victory for sanity today in the patent wars, as the European Parliament today approved a draft Directive that paves the way for the introduction of software patents in Europe -- but, thanks to grass-roots petitioning by critics of the measures, the original draft has been moderated considerably by MEPs. The revised (and passed) directive doesn't allow the patenting of business methods, severely restricts the types of software that can be patented (excluding software found in embedded devices like mobile phones, video recorders and set-top boxes), and restricts software patents to "true inventions". Oh, and only manufacturers (not users) of patent-infringing devices can be sued.

The fight isn't over yet, but the worst excesses of the US patent system -- which is driving many US companies to outsource their software development to foreign companies because of litigation fears -- look as if they've been held at bay.

[ Link ][ Discuss copyright-censorship ]



posted at: 19:20 | path: /copyright | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 22 Sep 2003

3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Gary Farber provides an essential link: James Oberg's detailed write-up of the Shenzhou-5 due for launch between the 10th and 15th of October, with which China will become the third power to put its own astronauts (okay, taikonauts) into orbit using home-grown boosters. And they're not just interested in doing one-shot launches using a capsule that looks like it's based on Soyuz. Shenzhou is actually a home-grown design, the booster is home-built too, and China is shooting for the #2 slot in manned space exploration.

Phillip S. Clark, a British space consultant specializing in Russian and Chinese technology, expects China's space agency to launch a small 12- to 14-ton laboratory, perhaps within the next two years. Clark predicts that in 2006 or 2007 China will loft a larger station similar to the Russian Salyut stations launched in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, Clark believes, China will begin the orbital assembly of a structure like the 130-ton Russian Mir station.

Got that? A Chinese space station by 2010.

According to space experts such as Harvey, boosting astronauts into orbit will be enough to make the world see China in a new light. "There will be a perception that the country has reached space superpower status," he says. "If China follows that with its own Salyut-class space station, it will impress the Asian region specifically and the world as a whole." China's goals for its space program are obviously not the same as America's, Russia's or Europe's. Judging from the hardware already built and the infrastructure in place, it seems clear that for the foreseeable future China intends to follow its own path in space.

[ Link ][ Discuss space ]



posted at: 20:54 | path: /space | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 20 Sep 2003

Election rigging for pleasure and profit

The EFF is currently trying to raise the alarm over a deeply sinister development at the IEEE. In case you haven't heard of it, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is an enormous and important professional body which, among other things, spawns committees that set out public standards for electronics, software, and hardware devices to conform to.

Normally, IEEE activities are nothing but praiseworthy, but this month something weird and nasty is happening in those hallowed halls -- something with poisonous implications for democratic government, world-wide.

You've probably heard about electronic voting machines. If you tracked the US presidential election you'll remember the hanging chads in Florida, the undesirable side-effects of using antique mechanical card-punch machines for filling out ballots. In the UK, Tony Blair and his panglossian ministers are getting all starry-eyed about internet voting, in an attempt to get the under-25 voters interested in the whole business. Anything that makes votes easier to count, and makes it easier for people to vote, would appear on the surface to be a good thing. However ...

As Rebecca Mercuri, professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College (and a specialist in electronic voting systems) points out at length, electronic voting harbours potentially immense dangers. As she writes: "I am adamantly opposed to the use of fully electronic or Internet-based systems for use in anonymous balloting and vote tabulation applications. The reasons for my opposition are manyfold, and are expressed in my writings as well as those of other well-respected computer security experts. At the present time, it is my strong recommendation that all election officials REFRAIN from procuring ANY system that does not provide an indisputable paper ballot. A detailed explanation, along with my recommendation for appropriately configured voting equipment, is provided in the full text of this statement, available here."

In case you're too lazy to read professor Mercuri's opinion, here's her key point: "Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result. There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system." In a nutshell: software can be hacked. If you don't have a piece of paper to hold, you're stuffed. It can't be proven to be a democracy any more than a system where the ballot boxes are carted away from the polling station by workers from the governing party, re-packed, and then appear mysteriously at the count in the custody of those same party adherents.

Speaking as a sometime programmer with a master's degree in computer science, I agree with her. She's dead right. Electronic voting systems are dangerously easy to rig. So the only way to safely approach electronic voting is with complete openness. To be acceptable, an electronic voting system must meet at least the following requirements:

  • It must print a paper record of the vote cast, which the voter must be able to see, and which must be retained, and which can be reconciled with the electronic record of the vote.
  • The software used must be open to third-party auditors, to the extent that it can be verified and if necessarily formally proven to be above suspicion. (Translation: only open source need apply.)
  • The hardware used must be open to third-party auditors, preferably conform verifiably to off-the-shelf standards, and may be challenged and replaced by the election commission with equivalent off-the-shelf equipment (to ensure that no sneaky hardware back doors are installed).

Needless to say, current electronic voting systems don't meet these requirements. They're almost all made by private commercial concerns like Sequoia Voting Systems or Danaher Corporation, Diebold Election Systems and ES&S. They're black boxes; in most cases the licence terms expressly forbid opening the hardware for inspection, let alone providing source code to the software. And the companies who make them may harbour conflicts of interest.

Now here's the EFF's beef with the IEEE:

In the aftermath of the Florida election debacle, the IEEE took up the question of standards for voting equipment. It created a working group, called Project P1583, overseen by a Standards Coordinating Committee known as SCC 38. After passage by IEEE, this standard will go to ANSI for final validation. The substantive work is in its final stages, and the draft standard is currently out to ballot.

This particular vote is extremely important, because the IEEE sits on an advisory committee to the forthcoming Election Assistance Commission established by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). This means that this standard could ultimately be adopted broadly throughout the United States. In a very real sense, the future of democratic systems in the U.S. and around the world are implicated by this standard -- the stakes couldn't be higher.

Problem: Unfortunately, instead of using this opportunity to create a performance standard, setting benchmarks for e-voting machines to meet with regards to testing the security, reliability, accessibility and accuracy of these machines, P1583 created a design standard, describing how electronic voting machines should be configured (and following the basic plans of most current electronic voting machines). Even more problematic, the standard fails to require or even recommend that voting machines be truly voter verified or verifiable, a security measure that has broad support within the computer security community.

To make matters worse, EFF has received reports of serious procedural problems with the P1538 and SCC 38 Committee processes, including shifting roadblocks placed in front of those who wish to participate and vote, and failure to follow basic procedural requirements. We've heard claims that the working group and committee leadership is largely controlled by representatives of the electronic voting machine vendor companies and others with vested interests.

This is an enormously important issue. What the IEEE standard specifies will probably be taken up by the US government under the HAVA proposal and will set a benchmark that will be followed worldwide. The big players in the commercial e-voting systems market want to ensure that the playing field meets their requirements, not the requirements of representative democratic governments, and they're nobbling the committee in order to get a lock on the standard. If we're not lucky we'll be stuck with voting machines that provide no audit trail, give no opportunity to verify that they're impartial and record votes correctly, and are made by corporations whose owners are political partisans who favour one party over any other.

If you're an IEEE member, please go look at the EFF alert and do something, as soon as you can. Help preserve democracy: it may be the most important political act you ever make.

[ Link ] [ Discuss electronic voting ]



posted at: 17:57 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

And now, the News

A small cabal with a plan for planetary hegemony has seized control of a major superpower, and is implementing a scheme to destroy that nation's civil liberties (using national security as a smoke screen). The government fronted by the cabal tampered with a UN weapons inspection support, is carrying out assassinations and sponsouring coups against democratic governments abroad, and is attempting to destroy unions at home. Their friends and cronies are picking up monopolies and big government contracts as they attempt to destroy the ability of the internet to act as a channel for alternate political voices, and avoiding punishment even when convicted of serious crimes. They're violating international treaties, lying about the benefits of liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban, and seeking to recolonize Africa. Their troops are implicated in massacres abroad and massive environmental damage at home -- and are deployed in an attempt not to secure an oil supply or prevent terrorism, but in order to prevent the rest of the world switching to an alternative trading currency.

Yep, Project Censored's 2004 report on the Top 25 under-reported news stories of 2002-2003 is out, and it makes for grim reading. This summary scratches the surface of their headlines -- but only just. It's a synopsis of the important stuff that didn't make the mainstream media -- events which tell a story that differs from the public narrative, a story that is politically incorrect (from an establishment point of view), a story that reveals unpleasant truths about the society we live in. When you put it side by side with the panglossian vision purveyed by the mainstream, and try to triangulate on what is really going on by looking for motives behind the lies and misstatements of truth in the mass-media headlines, it exposes something we don't like to think about: the gap between our heavily propagandized (but notionally free) media and the reality it claims to represent impartially. Because -- make no mistake -- if these stories were clearly false, they could be refuted easily and in public.

The lack of refutation, and the deafening silence in the mass media, tells its own tale. Remember, any coverage is good coverage. The way censorship works in the West is to deny stories that contradict the received truth the oxygen of publicity, lest people ask why they are being so vehemently contradicted. Our mechanisms of social control are more subtle than those a totalitarian dictatorship because our system requires the illusion of consent if it is to function efficiently.

Seriously, if you're not familiar with Project Censored, you want to read this report. And last year's. And the year before that. Because if you don't, you won't know half of what's really going on.

And now, the weather.

[ Link ] [ Discuss politics ] [ Discuss warming ]



posted at: 15:29 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 19 Sep 2003

Grr

So. I bugger off for most of a week, buy a car, drive around large chunks of Yorkshire and Lancashire, finally get home dog-tired and in need of a bath, then log on to check my email. And what do I find? Another Microsoft-specific worm, the Swen-A (aka Gibe-F). It's so prolific that it's hammering my mail server -- about 330 copies received since it first started up yesterday -- and each copy runs to 140Kb or more in size. The SpamAssassin system is catching them but they're coming so thick and fast that this puny little server can't reclaim memory from terminated SpamAssassin scripts fast enough to keep up. With results like this (in UNIXese):

[root@raq981 /root]# w
  6:27pm  up 73 days, 23:24,  2 users,  load average: 59.08, 60.54, 63.32
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU PCPU  WHAT
charlie  pts/0    82.41.202.133     6:13pm  3.00s  0.44s 0.08s  sh 
root     pts/1    82.41.202.133     6:14pm 39.00s  0.44s 0.23s  w 

The key indicator are the three decimal numbers after "load average" -- the instant, one minute, and five minute load ratings. A load average of 1.00 means the machine has one job waiting to run for each CPU. A load average of 59 means the machine is staggering along sluggishly, with 59 jobs tapping their fingers impatiently as it hurries to keep up.

Yes, Windows viruses can totally fuck a UNIX server up beyond recognition. All it takes is enough of them.

(Now writing procmail rules to bin the bastards on sight, rather than relying on the accurate but memory-hungry SpamAssdassin. Gaah. Where's my bath?)

[ Discuss Spam ]



posted at: 19:11 | path: /virus | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 15 Sep 2003

The mezzanine is in. The writer is out.

The new mezzanine in my study is in place and the rewiring proceeds apace. I'd post a photo in the blog except (a) it's still a mess, (b) I'm tired, and (c) tomorrow morning I'm off down south to visit relatives and buy my brother's car. This means I'm unlikely to update the blog until Friday at the earliest.

Since last week, Frigg (the big black cat) has managed to drag herself up the ladder in the bedroom and explore the top cupboard. As we're currently using the same ladder to get at the mezzanine I'm wondering how long it'll take the cats to explore up there ...

[ Discuss cats ]



posted at: 18:18 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 12 Sep 2003

Separated at birth?

Has anyone else noted that Mel Brooks, playing Governor Le Petomane in Blazing Saddles, bears a striking resemblance to George W. Bush, playing President of the United States?

Just curious. (And if anyone's got a better picture of Le Petomane? Like the shot of Le Petomane going cross-eyed while playing with his pen?)

Oh yeah: not much activity lately due to rebuilding of my study and cumulative exhaustion -- I haven't slowed down since getting home from Toronto, and after getting through my immediate backlog of work I've had to box up a ton of crap to make space for the installation of a mezzanine. Which will come in handy for next year's re-decorating plans ...

[ Discuss dumb ]



posted at: 21:52 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 10 Sep 2003

Drool

Orange are apparently getting ready to launch the Treo 600 as early as next week according to The Register.

pic of Treo 600 In case you're wondering, the Treo 600 is the tri-band smartphone from Treo -- the company founded by the guys who founded Palm, and which was recently re-acquired by Palm earlier this year -- that promises to deliver what the Palm Tungsten W doesn't, quite. It's a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone. It does infrared and USB, has a Handspring-compatible interface (meaning: it will probably talk to the Think Outside folding keyboards Real Soon), a 144MHz StrongARM processor and 32Mb of RAM, a 640x480 digital camera, and runs PalmOS 5.0. It's way more powerful than the Tungsten W, works anywhere in the world, and has only one drawback I can see -- the 160x160 screen. I really need the 320x320 screen of the Tungsten C or newer Palm machines to do proper amounts of word processing (that is, editing files as well as simply writing first-draft copy), but even without an external keyboard this machine is going to be close enough to my ideal all-in-one system that, well, I'm going to be at the head of the queue.

pic of Ericsson T39m My current phone is an Ericsson T39m -- a nice, tiny, triband mobile with GSM/GPRS and bluetooth and IR, but none of the more fancy modern features. I've been carrying it for nearly two years now and it has it's shortcomings: it's crap for texting and if I want to use the internet with it I have a headache. It means carrying the Tungsten C and XP Keyboard around and lining everything up on the IR port just so (the Tungsten C doesn't do Bluetooth). While the Tungsten C is a powerful enough computer that I can leave the laptop at home on long trips, it still means carrying three gadgets around instead of one. Whereas the Treo 600 isn't quite as powerful, but should do fine for checking the email, texting folks, making notes, being a PDA, and (if/when the XP Keyboard comes out for it) banging out text.

I've been taken in by the conventional wisdom for some time now, that mobile phones would eat the PDA market. But the Treo 600 makes it look like the reverse could be true. Jack the screen res up to the 320x480 of the newest PalmOS machines, add Bluetooth/WiFi/VoIP and some level of hardware expansion (at least to support external input devices like a folding keyboard), and this kind of PDA is going to eat the sub-notebook PC market's lunch, and the feature-rich mobile phone.

[ Link ] [ Discuss toys ]



posted at: 19:25 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 09 Sep 2003

Ridiculous

45Mb of virus delivered to me in 26 hours. That's just under 2Mb/hour. Another way of looking at the situation is that it's consuming up to 15% of the monthly bandwidth allowance on this colocated server. Another order of magnitude increase (and Sobig.F is already an order of magnitude worse than any other worm I've ever seen) and it'll start costing me real money.

Today's daydream of punishment for the virus writer responsible: to be sentenced to clean out the cats' litter tray (with his hands tied behind his back). Preferably once per individual virus received (that's what ... 450 times for the past day's work? The cats will die of old age first!).

On a more practical note, Paul Graham has a modest proposal for fighting spam. It won't work against viruses -- but against ordinary spam it should be a killer. Simply put, spammers send spam indiscriminately in order to generate hits on a website (through which they aim to sell goods or services). They expect a response rate of typically under 0.1%, and they send millions of junk messages (at the expense of the unwilling recipients). If they received a response rate of 10-100%, it would literally swamp their servers, subjecting them to high bandwidth usage charges and turning the tables on the "free lunch" paradigm that makes their business marginally profitable.

It should be easy enough to turn the tables on the spammers. Imagine, if you will, a software filter through which all positively-identified spam is sent by SpamAssassin. The filter extracts all URLs from the mail and then spiders them a couple of times. If a hundred thousand people with this tool are hit by a spam, it'll generate many hundreds of thousands to millions of hits on the spammer's website within a matter of minutes, hammering them into the ground.

There are problems with this approach to spam fighting. Firstly, legitimate emails containing URLs are broadcast to lots of mailing lists every day -- there needs to be some mechanism for positively identifying the mail as spam before spidering ensues. Secondly, if such a mechanism is badly designed it could open the way to distributed denial of service attacks. (Much as Osirusoft or ORBS or other spam blacklisting sites can take down an entire domains' ability to send and receive email, a malevolent attacker with spamware could broadcast spam with a URL pointing to their intended victim's server, and ensure that their victim was trashed by the spam response system.) I'm not convinced by the idea -- but anything would be better than the current mess.

[ Link ] [ Discuss spam ]



posted at: 14:56 | path: /virus | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 07 Sep 2003

Crazy ...

I'm successfully filtering out all the incoming copies of the Sobig.F virus before they hit my inbox.

But since I last zeroed out my virus trap, 80 hours ago, I have received 73Mb of virus payloads. That's nearly 1Mb per hour, and the rate is accelerating -- it was only about 6Mb in the first day, but it's now tending towards 1Mb/hour.

This has got to be sucking up a good chunk of the total email bandwidth of the internet.

UPDATE: sixteen hours have passed, and my virus trap is now up to 117Mb. That's 3.5Mb of viral crap per hour, or about the bandwidth of a 14.4K modem dialup. This is a worse shit-storm than the original Sobig.F attack a couple of weeks ago. I'm off to the pub tonight (it being Feorag's birthday) and I'll be soliciting suggestions for how best to deal with the asshole responsible. A free pint will be won by the most creative but appropriate torture ...

As a side-note: because of a distributed denial-of-service attack that suspiciously coincided with the first Sobig.F attacks, Osirusoft (one of the main spam relay blacklists) went offline a couple of days ago. Before they went offline their administrator, in what appears to be a fit of pique, set the SPEWS blacklist to blacklist the entire internet. If you use SpamAssassin, please update your configuration so as not to use Osirusoft as a blacklist -- otherwise you won't get any email from me, or a hell of a lot of other people, either. (More information on Slashdot and elsewhere.) It has been speculated that the Sobig series are being developed by spammers in order to turn infected machines into relay zombies ... it's at times like this that I realise I'm really living in the 21st century and I wish it would go away.

[ Link ] [ Discuss spam ]



posted at: 18:48 | path: /virus | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 06 Sep 2003

Michael Meacher's Statement

Michael Meacher, former environment minister in the Blair government, has created a localized shit-storm by speaking out on Iraq, the War on Terror, and 9/11.

Two things make this interesting. The first is that he's picked up on the PNAC allegations, intelligence failures in the run-up to 9/11, and the Reichstag Fire theory, and put them together with the west's increasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil supplies to connect the dots in a very ugly (but internally consistent) way. I've suspected something like this was the real explanation ever since the war on Iraq began to loom, but it's interesting to have a former senior politician say it in public -- especially given the vehemence of the denials and denunciations issuing from Downing Street and the US Embassy.

The second thing is the explosive implication of him raising it at this point in the Hutton Enquiry. I think it's looking inevitable that Blair is going to come out of this process with his credibility badly dented. He may survive politically, but it almost certainly marks the beginning of the end for his period in office and the big upcoming question in British politics is going to be: who will replace him when the time comes?

Meacher has dumped a steaming turd in the foreign policy punch bowl, associating his anti-neoconservative explanation for the 9/11/Iraq mess with Blair's unreliability and spin. He implicitly highlights a failure in British foreign policy at the highest level. In doing so, he provides a stick for any alternative leadership contender to use to beat on Tony Blair -- but if they use it they're going to have to follow it up by distancing themselves from the Bush administration's politics, possibly to the extent of ending the trans-Atlantic relationship that's been a foundation stone of British foreign policy since 1940.

[ Link ] [ Discuss Iraq invasion ]



posted at: 14:16 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 04 Sep 2003

Jetlagged in Leith

Well, I'm back and I'm mostly on UK time again. (I don't pull overnighters well and I'm really bad at dealing with west-to-east jetlag -- I was on Toronto time the morning after I arrived, but took a full 24 hours to readjust to being in the UK.)

The flight tickets sorted themselves out just in time for the trip -- thanks to Fearghas for putting me in touch with the travel agent, who had gone on vacation but was still in business. Weirdly, despite the angst and tooth-grinding before the trip the flights themselves went incredibly smoothly, despite me hatching a head-cold the day before departure. (As a result of which I spent the first couple of days of the worldcon half-deaf and in the odd stupid-but-hyper headspace that comes of dosing up on pseudoephedrine.)

In the dealer room at Torcon 3 I ran across a badge which I felt compelled to buy. It says, I love being a writer -- I just don't like the paperwork. This is particularly apt, considering that I'm just now getting my teeth into the last financial year's accounts: either I've gotten a lot more fanatical about hanging onto receipts or I'm buying a lot more junk, but it looks to me as if this year I'll be sending a mammoth spreadsheet to the accountant. (I could just send him the raw receipts, and he'd take them, but then I'd get a bill for about triple the rate he's currently charging. Tedium or money, what's it worth to you? My time costs less than my accountant's, which is why I'm doing the job myself.)

I did not win a Hugo. That's okay -- I didn't expect to. (Not winning a Hugo is a lot easier, the second time around.)

Toronto is a really nice city, at least on first acquaintance. I wish I'd been able to book a longer stay. It had all the advantages of any American city, but without giving me the sense of subliminal weirdness I get wherever I go in the USA. There's something about the United States, a subtle sense of manifest destiny combined with cultural and political assumptions that are totally alien, that stops me from feeling I can relax and take things for granted. Toronto, in contrast, I felt comfortable with: the kind of place I could see myself living.

It struck me, while I was out there, that exposure to the internet has gradually reduced my attention span to that of an amphetamine-crazed ferret. I am reading more than ever before, but fewer books, and less is sticking. It's time to strictly limit my daily webtime and start making headway on the to-read bookcase I've been steadily accumulating through buying books faster than I can read them for the past couple of years. This decision is, in part, prompted by the discovery that last year I bought a whole shelf-length of books back from ConJose, and this year I've repeated the exercise, and I've only read half of last years' load.

Pride of place in the things-I-found-in-the-Torcon-dealer-room goes to a whole ton of goodies from Apogee Books. Apogee are in the process of publishing a metric ton of NASA mission transcripts, from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and STS programs -- they also do books on such diverse subjects as DynaSoar (the X-20 spaceplane of the 1960's), Russian space projects, and planetary probes. If/when I get it together to do the hard-SF novel about the Russian Mars fly-by mission of 1967-69, this (along with Encyclopaedia Astronautica) is critical reference material. Especially the two-CD set of all the NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo mission transcripts.

Next, there's "The Strange Case of Dr Mabuse: A study of the twelve films and five novels", by David Kalat. It's a scholarly survey of the diabolical Doctor Mabuse, master criminal and man of mystery, a bad guy as well known to continental audiences as Count Dracula or Doctor von Frankenstein's creation.

And finally, I picked up a shedload of fiction, including Barry Hughart's complete works in one volume and the famous but hard-to-find "Scream for Jeeves".

Resolution for the new year: read this lot before next year's worldcon. And try to actually stick some book reviews on this weblog. I know you want them, really ...

[ Discuss conjose ]



posted at: 18:14 | path: /fandom | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 03 Sep 2003

I'm back

And jetlagged as fuck.

Normal blogging will be resumed after approximately one sleep cycle ...



posted at: 12:49 | path: /fandom | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


Quick links:

RSS Feed (Moved!)

Who am I?

Contact me


Buy my books: (FAQ)

Missile Gap
Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007)

The Jennifer Morgue
Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006)

Glasshouse
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006)

The Clan Corporate
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now)

Accelerando
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB -- due June 27, 2006)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)
Free download

The Hidden Family
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)

The Family Trade
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)

Iron Sunrise
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)

The Atrocity Archives
Via Amazon.com (Trade PB)
Via Amazon.co.uk (Trade PB)
Via Golden Gryphon (HC)
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Via Amazon.co.uk (HC)

Singularity Sky
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)
Via Amazon.com (US ebook)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)

Toast
Via Amazon.com
Via Amazon.co.uk


Some webby stuff I'm reading:


Engadget ]
Gizmodo ]
The Memory Hole ]
Boing!Boing! ]
Futurismic ]
Walter Jon Williams ]
Making Light (TNH) ]
Crooked Timber ]
Junius (Chris Bertram) ]
Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ]
Bruce Sterling ]
Ian McDonald ]
Amygdala (Gary Farber) ]
Cyborg Democracy ]
Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ]
Atrios ]
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ]
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ]
Jesus's General ]
Mick Farren ]
Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ]
Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ]
Tangent Online ]
Grouse Today ]
Hacktivismo ]
Terra Nova ]
Whatever (John Scalzi) ]
GNXP ]
Justine Larbalestier ]
Yankee Fog ]
The Law west of Ealing Broadway ]
Cough the Lot ]
The Yorkshire Ranter ]
Newshog ]
Kung Fu Monkey ]
S1ngularity ]
Pagan Prattle ]
Gwyneth Jones ]
Calpundit ]
Lenin's Tomb ]
Progressive Gold ]
Kathryn Cramer ]
Halfway down the Danube ]
Fistful of Euros ]
Orcinus ]
Shrillblog ]
Steve Gilliard ]
Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ]
The Panda's Thumb ]
Martin Wisse ]
Kuro5hin ]
Advogato ]
Talking Points Memo ]
The Register ]
Cryptome ]
Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
Global Guerillas (John Robb) ]
Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ]
Simon Bisson's Journal ]
Max Sawicky's weblog ]
Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
Hitherby Dragons ]
Counterspin Central ]
MetaFilter ]
NTKnow ]
Encyclopaedia Astronautica ]
Fafblog ]
BBC News (Scotland) ]
Pravda ]
Meerkat open wire service ]
Warren Ellis ]
Brad DeLong ]
Hullabaloo (Digby) ]
Jeff Vail ]
The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ]
Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ]
Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ]
Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ]


Older stuff:

June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)



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