After the horrific terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 a list of nearly 150 inappropriate songs was circulated over the internet. The inclusion of some songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” are bizarre (that song was about peace!). Other songs like Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” seemed like a very appropriate (response) to me.

Many individual stations did play songs from the list; conversely many stations also refrained from playing songs not on the list, due to lyrical content or simply because the music’s tone or style seemed inappropriate. As the list apparently had no official status within Clear Channel, it also had no expiration date or retraction, and stations gradually returned many songs to their playlists.

None of the songs on this list were written about 9/11 specifically, but many contained words like plane, fly or falling, the Wikipedia article notes.

Were these songs inappropriate or was it being sensitive to victims families and others by not playing these songs in the days following 9/11? Whatever your perspective, somehow I think this is the kind of thing the terrorists had hoped for as part of the attack on 9/11 and, that too, is very sad.

Personally, I’ve tried to stay away from writing about this topic in any significant substance here, avoiding it altogether in 2003 and mentioning it once in 2004: Three years after 911 is Osama Bin Laden dead or alive? As I re-read that piece, I believed Bin Laden would be captured by the 2005 anniversary of 9/11. That’s only a scant few months away and I’m not as hopeful today as I was then.

My wife and I were in Vegas vacationing when that awful moment in our nation’s history happened. We spent most of the time worrying about how or if we would get home and our children who were not with us at the time. Once the flight ban had been lifted, we were on the first plane headed out of Vegas to Seattle.

Where were you when 9/11 happened?

If the credit card companies can’t keep our data safe, then who can we trust? Next the Government and Insurance, these bastids are right up there on the financial food chain, but unfortunately they aren’t immune to security breaches either.

The credit card giant said its security division detected multiple instances of fraud that tracked back to CardSystems Solutions of Tucson, which processes transactions for banks and merchants.

At the end of the article the typical Government intervention battle cry is rang out by Senator Charles Schumer, D-N.Y: “… reminding us how important it is to pass a comprehensive identity theft prevention bill in Congress quickly.”

I doubt a bill is going to do anything to impede this type of fraud. What we need it hunt down these cyber criminals and start locking them away for life without any possibility for parole. And while these criminals are locked up they should be recruited to use their talents for good purposes helping the feds catch more of the bad guys. Zero tolerance for identity theft criminals.

I’m also for some sort of biometric security with plastic. Retina scan, fingerprint, etc. Computers should ship with biometrics included. Keyboards could inexpensively be outfitted with card swipers or biometric devices. There’s lots more that can be done from a technology standpoint to make it more difficult for this type of fraud.

But no more bills or congressional actions, please. Does anybody really believe, politicians aside, that these bills are any significant type of deterrent?

I heard this Barbara WaWa flap on the way back from lunch on a local talk radio show. Walters recently admitted on her talk show that she was “uncomfortable” seeing women breastfeeding in public. The Chicago Tribune talks about the PR bust which caused a protest of over 200 women at ABC headquarters:

But the rally at ABC is only the most visible example of a recent wave of “lactivism.” Prodded by mothers tired of being asked to adjourn to a bathroom while nursing in a public space, six states have recently passed laws giving a woman the right to breast-feed wherever she “is otherwise authorized to be.”

Lactivists is what these protesters are being called. Lactivism? Are these women serious? I had to go to Wikipedia on the term. Not there yet.

Unsurprisingly, this has brought on spotlight grabbing statements from Burger King and Starbucks who will roll out the stroller for breastfeeding on their premises.

My take: there are so many important issues in the world to discuss that this should be the last thing anybody gets upset about; let the breasts fly! Breastfeeding in public doesn’t bother or make me “uncomfortable” in the slightest. Janet Jackson’s breast display on the Superbowl didn’t bother me either. I respectfully request that any women who are breastfeeding in my vicinity that they not be uncomfortable if I see their breast. I’m not going to go all spycam or over-hormonal male on the situation but if a breast is brought into broad daylight then the woman in question better not get all uncomfortable about the exposure. If someone is that sensitive about being exposed then go somewhere private to feed your child.

Do MakeYouGoHmm readers get uncomfortable by women breastfeeding in public? If so, why? If not, then why not? I can’t believe the Wikipedia hasn’t racked up any material on this.

Pun intended.

With the man in question at age 91 one of the greatest journalistic mysteries of the last 30 years has finally been solved. Writes the Washington Post:

In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, “W. Mark Felt was ‘Deep Throat’ and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage.

The original agreement was that the true identity would not be revealed until after his death, but with Felt’s health fading and his admittance to Vanity Fair that he was the One, Woodward and Bernstein stepped up and confirmed. Something tells me a movie will be made about this exploring Felt’s life and involvement in exposing the Watergate scandal.

Not sure how I missed this one, but last Tuesday the hotly contested governor of Washington state signed into an aggressive law against spyware.

An anonymous reader submits “Today, the Governor of Washington signs a a bill outlawing spyware (bill history) which imposes penalties of $100,000 per violation. Spyware is broadly defined. It includes everything from changing a browser’s bookmarks or homepage settings, “Opening multiple, sequential, stand-alone advertisements in the owner or operator’s internet browser”, keystroke-logging, taking over control of the computer, modify its security settings, and even “Falsely representing that computer software has been disabled.”

This is more than a slap on the wrist and I would support any sort of financial penalty against spyware vendors who waste all of our time with their BS, but I’ll wait for some actual convictions to see if this does anything. I have a sinking feeling that this is something that looks good on paper but won’t have any actual teeth when being applied across the internet. Hope I’m wrong.

Arianna Huffington has compiled a list of people to blog (politics) like John Cusack and Ellen DeGeneres at a site called: The Huffington Post. You can find The Huffington Post RSS Feeds here.

No comments enabled and no trackbacks either, so this will be a one-way conversation, even though they are using Movable Type which supports both. This doesn’t fit Tyme’s definition of a blog, does it fit yours? I’m wondering if publicists will be writing most of these entries or if these will be the real deal.

I subscribed, reluctantly.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Orwellian references, too many Big Brotherisms in the blogosphere and elsewhere. I think before some of these people start writing the words “Big Brother” into something that they should actually read 1984 more carefully. For example, let’s analyze the numbers of wiretaps in 2004:

Federal and state judges approved 1,710 wiretaps covering wire, oral and electronic communications in 2004, none of which were related to terrorism investigations, for which an additional 1,754 warrants were issued last year according to a separate report put out by the U.S. Department of Justice. So last year’s grand total was 3,464 wiretaps approved for all state and federal investigations.

Judges also want to know what numbers the feds will be listening in on — down to the digit, as the article reports. Is it possible that wiretaps are happening without court appoval? Of course, but if they can’t use the information obtained from those tapped calls, that isn’t going to do them any good in putting away the alleged criminal.

VOIP and other computer surveillance was even more limited in 2004. Only 38 in all of 2004. Yeah, 38! So don’t be expecting the cops to be monitoring your VOIP calls, if they even have the technology, or snooping your email or browser history any time soon.

As for Google using our information to spy on us? Puh-lease. Google clearly wants to use our information to make their products better. The quest for making the most relevant searches is the Holy Grail and they know that. The more data they can collect, the better they will be. Research how when Page and Brin first got their start they downloaded the entire internet. They needed the data to work on their algorithms. What if they had never done that? Then we’d likely still have subpar search relevance (some think that even with Google we still do).

It’s ironic that somebody referred to me recently as usually paranoid when I don’t truly believe any of the current conspiracy theories and Big Brotherisms being tossed around about technology companies using their power and reach for truly evil purposes. Perhaps the person meant to say “usually cynical” because that I definitely am.

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has changed his mind on the issue of Microsoft supporting diversity in legislation instead of staying neutral. This was a real hot button issue that flared up on Scoble’s blog when he took the position against Microsoft’s decision to stay neutral.

I stayed out of that political discussion because two subjects of which I’ve learned are extremely caustic are religion and politics and I’m neither well-versed nor learned in either department. Yes, this blog has a politics category, but history will clearly show that I very rarely post anything to it.

This is not to say that I don’t think discussing politics and religion are important because I do. Rather, I don’t feel educated enough about those two topics to speak intelligently about them and would rather listen than speak on these topics — most of the time.

With that said, I agree with Mr. Ballmer’s change of heart and the new Microsoft’s principles for public policy engagement that Channel 9 posted:

Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.

I do not believe in anybody being discriminated against based on sexual orientation, sex, race, age, disability and it makes me smile knowing that the software company that I use and powers most of our computers in business and home will support legislation to maintain diversity.

It was a flood of emails — and blogs too, I’m sure — that helped to change Mr. Balmer’s opinion.

An update on a sad Christmas story: No Family access to dead marine’s e-mail, says Yahoo. Justin Ellsworth, 20, was killed over in Iraq and his parents wanted to look at his email, but Yahoo said no. Well, according to the The Associated Press:

The family was granted access this week after an Oakland County probate judge ordered Yahoo to do so. Yahoo had said all along that it would comply with any such order.

This might be the first ever case of this kind that reached the courts. Whether that’s true or false, it’s too bad that Yahoo needed their hand forced, but it’s good to see that this one turned out this way.

We have Google to thank for things like this. Yeah, disclaimer this, I’m in the list of beggers, along with other bloggers. Heck, even Dave Winer was over there begging for a Yahoo 360 invite yesterday (and got one)! Just who actually was in the Yahoo inner circle anyway that wasn’t a Yahoo employee or a friend of a Yahoo employee and that actually got sent invites?

It’s not Yahoo’s fault, really, they are just copying Google who pulled this with Gmail and the dead zone that is Orkut. We can blame these whole elitism marketing tactics on Google. I refuse to believe any of this is about limited beta testing any more, it’s all about PR. Maybe the PR guys should be blamed for this annoying, condescending marketing stunt. Yup, amazing coincidence that Steve Rubel was one of the The Invited.

I talked to several other people yesterday, none of which received invites. They all asked me if I got one, to please send one their way. Did we mention that if we wanted to be street beggers we’d break out a pen and cardboard box and work the nearest corner?

All this smokescreen beta stuff is doing is pissing off and alienating the people who weren’t invited and making those small few who were become the marketing arms for the mega corporations and therefore promoting elitism. I can’t be the only one who sees it this way, but I bet I’ll get idiotic comments saying that I should shut up and quit being a baby about this.

Scoble, are you still blindly believing this isn’t a complete setup and that bloggers aren’t being used as marketing shills?

Sure, The Powers That Be will tell folks that it’s because they want to tweak their servers and “make the program better” and get limited feedback from a “respected audience.” Please, I have beachfront property in Arizona for sale too!

If they really wanted to be quiet about things then they’d do something like what Microsoft does with their private betas: invite people and focus groups into test with detailed NDAs. Clearly to me, this is all about getting the word out. It’s free marketing. A free exploitation of the blogosphere and I just feel dirty and used even writing stuff like this. Did I link up 360? No. Why not? Because you’ll just go on a long waiting list that may or may not ever get filled.

Want to know something ironic? To this day I do not show ever receiving the original Gmail invite I originally signed up for through their website in April 2004. Has anybody else? No, please don’t send me one, because I received an invite shortly thereafter, just the way many others did: by begging from someone else who had one. That’s the game, people. It’s the bottom of the ninth, down by three runs, and the bases are loaded. No steroids needed to hit this one out of the park.

Since I don’t like being used or being a sheep, so if/when I ever do get a Yahoo 360 invite, I’m not even going to bother reviewing it here or becoming a “please invite me, please, please, please” breeding ground like what’s already happening on other blogs and exactly what happened with Gmail, Orkut and other clones of this insulting new trend.

Readers might be surprised, but I’m not mad at Yahoo with this. Heck, they are just following the lead taken from The Leader AKA Google. If I had more time I’d scan the blogosphere for what I know are many others annoyed by this growing invite-only trend. From what I’ve seen looking around other Yahoo 360 bloggers site though it seems to be mostly an imitation of MSN Spaces, which I’m currently bored with anyway.

Thank you Google for creating the world’s most useful search engine and now for fostering a new trend in elitism beta testing. As a stockholder and user I’m absolutely proud of you.

Not.