Those little shoulder fired surface to air missles are becoming more and more of a worry for commercial airlines. Folks are becoming more and more concerned daily that these missles will be used by terrorist to take down commercial airliners during takeoff or landing. Northrop Grumman may have an answer to this threat. Their concept for a new directed-energy laser weapon is designed to take down these small supersonic missles and they’ve even got a pretty cool anacronym for it, HORNET, which stands for “Hazardous Ordnance Engagement Toolkit.”

Via Dave, Cornell Law School is supplying a couple of RSS feeds on Supreme Court decisions, a decisions for today feed and a recent decisions feed. This actually could be useful in keeping up with what the Supremes are doing. I’ve subscribed to them with Sharpreader.

I just got an email that looked all the world like it came from Paypal asking me to fill out a form supplied in the email and give my username, password, credit card #, expiration date, and PIN. This was an HTML formatted letter so all I had to do was fill out the form and press submit and all that information would have gone to where the submit button told it to go.

This seemed like an awfully insecure way of handling this data to me so I tore into the letter to see how the form behaved and where it wanted to send my information. It ends up wanting to send it to www.client-support.biz/paypal/pp.php. I fired up my web browser and went to see where this place was. It redirected me to the official Paypal website. I went to look up who owned this “client-support.biz” domain and it belongs to a “thomas liebich” in Vienna, Austria.

What this little nasty e-mail would have done, had I filled out the form with the information it asked and clicked on the submit button, is send all my information to the client-support.biz website and then immediately redirected me to the Paypal website with the proper login information and I’d have never been any the wiser. What do you want to bet that no one ate Paypal has ever made any business arrangements with “Mr. Liebich” to do anything like this?

I thought this was interesting and just thought I’d pass the information on to y’all. It’s never a good idea to fill out any of these forms that you receive in e-mail. Think real hard about the information you are submitting anywhere and consider if you really trust where this informtion will end up. Most things out there are harmless, not all though. This was one of the things that could have really bitten me.

This is fascinating tale. The interesting part to me is the talk of how Uday and Qusay were organizing resistance. They were killed in northern Iraq which was not suppose to be an area particularly fond of their regime.

This could be interesting. A pair of songwriters, Shannon Campbell and Scott Andrew, are going to be collaborating on songs for twenty-four hours on Saturday. The two are on opposite coasts and the collaboration will be taking place on a weblog. I’ll be checking it out on and off.

If things work right you ought to be able to point your newsreader to www.flutterby.com and subscribe to flutterby.larryslog and see this post. Of course things never go right the first time.

Of course things will have to be tested.

And tested…

No, it isn’t working yet, but I’ll get there.

Update: It still doesn’t work and I’m not sure when it will exactly… if ever.

Living in the Atlanta Metropolitan area I have become somewhat accustomed to traffic jams. I still don’t like them but I know to accept the things I cannot change and listen closer to the traffic reports on the radio next time.

Yesterday I left my home in Lawrenceville at midday to visit my son in Chattanooga. Traffic should have been bearable at the time I left but I hit a snag on I285 heading west toward I75. Some inconsiderate lunkheads had had an accident and that turned a twenty minute drive from I85 to I75 into an hour and fifteen minute nightmare.

I kept my cool.

After hitting I75 Nick, who is my youngest son, and I actually made good time and I was able to drop him off at his brother’s house and make it to a bank that I still do business with in Chattanooga before the 4:00 closing time. I was still in a very good mood for the visit. I was dropping Nick off to spend a week with his brother, Drew, and intended to be back on the road by 7:00PM.

That didn’t work out too well. I got back on the road at 8:30PM which should have put me back home at 10:30PM. That wasn’t to be.

Somewhere around milemarker 328 there was a pile up of eighteen-wheelers on I75 heading south. Rumors floating around on the interstate where I was parked were that it involved five of them. I sat there with my engine and lights off for over an hour. For another hour I was creeping along in 1st gear with my foot off the gas. This was awful!

I pulled into my driveway about 1:30AM this morning. There was a tree laying in the spot I normally park my truck. At that point I felt very good about being gone.

Milk Cartons do work. John Robb has been found.

I liked Atom just fine but, geewhiz, name the damned thing something, already. This is rocking on way too long.

Dan has set Flutterby up to serve up Industrial Strength Syndication. Oh, he’s still doing RSS 0.91 and 2.0 but now he’s stepped up with a tried and true syndication method, NNTP.

There has been a lot of discussion going on about bloggers editing their posts after they have published it and of the author of the blogs editing out flames in their comments. Some folks are pointing out the ethics of doing these things with sides being taken and whatnot. One blogger, Rebecca Blood, came up with a proposed code of ethics for bloggers. I like what she came up with but I’ve never thought of myself as a journalist, only someone who likes to write his thoughts down and put them somewhere that they can be commented on. I don’t believe Rebecca’s ethics quite apply to this blog.

Still, since folks are getting all hot and bothered about edits and such I thought it might be a good idea to publish a house policy how I operate this blog. If you want to hold me to a standard this is the standard to hold me to.

1. I will edit my posts. If I see a typo or a grammatical error I’m not going to leave it out there for the world to see and point to saying, “look what a dummy.” If I ever post something that I look at and say, “boy was I a jerk to say that”, I’m going to remove it. If you quote what I say and point to it before I remove it let me know and I’ll edit my post again to say what I’ve done and why I edited my post. I have no problem admitting I’m a jerk when I’m a jerk.
2. I don’t get many comments on this site and I’ve never edited a comment here or on Justin’s Journal but that’s just because there has never been a problem. If you have attached your name and e-mail address to the comment I’ll leave it be unless it’s clearly libelous or unjustly opening up an embarrassing personal situation for someone else. If you are an anonymous commenter I’ll delete your comment for a lot less of a reason. I’m out here in the open with what I say, if you want to be controversial in your comments then I think it’s only fair to ask you to open yourself up the same way with a proper ID.
3. I will strive to be accurate with the information I convey here unless I’m in a playful mood and want to yank someone’s chain. With that in mind I will leave you this caveat, believe nothing you read on this site unless it is consistent with what I have said in the past or with what you know. You ought to be able to tell by the tone of my post and the category I place the post in if I’m being serious or not. If you can’t tell then check my facts with Google. I will occasionally pull your leg.

That’s all I can think of for now. Most likely this post will be edited. I’ll link to it in the header in a day or so in order to have an easy way to find my policy page. If you have any questions just leave them in the comments here… or ask them on your blog and send me a track back ping.

The copyright on the spec for RSS 2.0 has been transferred from Userland Software to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. There has also been a committee of three established, made up of Jon Udell, Brent Simmons and Dave Winer, to promote and answer questions regarding the spec. This is good news.

Mitch Ratcliffe: The problem is that the media industry is not adapting to changing market conditions, not that illegal copying is destroying the industry.

This is something I’ve been saying for a long time. Sure, there needs to be criminal penalties in order to discourage copyright infringement but if one’s livelihood depends on a business model working then one needs to adapt there business model to current market demands. What we are seeing now is an industry resisting adapting to new technologies and wanting Washington to legislate their business model back into a profitable model. That wasn’t what IP laws were written to accomplish in the first place.

Oh, and don’t think that these laws are being passed just because our legislators believe this is the right thing to do. Influence appears to be being purchased in this areana.

Shelley has posted a picture, a double image of the moon. I like it. There something soothing and comforting about looking at it. It, it — it looks like breasts.

I did something stupid when I first set up this site. I wanted an about file that I could tell a little about me. I just whipped up an HTML file formatted similar to the rest of the site and threw it in the root directory of Larry’s Log. I should have let Blosxom manage that just like it does everything else on this site. The entry below was to accomplish that.