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Africa: rape epidemic in Congo war worsens
Each day, at least ten new women and girls who have been raped show up at one hospital in the Congo. Many have been so violently assaulted "from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair," according to this piece by Jeffrey Gettlemen in today's New York Times: According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way. United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty. Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said...

Canada's privacy commissioner to geeks: design for privacy!
Here's a one-hour video of a magnificent lecture from Canada's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr Ann Cavoukian, to the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club. The talk is called "Privacy by Design," and it charges technologists to build tools that minimize the collection and retention of personally identifying information, and to consider a complete, end-to-end, comprehensive framework for protecting user privacy. As Mitch Kapor said when he founded EFF, "architecture is politics" -- when you design tools that have wiretappable elements, you invite wiretapping. When you design tools that retain user data, you invite identity thieves and overreaching subpoenas. Cavoukian argues that privacy and security are not zero-sum, that privacy is just as important in the "post-9/11 world" as it was before, and that you don't need to give up one to get the other. She addresses specific privacy-protection computer science techniques, and cites Kim Cameron's wonderful Seven...

French fan-translation of "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"
Zen le Renard, a French reader of my stories, has translated my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which appeared in my short story collection Overclocked and was released under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial remixing. Zen le Renard reads English, but wanted to share the story with his monolingual sysadmin friends in France, so he took on the project. Voila! Quand le mobile de Flix se mit sonner 2 heures du mat, Kelly se retourna, lui tapa l'paule et grogna Pourquoi t'as pas teint ce putain de tlphone avant qu'on se couche ? Par ce que je suis d'astreinte, lui rpondit Flix en s'asseyant au bord du lit. Il attrapa son futal qu'il avait laiss par terre avant de se pieuter et Kelly, en continuant de lui boxer l'paule, lui dit : T'es pas un putain de mdecin non plus, t'es rien qu'un foutu administrateur systme C'est mon boulot, qu'il lui dit. Ils te font bosser plus dur qu'un cheval de trait ! lui dit Kelly. Tu sais bien que j'ai raison, bon...

Public radio station in NYC won't air "Howl" for fear of the FCC
The FCC's war on dirty words is having a chilling effect -- even WBAI Pacifica, the radical radio station in NYC, is scared of airing Allen Ginsberg's magnificent poem, Howl. "Why, 50 years later after a judge ruled that children could read this poem, people are afraid the courts will say that their ears shouldn't hear it," said Ron Collins, a constitutional law instructor and First Amendment advocate who is leading a small group of authors, broadcasters and free-speech advocates pushing to broadcast the poem eventually. "Yet they can go on the Internet and see far, far worse things." Another irony: WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation station in New York that plans to post "Howl" online, is the same station that took on the FCC more than 30 years ago over the right to air George Carlin's comedy routine featuring the "seven dirty words." The challenge led to a 1978 Supreme Court decision governing what naughty words can be broadcast and when. Pacifica's attorney for FCC issues, John...