Don’t forget to test your firewall at Steve Gibson’s stalwart site, Gibson Research.

[Thanks to Roch Skelton from a mailing list for the reminder.]

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Beliefnet is back online. Last time I looked, it wasn’t there. Good. It’s the type of experiment I personally want to succeed: a shared space for talk about religion that tries to be respectful of differences. Getting that balance right is difficult — or, put technically, impossible — but there’s room in the world for lots of attempts.

I found out about the rebirth of Beliefnet because Steve Waldman, the editor in chief, has a diary (Remember diaries? They’re like blogs but more tied to daily events) in Slate, recording his group’s comeback from bankruptcy. Informative and charming.

I was on a panel with Steve a couple of years ago and liked him immediately. My respect for him has only grown.

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We have confirmation.

I blogged about the difficulty of learning from history, prompting some people to contribute relevant quotations to the blog discussion:

“History teaches us that man learns nothing from history” (Hegel, contributed by JLaw)

“Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.” (Thucydides, contributed by Vergil Iliescu)

And today’s Boston Globe reports that Bush is lecturing our European allies about what we should have learned from the policy of appeasement, leaving out the small disanalogy that Hitler was breaking off bits of Europe one at a time whereas Hussein has been successfully contained ever since the Gulf War. Appeasement doesn’t apply here.

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Greg “LinuxMan” Cavanagh points out this tidbit from the December issue of Linux Journal:

…the PC speaker in post-2.5.31 kernels may now be used as a microphone. This is new and weird. As Jos Hulzink put it on the linux-kernel mailing list, “2.5.32 will go into the history books as the kernel that implemented voice recognition for all AT class computers ..”

Greg comments: “Umm, you mean every machine broken into is now a listening device. Wow.”

If he’s right, this is spooky. Fortunately, our Republican government is fiercely committed to civil liberties so there’s no chance this could be abused.

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While looking for phone cards to call from Greece to the US (my brother-in-law is about to leave for Athens on a business trip), I came upon this page.

I’m reading along, not getting a good feeling about the reliability of this business — is Steve going to be there for me if I have trouble with the card? — when I get to the middle of the page. Do a search on the page for “OH GOD” to see what I mean. Disturbing.

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The new satiric newsletter from Hank Blakely is out. As always, I like his weekly sends announcing the new issue. In this one, for example, he writes:

We have nothing to fear but fear itself, which, it turns out, is more than sufficient…

And from the It’s Not Supposed to Be Funny, It’s Just Easier to Laugh than Shit Your Pants in Fear Dept. comes this quote from W as reported in the new Woodward book:

“I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

(Thanks to Michael Finley for passing along this link to Xanga.)

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I’m doing an online chat on Thursday and a real-world panel also.

The panel is at MIT at 5pm in Bldg. 2 Room 105. It’s a discussion with Michael Keating about the real world effects of the Web.

The chat is with Richard Seltzer. Here’s the blurb he just sent out to his mailing list:

Our next chat will be this Thursday, Nov. 21, 2002, from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time (GMT -5) when we will be talking with David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Small Pieces emphasizes the human and paradoxical aspects of hte Web — how we behave and interact there and what that says about what it means to be human. He was on two previous chat programs of ours talking about Cluetrain (with Chris Locke and Rick Levine). Those transcripts are available at http://www.samizdat.com/chat124.html (February 3, 2000) and http://www.samizdat.com/chat125.html (Feb. 10, 2000). See my review of The ClueTrain Manifesto and my review of Small Pieces.

To connect to our chat sessions, go to http://www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html We’re on from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time (GMT -4) on Thursdays.

To view past transcripts and the upcoming schedule, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/chat.html

Hope to see you somewhere!

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Eric Norlin is beginning to think about a taxonomy of trust: 1. You are who you say you are. 2. You do what you say you will do. 3. The combined experience of 1 and 2 builds over time.

As Norlin points out, this applies to one particular type of trust, especially when it comes to transactions and collaboration. But it doesn’t fit so well when applied to squishier relationships. Why did I trust that guy named AKMA — if an AKMA is a guy at all — after reading his first couple of blog entries? In this case I didn’t care much about #1, and #2 doesn’t apply. Different type of trust. Not an objection to Eric’s taxonomy, just a comment on its scope. And implicitly: what’s the relationship of the two types of trust, unless it’st just a trick of language?

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Having discussions attached to my blog entries is new to me. What’s the etiquette about replying?

For example, on the discussion attached to my blog entry about using Movable Type, Miasma posted a thoughtful message about the importance of categories. I learned from it, but I don’t have questions or a comment. Had Miasma sent me an email with the same content, I’d reply with a hearfelt “Thanks!” of some sort. Thank-yous appended to every thoughtful discussion entry would be noise. So, what’s the netiquette? Is it OK not to acknowledge the time and thought someone has spent?

Where’s our aptly-named Emily Post?

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Vergial Iliescu points us to an interactive Flash (i.e., move your damn mouse) that features pointless but amusing morphings and the like:

http://www.foulds2000.freeserve.co.uk/bushv6.htm

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