Computer News Daily: “Users responded quickly and generously: As of Friday afternoon, Amazon.com had racked up almost
140,000 contributions to Red Cross, totaling more than $5 million.

The default amount is set to $10, but donations averaged $26 the first day and climbed steadily
to $35 by Friday, according to spokeswoman Patty Smith. They came from all over the world, she
said. When I talked to her, there were 128 countries on her list, ranging from Albania and Andorra
to Zambia.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “The official record industry music download services have annouced they are ready for business. But business has changed in the wake of the WTC tragedy and if these services want to be viable they will have to forget their global legal challenges and instead develop pricing and terms that are realistic for Netizens to actually consider.

http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/pressplay. htm“

– By Richard Stallman–

The worst damage from many nerve injuries is secondary — it happens in
the hours after the initial trauma, as the body’s reaction to the
damage kills more nerve cells. Researchers are beginning to discover
ways to prevent this secondary damage and reduce the eventual harm.

If we are not careful, the deadly attacks on New York and Washington
will lead to far worse secondary damage, if the U.S. Congress adopts
“preventive measures” that take away the freedom that America stands
for.

I’m not talking about searches at airports here. Searches of people
or baggage for weapons, as long as they check only for weapons and
keep no records about you if you have no weapons, are just an
inconvenience; they do not endanger civil liberties. What I am
worried about is massive surveillance of all aspects of life: of our
phone calls, of our email, and of our physical movements.

These measures are likely to be recommended regardless of whether they
would be effective for their stated purpose. An executive of a
company developing face recognition software is said to be telling
reporters that widespread deployment of face-recognizing computerized
cameras would have prevented the attacks. The September 15 New York
Times cites a congressman who is advocating this “solution.” Given
that the human face recognition performed by the check-in agents did
not keep the hijackers out, there is no reason to think that computer
face recognition would help. But that won’t stop the agencies that
have always wanted to do more surveillance from pushing this plan now,
and many other plans like it. To stop them will require public
opposition.

Even more ominously, a proposal to
require government back doors in encryption software has already
appeared.

Meanwhile, Congress hurried to pass a resolution giving Bush unlimited
power to use military force in retaliation for the attacks.
Retaliation may be justified, if the perpetrators can be identified
and carefully targeted, but Congress has a duty to scrutinize specific
measures as they are proposed. Handing the president carte blanche in
a moment of anger is exactly the mistake that led the United States into the
Vietnam War.

Please let your elected representatives, and your unelected president,
know that you don’t want your civil liberties to become the
terrorists’ next victim. Don’t wait — the bills are already being
written.

Copyright 2001 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted
in any medium provided the copyright notice and this notice are
preserved.

Wired: “Geektavists — alarmed by pending anti-terrorism legislation — meet to find ways to persuade legislators that American liberties, including privacy protections, should be upheld even in wartime.”

Wired: “Nearly half the states in the U.S. have tough anti-telemarketing calls on the books. But similar antispam laws are just a pipe dream … for now.”

BBC: “The FBI has warned of an increase in hacking attacks following last
week’s suicide hijacking events in the US.

The cyber attacks were likely to be carried out by “self-described
patriot hackers, targeted at those perceived to be responsible for
the terrorist attacks”, said the FBI’s National Infrastructure
Protection Center (NIPC).

Malicious hackers have already defaced some websites, including
that of Afghanistan’s ruling Taleban movement.”

DebianPlanet: “I’m sysadm at at school in denmark with 2200 users in my /etc/passwd file on my potato. apt-get
update fails because of too many lines in the passwd file, furthermore the number of users will
increase the next years.
Other schools in the area use novell which apparently can authenticate against an LDAP – server. So i
had the idea to join them and employ an LDAP server for authentication. But after reading parts of
the OpenLDAP doc I gave up. Is there no easy way to employ LDAP as an authentication system?”

The Globe and Mail: “‘We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!’ a man locked in a washroom on one of the ill-fated flights told 911 operators over a cellphone.

Other calls made by passengers aboard the four hijacked airliners before their deadly crashes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania were
also made public to audiences around the world shortly after the attacks.

In some cases, survivors rang their friends and relatives from the rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, telling them
they were alive.”

LinuxSecurity: “This week, perhaps the most interesting security articles include “Public Key Infrastructure Overview,” “GPG: the Best Free Crypto You Aren’t Using,” and
“Information Warfare: How to Survive Cyber Attacks.” As you might expect, many cryptography articles were released in response to the tragedy. If you
are interested in the crypto debate, I invite you read what is available.”

The Nation: “The announcement that HP
will use “$25 billion” of grossly overpriced HP stock to buy an almost
worthless Compaq will save Carly Fiorina’s job for a while (a religious
doctrine of US capitalism says you can’t fire a CEO-even one who
has missed three consecutive quarters of earnings projections-while
she’s in the middle of this big a deal), but although the merged company will probably soon fire twice the 15,000
workers it has already said will go, no one but Bill Gates can save HP/Compaq and the others.

He can do this by releasing a new operating system even more bloated, slow and enormous than his current
excrescences, thus requiring a general round of expensive and pointless consumer hardware upgrading-pointless for
the consumers, that is, but not for the manufacturers, whose interests for the next few months lie in supporting Gates.”