Weird thing of the day 25 February 2005/16 'Adhar Ri'shon 5765 (Go Bowling Day)

Greetings.

I have too many URL files for weird news articles cluttering up my desktop:

• Yahoo! News - Salt Should Be Regulated Food Additive, Group Says (Duh. Maybe someone will get around to trying to ban tobacco. It’s about time the federal government acted responsibly.)
  
• Freed Terrorist Arrested Again (This does not bode well for the whole concept of making “gestures” towards the “Palestinians”.)
  
• Yahoo! News - Poll: Most Want U.S. Price Limits on Drugs (Duh. All those who believe any of the excuses of the drug companies and the federal government for drug prices being significantly higher here than in Canada, stand on your heads.)
  
• Yahoo! News - Survey: Teens' Religious Knowledge Shallow

I would also like to make fun of some spam I received yesterday. It purports to be from “Web@FBI.gov” and says:

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 40 illegal Websites.

Important: Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.


Yours faithfully,
M. John Stellford



++-++ Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
++-++ 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 2130
++-++ Washington, DC 20535
++-++ (202) 324-3000

This one, like a lot of other spam, assumes people are downright stupid. Most obviously, the quality of the language is substandard (e.g., “we” should be capitalized, “Yours faithfully” has no place in a formal letter), which is a tip-off it is not from the FBI. (The government tends to use proper English, George W. Bush excepted.) Secondly, the sender would likely have a username more sensible than "Web". Thirdly, I have major doubts the FBI is conducting that draconian level of surveillance of the Internet, which would involve a lot of peaking at data passing through their computers on the way to other computers or (worse) spyware; either way, an invasion of privacy is involved, and as such they would arguably be trampling on my constitutional rights unless they had probable cause and a warrant. Finally, if the FBI wanted to ask me questions concerning alleged illegal activity on my behalf, I would presumably be visited by their agents personally. There have to be smarter ways to get people to activate a virus.

Today’s weird thing is the article “Wright This Way: iPod Shuffle RAID” and its sequel “Wright This Way: Shuffle RAID Redux”. For the uninitiated into the obscure world of computer geekdom, RAID stands for “redundant array of inexpensive drives” and refers to a way of configuring a bunch of small drives to act as a bigger, automatically backed-up drive. Using a bunch of music players for the job is simply creative silliness. (Challenge for anyone seeking ultimate RAID silliness: a floppy disk RAID.)

Enjoy, and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron