The prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, just announced the banning of 3G cell phones from his country, all because his wife was receiving content that was just a li’l too dirty for his taste:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (Reuters) — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has banned 3G mobile phones after a complaint from his wife and her friends about receiving pornography on them.

“I have written to the Minister of Telecommunications to delay the use of certain mobile phones,” Hun Sen told an assembly of Buddhist monks in Phnom Penh on Friday.

“We can wait 10 more years until we have managed to improve morality in society.”

I just find it funny that not only has this guy decided to throw out the baby with the bathwater by ignoring 3G’s positive attributes in favor of focusing the acts of some perverts, but that the former deputy regional commander of a totalitarian regime, responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people, can sit high n’ mighty and talk about “improving morality in society.”

Ah, but then we can’t speak in judgement either… we have Bush.

It’s official: the US treasury and the IRS have determined that the Spanish-American War is over, and we taxpayers have paid off the war’s financing. So now that pesky Federal Excise Tax that shows up on our phone bills is being repealed… four months of fighting, and 108 years of paying for it.

Yay, victory?

So, if you have Norton/Symantec Antivirus, security experts say you may not be safe:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Symantec Corp.’s leading antivirus software, which protects some of the world’s largest corporations and U.S. government agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs, researchers said Thursday.

Symantec said it was investigating the issue but could not immediately corroborate the vulnerability. If confirmed, the threat to computer users would be severe because the security software is so widely used and because no action is required by victims using the latest versions of Symantec Antivirus to suffer a crippling attack over the Internet.

According to eEye, the vulnerability is present in Norton’s version 10-series.  And Symantec is at present neither confirming or denying.

Skype has just announced free outgoing calls to any landline or cell phone in the US and Canada through 2006. Nice! This I think, is the perfect way to stick it to landline companies who have allegedly submitted call logs to the NSA.  If they’re going to sell out our privacy, they shouldn’t be paid!
Though, to get true call encryption, your called partner-in-crime would also have to have Skype, and thus make a pure encrypted VoIP call that doesn’t touch the public telephone network.

USA Today reporter Lesley Cauley recently broke the news that the National Security Agency has been doing its typical bang-up job of using a canon to kill a mosquito, trampling over the the rights of millions of Americans in its effort to find al Qaeda terrorists. The NSA seems to feel that by collecting a massive database of all calls made in the US, it can find the bad guys. Needle in a haystack, anyone?

Currently Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth (soon to be a part of AT&T anyway) have been named as companies willingly turning over their calls databases beginning shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks. This does not mean that users of Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile or other telecom companies are “under the radar,” as just about any call beginning or ending on an AT&T/Verizon network was likely logged. Note that many cell companies must contract with local exchange carriers – like AT&T or Verizon – to carry their cell calls over landline networks to their destinations.

And Bush says nope! No privacy violation here!

“Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates,” Bush said. “The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”

So if the target was known affiliates, then wouldn’t their activities, including what phones and telecom devices they used, where and when, be, well… known? Then why go through the herculean effort of sifting through massive amounts of unknown data, except to possibly undertake a witchhunt?

And I know there are a lot of uber-patriots out there who will counter that if God-Fearing Red-Blooded American Citizens made calls that were recorded but didn’t break any laws, then they have nothing to worry about. And that’s all fine and good, but really now… What does my calling to order a pizza having anything to do with Al Qaeda? Should I just be okay with the fact that maybe, some pencil-pusher at the NSA has a transcript of the romantic babblings that may have occurred over the phone between myself and my better half?

We have reached a stage in this “war against terrorism” that I feared would come to pass. We must now fear more from our own government that we had to fear from the terrorists. The terrorists don’t need to be jealous of our “way of life” any longer; the hyper-patriots are doing a smashing job of taking our freedoms away for them.

What’s worse, these same agencies no longer feel the need to do this clandestinely. A year ago maybe, the NSA would have denied the whole thing. Now, the stance is “yeah, we’re doing this… so what?”
The terrorists HAVE won.