Areas of Unrest

19 June 1999 - In the News

Milo circulates all the free magazines he gets around the department. Most of them get glanced at and passed along, but this tidbit from "Federal Computer Week" was good enough to pass along:

"The Army's European Command recently has taken steps to block access to pornographic World Wide Web sites, developing a monitoring system that launches a screen with a dragon on it warning users that their attempt to access any inappropriate sites has been logged. The system reportedly uses a combination of keyword monitoring and Internet Protocol blocking technology.

However, the one site they didn't count on was the Defense Supply Expert (DESEX) system, which can be found on the Web at www.desex.com. Because the Uniform Resource Locator includes the letters S, E and X in succession, users attempting to access it were visited by the dragon. Rumor has it that officials responsible for DESEX have been asked to change the system's name."

Another issue of the same magazine reported on radio signals from U.S. aircraft carriers interfering with Australian garage door openers. It sounds really stupid - but how many people would even have thought to ask what frequency the garage door openers use?

While I sometimes think I mention death too often in these pages, this week I heard an obituary on the radio that I have to mention. Lord "Screaming" Sutch, head of the Monster Raving Loonie Party (in Great Britain) died. The world is just a little bit saner ... and that is a very sad thing indeed.

Incidentally, since I already mentioned obituaries, I was surprised at how little attention Saul Steinberg's death got a few weeks ago. I had the perfect editorial cartoon for that one. I'd copy his most famous cover from The New Yorker (the one that shows the New Yorker's view of the world) and pencil in his grave.

As for personal news, my trip to Denver was moved a week and my trip to Huntsville was postponed indefinitely (Congress mucking around with our program budget again). So I went and made a flurry of personal travel arrangements. I've got one trip to the Bay Area to see Robert, as well as my brother and assorted relatives, one trip to New York to see the exhibit on Shackleton at the American Museum of Natural History, and a trip to Alaska for the sake of going to Alaska. It will be early September so the chances of seeing the aurora are smaller than I'd hoped for, but I'll be able to take the train from Fairbanks to Anchorage, which is another thing I have wanted to do forever. Best of all, I'll have been to all 50 states.