You mean I do have a right to an attorney?

The Supremes have decided that US citizens have the right to due process when detained as Enemy Combatants by the US Military, even if they are being sequestered on the Moon or Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. And federal courts have jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus petitions. I feel better now that Justice O'Connor, in writing the opinion for the 6-3 majority, has reminded those of us who had forgotten:

...a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.

She also says:

[Hamdi] unquestionably has the right to access to counsel in connection with the proceedings on remand.

It's
not clear that you have these rights if you had somehow turned your shoes into a bomb, but one thing at a time.

Oh, that's different!

Yesterday I complained about a hopeless situation where Blogger, my Webhost (Charter) and some browsers (read: Mozilla) interacted to result in some of Recondite's readership not being able to post comments.

Turns out the fix was simple: Blogger stores permalink files with the same extension as archive files. I told Blogger to archive into "archive.html" (I let it pick its own name before) and after reposting every stinking article, comment links work.

Try it and see. And comment!

End of an Error

Believe it or don't — COMDEX Las Vegas 2004 has been cancelled. It was Yogi Berra who said (about a NYC eatery): "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

Two wrongs don't make a compliant browser

Recondite readers who use standards-compliant browsers rather than, say, IE, may notice that this blog's permalinks and comment tags (at the bottom of every post) don't do the right thing when you click on them. Rather than seeing a formatted page of HTML, you see a page of text containing, well, HTML. This is because, as Eric Rescorla points out, this blog's web server offers those pages as Content-Type: text/plain rather than text/html. Don't blame your faithful correspondent.

To format this blog, I use Blogger. For the webserver, my ISP, Charter provides. Blogger writes permalink (and comment) pages as files named as it chooses, without an extension. Charter runs Apache, apparently configured to serve extension-less files (as opposed to files with the extension .html) as text/plain. The server is also apparently configured to ignore .htaccess files in my directory as well (not that this is unreasonable), so I can't change anything. So the wrong thing happens, unless of course, your browser does the wrong thing itself. Get it?

So run IE. Or don't. But don't blame me.

Update 6/24: I just got a response from Blogger technical support with a suggested fix for my configuration. We'll see this works. If it does, perhaps we should title this post Oh, that's different! Nevermind....

Shall I cough on you, George?

On my XP machines, I run Norton AntiVirus 2003 and hope not to be bothered. In addition, I manually run Ad-aware because of Symantec's stance regarding trojans and spyware (they're not viruses, hence Norton doesn't bother to protect against them).¹

Well, this apparently wasn't enough. For the past two days, I've had various horrible symptoms: home page hijacks, toolbar reconfigurations, popups when no browser is running and other irritating things as well. I update Norton and scan: nothing. Update Ad-aware, and get all sorts of malware detected, which Ad-aware removes. But the symptoms reappears some time later.

I check the websites that the pop-ups and hijack destinations reference, nothing interesting and googling them yields nothing either. Trend Micro's HouseCall ActiveX-based malware scanner doesn't run at all — IE crashes.

Without any clues other than the fact that HouseCall won't run (suspicious in itself) I download the trial version of Trend Micro's stand-alone antivirus product, PC-cillin. Interestingly, the installer refuses to run unless Norton is uninstalled! After some thrashing around, I decide to uninstall Norton and install PC-cillin. After installing and updating PC-cillin I get to run it. Immediately, it finds TROJ_AGENT.AC and JAVA_BYTEVER.A.² Problem solved.

This experience doesn't give me a whole lot of faith in Norton. I do get a giggle, though, from the thought of a silent war for disk space between software trial versions.

[1] This policy was changed in the 2004 version.

[2] Turns out what my PC had was the CoolWebSearch hijack trojan which uses the ByteVerify exploit in the MS Java VM and is notoriously difficult to get rid of.