The Mandelbear's Musings

So, Moussaoui gets life in prison. I have many reasons for opposing the death penalty, including the money, time, and public attention wasted on futile attempts to ensure that it's never applied by mistake. But in this case, I think it would have been particularly unfortunate to kill a man for, in essence, failing to incriminate himself. What in hell was the government thinking?

I will mention only in passing the speculation that people who are arguably even more culpable will never come to trial because the evidence against them was obtained under torture. It was Moussaoui's good fortune in being captured on US territory and in public that got him a fair trial. What this does for the prospects those less fortunate, now that the government has received a well-earned rebuke from Moussaoui's jurors, is anybody's guess.

In other news, thanks to filkerdave, we now know what was really behind the recent LJ outage. It was a DDOS attack, alright, but it was initially directed against a company called Blue Security, whose business model consists of persuading people to install software that mounts a DDOS attack on alleged spammers. When the spammers turned the tables, BS cleverly redirected the attack from their own servers to their blog, which just happens to be located at TypePad. Which, like LJ, just happens to be owned by Six Apart.

update: more info at cbronline.com and discussion at Slashdot

And thanks to technoshaman, we now know where BS's US offices are: 2480 Sand Hill Road, Suite 200 / Menlo Park, CA. Which just happens to be an easy walk from where I work. My feelings about this are really indescribable -- not unlike how I felt when I learned, when my daughter got mugged last year, that there were violent criminals living just a few houses down on the street where I live.

It's a good thing we don't have a supply of torches and pitchforks at the lab.