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There are over 1 million records covering 400,000 names on the US Government’s terrorist watch list, according to this Reuters article, U.S. terrorism watch list tops 1 million. 

How in the name of good common sense can this list be effective? That’s what the ACLU would like to know, and I agree with them.

According to a survey by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, 7 percent of the respondents had at least one electronic device seized for inspection while traveling. As the New York Times points out in this op-ed piece, The Government and Your Laptop, searching a computer or cell phone can involve much more information than a simple luggage search might reveal. 

Whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment? I know the US Senate, including Senators Inouye (D-HI) and Obama (D-IL) tossed it under the bus last week when they extended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI) voted no, while John McCain (R-AZ) did not vote on the measure - see the roll call. 

At least the ACLU has filed a suit to halt FISA - see this Wired article called Bush Signs Spy Bill, ACLU Sues for details.

I’d been offline all weekend, so this morning I decided to check my Twitter page. Twitter is a web site that lets users microblog with 140 character messages typed into the web site or mobile text messages. 

I had a few new followers whom I did not know in real life, and each of them had weird names. A few reminded me of the passwords AOL used to stamp on its disks and CDs, while others were straight from a spammer’s imagination:

• agoraindex
• tarahbrown
• MyInternetBusin 
• HarbourHeights 
• WallpaperManica
• she0foreclosure 
• xiaopan
• Rhonda1989

As it turns out, these were all attempts at sending me Twitter spam. My Twitter profile is public, so anyone can follow me. 

To make matters worse, Twitter has no system for mass blocking profiles. I had to block each of these profiles one by one, and each block required a round trip through 5 web pages. 

Adam J. O’Donnell of Cloudmark has a good ZDNet article called Twitter’s holiday battle with spammers that has some good observations.

Twitter has enough problems as it is - the service goes down for hours at a time, and has inspired users to name one of Twitter’s network outage notices as the Fail Whale.

One of the country’s largest web hosting companies, The Planet, is still down after a fire knocked out their main data center’s transformer. To their credit, Planet managers have been providing regular updates on a web forum. Here’s update #2, which is a good example:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. [CDT], a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

The Houston Fire Department ordered Planet staff to shut down the data center’s electric generators. Approximately 7500 9000 web servers and 9000 7500 customers are affected.

One reason that I use DreamHost.com to host billso.com is the incredible level of transparency that DreamHost provides. DreamHost is employee-owned, which helps explains their reporting policy. I’ve never had a major problem with DreamHost, but I know that I can check the status reports for the data center and most of their servers at any time, on the Web or with RSS

See Center Networks for more comments about the Planet fire. I agree with Allen Stern - given the number of servers and clients affected, I expected to hear much more on the blogosphere this morning. The outage affects Planet’s Server Command, ResellOne, and legacy EV1 customers.

The Hosting News posted an excellent article on 29 May 2008 about several recently completed projects at The Planet. It’s tempting to think that this project and the fire are connected, but there’s no indication of that yet. The Planet used to be known as EV1. I remember EV1 from from my years in Austin, when that company offered cut-rate dial-up internet service and web hosting. Their radio commercials were just awful.

The Register and Broadband Reports have posted very brief reports, and here’s the Wikipedia page for EV1.

Steve Tobak is fretting about his new Sony laptop computer, because it’s having problems and he doesn’t have time to fix it.

Sounds like he needs a Mac.

First, the good news: crazy rasberry ants are smaller than fleas, but they will eat fire ants. I hate fire ants, and I don’t miss them at all.

Now here’s the bad news: these ants also eat plants, and they like to get into electronic equipment, including network cable and hard drives, according to CRN. That’s a recipe for failure.

Pray that paratrenicha species near pubens don’t come to your neighborhood.

See the Associated Press, Texas A&M’s web page and BoingBoing for more information and links.

Updated 16 May 2008: here’s the New York times article about the crazy running ants.

Update 16 June 2008: I added this YouTube video from Houston’s FOX news report.

Photo courtesy of Texas A&M University.

Related posts on billso.com

• 26 August 2004: Killer bees reach Oklahoma
• 13 August 2004: Giant mutant ants in Australia