Update at 4:30PM. First the good news. Shanti Braford responded to my emails. It's not a denial-of-service attack, it's just a buggy bot. The bad news — the flood continues unabated. About five requests per second. A huge waste of bandwidth and money.

Kevin Werbach: “A thorough mess perhaps, but a necessary one. The DMCA is so clearly out of step with reality that reopining it is inevitable. However, I won't dismiss the possiblity that the “reopening” process will lead to something worse.”

Tech IPOs Will Be Back with a Vengeance in 2004 (Reuters). Reuters – Investors, brace yourselves — 2004 is gearing up to be the year of the technology IPO.

I was about to begin a day away from the computer, and decided to check my server log, and saw tens of thousands of accesses by a bot at 69.10.144.111 of a single file. I entered the IP address in my browser. This usually doesn't get you anything but this time it got me an empty Movable Type weblog for “Shanti Braford.” I looked up this person on Google, and found that he is the author of Popdex. So this probably isn't a denial of service attack, rather a script with a bug — a bug that's costing me a boatload of money. If you're friends with Mr Braford please call him up and ask him to kill the script. In the meantime I've temporarily removed the file (sorry) to help minimize the damage.

Robert Novak on the Democrat's Dean Dilemma.

The Dean dilemma was spelled out to me by a sage Democratic practitioner whose views I have sought since 1968. He has felt for months that the former Vermont governor faces horrendous defeat against President Bush. Last week, this party loyalist told me he felt Dean will be nominated unless an act of intervention stops him. He added that he is sure Dean can be stopped but at the cost of unacceptable carnage. Implicitly and reluctantly, therefore, he is swallowing Dean.

The hope inside the Democratic establishment has been that once Dean perceived himself on the road to the nomination, he would pivot sharply toward the center. He may be unable to perform or even attempt this maneuver. He is no ideologue, but he has not outgrown being the smart-aleck kid from Park Avenue with a hard edge. The Democratic savants I have contacted can only shake their heads over his stubborn insistence that Saddam Hussein's capture has not made the country safer.

Most Americans and, indeed, most Democrats are hardly aware of Howard Dean's existence. The national polls that have propelled him well ahead of any other candidate still give him support from only one of four Democrats (slipping slightly after Hussein's capture). He runs far behind Bush in any one-on-one poll.

WSJ Editorial on Libya's WMD Retreat.

The timing and nature of this conversion also vindicates the Bush anti-terror Doctrine. Gadhafi's emissaries first approached British officials in March, just as the war in Iraq was getting under way. From the first days after September 11, Mr. Bush offered state sponsors of terrorism a choice to be with us or against us. If Gadhafi had any doubts about U.S. resolve after the Taliban fell in Afghanistan, they vanished once he saw that Saddam Hussein was also headed for the spider hole of history.

It's amusing to see the same people who have opposed the Bush Doctrine now claiming that Gadhafi's conversion is the triumph of “diplomacy.” European Commission President Romano Prodi averred on the weekend that Libya's reversal “demonstrates the effectiveness of discrete diplomacy and engagement, which has been the European Commission's consistent approach.” The French and Senator John Kerry said something similar, as usual.

But years of diplomacy by itself didn't seem to move Libya from its terrorist ways. Only when Gadhafi could see that WMD programs were a path to his own self-destruction, as they were in Iraq, did he agree to turn state's evidence against himself. Mr. Bush's new Proliferation Security Initiative, which is attempting with 10 other nations to use the military to intercept WMD shipments, was also noticed by the Libyan.

Mr. Kerry's Saturday statement that “this significant advance represents a complete U-turn in the Bush Administration's overall foreign policy” shows why he's going to have to mortgage more than his Beacon Hill home to become commander-in-chief. He doesn't understand that the credible threat of force, and often its use, is essential before diplomacy has any chance of working.

I started a moderated mail list for people who use RSS, either as a publisher or reading feeds in an aggregator. The list is moderated to keep it on topic and away from personal issues. It's just about using RSS, not debating its merits or other formats that may be like RSS. I wanted to have this list to get ready for the session I'm doing at RSS Winterfest, below, and of course if it's an active resource it'll be around for a long time after that.

Here's a “Userland” opportunity. This happens too often for a product in use by many novices.

Lack of customer support?. I post this reluctantly. I have used the customer service 'support' e-mail address provided when I sought to upgrade my storage capacity. I sent 3 friendly informative e-mails on 19.12.2003. and have received absolutely no response. Each e-mail more clearly explained my position as I sought to diagnose more fully the problem. Can someone advise what I need to do to receive support please? Surely, if I have used the contact e-mail address Radio UserLand provides, it ought to have been processed by now? Any thoughts anyone? Martin [Radio UserLand Messages]

Scott Rosenberg: “Our office tower just started swaying. Stopped now. Seems like there was just a medium-size quake in the Bay Area.”

You can tell Ralph to run, or not, in this Web form.