GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Craig Schamp has comentary, and a link to this story.

THE DNS PROBLEMS were the result of a Denial-of-Service attack. HostingMatters has been in touch with law enforcement, as they seem to know where it was coming from.

THE BEAR SAYS I’m wrong about Bill Frist’s HIV/Terrorism speech, and that so is Knoxville media commentator “Bubba Mullet.” I’d say only half wrong — I thought that the meat of the criticism was that Frist was tying AIDS to terrorism via a “root cause” argument, mostly to get more money. I agree with The Bear when he notes:

What I think we can clearly conclude, though, is that he is at least suggesting that there are similarities between the problem of solving the HIV crisis, and the problem of combating bioterrorism. To me, that’s a perfectly sensible argument, although as Bubba points out, Frist may well be drawing that comparison to gain public support for a major funding initiative he’s promoting. But that doesn’t necessarily make it an invalid comparison.

No, it’s not necessarily invalid. And I don’t think the program that Frist is pushing is bad. It’s just an example of how many initiatives that don’t really have a lot to do with terrorism are being relabeled as terrorism-related now. This sort of thing happens all the time in government, but I think it’s worth pointing out when it does.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON arming pilots over at The Corner.

OKAY, NOW MY DNS IS HAVING PROBLEMS — Hostmatters.com’s namehost is down and InstaPundit.Com isn’t working. But the hard IP of http://64.247.33.250/ still works (I guess you know that if you’re here), and it’ll be fixed soon, I hope.

UPDATE: HostingMatters says they’re working on the problem.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Seems to be fixed.

I LIKE BILL FRIST, and I think he’s a smart guy. But in this speech in Knoxville he seemed to draw a rather, um, tenuous, “root causes” kind of connection between AIDS and terrorism. Knoxville’s news watchblog is on the story, and has an explanation.

MARS NEEDS GUITARS! Well, that’s not actually the point of my TechCentralStation Mars column today, but I do manage to quote Webb Wilder.

UPDATE: Oh, and don’t miss this Mark Steyn column where he takes a swipe at space environmentalists who want to close the Moon to development. And Virginia Postrel wants to terraform Texas! I’ve been through a Dallas summer, so I know what she means.

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET: Sorry about the brief “Bandwidth Exceeded” outage. I hadn’t actually exceeded bandwidth, which is basically impossible under the deal I’ve got with them. Something was just set wrong. I emailed the techsupport people, got a reply within a few minutes, and it was fixed within a few more minutes.

It’s best not to make mistakes, but since everyone does make mistakes, the real measure is how you deal with them. The good folks at HostingMatters are doing pretty well by that measure.

“THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT HAVE A SECURITY SYSTEM, it has a system for bothering people.” That’s what an Israeli security expert says in this Christian Science Monitor story. It sounds about right to me. And so does this: “The difference between the Israeli and American systems is that we are looking for the terrorist, while the Americans look for the weapons.”

THE FBI’S “CARNIVORE” EMAIL SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM turns out to have been Osama’s best friend:

The FBI mishandled a surveillance operation involving Osama bin Laden’s terror network two years ago because of technical problems with the controversial Carnivore e-mail program, part of a “pattern” indicating that the FBI was unable to manage its intelligence wiretaps, according to an internal bureau memorandum released yesterday.

Hey, but that’s okay. It may not have worked on bin Laden — but it managed to give the FBI warrantless access to innocent people’s email instead:

An attempt in March 2000 to secretly monitor the e-mail of an unidentified suspect went awry when the Carnivore program retrieved communications from other parties as well, according to the memo.

Oh, I’m sleeping better knowing about this.

BOY: I know a lot of people suffering from NIMDA and KLEZ. My firewall apparently stops NIMDA, but as I remarked last week, I get a KLEZ-infested email almost every time I check mail. Is this cyberwar? It certainly seems worse than I’ve ever seen.

Question: I’m about to install the home network. Will my Linksys WAP-11 be sufficient firewalling, or should I put Norton on each computer?

UPDATE: Hey, thanks for all the advice in the comments section (er, except for Richard Bennett’s comments about my daughter. Jeez.) and by email.

LIBYA SEEMS AWFULLY ANXIOUS to get out from under the “terrorist” designation. What does Qaddafi think he knows that makes him so anxious to get on our good side?

JOE KLEIN SAYS that France reminds him of America in the 1970s. Now that’s a bummer.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE on the growth of anti-semitism, and note the Algerian connection. But here’s the clincher:

The little accidents and odd behaviors do add up. The new wind is definitely blowing. A few months ago no one was chanting for murder. In those days it was pretty unusual to stumble across diatribes against Judaism or anti-Semitic phrases in the intellectual press. But look what has happened. Something has changed.

STEPHEN GREEN directs us to this story on smuggling dildoes into Texas. In Tennessee, I’m proud to report, both dildoes and guns are legal. If only New York and Texas could be as liberated.

Actually, there was an attempt to ban the sale of vibrators and dildoes in Tennessee a few years ago, but the morning-drive DJ’s (and a fictitious group named “Well Endowed Tennesseans”) spread the word that it was because the legislators sponsoring the bill were, ahem, insecure in their masculinity. It died a quiet death, and I’m told the sponsor still doesn’t like to talk about it.

READER BARRY MOLEFSKY notes that an unaccustomed ray of common sense is shining across the Arab world.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: British solicitor and frequent correspondent Martin Pratt writes:

BTW After nearly a year of reading your site I have come to the conclusion that on firearms ownership at least, you have just about succeeded in changing a long standing opinion of mine. Just thought you may like to know you are doing some good!

I’m amazed. But Eugene Volokh tells a similar tale.

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Here’s an article from the Sacramento Bee.

ICE ON MARS GOOD, big NASA management problems bad. This article is mostly on-target, though one passage is a bit unfair: “When the shuttle was being designed in the 1970s, NASA unwisely chose to build a vehicle with high operating costs because it would reduce the expense of initial development.” This was NASA’s “choice” only in the sense that “your money or your life” is a choice — OMB and Congressional budget folks made clear that there wasn’t more money for initial development. It was a bad idea, and NASA maybe should have squawked more, but NASA had no leverage — and the people who did have the leverage didn’t care about the problems they were saddling the nation with down the line.

UPDATE: This Slashdot thread has some interesting observations on human missions to Mars, along with links to a couple of new pieces about the difficulties of such a mission, one from the BBC (which also opines that the U.S. should pay, but that a representative from the poorest nation on Earth should stop onto Mars first) and one from USA Today on NASA’s infrastructural problems.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an article suggesting that there’s really a lot of ice on Mars, enough to flood much of the planet if it melted. (Which, by the way, would be a good thing). And here’s another. A reader observes that the biggest Mars flood so far is the rate at which this information is leaking out of NASA prior to the scheduled announcement.

FORGET TEEN SEX! You want hate mail, just dis Bono. A bunch of people wrote me to say, in near-identical language, that Bono is not just an ’80s rock star, but a ’90s and ’00s rock star, too, and that he knows more about debt relief than most heads of state.

Well, okay. I still thought the headline was odd.

ERIC ALTERMAN says American Jewish settlers on the West Bank shouldn’t be there.

AMERICAN TROOPS ARE PLANNING TO PULL OUT OF THE PHILIPPINES by July 31, according to this report. That pullout isn’t dependent on whether the missionary couple of Martin and Gracia Burnham are released by Muslim rebels.

I’m of two minds on this. The folks at Christianity Today are understandably unhappy about the missionary angle, but I’m not sure I want to make U.S. presence in the Philippines turn on something that is so thoroughly under the control of the bad guys. On the other hand, July 31 sounds pretty soon to me. Perhaps we feel that we’ve done enough good there — or will have by then — to justify the mission. Or perhaps somebody read too many Nick Kristof columns.

The worst thing we can have is a reputation for bugging out quickly. The United States has fought guerrillas successfully all over the world — including in the Philippines, as Max Boot points out in his new book — but we’ve typically done so by being thorough and patient. Have we been thorough and patient in the Philippines? (Via Amy Welborn).

UPDATE: John Weidner says I’m wrong to attach much significance to this. He’s pretty persuasive.

JOHN TABIN reflects on what China might gain from an Indo-Pak nuclear war. I think China loses more, in terms of regional instability, than it gains. But it’s an interesting observation.

PATRICK RUFFINI says the O’Neill / Bono disagreement winds up a victory for O’Neill.

I’ve never quite understood O’Neill’s unpopularity with the press, since most of his objectionable behavior seems to consist of telling the unvarnished truth. But what struck me most about the coverage of the Bono / O’Neill spat was this Reuters headline: “Uganda Tour Deepens O’Neill, Bono Divisions on Aid.” Now, I’ve got nothing against Bono, but, really, this makes him sound like a head of state or something. He’s a frickin’ ’80s rock star! It’s just funny.

Then again, Reuters also informs us that: “Dr. Seuss was an American author who wrote children’s books.”

SEX, DRUGS & ROCK ‘N’ ROLL: Andrew Dodge concludes his series.