It's been a wild week for Apple and its famous iPhone, as they got caught between a $1,000 application, rumors that Apple “takes care” of our iPhones even if we don't necessarily want them to and several apps being taken down from the App Store without explanation.

The result was: disoriented customers, disappointed developers and a lot of questions and theories about a “kill switch” that acts as a secret big red button that Apple might push anytime they find something they don't like on your iPhone.

Black Lawyer's Loss Was Not a Surprise

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2008; A08

For Nikki Tinker, Tennessee's 9th Congressional District hung as sweetly as a plum in the state's Democratic primary. It has a black majority, is full of churchgoing African American women like herself, and includes the hallowed ground where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white man.

But in an election season in which racial appeals may be losing their power, Tinker discovered that looks can be deceiving. On Election Day, she was crushed by her white opponent, Rep. Stephen I. Cohen, whom Tinker labeled as anti-prayer in one campaign ad and tried to link to the Ku Klux Klan in another.

Black Lawyer's Loss Was Not a Surprise

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2008; A08

For Nikki Tinker, Tennessee's 9th Congressional District hung as sweetly as a plum in the state's Democratic primary. It has a black majority, is full of churchgoing African American women like herself, and includes the hallowed ground where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white man.

But in an election season in which racial appeals may be losing their power, Tinker discovered that looks can be deceiving. On Election Day, she was crushed by her white opponent, Rep. Stephen I. Cohen, whom Tinker labeled as anti-prayer in one campaign ad and tried to link to the Ku Klux Klan in another.

The Guantanamo Bay military jury that sentenced Osama bin Laden's driver to just five additional months -- instead of the 30-year minimum sought by the government -- intended no message to the Bush administration or comment on its military commission system, according to one officer who served on the panel.

Instead, the military juror said, the panel looked at the evidence against Salim Hamdan and found it simply didn't support prosecutors' depiction of a hard-core al Qaeda terrorist who hates America and its way of life.

By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2008; A01

On the morning of July 10, Jean C. Duley decided she had a phone call to make. She had agonized all night. Her counseling client, Bruce E. Ivins, had announced in a group therapy session the evening before that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax investigation and had a plan to kill his co-workers.

From her desk at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, Duley called the Frederick Police Department to report Ivins's threats. The scientist was taken into custody that afternoon and placed in a psychiatric hospital. A day later, the FBI showed up at Duley's office for the first time.

Up until Matasano mistakenly let the cat out of the bag about the DNS forgery attack that Dan Kaminsky found, lots of experts were downplaying the problem as old and known. Once the details were released, those same folks agreed, that yes, the problem Kaminsky found was that bad. Since Kaminsky gave his presentation about the DNS vulnerability (along with two blog posts explaining Why So Serious and a Summary), a lot of noise is being made about the impacts.

Can I take a moment to say, "well, duh!" Alright, got that out of my system. The short story is just about everything relies on DNS. Web surfing, e-mail, anti-spam, SSL, content delivery, and so on. It's not just that those services rely on DNS, those services can be made party to the attack. Kaminsky has no less than 17 detailed slides on why attacking DNS is fruitful. Kaminsky then dives into why SSL is not a silver bullet. Every network device, connected to the Internet or not, relies on DNS for name resolution.

GOP Campaign Launches Three Ads as Obama Heads for a Week in Hawaii

By Jonathan Weisman and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 9, 2008; A06

With Barack Obama stepping off the playing field for a week-long Hawaiian vacation, John McCain's campaign released three new attack ads yesterday, signaling that the senator from Arizona would use the void to continue pummeling the character of his rival for the White House.

Obama's trip to Hawaii, where he spent much of his youth, comes after a week in which his Republican opponent dominated the news with his negative assault. Obama aides said the senator from Illinois is maintaining his lead in polls and will not be goaded into responding with character attacks of his own.

WASHINGTON -- One night in autumn 2001, as the U.S. reeled from the worst act of bioterrorism in its history, Bruce Ivins was alone in his cluttered Fort Detrick, Md., office, scrubbing phones, walls and furniture.

For colleagues, this was proof of the anthrax scientist's attention to safety. From a distance of seven years, it might be evidence of his guilt.

The Hamdan Validation
August 9, 2008; Page A10

On Thursday, a war crimes tribunal sentenced Salim Hamdan to a mere five and a half years in prison, which, with credit for time served, means that Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver could be released as early as January. To borrow the obligatory media idiom, this "raises questions" about the process -- namely one: Could anything happen at Guantanamo that isn't "a stunning rebuke" or "an embarrassing blow" to the Bush Administration?

The sentence came down a day after Hamdan was absolved of the more serious of the two charges leveled against him. The prior political narrative was that the commissions amounted to a new Inquisition. But never mind. Some eminences claimed that Hamdan's partial acquittal really meant he had been found "guilty as ordered." Now a panel of senior military officers has rejected the 30-year sentence prosecutors requested -- and we are told that also counts as a strike against military commissions.

Solzhenitsyn Was a Russian Patriot

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union -- the result of his novel, "The Gulag Archipelago," being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, "The Great Terror," with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a "little" poem of his. Of course I agreed.

The little poem, "Prussian Nights," turned out to be 2,000 lines! Thankfully, he and his circle helped. It was an arresting composition, increasing our knowledge of him and his times -- something worth reading, and rereading, for its stunning historical background.