Liberators, with sexual abuse, torture for good measure - "The charges have been documented by photographs taken by guards inside the prison, which were broadcast Wednesday night by the CBS News program 60 Minutes II and have now been verified by U.S. military officials."

U.S. soldiers abuse Iraqi prisoners - "One photo shows a pyramid of naked prisoners with insults in English written on their bodies, and with soldiers standing on top of them. Several other photos showed prisoners forced to pose as though they were sodomizing each other or having oral sex with each other."

Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed - "In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up."

CBS would have sat on this story forever, at the govenment's bidding, if given the chance. From the bottom of this page:

"Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast -- given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq."

"60 Minutes II decided to honor that request, while pressing for the Defense Department to add its perspective to the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison. This week, with the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and with other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate in our report."

IsoBuster 1.6 (in freeware mode) rescued all of the data off a deeply scratched CD for a client yesterday. Nothing else had worked, including the SkipDoctor. If IsoBuster has worked miracles for you too, consider making a donation or registering - help keep this awesome project alive!

Recycling tech trash - Matthew McGlynn helps save the planet. You can too!

 RmEmpty v1.2 [36k] + Delete empty folders recursively.    

OneLook Reverse Dictionary - "Describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word."

Furl sounds like a neat idea. It "helps you save, share, and recall anything you find online," essentially acting as your personal database of saved webpages. Features include:

• Save articles, pages, and receipts with a single click.
• Never lose a page due to memory, paid archives, or "link rot" again.
• Nothing to install. Access your archive from any computer, anywhere.
• Automatically share what you find through email, RSS and site integration.
• Search across all the data in your archive in an instant.
• It's free and quick to sign up.

But who knows how long Furl will be around? What happens to your data if they disappear? Fortunately, these guys have the answer: strong export support. Be sure to check out the entire FAQ, as it is particularly well-written and informative.

Extracts from Seneca's Epistolas:

How long shall we weary heaven with petitions for superfluous luxuries, as though we had not at hand wherewithal to feed ourselves? How long shall we fill our plains with huge cities? How long shall the people slave for us unnecessarily? How long shall countless numbers of ships from every sea bring us provisions for the consumption of a single mouth? An ox is satisfied with the pasture of an acre or two; one wood suffices for several elephants. Man alone supports himself by the pillage of the whole earth and sea. What! Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach, while she has given us such insignificant bodies? No, it is not the hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness which costs so much. - Epistola, 1x

In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs ... Insatiable, unfathomable, gluttony searches every land and every sea. Some animals it persecutes with snares and traps, with hunting nets, with hooks, sparing no sort of toil to obtain them . . . There is no peace allowed to any species of being . . . No wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying. . . Count the cooks you will no longer wonder at the innumerable number of human maladies. - Epistola, xcv

If these maxims are true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstaining from flesh foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? I merely deprive you of the food of lions and vultures ... We shall recover our sound reason only if we shall separate ourselves from the herd - the very fact of the approbation of the multitude is a proof of the unsoundness of the opinion or practice. Let us ask what is best, not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed. None is so near the gods as he who shows kindness. - Epistola, cviii

An anonymous reader kindly sent in a link to Corel InfoCentral 7 for Windows NT/2K/XP (direct download link). There are also loads of great iBase Templates and utilities. Be sure to check out the manual in PDF format. Thanks to Michael A. Koenecke for putting it all together.

BareGrep [140k] + Grep with GUI. Works with both plain text and binary files. Would prefer no splash screen.   (submitted around the same time by Mike Mills, Terry Brown, and Toni Eisner)

 PCISniffer 1.2 [675k] + Bootable floppy that detects and displays all PCI busses and devices. Database includes approx. 4000 devices and 1500 vendors.  

Dialup is still the rule - "(T)ens of millions of Americans (are) seemingly immune to the lure of more speed and satisfied with dial-up services. A majority of Americans who surf the Internet still do so by dialing in on regular telephone lines..."

Corel InfoCentral (freeware for Windows 9x, approx 4MB) is unique among PIMs. Its object-oriented data store allows complex relationships to be tracked with ease. Check out these Usenet posts:

1. "Unlike anything you've seen"
2. "Entity Relationship Mapping"
3. "Manage relationships between various pieces of information"

Running out of PCI slots? How about adding 13 more? Need to use PCI cards with your laptop? No problem. (via James Broder at Skunkware)

Vernon kindly sent in a link to .kkrieger, perhaps the world's smallest game (96k) which sports graphics like this. It requires some pretty serious hardware (by TinyApps standards, anyway) to run:

• A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
• 512MB of RAM (or more)
• A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
• Some kind of sound hardware
• DirectX 9.0b

Unbeknownst to most users, Windows ships with some serious music making software. (via ritilan.com)

Drive SnapShot 1.3 is simply the most amazing drive imaging software for Windows:

• Create disk image backups while running Windows. There is no restart (to DOS) necessary.
• Continue your work, while the backup is in progress. There are no difficulties with opened files. This enables a very fast and easy way to backup servers and other computers that must run 24 hours a day.
• Creates a virtual drive, containing all of your drive's data. You may use, compare, or restore these files directly from the Disk Image file. This works with any program of your choice, including (of course) the Windows Explorer.
• Complete restore of a disk in case of disaster. If a disk is restored to it's original state, it will be exactly the same as at the time of backup - byte for byte. Restoring a system partition will require DOS; other drives can be restored from within Windows.
• Compatible with all Windows file systems (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS)
• Compatible with all Windows RAID methods
• Very easy and comprehensive command line interface
• Drive Snapshot does not require installation.
• Program size under 1.44MB
• Will NOT copy anything into your Windows or system directory, nor will it change anything in your system configuration.

(via Detlef Loeffelholz)

Dillo is a tiny (350k) web browser for Linux. Written completely in C and based on GTK+ (GNOME not required), Dillo is very fast. Similar in feel to OffByOne, the sleek and simple browser for Windows. (via anonymous email)

LogMeIn.com - Remote access service similar to GoToMyPC. No credit card is required for the free fully-functional preview. Just now tested it over a cable modem and am very impressed with the speed (virtually instant), extensive features and ease of use (though the browser-based client seems to require IE). LogMeIn might be useful in situations where setting up VNC is not practical.

 HD Tune [131k] + Hard disk utility which reports drive info, health, and benchmarks. (via Langa List)

 Netcat 1.1 [58k] {S}+ Network swiss army knife. Among its many uses, Netcat can be used to retrieve full HTTP headers (four other methods were covered last year). Review

Gmail from Google is a free webmail service offering 1GB of storage. Though currently in testing, Kevin Fox offers some screenshots, and Slashdot examines the privacy concerns. As one poster points out, Spymac offers a free 1GB webmail service too.

Does life imitate art? (via This Modern World)

"The Telnet BBS Guide is the largest active listing of Telnet accessable Bulletin Board Systems on the Internet." Aspiring sysops may enjoy How to Set Up a Telnet BBS. (via Jim's Inchoate Weblog)

KeyNote 0.999 [703k] {S}+ Treepad-like app with RichText support, encryption (Blowfish or IDEA), import/export TXT, RTF, HJT (Treepad), n_text (DartNotes), HTML (import only), and much more.   (via Jeff Jewell)