The Electronic Frontier Foundation. For anyone who is concerned about freedom and user rights in the electronic age, this site is a must-visit. If you are not concerned about such things yet, try reading this short story by Richard Stallman. If you're still unconvinced, this Washington Post story about publishers and libraries, and this article in Scientific American about the DVD encryption story may convince you that all this is becoming true sooner than anyone expected.

If that didn't scare you sufficiently, try this chapter from Jessica Litman's book, Digital Copyright.

Since Litman wrote her book, the US Government arrested Russian programmer Dimitri Sklyarov at Adobe's instigation. A Russian citizen, who wrote a program which is legal in his country, can today be arrested in the US because his program can be used to break encryption; this is the same country where guns are sold freely because crime is claimed to be the responsibility of the buyer, not the supplier of the tool. He was subsequently released but his employers are still fighting the case. Read about that here, the FAQ in particular.

Also worth reading: this article by John Gilmore (of the EFF) on what's wrong with copy protection. (If that link doesn't work, it's also available here.)

The Keith Henson case. In the middle east there are Muslim fundamentalists, in India we have Hindu funtamentalists; and in the US they have -- scientologists. On the same site, the tie-up between District Attorney, representing the "State of California" in the case, and the Church of Scientology, who have a history of terrorising both members and critics, and have a mammoth list of criminal convictions behind them in the US, Canada and Europe. Operation Clambake has more details about the "Church".

But then, those of us who live outside the US have been a bit doubtful about just how committed it is to democracy and freedom outside its borders. Take a look at this people's history of the CIA.

But here's an old radio broadcast about the good side of America.

Indian Ocean, who make my favourite Indian music outside of the classical variety.

The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record, some astonishing colour photographs of pre-revolution Russia.

Federico Peliti's photographs of 19th century India. Not as visually spectacular as Prokudin-Gorskii, but fascinating stuff nonetheless.

Harmonia Mundi. Their small boutique on Rue de Rivoli in Paris, a 5 minute walk from where I live, is absolutely my favourite music shop anywhere: they mostly stock their own label and other related independent labels, mainly classical, jazz/blues, and various kinds of world music; the people at the shop know what they have, and nearly everything I've bought there is superb stuff.

The place to go if you like the music of J. S. Bach.

Carnatic music, or the classical music of South India: interestingly, one of the best books I know of on the subject is by a German, Ludwig Pesch, himself an accomplished performer who also maintains an interesting webpage on the subject.

Past Perfect: I have their remasterings of recordings from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s of Duke Ellington, Noel Coward/Gertrude Lawrence, and the music of George Gershwin; the quality and clarity are astonishing.

Internet mail, an article on how to use it (in particular, how to format it) to good effect, by Greg Lehey.

A Greensleeves homepage

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Makes sense, right?

Kehlog Albran's The Profit.

A Jabberwocky page.

All about Asterix, in French and in English

The Onion, my favourite news source.

Dave Barry's weekly wisdom.

You'll find the holy grail here.
But this seems to be the official Monty, ideal if you feel in an abusive mood.

Pictures which should convince the most hardened creationists that evolution is, indeed, for real. (I received this by email and don't know who's responsible for the individual pictures, but would be interested in learning.)

The Bushblog, on SatireWire.

Mondegreens. The lyrics aren't that weird, you just heard them wrong.