The House of Representatives has rejected telecom immunity, and a lot of what the President wanted in the way of surveillance powers. Considering the damaging finds from the DoJ's Inspector General on the FBI's abuse of the powers that they have been given since 9-11, it's good to see Congress putting its foot down at least in some small way on Bush's demands for more power. That this comes on the heals of reports that the FBI not only abused its powers, but attempted to cover up those abuses. They've proved themselves very untrustworthy with what they already have, so it's just not even worth hearing them out when they ask for anything else.

I think that I have figured out a novel means to finally put the kibbosh on the ability of spammers to spam the movable type comment script once and for all. I've got some ideas that I need to test out in code, but on paper it looks promising. The only catch is that it would require Movable type users to publish their pages as PHP files instead of HTML files.

Lastly, I've been working on creating an integrated survey plugin for Movable Type users. Some bugs need to be worked out, but I'm closing in on a beta release. I suspect that the beta will be available on my plugins blog sometime by the end of next week.