A few weekends ago, I was poking around my site statistics and found that I had a huge number of hits and was using a much larger percentage of my bandwidth than I’d expect with a silly, personal text- and image-only weblog:

So I took a look at my referrers:

And sure enough someone is hotlinking one of my images at http://forums.vwvortex.com. It turns out it’s my from my post about Buying a Reliant Robin:

Which they found because I’m the first hit in Google Image Search for “Reliant Robin”:

So I replaced it with this:

Earlier this week, Amazon terminated the Amazon Web Services account that WikiLeaks was using to host the site, possibly caving to political pressure from the office of Senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman subsequently issued a statement calling for all companies to censor WikiLeaks. Daniel Ellsberg, the figurehead behind the Pentagon Papers, published an open letter to Amazon condemning this decision, closed his Amazon account, and encouraged others to do the same.

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece on how Joe Lieberman Emulates Chinese Dictators.

I just requested that my account be cancelled. You can too. I used to use Amazon as a convenient one-stop shop for pretty much everything, so yes, my life will get a little bit more inconvenient without said account.

Thomas Jefferson, 1791:

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.