In an interesting memo apparently leaked to the British newspaper Observer, a senior US NSA official is seen asking British (and, presumably, other) intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. allies to try to bolster the U.S. negotiating position over Iraq. This is seen by many as a Nixon-like dirty tricks.

Understandably, this has created a huge stir in Britain. What is even more surprising is how quiet this has been in the U.S. Has the American press lost all sense of journalistic independence from the government?

The Register has an article analyzing the authenticity of the memo.

Today, a story (beware the popups) on PHPNuke.org caught my attention. Basically, it is slamming Yale’s excellent LawMeme site because it doesn’t include a PHPNuke copyright statement at the bottom of each page. The PHPNuke people seemed to be asserting that this was required of them under the GPL.

This concerned me, as PHPNuke is a part of Debian, which has a strict set of guidelines requiring included software to be truly Free. I did some checking, and, in a post to debian-legal, highlighted the problem.

There are several interesting aspects of this saga. One is that some may consider the user to actually be distributing parts of the PHPNuke code to each person that views a webpage. Another is whether PHPNuke qualifies as an “interactive program” under the GPL. So far, these seem to be uncharted waters.