As everybody’s heard by now, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Prop 8 ban of same-sex marriage violaes the equal protection and due process rights clauses of the US Constitution. Well, duh. How this could be considered “controversial” is beyond me. As long as people are allowed to marry other people, nobody gets to discriminate between different “types” of people. You may not like who other people choose to marry (such as, say, when 26 year old Anna Nicole Smith married 89 year old J. Howard Marshall), but it’s really none of your goddamn business. Of course, this isn’t over with, and the case will be appealed to the 9th Circuit, and eventually to the Supreme Court, where, if there was such a thing as “justice,” they would not only rule that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional, but that there is no need for laws “legalizing” it, because it’s already legal for two humans to get married. But I don’t really associate SCOTUS with “justice” these days.

Speaking of SCOTUS, Elana Kagan is expected to be the fourth woman confirmed to the Court today, over the objections of all but five or so Republicans and “Democrat” Ben “The Wig” Nelson, and without the backing of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund.

“This rare decision comes because Kagan’s record as an attorney is too ambiguous for MALDEF to make an informed determination about her current knowledge and potential understanding of Latino legal concerns,” the group’s president, Thomas Saenz, wrote in a commentary written for the online news Website the Huffington Post.

I don’t expect Kagan to turn out to be a flaming liberal (hopefully she’ll at least be to the left of Fat Tony Scalia), and therefore will not be in the least disappointed if (or when) she votes to uphold California’s Prop 8.

If you’ve got an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, be careful about where you surf.

The iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touches running iOS versions 3.1.2 or higher have a critical security flaw that allows malicious code to be loaded through Safari (the web browser) to give hacker’s full access to infected handheld devices.

The finding has been so serious that the German government issued an official warning in which it sited “two critical weak points for which no patch exists.”

On the bright side, you can use the same technique to “jailbreak” your phone.

Of course, this isn’t the first security issue with these devices, nor is it likely to be the last, and Apple already says they’ve got a fix for it, which they’ll release when they get around to it.

As long as there are smart people with a lot of time on their hands, they’ll always be able to figure out a way to screw with these things – whether they’re Linux or Windows-based PCs, Macs, or iWhatevers. It’s just nice to see that Apple now has enough market share with their stuff to make them attractive to hackers. They’ve been pretty well known in the past for not bothering to fix known (but unpublicized) vulnerabilities in the past, then vilifying those who make the exploits public out of frustration with Apple’s slow response. Maybe this will shake thing up out there in Cupertino.

And, finally, I’d like to say Happy Birthday to my wife. Happy Birthday, Granny!