Monday, February 24, 2003

Spyware: A Secret War (John Borland) Read it and weep. Many of you probably have spyware installed on your systems. You can get it from installing "free" apps and playing "free" flash games and clicking on "cool" links. It sucks (to use the technical term) to have to worry about this stuff. Here's the latest dirt "Recent months have seen a spurt in so-called browser helper objects (BHO), which attach themselves limpetlike to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser software and act as a toolbar or other browser plug-in. The worst of these can radically change browser settings, including home pages and bookmarks, and make it difficult or impossible for people to change these back without their knowing how to manipulate the Windows registry. Recent examples of these, distributed by Web advertising portals Lop.com and Xupiter.com, redirected browsers to their respective sites at every available opportunity." and resources to help rid yourself of the red menace, to maintain your sweet purity of essence. Well done, CNet News.com! And there are links to couple of other articles, PC invaders and PC's enemy within, both worth a look. Educate yourselves, things are only going to get worse. Ask your lawmaker to pass laws to wipe out this flagrant abuse. 5:47:29 PM    comment [] Art Alert: The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss Before Theodore Seuss Geisel found fame as a children's book author, the primary outlet for his creative efforts was magazines. His first steady job after he left Oxford was as a cartoonist for Judge, a New York City publication. In 1927 one of these cartoons opened the way to a more profitable career, as well as greater public exposure, as an advertising illustrator. This fortuitous cartoon depicts a medieval knight in his bed, facing an dragon who had invaded his room, and lamenting, "Darn it all, another dragon. And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with Flit" (a well-known brand of bug spray). This inaugurated a 17-year campaign of ads whose recurring plea, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!," became a common catchphrase. These ads, along with those for several other companies, supported the Geisels throughout the Great Depression and the nascent period of his writing career. The Dr. Seuss Collection, housed at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, contains many examples of Dr. Seuss's advertising artwork. The library has scanned a selection of these advertisements for greater access. Besides promoting the Standard Oil companies Flit and Esso, Dr. Seuss's creations have hawked such diverse goods as ball bearings, radio promotional spots, beer, and sugar. 5:22:48 PM    comment [] Information War in Iraq (Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt) Interesting New York Times article on efforts to sway the people and army of Iraq into (at least) staying out of our way when the Velvet Hammer of Pure American Love comes pounding down on their undeserving heads. "Even before President Bush orders American forces to loose bullets and bombs on Iraq, the military is starting an ambitious assault using a growing arsenal of electronic and psychological weapons on the information battlefield. American cyber-warfare experts recently waged an e-mail assault, directed at Iraq's political, military and economic leadership, urging them to break with Saddam Hussein's government. A wave of calls has gone to the private cellphone numbers of specially selected officials inside Iraq, according to leaders at the Pentagon and in the regional Central Command. As of last week, more than eight million leaflets had been dropped over Iraq - including towns 65 miles south of Baghdad - warning Iraqi antiaircraft missile operators that their bunkers will be destroyed if they track or fire at allied warplanes. In the same way, a blunt offer has gone to Iraqi ground troops: surrender, and live. But the leaflets are old-fashioned instruments compared with some of the others that are being applied already or are likely to be used soon." . . . "In Afghanistan, the biggest lesson we learned in our tactical information operations - the radio and TV broadcasts - was the importance in explaining, `Why are we here?' " a senior American military officer said. "The majority of Afghanis did not know that Sept. 11 occurred. They didn't even know of our great tragedy." ("Firing Leaflets and Electrons, U.S. Wages Information War", New York Times) 4:55:49 PM    comment [] Demo... ...is a trade show, attracting small young companies with promising technologies to show off. This article describes 10 "technologies to watch", the best of show in the author's opinion. Here are a few that caught my attention, including one that I am actively using (MaiFrontier) with excellent results so far: The Mok Reality Editor turns digital pictures into photo-realistic 3-D environments. PKZIP 6.0 compresses and encrypts files before you send them. They've partnered with RSA security to build encryption into the package. So file-protection technology is now available to the unwashed masses with the push of a button. MailFrontier's Matador Anti-Spam desktop rules. It really does block unwanted e-mail before it hits your in-box. "This product uses a combination of methods to combat unwanted e-mail messages, that bane of corporate Internet productivity. Besides message content analysis, the three major tactics: One, it works off a list of trusted contacts whose messages will always get through. Two, it creates a list of known offenders whose e-mail always will be blocked. Three, it collaborates with other users of the software, learning from the experience of others which messages might be spam. MailFrontier faced off against rival spam-blocker Cloudmark in an anti-spam challenge at Demo, and MailFrontier won, hands down -- it blocked 85 percent of spam, and only 1 percent of the time categorized a legitimate e-mail as junk mail." I even installed Outlook Express in order to test this puppy out -- I am that desperate to gain control. It sure does seem to work with no effort on my part. Most if not all of the spam is not in my inbox, and all my mailing lists and personal mail is getting through. The interface is easy to work with, although I basically have not had to use it: the thing just works. 30 day free trial. I may have to cough up some cash for this one! 4:28:40 PM    comment [] Sympathy for the Devil (John Perry Barlow) I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all. With this in mind, I've given some thought lately to how all this might look to the Vice President (who is, I remain convinced, as much the real architect of American policy as he was while Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff or George the First's Secretary of Defense). As I've mentioned, I once knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get elected to his first public office as Wyoming's lone congressman. I conspired with him on the right side of environmental issues. Working closely together, we were instrumental in closing down a copper smelter in Douglas, Arizona the grandfathered effluents of which were causing acid rain in Wyoming's Wind River mountains. We were densely interactive allies in creating the Wyoming Wilderness Act. He used to go fishing on my ranch. We were friends. With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I¹ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this distance. I believe he is personally indifferent to greed. In the final analysis, this may simply be about oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it that way. I am relatively certain that he is acting in the service of principles to which he has devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that is unimpeded by sentiment or other emotional overhead. Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself included, has not asked out loud. It¹s not an easy question to answer, but neither is it a question to ignore. Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest habit. The more common of these has been symmetrical balance of power. This is what kept another world war from breaking out between 1945 and 1990. The Cold War was the ultimate Mexican stand-off, and though many died around its hot edges - in Viet Nam, Korea, and countless more obscure venues - it was a comparatively peaceful period. Certainly, the global body count was much lower in the second half of · the Twentieth Century than it was in the first half. Unthinkable calamity threatened throughout, but it did not occur. The other means by which long terms of peace - or, more accurately, non-war - have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a single ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the Pax Romana, a "world" peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180 AD. I grant that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They crucified dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets, and generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus Himself. But war, of the sort that racked the Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, and indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar, did not occur. The Romans had decided it was bad for business. They were in a military position to make that opinion stick. (There was a minority view of the Pax Romanum, well stated at its height by Tacitus: "To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace." It would be well to keep that admonition in mind now.) There are other, more benign, examples of lengthily imposed peace. One could argue that the near absence of major international wars in the Western Hemisphere results from the overwhelming presence of the United States which, while hardly a dream neighbor, has at least stopped most of the New World wars that it didn't start. The Ottoman Empire had a pretty good run, about 700 years, after drawing its borders in blood. The Pharoahs kept the peace, at least along the Nile, for over 2800 years until Alexander the Great showed up. If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the latter doesn¹t necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other. It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability can be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one that terrified us into peace during the Cold War. Europe, old and new, is furious with the United States at the moment (if my unscientific polls while there in January are at all accurate), but they are a very long way from confronting us with any military threat we¹d find credible. I¹m pretty sure that, soon enough, hatred of our Great Satanic selves will provide the Islamic World with a unity they have lacked since the Prophet's son-in-law twisted off and started Shi'ism. But beyond their demonstrated capacity to turn us into a nation of chickenshits and control freaks, I can¹t imagine them erecting a pacifying balance force against our appalling might. I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations through in vastly greater detail than I¹m providing here and has reached these following conclusions: first, that it is in the best interests of humanity that the United States impose a fearful peace upon the world and, second, that the best way to begin that epoch would be to establish dominion over the Middle East through the American Protectorate of Iraq. In other words, it¹s not about oil, it¹s about power and peace. Well, alright. It is about oil, I guess, but only in the sense that the primary goal of the American Peace is to guarantee the Global Corporations reliable access to all natural resources. Wherever they may lie. The multinationals are Cheney's real constituents, regardless of their stock in trade or their putative country of origin. He knows, as the Romans did, that war is bad for business. But what's more important is that he also knows that business is bad for war. He knows, for example, there there has never been a war between two countries that harbored McDonald's franchises. I actually think it¹s possible that, however counter-intuitive and risky his methods for getting it, what Dick Cheney really wants is peace. Though much has been made of his connection to Halliburton and the rest of the Ol Bidness, he is not acting in the service of personal greed. He is a man of principle. He is acting in the service of intentions that are to him as noble as mine are to me - and not entirely different. How can this be? Return with me now to the last time I was convinced he was insanely endangering life on earth. This was back in the early 1983 when Dick Cheney was, at least by appearances, a mere congressman. He was also Congressional point man for the deployment of the MX missile system in our mutual home state of Wyoming. (The MX was also called the "Peacemaker," a moniker I took at the time to be the darkest of ironies.) The MX was, and indeed still is, a Very Scary Thing. A single MX missile could hit each of 10 different targets, hundreds of miles apart, with about 600 kilotons of explosive force. For purposes of comparison, Hiroshima was flattened by a 17 kiloton nuclear blast. Thus, each of the MX¹s warheads could glaze over an area 35 times larger than the original Ground Zero. Furthermore, 100 MX missiles were to lie beneath the Wyoming plains, Doomsday on the Range. Any one of the 6000 MX warheads would probably incinerate just about every living thing in Moscow. But Cheney's plan - cooked up with Brent Scowcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and other familiar suspects - was not about targeting cities, as had been the accepted practice of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The MX was to be aimed instead at the other side's missile emplacements. The problem with this "counter-force strategy," as it was called, was that it was essentially a first-strike policy. The MX was to be placed in highly vulnerable Minuteman silos. In the event of a Soviet first strike, all of the Peacemakers would have been easily wiped out. Thus, they were either to be launched preemptively or they were set to "launch on warning." The MX was to be either an offensive weapon or the automated hair-trigger was to be pulled on all hundred of them within a very few minutes after the first Soviet missile broke our radar horizon. In either case, the logic behind it appeared to call for fighting and winning a nuclear war. Meanwhile, President Reagan was bellowing about "the Evil Empire" and issuing many statements that seemed to consider Armageddon a plausible option. I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill during the winter of O81-O82. I lobbied over a hundred Congressmen and Senators against a policy that seemed to me the craziest thing that human beings had ever proposed. The only member of Congress who knew more about it than I did was Dick Cheney. Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about "circular errors probable" and "MIRV decoys" and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, "I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I¹ve ever seen up here." At that point, I agreed with her. What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over. As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision of implacable, irrational, lethality that the Soviet leaders would decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation. It worked. While I think that rock on' roll and the systemic failures of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism as did Dick's mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didn't look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and Reagan's terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging psychological rather than nuclear warfare. I¹m starting to wonder if we aren't watching something like the same strategy again. In other words, it¹s possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing. This time, instead of trying to terrify the Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I'm right about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any more than the MX missile did. First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that it¹s safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops. Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words, they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed with either. By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald¹s and the Home Shopping Network, all "news" will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac. If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I'd been in charge back in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes. Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method. Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas. We'll probably know which it¹s going to be sometime in the next fortnight. By then, I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart of darkness and closer to the heart itself. 1:10:56 PM    comment [] As part of our ongoing war coverage, we need to link to this picture of the anti-war demonstration -- in Antarctica. Way too cool for words. (via the eschaton weblog) 11:50:01 AM    comment [] Political Humor for the Huddled Masses The Dept of Homeland Security explains the practicalities of emergency preparedness. This blogger will kindly explain the current political situation to you. All involved -- and you, if you click on the link -- will no doubt end up on a list of potential troublemakers. Sign me up and send me the valuable bonus prize for early registration. 11:40:41 AM    comment [] World Wide Weird and Wacky News, part 462: Fun with Uteri A Kentucky doctor is being sued by his historectomy patients, on whose uteri he etched the initials of his alma mater in the course of the surgeries. Thanks and a tip of the cervical cap to boing boing. 11:15:02 AM    comment [] Undeclared Wars (Thomas Sowell) It is a painful reminder of human folly, irresponsibility, and exhibitionism that millions of "anti-war" demonstrators have somehow convinced themselves that they have some special aversion to war. No sane human being wants war. There would be cheers throughout the White House if Saddam Hussein decided to pack his bags and go into retirement somewhere. The real question is: What are the alternatives at this point? The alternative proposed by France is precisely the alternative that led France into disaster and humiliation in World War II. France "gave peace a chance," both before and after that conflict began. In violation of her mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia, France threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves at the Munich conference in 1938, by agreeing to Hitler's demand that the western portion of that country be turned over to him, without a shot being fired. Even after formally being at war a year later, France's military inactivity for more than six months led people to speak of "the phony war." During that time, Hitler's main military forces were on the eastern front, invading Poland, and France had overwhelming military superiority on its border with Germany. But France just waited. In May 1940, the wait was over. The main body of Hitler's troops were now on the western front. When they attacked, France surrendered to the Nazis after just six weeks of fighting. France, of all nations, should understand that waiting can have a very high cost. That cost would have been even higher if not for France's liberation four years later by Allied troops landing at Normandy, where thousands of young Americans remain buried under a sea of crosses to this day. "Anti-war" demonstrators act as if we have a choice whether or not to be at war. We were already at war before September 11, 2001, which served to shock many of us into an awareness of that fact. International terrorists had already declared war on us. The countries that sheltered them and aided them could hide behind the fact that they had not declared war on the United States. They were fighting an undeclared war, using others as their hit men. When Bill Clinton was president, he fought a "phony war," doing just enough to keep the media satisfied and the issue swept under the rug, but not enough to let the countries who were sponsoring terrorists get the message that we were serious. President Bush has changed that with his invasion of Afghanistan, one of the centers of international terrorism. We haven't started a war. We have just recognized the war that others started, instead of burying our heads in the sand, as the "anti-war" demonstrators would like us to do.  Make no mistake about it, war is dangerous, regardless of who starts it. There may be body bags, not only overseas but also here in America. And you or I could be in those bags. The truly catastrophic possibility is that North Korea could use their nuclear weapons themselves or they could fight an undeclared nuclear war by turning some of those missiles over to international terrorists. We can only hope that our leaders, who have far more information than we do, are dealing with this threat with cool heads, stout hearts, and strong nerves. As for Iraq, should we let U.N. inspectors keep trying to find a needle in a haystack? Iraq is larger than Japan, nearly 50 percent larger than Italy and about 80 percent larger than Great Britain. And that doesn't count the places where it can hide its weapons outside Iraq, including on its own ships. If we learn nothing else from this episode, it should be that we cannot allow the defense of American lives to be held hostage by the United Nations -- which has already given Saddam Hussein a final warning, and now wants to give him another final warning. And, if he doesn't heed that, they will threaten him with yet another warning. If wars could be prevented by waiting and hoping, World War II would never have happened. Every mistaken step in appeasement was cheered by crowds and every attempt to build military defenses was denounced by them. If crowds are to be our guide, we are truly headed for ruin. (townhall.com via the Interesting People mailing list) 11:03:54 AM    comment []

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