Blogs — a video history

Chuck Olsen has made a nice QuickTime movie about blogging as a venerable genre. It’s 12MB but worth it.

What people are reading in the New York Times

Here’s the list of the most-read articles over the last two weeks:

1. Portrait of George Bush in ’72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time By SARA RIMER, Published Sept. 20

2. Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain By KEVIN FLYNN and JIM DWYER, Published Sept. 10

3. Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and RALPH BLUMENTHAL, Published Sept. 9

4. Op-Ed: Cheney Spits Toads By MAUREEN DOWD, Published Sept. 9

5. U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq’s Future By DOUGLAS JEHL, Published Sept. 16

6. Cracking Under the Pressure? It’s Just the Opposite, for Some By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, Published Sept. 10

7. Cheney Warns of Terror Risk if Kerry Wins By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID M. HALBFINGER, Published Sept. 8

8. This Time Bill O’Reilly Got It Right By FRANK RICH, Published Sept. 19

9. Op-Ed: Pre-emptive Paranoia By MAUREEN DOWD, Published Sept. 16

10. Op-Ed: Missing in Action By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Published Sept. 8

Interesting that Maureen Dowd figures twice. She’s quite a dame. Here she is on Cheney:

“It’s like that fairy tale where vipers and toads jump out of the mouth of the accursed mean little girl when she tries to speak. Every time Mr. Cheney opens his mouth, vermin leap out.

The vice president and president did not even mention Osama at the convention because of the inconvenient fact that the fiend is still out there, plotting. Yet they denigrate Mr. Kerry as too weak to battle Osama, and treat him as a greater threat.

Mr. Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn’t protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn’t protect us from the real 9/11. Think of what brass-knuckled Republicans could have made of a 9/11 tape of an uncertain Democratic president giving a shaky statement that looked like a hostage tape and flying randomly from air base to air base, as the veep ordered that planes be shot down.”

What’s in a PC?

According to John Vidal, writing in the Guardian, a typical 27kg (60lb) desktop computer contains:

Plastics – 6.26kg
Lead – 1.72kg
Silica – 6.8kg
Aluminium – 3.86kg
Iron – 5.58kg
Copper – 1.91kg
Nickel – 0.23kg
Zinc – 0.6kg
Tin – 0.27kg

Also present are trace amounts of manganese, arsenic, mercury, indium, niobium, yttrium, titanium, cobalt, chromium, cadmium, selenium, beryllium, gold, tantalum, vanadium, europium, and silver.

What Google did next

There are persistent rumours of a Google browser in the works. And guess what — last April Google Inc registered the domain gbrowser.com.

National Insecurity

“Cat Stevens Denied Entry to the US”. But that’s only the headline on an even more hilarious story. “A security alert involving the singer who used to be known as Cat Stevens has forced a London-to-Washington flight to be diverted to another US airport. The plane was already in the air when US officials identified that the singer, whose name is now Yusuf Islam, was on one of their “watch lists”. United Airlines Flight 919 was diverted 600 miles (1000km), landing in Maine. After an interview, the singer – who converted to Islam in 1977 – was denied entry into the US. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials said the access was denied “on national security grounds”, without giving any further details.”

I’ve just been looking at my iTunes library to see which of his songs would be most appropriate background for this little saga. ‘Miles from Nowhere’? ‘On the Road to Find Out’? Or ‘Where do the Children Play?’

Later: Quentin suggests ‘Wild World’ and ‘Peace Train’!

Bloggers by night

A shot snatched at the O’Reilly FOOcamp in Enschede in August. The hotel foyer had comfortable armchairs and a wireless network, and so tended to attract people at the end of the day who wanted to catch up on email, or update their blogs. It also had a reflective ceiling which gave the image something of the tone of a Rembrandt painting.

The rise and fall of the fax machine

I loathe fax machines, but the history of the technology is very instructive. For one thing, it’s very ancient — the underlying concept was patented 150 years ago by Alexander Bain; the reason it took over 100 years to become a mainstream technology has a little to do with technology but much more to do with politics (telephone networks tended to be owned by postal authorities until quite recently and it took deregulation and privatisation to loosen their grip on what went over the wires). I often cite this to engineering students, who tend to assume that technology is what determines what happens. But fax was an interim technology which was rapidly overtaken and outgunned by email. There’s an interesting Economist piece about its prospects.

How Google works

The Economist has the best non-technical explanation I’ve seen. Even includes a link to Larry Page’s 1998 presentation of the ideas at a Berkeley seminar.

Guess what? Attacks on Windows-based computers are increasing

My, my. Here’s John Markoff in the NYT:”A survey of Internet vulnerabilities to be released Monday shows a sharp jump in attacks on Windows-based personal computers during the first six months of 2004, along with a marked increase in commercially motivated threats.

The Internet Security Threat Report says that from Jan. 1 to June 30 there were at least 1,237 newly discovered software vulnerabilities, or flaws that could compromise security. That translates into an average of 48 new vulnerabilities a week.”

The survey warns about a significant increase in the number of robot, networks — i.e. arrays of personal computers that have been compromised to inject large volumes of viruses, worms, spyware or spam into the Internet. Over the first six months, the number of monitored bot networks rose to more than 30,000, from fewer than 2,000.

This represents the expansion of a black market economy in which creators of bot networks sell access to them to commercial spammers and others who wish to send information anonymously. Or, to put it another way, malware writing has moved from a hobby to a serious business — a point we made in our online course on the subject.

Iraq — the election

No, not the showcase poll still scheduled for January 2005. I mean the one in November in the US. There are clear signs emerging of a strategy to refrain from heavy-handed military actions until after the election. Then the US will go for broke to ‘pacify’ or neutralise the parts of the country currently beyond their control. You can imagine what this will be like. Seymour Hersh was on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. This is what he said:

“The real issue is what are we going to do in Iraq. Let’s assume Bush is going to be re-elected. We’re going to keep on bombing, and we’re going to escalate. We’re going to throw more shells, more artillery, more force at that country. The old cliche about Vietnam — that we had to destroy the country in order to save it. There’s no exit plan in America. There’s no noble plan. All that talk about outside influences and outside agitators. Most of the opposition comes from an insurgency fed by the Shia and tribal forces that weren’t given the democracy they asked for, that they were promised. We’re going to bomb and bomb and bomb — that’s our solution. And it’s crazy.”

Yep.