Conor Gearty on Hutton

My friend Conor Gearty has a terrific 5000-word piece in the London Review of Books on the Hutton report. Excerpt:

“On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control by Number 10 unnecessary, constructing a document that pleased his political masters, and which required some further tinkering rather than a radical overhaul. The replacement of ‘could’ with ‘capable of being used’ and other concessions of this sort made at Campbell’s request have credibly underpinned the allegation of ‘sexing up’. But the whole document was in its conception, structure and language a ‘sexing up’ of intelligence: all Campbell was alleged to have been doing was ‘sexing up’ the already ‘sexed up’, like offering Viagra to a sex maniac. Right from the start, the intelligence community (a spooky term in every sense) should have had nothing to do with the idea of a dossier intended for public consumption. Instead they were drawn into the Campbell world of spinnery and sleight-of-hand, where even they – arch-spinners and sleighters-of-hand – couldn’t cope.”

Pamela Jones on IP mania

Interesting Wired interview with Pamela Jones, founder of Groklaw, about the Linux/SCO row and other matters. Quote:”With time I expect that as tech savvy-ness increases in the judiciary, and it will, someone will notice that software is just math, creativity and math, and patenting 1 + 1 = 2 will eventually set us up to where only the owners of that and similar patents can write software. Meanwhile the rest of the world will move ahead in development, while the United States is stuck in the mud because no one can write 1 + 1 = 2 without crossing somebody’s palm with silver.”

(Some) Windows code escapes into the wild

According to a BBC report, some of the source code for Windows 2000 and NT has been leaked onto the Net. Wonder how it happened — and whether it’s a byproduct of Microsoft’s “shared-source” initiative.

More…From CNET: “The 203MB file contains code from Microsoft’s enterprise operating system, but the code was clearly incomplete, said Dragos Ruiu, a security consultant and the organizer of the CanSecWest security conference, who has examined the file listing.

“It was on the peer-to-peer networks and IRC (Internet relay chat) today,” Ruiu said. “Everybody has got it; it’s widespread now.”

The 203MB file expands to just under 660MB, he said, noting that the final code size almost perfectly matches the capacity of a typical CD-ROM. The entire source code, he said, is believed to be about 40GB, meaning that the file circulating Thursday is only a fraction of the full code base.

“It looks real,” he said. “You can’t build Windows, however. It’s just a bunch of chunks of the operating system.”