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.
Iraq: being wise before the event
Listening to the row about the Daily Telegraph‘s leaked Foreign Office pre-invasion paper warning about the lack of post-invasion planning, I was thinking “well, it wasn’t just the Foreign Office”. And then I remembered a wonderful piece James Fallows had written in The Atlantic way back in November 2002. It’s here (but you need to be a subscriber to the print edition to get the full text). The standfirst says it all, though. It reads:
“Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq’s borders — and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?”