Custer’s Last (profitable) stand

Following on the discovery of the missing billions in ‘reconstruction’ funds for Iraq, here’s the latest instalment of the farce, as reported by the NYT:

“Managers of a security firm that won large contracts in Iraq warned their bosses in February of what they called a pattern of fraudulent billing practices, internal company memorandums suggest.

The memorandums, written primarily by two company managers, charged that the security firm, Custer Battles, repeatedly billed the occupation authorities for nonexistent services or at grossly inflated prices.

The company, which quickly grew to garner security contracts worth $100 million in little more than a year, denies the charges. It argues that the managers confused sincere attempts to document jobs done in a hurry, in a war zone, with deliberate deception and that the company provided all contracted services for the agreed-upon price.

The memos and a lawsuit filed by former employees cite several specific instances, including billing the Coalition Provisional Authority $157,000 for a helicopter pad that in fact cost $95,000, and repainting forklifts abandoned by Baghdad Airways and then charging the authority thousands of dollars a month, claiming that the forklifts were leased.

One of the managers was later fired by the company and is part of a lawsuit charging Custer Battles with defrauding the federal government of tens of millions of dollars. The other manager, who has since been appointed to a high-level position with the company, recently declared that after further research, he believed that any questionable practices were the fault of a few individuals and had not been condoned by the owners.

On Sept. 30, the Pentagon, concerned by the allegations raised by the employees, barred Custer Battles from receiving further military contracts, and it has withheld at least $10 million in payments to the company. The company is appealing the ban.”

Just fancy that!

This week’s Economist has an engaging little piece about the travails of Sainsbury, the failing supermarket chain, which is suffering from the calamitous effects of the reign of its ousted Chief Exec, the portly Sir Peter Davis.

One of his blunders — according to the Economist — was “a fancy new IT system run by Accenture, a business-services firm. But that didn’t work either: Mr King [Sainsbury’s new Chief Exec] said that the new computer system had failed to deliver, and that the contract with Accenture would be re-negotiated. Being associated with such a high-profile failure might be expected to damage one’s reputation. Certainly Sir Peter’s looks tarnished. Happily, this fate seems to have escaped Ian Watmore, the man responsible for running Accenture’s IT consultancy business at the time. He has just been appointed to head up the e-Government unit in Whitehall, where he will oversee the government’s notoriously calamitous IT projects.”

Verily, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Broken Windows in Las Vegas

Link.

The Power of Nightmares

I’ve just watched a terrific film on BBC2 by Adam Curtis on the origins of Al Qaeda and the US Neocon movement. Two depressing sides of the same coin: both comprised of folks who know (with a fanatical certainty that is immune to rationality) what is the case. Here’s an excerpt from the BBC blurb:

“At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended. Together they created today’s nightmare vision of an organised terror network. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

The rise of the Politics of Fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neoconservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neoconservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to ‘see the truth’.”

The Draft issue

On September 26 I wrote about the strange silence surrounding the legislation currently before the US Congress enabling universal conscription (including women). Now it’s finally begun to surface in the US presidential campaign. Here’s an insightful posting by Joshua Micah Marshall on the subject:

“My point, as I’ve said previously, is not that there will necessarily be a draft or that the Bush administration is planning one or wants one. The point is that the administraiton has pursued a mix of policies that make it a very real possibility — not because the administration wants a draft, but because they may drive the country into a position where we have no choice.

Take the president’s comment to the Associated Press. We have the manpower to deal with another major theater conflict in North Korea or Iran? Really? The US military is under great strain now with current deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. How can we possibly have sufficient manpower to handle an all-out war with North Korea and its aftermath, without pushing the all-volunteer military past its breaking point?

Through a mix of conscious policy and mismanagement, the White House has gotten us to the point where another major conflict would be quite difficult to sustain for a number of reasons. The point of a debate about a potential draft is to weigh the consequences of those policies and that record of mismanagement.

By making categorical statements that are false on their face — i.e., there will never be a draft — the White House is trying to avoid or cut short that debate. And that makes sense because when you have the debate on its merits, a draft does seem like a real possibility.”

I want one of those

It’s called TV-B-Gone and it’s a universal remote controls that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like the key-fob one has for a car, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first. Just think — every time you go into a bar or a cafe or an airport lounge with some daft TV show blaring in the corner, you can unobtrusively zap it. Mmmm…..

That bulge in Dubya’s suit…

… is an iPod!

Link.

The most bizarre campaign website so far

Some of Dubya’s relatives have put together the site Bush Relatives for Kerry with the message “Don’t vote for our cousin”. Why? “Because blood is thinner than oil”.

The US e-Election

As the US prepares to go to the polls to decide what everyone agrees is the most important election since FDR was voted in, lots of key states will be using Diebold voting machines. Everybody I know in the security business thinks this is bad news, but most non-techies probably feel unqualified to express an opinion. If so, they might consider a beautifully clear account by Ed Felten, who knows this stuff backwards. Here’s his analysis of one vulnerability in the system:

“One of the problems in voting system design is making sure that each voter who signs in is allowed to vote only once. In the Diebold AccuVote-TS system, this is done using smartcards. (Smartcards are the size and shape of credit cards, but they have tiny computers inside.) After signing in, a voter would be given a smartcard — the “voter card” — that had been activated by a poll worker. The voter would slide the voter card into a voting machine. The voting machine would let the voter cast one vote, and would then cause the voter card to deactivate itself so that the voter couldn’t vote again. The voter would return the deactivated voter card after leaving the voting booth.

This sounds like a decent plan, but Diebold botched the design of the protocol that the voting terminal used to talk to the voter card. The protocol involved a series of six messages, as follows:

terminal to card: “My password is [8 byte value]”
card to terminal: “Okay”
terminal to card: “Are you a valid card?”
card to terminal: “Yes.”
terminal to card: “Please deactivate yourself.”
card to terminal: “Okay.”

Can you spot the problem here? (Hint: anybody can make their own smartcard that sends whatever messages they like.)

As most of you probably noticed — and Diebold’s engineers apparently did not — the smartcard doesn’t actually do anything surprising in this protocol. Anybody can make a smartcard that sends the three messages “Okay; Yes; Okay” and use it to cast an extra vote. (Do-it-yourself smartcard kits cost less than $50.)

Indeed, anybody can make a smartcard that sends the three-message sequence “Okay; Yes; Okay” over and over, and can thereby vote as many times as desired, at least until a poll worker asks why the voter is spending so long in the booth.

One problem with the Diebold protocol is that rather than asking the card to prove that it is valid, the terminal simply asks the card whether it is valid, and accepts whatever answer the card gives. If a man calls you on the phone and says he is me, you can’t just ask him “Are you really Ed Felten?” and accept the answer at face value. But that’s the equivalent of what Diebold is doing here.

This system was apparently used in a real election in Georgia in 2002. Yikes.”

Did Bill Gates sucker Gary Kildall? Or did Kildall just blow it? Version 102a

Wherever techies gather to reminisce, one of the most rehashed myths of the history of the PC industry is whether Microsoft’s MS-DOS was a rip-off of Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system. The story is told for the first time from Kildall’s perspective in Harry Evans’s coffee-table history book, They Made America — just out from Little, Brown — so stand by for more arguments. In the meantime, Business Week has a really excellent exegesis of the saga.

My own guess is that (a) Kildall blew it, (b) Gates did shaft him and (c) QDOS (the precursor of MS-DOS) did infringe Kildall’s copyright. But, as Business Week shrewdly observes, Kildall would not have been the guy to build an industry. He lacked Gates’s killer instinct.