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.
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?”
CBS’s fake National Guard memos
CBS ran a 60 Minutes documentary about Dubya’s dodgy National Guard service records. The programme was based on some memos which turned out to be forgeries. So much is public knowledge. What is less well known is the role that Bloggers (mainly from the Conservative end of the political spectrum) played in exposing the forgeries. Here’s a fascinating analysis by Jonathan Last. He concludes:
“The questions about the authenticity of the 60 Minutes documents are settled. The evening of September 15, Dan Rather cluelessly told the Washington Post’s indefatigable media reporter Howard Kurtz, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.” Rather was a week late; Free Republic’s Buckhead had scooped him. And dozens of bloggers, whether in pajamas or three-piece suits, had subsequently filled in many of the details. (CBS could still break one big story–who gave them the forged memos?–but has so far hidden behind an invocation of “longstanding journalistic ethics” governing “confidential sources.” So forgers are now sources?) Bloggers, and Internet-savvy writers more generally, have now proven that they can ferret out journalistic malpractice and expose the guilty parties.
Part of what makes bloggers well-suited for the role of fact-checking is that there are so many of them. With millions of people blogging and reading blogs, you’re bound to find a handful of real experts on any given topic, and these experts can coalesce quite easily. When National Review Online’s blogger Jim Geraghty asked readers about James J. Pierce, a new document expert CBS trotted out on September 15, he was deluged with responses. Within an hour, Geraghty had been furnished with a link to a website showing the sort of low-level expert witness business Pierce usually does. As Little Green Footballs’s Charles Johnson noted, “It’s sort of an open-source intelligence gathering network that draws on expertise from around the world.”
This critical mass creates a buzzing marketplace of ideas. To be fair, many of these ideas are bogus, but they are also rapidly exposed as such, sometimes in mere seconds. For example, an exuberant commenter will note that one of CBS’s memos carries a Saturday date; another, dripping with condescension, will remind the first that Guard members are called “weekend warriors” for a reason–they drill (and keep office hours) on Saturdays. A number of the specific criticisms of the CBS documents on blogs were overstated, too categorical, or simply wrong. These provided aha! moments for CBS and its blogging partisans, but they were shot down just as quickly by commenters on the blogs criticizing CBS. It is not true, for instance, that typewriters couldn’t do superscripts, as some CBS critics too triumphantly generalized. It is true that typewriters couldn’t produce the particular superscripts seen in the memos, and that these same superscripts are automatically produced by Microsoft Word.
As a recent piece in Investor’s Business Daily noted, “In the same way the market sifts and analyzes information stocks better than any individual investor or institution ever could, the blogosphere weeds out the chaff.” Thus, a lone helpful comment at FreeRepublic.com gets quickly elevated into the spotlight, while the multitude of cranky grumblings disappear down the memory hole.
Aside from technological advantages, there seems to be an ideological divide at work, too. The political blog world is arguably more conservative than liberal, though there is a sizable contingent of liberal blogs. But these liberal blogs function more like the old media than do their conservative Internet brethren. While blogs such as Power Line and Little Green Footballs and Instapundit were chasing the CBS story, interviewing experts, posting material as they found it–whether or not it supported the case against CBS–many of the liberal blogs went into entrenched-partisan mode.”