The china shop rule

Notice often seen in shops selling delicate porcelain: “If you break it, you own it”. Does this apply to Iraq? Yes and no. ‘Yes’ because the success of the invasion led to a vacuum which was predictable, could have been planned-for — and wasn’t. ‘No’ in the sense that Iraq was broken long ago, by Saddam and his regime. What makes the current unfolding disaster so depressing is that no matter what one thought about the original decision to go to war, the US and Britain cannot quit now. Retrospective moral outrage is no longer a credible position. And that’s very uncomfortable for everyone.

What’s really important about Google

In the end, it isn’t the search engine — important though that is. The real significance of Google is that its techies have built the most powerful computing cluster ever created, and this will in due course enable the company to provide web services that nobody else can match. So what investors will be buying into is not just revenue streams from search-related advertising (lucrative though those may be), but the strategic potential of technology that nobody else — not even the DoD — possesses.

Big Music gets it wrong — again!

Sony, which is normally very good at creating attractive consumer products, has launched its own online music store. And guess what? It’s a turkey — obsessed with control-freakery, using a proprietary format that only plays on Sony hardware, etc. See the Washington Post review. In a nutshell: “This service is an embarrassment to the company that gave the world the Walkman.”

So who’s responsible for the torture and abuse in Iraq?

I watched Donald Rumsfeld’s Congressional performance and wondered where the buck really stops for the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Rumsfeld and Bush express horror about how the abuses are profoundly un-American. There’s a lot of talk about “bad apples”, etc. But two things published on the Net make one wonder.

The first is a remarkable New York Times account of the circumstances under which untrained reservists came to be in charge of a teeming prisoner population under unspeakable conditions. Why is this so revealing? Well, it vividly shows the extent to which Rumsfeld & Co did absolutely no planning for dealing with Iraq after the invasion and the defeat of Saddam’s regime.

As to the “bad apples” argument, well it doesn’t wash either. It’s a terrible truth about human beings that whenever some people have absolute power over other human beings, (whether in concentration camps, children’s homes, old people’s care centres, prisons) some of them behave badly, and some do truly terrible things. So any civilised country takes great pains to ensure that this kind of unaccountable power is exercised as little as possible by its forces. No pains were taken by Rumsfeld & Co.

The second salutary item on the Net is a sequence taken from the video-recording system of a US Apache helicopter operating in Iraq. If you have a strong stomach, you can find the MPEG here. If you don’t want to watch it, the gist is this: it’s night-time, so all the action is shot through night-vision lenses; there are three Iraqis on the ground, near a truck which may contain a Stinger anti-aircraft missile; as the chopper approaches, the Iraqis run in various directions. One by one they are picked off with the precision of a video game. The last survivor chooses to hide under the truck. The gunner fires at the truck, and vaporises it — and presumeably the Iraqi. But then a figure appears, on the ground, crawling away from the wreckage. The gunner is ordered to kill him. And he does — poof!

What’s interesting about this is not so much the growing similarity between real and virtual warfare, but the way overwhelming force is used to kill a wounded soldier, who was clearly beyond posing a threat to the helicopter. And what this says about the mindset of US forces in Iraq.

Through a glass brightly

Saw this hanging in the porch of a friend’s house yesterday.

Things to bear in mind when giving Commencement Addresses

One of the dubious pleasures of middle age is that your Alma Mater may decide you’re now sufficiently old/prominent/rich (delete as appropriate) to be invited back to give an Address on Graduation Day. I know — it’s happened to me. The temptation to give a pompous sermon to a captive audience is difficult to resist. (I’m not sure I succeeded.) In the meantime, here are some useful guidelines.

“Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.

The statement ‘You sound like a broken record’ means nothing to them.

They do not have a clue how to use a typewriter.

They’ve never heard, ‘Where’s the beef?’

Paul Newman has always made salad dressing.

Michael Jackson has always been white.”

My favourite Commencement Address is still Woody Allen’s. It begins:

“Today we are at a crossroads. One road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we choose wisely.”

Memo to CIOs: remember to count cost of security patches and repairing malware damage when computing TCO of Windows-based systems

One plank in the Microsoft hymn-sheet against Open Source software is that the ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ (TCO) is more important than the initial purchase price. The argument is that companies should not be distracted by the low initial cost of free software, but should add in the costs of conversion, support, etc. So indeed they should. But one thing that is consistently ignored in computing the TCO of a Microsoft system is the cost of coping with the security vulnerabilities of the software. All of which makes an item from Good Morning Silicon valley about Gartner Research’s views on Microsoft (in)security very interesting indeed:

“It’s never been cheap to run a Windows shop. Host intrusion detection. Scalable antivirus protection. Patch management. All these things are costly, especially given the amount of malware that finds its way into the wild these days. So it’s entirely likely that administrators around the world will respond to Gartner’s announcement that vulnerabilities in Windows raise the total cost of using the OS with a collective ‘no —-, Sherlock.’ But corporate types, who after all make up much of Gartner’s core audience, may sit up and take notice. And if we’re lucky, they might realize that turning on Windows’ automatic update feature doesn’t make you immune to worms like Sasser and that one can rarely budget too much for additional security technology….”.

The relevant quote from the Gartner source reads…:

“Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday.

Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner, recommended that enterprises boost spending on patch management and intrusion prevention software to keep ahead of worms, which are appearing ever sooner after vulnerabilities in Windows are disclosed.

‘This is part of the carrying cost of using Windows,’ said Nicolett. ‘The cost of a Windows environment has gone up because enterprises have to install security patches very rapidly, deal with outages caused by secondary problems with these patches, and deploy additional layers of security technology.’

Although he placed some caveats on his numbers, Nicolett said that informal surveys with Gartner clients indicate that simply moving from a no rapid patch deployment capability to an ongoing process that can respond quickly to vulnerabilities raises the cost of using business by about 15 percent.

Nicolett’s advice stemmed from the recent outbreak of the Sasser worm, which began striking Windows systems last Friday and has infected a large number of machines world-wide, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to well into the millions.”

Graphic beauty

I love Danny Gregory’s Blog, and envy him his talent. This is a beautiful image from an ingenious group project.

“Take a page, divide it into thirty squares, then do a drawing each day in one of the squares. After a month, it will be filled with a rich quilt of art. No matter how lame any one of the drawings is, the overall result will be beautiful. As the month ended, some of the participants have been uploading their work. It’s very interesting and inspired me.” Me too. I’m going to try this with thumbnail photographs.

iPod mania

Never ceases to amaze me. iPod Lounge has been encouraging people to send in photographs of their iPods. Some, like this, are deliciously wacky.

Intrinsic vulnerability of Linux?

Interesting paper by Dan O’Dowd arguing that objections to his assertion that Linux is unsafe for defense systems were based on (i) “dangerous misconceptions that it is equally easy for foreign intelligence agents or terrorists to infiltrate malicious code into any operating system” and (ii) “that the many eyes looking at the Linux source code will find any malicious code infiltrated into Linux”. In part, O’Dowd relies on the fact that UNIX co-author Ken Thompson showed many years ago that an open source process couldn’t find clever subversions, no matter how many people of whatever competence looked at the source code. O’Dowd is also claiming that the embedded Linux system sold by his company is not vulnerable in this way. He may be right (I hope he is), but embedded systems are of limited applicability.