Edward Said

There’s a lovely tribute by Steven Johnson on his Blog.

“I think it’s worth saying something here that I’ve said about Said for more than ten years now: on his best days, he was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met in my life — handsome, stylish, impossibly articulate, and surprisingly willing to take a joke at his own expense. (I used to tease him about his being indirectly responsible for unleashing [Judith] Butler on the world.) I remember vividly one early spring afternoon, sitting through a seminar he was teaching on public intellectuals, in a room overlooking the Columbia campus and the sun setting over Riverside Park, and thinking to myself: there’s literally nowhere else I’d rather be right now. I’m sure there are thousands of his students out there sifting through similar memories today.”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be remembered like that.

Careless talk costs jobs — especially if you’re rude about Microsoft

Here’s the story. A group of security experts produces a paper (aimed partly at a US Congressional audience) which argues that overreliance on Microsoft Windows threatens the security of the U.S. economy and critical infrastructure. Nothing unusual in that, you may say: it’s only stating the obvious — especially given that, although the study was independently financed and researched, it was distributed by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a Washington-based trade association largely made up of Microsoft’s rivals.

But then something interesting (though not entirely surprising) happened. Dan Geer, one of the authors of the report and a longtime computer security researcher, was Chief technical Officer at a Cambridge, Mass. outfit called @Stake which does a lot of business with Microsoft. And guess what? Just before news of the report broke, Dan found that he was no longer employed by @Stake. Apparently he had forgotten to obtain his employers’ approval for the study’s release. Tsk, tsk.

“Participation in and release of the report was not sanctioned by @Stake,” the security and consulting company said. “The values and opinions of the report are not in line with @Stake’s views.”

You bet. A Microsoft spokesman said the software maker had not pressured @Stake to make any decision on Geer’s status. “We had nothing to do with @Stake’s internal personnel decision,” the spokesman said. Of course they didn’t — there was no need to. Just to make sure there would not be any misunderstandings in Redmond, however, @Stake did call Microsoft late Tuesday night (after news of the report’s contents first broke) to say that Geer’s findings did not reflect the company’s opinions.

It’s a bit like a story from the Old Soviet bloc, really. Everyone in the industry knows that the world’s chronic dependence on Microsoft’s buggy, insecure products is one day going to cause catastrophe, yet many people who know about security are scared to speak out because they will be fired if they do so. The most powerful censorship is when people censor themselves.

Here’s the Washington Post report, which includes an account of how CIO magazine declined to distribute the report — just to reinforce the point about self-censorship.

Jimmy Carter on the Patriot Act

‘Carter, speaking Tuesday at the Carter Center in Atlanta, said the Patriot Act, profiling of Muslims and holding suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay run counter to the principles of democracy the United States preaches to the rest of the world. “They have been held in prison without access to their families, or a lawyer, or without knowing the charges against them,” Carter said. “We’ve got hundreds of people, some of them as young as 12, captured in Afghanistan, brought to Guantanomo Bay and kept in cages for what is going on two years.” Carter said it’s difficult for international aid workers to spread the message of human rights to places like Cuba, Africa and the Middle East when the U.S. government doesn’t practice fairness and equality.

“I have never been as concerned for our nation as I am now about the threat to our civil liberties,” Carter said.’

I always had a soft spot for Carter. Now I know why. [Full report of his speech]

Interview transcript

One thing I’ve learned from Dave Winer is that it’s always a good idea to put one’s own transcript of a media interview on the Web, just to make sure that one isn’t, er, misrepresented by Big Media. Not that the nice chap from Ireland’s Sunday Tribune would do such a thing, of course. Still, here’s the transcript:

Q: How did you come to be doing a blog?

A: I’ve been keeping a private online diary on my personal web-server for years (since about 1996 I think) — mainly because I needed a kind of working notebook where I could put notes on stuff I was reading and thinking about. In particular, I was afraid that I’d ‘lose’ or forget important stuff, so I put a search engine on my private online diary and that turned it into a terrific personal resource. But basically it was like a lab notebook. The one thing my private diary didn’t do very well was organised archiving, so in the end I decided to use Radio Userland to do it for me, and at the same time to make the diary public.

Q: I know many people have been blogging for years, but why do you think that blogs have become so ubiquitous in the past 18-24 months?

A: Two main reasons:

1. Software arrived to make it easy for non-techies — Blogger.com, Moveable Type, Userland Radio.

2. 9/11 in the US generated a huge desire for expression and discussion among Web users. Mainstream media were no good for that. And the old Internet newsgroup system was useless because it was too polluted by porn, spam and flaming. So weblogging grew to fill the gap.

Q: What can blogs do that traditional reporting cannot?

A: Offer views that are not mediated through the normal editorial (and therefore ideological) gatekeepers of ‘official’ journalism. But I think too much is made of the distinction between Blogging and journalism. Most Blogging is commentary, not reporting. In some areas (e.g. technically arcane), Bloggers are real subject experts and I would always prefer their judgment to that of amateurish reporters (no matter how well-intentioned or conscientious).

Q: Blogs reflect a wider diversity of opinions and views than traditional reporting and media products do. They also operate under fewer quality and accuracy checks and balances. What is your view of that balance between a multiplicity of voices and an impression of less reliability?

A: I’m not unduly impressed by traditional media standards, nor should you be. I see no evidence of a concern for accuracy in the Sun, Daily/Sunday mail, daily/Sunday Indo, Fox News, etc. When was the last time you noticed an accuracy check in the Sun? And even BBC reporters (so we find from Hutton) don’t keep shorthand notes, or check stories against second independent sources!) Blogs vary in quality and objectivity. But mostly they are commentary of one kind or another, not reporting, so the quality/reliability issue doesn’t arise.

Q: What, in the blogging world, has most impressed you in the last 6 months?

A: The most impressive development is the widespread use of RSS feeds to enable Blogs to link up, and the evolution of software like NetNewsWire which enables Blogging to become more than the sum of its parts. I’m also watching closely the way the Berkman Center at Harvard has taken on Blogging as a way of enriching academic and public discourse. And of course there is Governor Dean’s Campaign, which is making inspired use of the Net — and includes Blogging. See Deanspace.

Q: What, if any, blogging tricks is the mainstream adapting and adopting for its own uses?

A: Mainstream media shows no signs yet of understanding what’s going on. In part that’s because Blogging is way outside the big media paradigm.

Q: Many of the very early WWW sites, back in the mid 1990s, were basically online journals, detailing a person’s life or interests or hobbies. Is there a fundamental difference separating blogs from these early sites?

A: Yes. Those early ‘weblogs’ were really just collections of links to ‘cool new stuff’ appearing on the burgeoning infant Web. Contemporary Blogs are more personalised, less technical and often just introspective.

Q: Why is blogging so important? What role does it now play in the wider social context?

A: It creates a space for public discussion which had been closed up by the dominance and control of Big Media. It re-enables what Jurgen Habermas called the ‘public sphere’. Healthy democracies need such spaces.

Q: What is a bad blog?

A: What’s a bad diary?

Q: What is the Irish blogging scene like? Is it having any real effect on Irish public/political life?

A: Don’t know — the person to ask is Irish Times journalist Karlin Lillington, who has a lovely Blog called techno/culture

Q: Why do you blog?

A: To express ideas that matter to me, and to let a few friends know what I’m thinking about.

Q: Is doing a blog not just a modern form of ego-fuelled vanity publishing?

A: That’s Big Media’s prejudiced view. Partly reflects a contempt for ‘ordinary’ people (i.e. “what could Joe Public possibly have to say about anything?”) and cynicism (“why would anybody write for nothing?”) Misses the point entirely.

Hugo Young

Hugo Young, the wisest political commentator of our times, is dead. Magisterial, lofty (in reality as well as in temperament) and incorruptible, he often expressed what I felt about Thatcher, Major and Blair. But unlike me, he was not choked by moral indignation, so his writing cut through cant and controversy like a scalpel. I had no idea he was dying (from cancer), so it’s nice that I picked up here on the last column he wrote — about how Blair’s decision unquestioningly to support the US constituted an effective surrender of British sovereignty. I always turned first to his column in the Guardian — just as I had turned to him decades ago when he wrote for the Sunday Times. And, like many other liberals, I will miss his voice. He was an example of how good — and how important — journalism can be.

Next Microsoft worm arrives

This evening, a funny message headed “From Microsoft Security Department” arrived in my (Mac!) inbox. It had lots of Microsoft-type graphics, plus helpful text. “This is the latest version of security update, the September 2003 Cumulative Update”, it read, “which resolves all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express… Install now to maintain the security of your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an [sic] malicious user to run executable on your system…”. Etc. etc. At the end, of course, is the executable file that does the damage.

It’s the Swen or Gibe worm. According to the BBC, the worm switches off any anti-virus or firewall software and mails itself to addresses it finds on the victim’s computer. It also installs various files to make sure that it is run every time the computer boots up. “According to e-mail filtering firm, MessageLabs, the first copies originated from Slovakia on 14 September, with some later coming from the Netherlands.”

Two questions: (1) Who would be taken in by this (especially when you see that the actual message source is “grahggimbgmve_ynpekspq@updates_msn.net”? (2) Why can’t the virus writers take the trouble to get their grammar right?

The feebleness of mainstream American media

Paul Krugman is a terrific economist and a great newspaper columnist. His cool, sane perspective on the Bush regime is one of the few bright sparks in the prevailing darkness. Here’s a report on his gig at Harvard the other day:

“Krugman was a riot on Big Media’s docility.  “If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say ‘yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic.’  And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth: Views Differ.’…and would at most report that some Democrats say that it’s round.”  There’s “something deeply dysfunctional,” he observed, with established media facing “something we’ve not seen before, an epidemic of lying about policy.”  Three years of Times columnizing have been “a story of radicalization” for the liberal (but not too liberal) economist who was hired by Howell Raines in 1999 to explain trade policy, globalization and the Internet bubble.   He has become instead the irrepressible child watching the Bush parade, speaking truth to heedless power.”

Blue Screen of Death — the stats

It’s just two years since I stopped using Windows. What do I miss? Viruses, and worms, obviously. But most of all, I haven’t seen a Blue Screen of Death in two years. Instead I have Mac and Linux machines which run without rebooting for weeks, and which never seem to experience the total system failure which is a Windows speciality. In an interesting article, John Dvorak has been doing some calculations based on something Bill Gates said recently about crashes. Quote:

“Gates said that 5 percent of Windows machines crash, on average, twice daily. Put another way, this means that 10 percent of Windows machines crash every day, or any given machine will crash about three times a month. Since Bill is a math junkie, I have to assume this number is real and based on something other than a phone survey…

Now according to StatMarket.com, as of March 2003, Windows XP had 33.41 percent global market share among operating systems. Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and make Windows XP’s share an even 35 percent at this point. How many computers are in use? According to the Computer Industry Almanac, there were 603 million worldwide in 2001, and the growth rate seems to be around 10 to 15 percent per year. Let’s be relatively conservative, and add just under 100 million to get a round number of 700 million PCs. With 10 percent of them crashing daily, we have 70 million crashes every 24 hours. “

Now just try this thought experiment: imagine if Ford released cars with this kind of failure rate. And imagine if we changed our consumer legislation to make Microsoft liable for the instability and insecurity of its software. Now that would have an interesting impact on its share price.

The gist of the problem with Blair and Bush

Terrific column by Hugo Young pointing out that Blair effectively surrendered sovereignty when he decided that the UK should throw in its lot with the US. Quote:

“Intelligence, in other words, has become a flexible friend, a political instrument. Its chief agent, John Scarlett, moreover, has become a crony of No 10 rather than a distant and detached truth-teller. Among the many corruptions this war has brought about, we can therefore say, is the degradation of what was once advertised, and globally agreed, to be a jewel in the Whitehall apparatus.

This happened for a prior reason, which is not new but deserves frequent repetition. The intelligence, culminating in the dossier, had to fit a prior decision. This has been the great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny. He was committed to war months before he said he was. Of course, he wanted it buttered up. He wanted a UN sanction. He fought might and main to push Bush in that direction. But he was prepared to go to war without it.

He needed this skewed intelligence to make the case, and he didn’t really mind what he had to say to get it. He had made his commitment to Bush, stating among other extraordinary things that it was Britain’s national task to prevent the US being isolated. But he was also in thrall to the mystic chords of history. He could not contemplate breaking free of ties and rituals that began with Churchill, and that both Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence – the Foreign Office is somewhat wiser – have cultivated, out of fear and expectation, for decades.”

People in glasshouses…

… shouldn’t throw stones. (Also, they should undress in the dark.) One of the more nauseating aspects of British press coverage of the Hutton Inquiry is the vicious attacks on the BBC delivered daily by the right-wing print media. To describe this sermonising as sanctimonious cant would be to dignify it. But yesterday’s Guardian carried a terrific piece by its editor, Alan Rusbridger, which beautifully pricks the bubble. He’s particularly good on Murdoch’s Times and Conrad’s loony Telegraph.

I expect that nobody will come out of Hutton looking good. But the BBC (though it made some mistakes) looks better than most. The Corporation should, however, now revise its policy of allowing BBC journalists to convert the celebrity they acquire as a result of doing their BBC job into freelance celeb employment. Andrew Gilligan, for example, the BBC reporter at the heart of the inquiry, should not have been allowed to write columns in rabid right-wing newspapers like the Mail on Sunday. Ditto for John Simpson, the former Foreign Editor of the BBC who was forever writing books and columns in reactionary periodicals about his adventures at the licence-fee payer’s expense. Ditto for the sanctimonious Fergal Keane — the nearest thing the media world has to Wackford Squeers. Journalists should never be celebs because that makes them the story.