Groundhog… er, Creepy-Crawlie Day
By strange coincidence, two of Britain’s most prominent creepy-crawlies have today been given licence to crawl out from under their stones. Peter Mandelson, the disgraced former Cabinet minister is all over the media saying the things about the Kelly affair that Downing Street cannot utter at present. And Jeffrey Archer, the so-called ‘writer’, has been released from gaol. Will nobody save us from these pests?
Governor Dean, the Internet and the forthcoming presidential election
Something very interesting is going on in the US, as yet apparently unnoticed by the mainstream media. Vermont Governor Howard Dean, a sane and decent human being — a GP in fact — is running for president. He has little money, no big backers and the Democratic Party regards him as a no-hoper pinko leftie. In conventional American political wisdom he is a Dead Duck.
And yet Governor Dean is making astonishing progress. For example, everywhere he goes he is greeted by thousands of people — the kind of numbers that in the old days would have required a massive organisation and lots of forward scouts. How is this possible? Answer: because Howard Dean is making really shrewd use of the Net. For example, he’s using Meetup.com to enable supporters to find one another and get together. He’s using the web to raise funds — very effectively. Larry Lessig gave him a guest slot last week on his Weblog. And the Dean campaign even has its own weblog. The strangest thing about Howard Dean is that he is the only major US politician who seems connected to external reality — at least to European ears. Most of the others seem to be inhabiting a parallel universe.
This is all lost, of course, on the mainstream media, locked as they are in their Washington/Republican mindwarp. Insofar as they think of Dean at all, they think of him as the continuation of George McGovern by other means — and everyone knows what happened to George. They cannot imagine an unknown candidate from a minor state actually making it into the big time. And no liberal has ever made it to the White House. As the evidence of Bush’s dishonesty, mendacity and incompetence seeps out, however, they may discover that the public rather likes Governor Dean. Just as they once found they rather liked a hick peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.
On this day…
… in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I vividly remember watching the video footage in a crowded, hushed room in the University Centre (aka the GradPad).
An innocent victim of political spite
Guardian photograph.
David Kelly, the scientist traumatised by being dragged into a political catfight by the Blair government’s spin doctors, has killed himself. Hugo Young, writing in the Guardian, says it all:
” The 45-minute detail was hyped by Tony Blair into the essence of the foulest charge against his sainted integrity, and therefore had to be squashed by every means. The smell that’s left behind is even more odious: that of a state – executive and parliament combined – willing to abandon all sense of proportion to score political points against its critics.”
This is the end of the road for some of us. I voted for Blair in 1997 because I thought the world needed to be shot of the corrupt, sleazy, exhausted Tory regime. Since then I’ve watched with dismay as the Blair regime metamorphosed into arrogant, pious control freaks at home and sychophantic bag carriers for the US abroad. Their treatment of Dr. Kelly means that I will never vote Labour again. Wonder how many others feel like this today? May this innocent victim of political hypocrisy rest in peace.
e-Government, Bush style
“Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.
The White House says the new e-mail system, at www.whitehouse .gov/webmail, is an effort to be more responsive to the public and offer the administration “real time” access to citizen comments.
Completing a message to the president also requires choosing a subject from the provided list, then entering a full name, organization, address and e-mail address. Once the message is sent, the writer must wait for an automated response to the e-mail address listed, asking whether the addressee intended to send the message. The message is delivered to the White House only after the person using that e-mail address confirms it.” [More. (NYT)]
Linux reaches Afghanistan
BBC story.”Afghanistan is being rebuilt with the help of the Linux operating system.
The United Nations is training civil servants in the intricacies of the software to help them get government computer systems up and running.
The first civil servants to complete their training in Linux went back to work earlier this month.
The UN hopes that training government workers to use Linux will help the country close the technology gap that separates it from many other countries…”
AOL is going to offer Blogging to its subscribers
Washington Post story. Apparently they’re going to call them ‘AOL Journals’ because AOLers are unsure about ‘Blogs’. Stand by for a massive expansion of the Blogosphere. I suppose it’ll be a good thing overall — though when I think of what AOL did to the News Group culture (it brought the Homer Simpsons of this world onto the Net), I wonder…
Windows Server 2003 is like “Swiss cheese”
That would be Emmentaler, I suppose.
Here’s the CBC News story:
“The software was the first product sold under the “Trustworthy Computing” intitiative launched last year by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. At the time, it was hailed as a “breakthrough in terms of built-in security and reliability.”
Now comes the really funny bit…
“The announcement comes just after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded a multi-million dollar contract for Microsoft to supply software for the agency’s new computers.
“This is one of the worst Windows vulnerabilities ever,” said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security in California. Maiffret warns customers that “until they have this patch installed, it will be Swiss cheese [~] anybody can walk in and out of their servers.”
Microsoft spent hundreds of millions on security improvements but Polish researchers managed to bypass the additional protections three months after the software went on sale in April. ”
Microsoft’s Munich sweeteners
There’s a riveting report on USA Today of the lengths to which Microsoft went to prevent the city of Munich defecting to Linux. Some details:
“Ballmer visited Mayor Christian Ude to assure him Microsoft would do what it takes to keep the city’s business. Documents obtained by USA TODAY show Microsoft subsequently lowered its pricing to $31.9 million and then to $23.7 million — an overall 35% price cut. The discounts were for naught.
On May 28, the city council approved a more expensive proposal — $35.7 million — from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM, a big Linux backer.”
Note: the decision to go with Linux was not driven just by cost.
Apart from the whopping discounts, Microsoft also offered other inducements:
:For example, the company:
” * Agreed to let Munich go as long as six years, instead of the more normal three or four, without another expensive upgrade, a concession that runs against its bread-and-butter software upgrade strategy.
* Offered to let the city buy only Microsoft Word for some PCs and strip off other applications. Such unbundling cuts against Microsoft’s practice of selling PCs loaded with software.
* Offered millions of dollars worth of training and support services free.”
Quagmire News
Useful reality check from the new US commander in Iraq. Quick summary: we’re in a guerrilla war (aka quagmire) here, folks. Longer version from the NYT reads as follows:
“American troops in Iraq are under attack from “a classical guerrilla-type campaign” whose fighters, drawn from Saddam Hussein’s most unyielding loyalists and foreign terrorist groups, are increasingly organized, the new commander of allied forces in Iraq said today.
The commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, pledged that the United States and its allies would not be driven from Iraq by the guerrilla attacks, which today killed one American soldier and wounded at least six others around Baghdad. But he cautioned that pacifying Iraq might require fresh American troops to spend yearlong tours there, double the normal duration of Army forces on peacekeeping duty.
The assessment of Iraqi resistance by General Abizaid was a significant change from previous comments by senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has said that the insurgents’ raids were too haphazard to qualify as a guerrilla war or organized resistance.”