The arbitrariness of media attention
As we fret (rightly) about the casualties of war in Iraq, ponder this:
“The four-and-a-half year conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the worst since World War II. An estimated 3.3 million people have died as a result of the war making it the “tragedy of modern times”, according to a report issued by the International Rescue Committee aid agency.”
Visual Neighbourhood
Just seen this intriguing tool in a link on Karlin Lillington’s wonderful Blog.
Stooping to conquer
From Dan Gillmor.
Virus Slimeballs’ Latest Trick. This is the text accompanying a new virus. It’s designed to trick you into opening the attachment by playing…
The fog of journalism
In an age of relentless, 24×7 television coverage, why is it that we don’t have a clue about what’s really going on? In this piece from The Atlantic, William Powers suggests that we need newspapers to penetrate the fog. Quote:
“There’s also an emerging star in The [Washington] Post, a reporter named Anthony Shadid who has been writing remarkable dispatches from Baghdad. On the morning of the first missile attack on Baghdad, he filed the most gripping, graceful account that I saw anywhere. At one point this week, he was inside the home of an Iraqi family that isn’t thrilled with Saddam, but is also terrified of and angered by the U.S. invasion: “To this family, the assault is an insult. It is not Hussein under attack, but Iraq, they said. It is hard to gauge if this is a common sentiment, although it is one heard more often as the war progresses. ‘We complain about things, but complaining doesn’t mean cooperating with foreign governments,’ the father said. ‘When somebody comes to attack Iraq, we stand up for Iraq. That doesn’t mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities.’ “
Anecdotal stuff, not necessarily representative of the broader Iraqi populace, but powerfully told. With U.S. soldiers meeting unexpected resistance on the battlefield that very day, Shadid put flesh on what was then the story of the hour: the possibility that coalition forces might not be as welcome as expected.
After reading that story, I went back to the television, and the fog descended again. It didn’t lift until the next morning, when the newspapers arrived.”
Well, up to a point. The image I have all the time at the moment is of looking through the wrong end of a telecope. What we have now is 600 wrong-ended telescopes in the form of the ’embedded’ journalists travelling with the marines. It’s impossible to figure out what’s really happening just from peering in to these instruments.
Solution to that awkward question: what to give George W. Bush for his sixth birthday
Why this tasteful little figurine. A snip at $19.95. [Thanks to Quentin for the link.]
Use a Firewall, Go to Jail
A dispatch from Professor Ed Felten.
“The states of Massachusetts and Texas are preparing to consider bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (TX bill; MA bill) The bills are obviously related to each other somehow, since they are textually similar.
Here is one example of the far-reaching harmful effects of these bills. Both bills would flatly ban the possession, sale, or use of technologies that “conceal from a communication service provider … the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication”. Your ISP is a communication service provider, so anything that concealed the origin or destination of any communication from your ISP would be illegal — with no exceptions.
If you send or receive your email via an encrypted connection, you’re in violation, because the “To” and “From” lines of the emails are concealed from your ISP by encryption. (The encryption conceals the destinations of outgoing messages, and the sources of incoming messages.)
Worse yet, Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology widely used for enterprise security, operates by translating the “from” and “to” fields of Internet packets, thereby concealing the source or destination of each packet, and hence violating these bills. Most security “firewalls” use NAT, so if you use a firewall, you’re in violation.
If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the “Internet Connection Sharing” feature of your favorite operating system product, you’re in violation because these connection sharing technologies use NAT. Most operating system products (including every version of Windows introduced in the last five years, and virtually all versions of Linux) would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.”
The cost of giving something away!
Wired. But instead of the few hundred downloads Fleishman expected, the book was downloaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he’s charged incrementally for bandwidth, Fleishman estimates he could be billed $15,000 at the end of the month — possibly a lot more. “It’s a financial catastrophe,” said Fleishman. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]
The Baghdad blogger
First noticed in the mainstream press by the Guardian, which concluded that he was not a hoaxer, now people are wondering if anything’s happened to him. Hmmm…
Meanwhile, media interest in War Blogs continues to grow. Dave Winer was interviewed about them and posted this list of what he regards as interesting ones. And the Warblogging site is compiling an Index of Evil, tracking the numbers of weblogs which refer to Ashcroft, Saddam, bin Laden or Poindexter. Inside VC is now running a war blog. And, best of all, BBC war reporters now have a rolling web log in which they post stuff which often seems better than their polished news reports. There’s a strange Blog called Strategic Armchair Command. And a useful Warblogs portal.
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander…?
Presidential candidate Howard Dean gave a talk at Harvard last night. He asked an interesting question. Next year, how will we feel when China invades Taiwan because they think they have weapons of mass destruction? Has the new Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive wars, unleashed a philosophy of world power that we may not be so comfortable with? [Scripting News]
This war brought to you by…
From Scott Rosenberg…
The US is invading oil-rich Iraq, and much of the world thinks — rightly or wrongly — that it’s doing it because Bush & Co. want the country’s oil. The Bushies deny this vehemently (as do their British allies). Yet when US troops name their “forward operating bases,” they choose the names Exxon and Shell.
“I’m not making this up”, says Scott. “Those are the names of the 101st Airborne’s helicopter bases in Iraq, according to this New York Times report.
The Pentagon is apparently explaining that these camps are refueling bases, and that justifies the naming. I dunno. This may be true. But it doesn’t help us. The Bush administration has been given lots of points for its handling of this war’s PR, but this looks like a ludicrously stupid blunder.”