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How low can you go?
Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

� I’m not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I’ve had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush…

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about. [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

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Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

NYT story reads, in part: The frantic message came from the corporation’s information technology workers: “HELP NEEDED: If you have servers that are nonessential, please shut down.”

The computer system was under attack by a rogue program called SQL Slammer, which affected servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with a patch — issued months ago — to fix the vulnerability. The worm hindered the operations of hundreds of thousands of computers, slowed Internet traffic and even disrupted thousands of A.T.M. terminals.

But this wasn’t happening at just any company. It was occurring at Microsoft itself. Some internal servers were affected, and service to users of the Microsoft Network was significantly slowed.

The disruption was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of secure computing. On Jan. 23, the company’s chairman, Bill Gates, sent a memo to customers describing progress in improving its products since he announced a “trustworthy computing” initiative a year ago.

“While we’ve accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still more to do,” he wrote. He cited the hundreds of millions spent to shore up Microsoft’s products, and its plans to deliver more secure products in the future. He also listed “things customers can do to help.” The first item was “stay up to date on patches.”

More on Slammer — Wired story.

PowerPoint and its discontents

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PowerPoint and its discontents

My Observer column of January 12 was about the pernicious way PowerPoint has sapped the will to think of the corporate world. Now, courtesy of the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily, comes a flood of insightful pieces on the same topic:

Here, for example, is a lovely essay by Julia Kelly published on January 22. Thomas Stewart is calling for PowerPoint to be banned. And presentation guru Edward Tufte has even entered the fray with a scathing piece on PowerPoint graphics. Quote:

“The original table, so effective, collapses into incoherent chartjunk. … Everything is wrong with these smarmy, chaotic graphics: scaling, low resolution, color codes, breaking data into pieces, branding, an indifference to data and evidence. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these graphics would turn into a particularly nasty prank if used by cancer patients seeking to discover their survival chances. “

Meanwhile, if Lincoln had had PowerPoint here’s how the Gettysburg Address would look.

Another Microsoft virus goes unreported

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Another Microsoft virus goes unreported

“Attack Overwhelms Internet, Slows Traffic”, says an AP report in the NYT. But we get half-way down the story before it is revealed that the new virus is actually exploiting vulnerabilities in, ah, Microsoft software. “Rick Miller, a spokesman for Microsoft Corp., however, confirmed that Internet congestion was interfering with administrators trying to download the crucial software patch that Microsoft made available to protect vulnerable computers.”

But now comes the really funny bit: For it turns out that “the same congestion also completely prevented consumers from contacting Microsoft over the Internet to unlock the anti-piracy features of its latest products, including the Windows XP and Office XP software packages.” Verily, you could not make this stuff up. But why doesn’t the headline say Virus exploits Microsoft vulnerability, screws up Internet?

Politics, language and the Eldred decision

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Politics, language and the Eldred decision

I’ve been reading Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language” which is partly about how politics can corrupt language. And then my colleague, Ray Corrigan, pointed me to an acute piece in the American Open Technology Consortium Blog by Doc Searls. It’s worth quoting in full:

“I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts about the Eldred decision. At this point I think there are several contexts that need to be explored.

One is legal — constitutional, really. Larry and the lawbloggers (sounds like a good name for a band) are all over that one.

Another is political. The Sony Bono Act was a political creation in the first place, and the Supreme Court decision in its favor was a political victory for Hollywood (yes, print publishers had some interest in it, but the story plays as a Hollywood victory, complete with quotes from Jack Valenti and Hillary Rosen).

The third is metaphorical. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court. Here’s how Richard Bennett puts it:

‘The issue here isn’t enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the conservative justices who sided with the majority is more likely the protection of property rights. In order to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright. ‘

Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

This isn’t just a battle of words. It’s a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain, lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we’re speaking about one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s very much the way our minds work.

But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details.

“The Commons” and “the public domain” might be legitimate concepts with deep and relevant histories, but they’re too arcane to most of us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing kinda rubs him the wrong way. Communist and Commonist are just a little too close for comfort. Too social. Not private enough. He didn’t say he was against it; but he did say it was a stretch. (Maybe he’ll come in here and correct me or enlarge on his point.) For many other libertarians, however, the stretch goes too far. Same goes for conservatives who subscribe to the same metaphorical system in respect to property.

So the work we have cut out for us isn’t just legal and political. It’s conceptual. Until we find a way to win that one, we’ll keep losing in Congress as well as the courts.”

Doc’s right: rule one in public debate is never allow your opponents to capture the language in which the discussion is conducted. He also points to another interesting site, “Metaphor, Morality, and Politics: Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust” by George Lakoff.