The stained-glass portrait of Samuel Johnson in his house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, in London.
Flame, Stuxnet and cyberwar
From Good Morning Silicon Valley, citing the Washington Post.
There have been persistent whispers that the United States and Israel collaborated on the Stuxnet worm, which hit the computer systems of a nuclear plant in Iran a few years ago and was discovered in 2010. Earlier this month, spyware dubbed Flame was found on computers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. Security experts have said Stuxnet and Flame have the same creators. Now the Washington Post reports, citing anonymous “Western officials,” that the U.S. and Israel were those creators; that Flame was created first; and that Flame and Stuxnet are part of a broader cyber-sabotage campaign against Iran. That campaign started under President George Bush and is continuing under President Barack Obama, according to a New York Times report earlier this month. (See Burning questions about Flame and cyberwar.) The Washington Post report describes Flame as “among the most sophisticated and subversive pieces of malware to be exposed to date” — a fake Microsoft software update that allows for a computer to be watched and controlled from afar.
On the surface…
… this has to be a spoof. Doesn’t it?
A reader in Dr Johnson’s house.
Believe it or Not!
The United Kingdom is one of America’s closest allies. The nations have together fought multiple wars, and remain closely tied commercially, politically, and militarily. Yet a 2006 National Geographic survey of young [American] adults found that only one in three could find the United Kingdom on a map.
From The Atlantic.
The same source claims that a 1999 Gallup poll revealed that 20 percent of Americans think that the sun revolves around the earth.
Innovation in an age of austerity
This lecture by Eben Moglen* of Columbia Law School is the most important thing I’ve seen in ages. It’s 90 minutes long (45 minutes talk + 45 minutes Q&A), so you need to make yourself a coffee and book some time out. But it’s worth it. And if you’ve really, really busy, then there’s a useful — but not comprehensive — set of notes by Stephen Bloch here.
Cory, who first alerted me to this, has ripped the audio so another way to access it is to put on an MP3 player and listen to it on the train or in the car.
Cory described the talk as “one of the most provocative, intelligent, outrageous and outraged pieces of technology criticism I’ve heard” and I agree. It’s also a useful antidote to the greatest evil of all — conventional wisdom.
*Footnote: For those who don’t know him, here’s a useful brief bio:
Eben Moglen has been battling to defend key digital rights for the last two decades. A lawyer by training, he helped Phil Zimmerman fight off the US government’s attack on the use of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption program in the early 1990s, in what became known as the Crypto Wars. That brought him to the attention of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, and together they produced version 3 of the GNU GPL, finally released after 12 years’ work in 2006.
Today, he’s Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center and the motive force behind the FreedomBox project to produce a distributed communication system, including social networking that is fully under the user’s control.
Alphabetical order
Airport at dawn
Fair use and the Joyce Estate
“When I proposed a James Joyce biography to my publisher, I was aware that the deadliest booby trap on the road ahead was the Joyce estate’s explosive trustee, Stephen James Joyce, the author’s grandson.”
Yesterday was Bloomsday — the first Bloomsday in which Ulysses is in the public domain. The Daily Beast celebrated by publishing a nice piece by Gordon Bowker, the great man’s latest biographer
Missing in action
This blog went missing yesterday, for reasons that were entirely ridiculous, not to say predictable: it was moved to a different server. My web-hosting service had, of course, alerted me well in advance that this would happen but — well, you can guess the rest: the email got swamped in the tide that floods my inbox and…
After I’d reset the DNS pointers, it took 24 hours for the change to ripple through. If you’re a regular reader, please accept my apologies. As usual, incompetence rather than conspiracy provides the best explanation.