Russian ‘democracy’

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Interesting — though unsurprising — piece in this morning’s New York Times…

A new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that has deployed a nationwide cadre of loyalists that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party. Fearing such retribution, many of the people interviewed for this article asked not to be identified.

The government has closed newspapers in St. Petersburg and raided political party offices in Siberia. It was hardly unusual when in Samara, in the nation’s center, organized crime officers charged an opposition campaign official with financial crimes shortly before the December parliamentary elections and froze the party’s bank accounts.

Here in this historic region on the Volga River, Mr. Putin’s allies now control nearly all the offices, and elections have become a formality. And that is just as it should be, they said.

“In my opinion, at a certain stage, like now, it is not only useful, it is even necessary — we are tired of democratic twists and turns,” said the leader of Mr. Putin’s party in Nizhny Novgorod, Sergei G. Nekrasov. “It may sound sacrilegious, but I would propose to suspend all this election business for the time being, at least for managerial positions.”

Er, the UK is now dependent for its gas on this new model state.

Taking the Michael

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This morning’s Observer column…

Chutzpah, according to a famous definition, is a chap who, having murdered his mother and father, then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan. It might have been coined with Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, in mind.

Last week the budget airline had to take its website offline for three days to enable a massive upgrade of its computer systems. You’d have thought that it would be a source of acute embarrassment for the ‘ticketless airline’. Not a bit of it: instead, anyone logging on to Ryanair on Wednesday found a cheery message. ‘Web Closing Down Sale’ it screamed: ‘Cos the website will be closed we need your bookings today’. Cheeky, eh? No wonder they make money…

The new story-telling

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One of the most interesting developments in the last few years is the ease — and skill — with which some newspaper journalists have taken to multi-media work. (See Michael Rosenblum’s wonderful post about “waiting for the pencil”.) Sean Smith of the Guardian is a shining example, so it’s nice to see that the Royal Television Society has given him an award for his work in Iraq. Thoroughly deserved.

Thanks to Adrian Monck for spotting the award.

So you thought encrypting data on government laptops would make them safe?

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Think again. Ed Felten has made an interesting discovery:

Today eight colleagues and I are releasing a significant new research result. We show that disk encryption, the standard approach to protecting sensitive data on laptops, can be defeated by relatively simple methods. We demonstrate our methods by using them to defeat three popular disk encryption products: BitLocker, which comes with Windows Vista; FileVault, which comes with MacOS X; and dm-crypt, which is used with Linux. The research team includes J. Alex Halderman, Seth D. Schoen, Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, William Paul, Joseph A. Calandrino, Ariel J. Feldman, Jacob Appelbaum, and Edward W. Felten.

Our site has links to the paper, an explanatory video, and other materials.

The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today’s DRAM memories. DRAMs are the main memory chips used to store data while the system is running. Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power. But this isn’t so. Our research shows that data in DRAM actually fades out gradually over a period of seconds to minutes, enabling an attacker to read the full contents of memory by cutting power and then rebooting into a malicious operating system.

Interestingly, if you cool the DRAM chips, for example by spraying inverted cans of “canned air” dusting spray on them, the chips will retain their contents for much longer. At these temperatures (around -50 °C) you can remove the chips from the computer and let them sit on the table for ten minutes or more, without appreciable loss of data. Cool the chips in liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) and they hold their state for hours at least, without any power. Just put the chips back into a machine and you can read out their contents.

This is deadly for disk encryption products because they rely on keeping master decryption keys in DRAM…

Bet this won’t stop Gordon Brown & Co confidently asserting that our data are safe in their laptops.

The best democracy money can buy

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Fascinating New York Times piece about Hillary Clinton’s campaign spending.

“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. “So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.”

The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.

The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

The article identifies two basic problems: Clinton’s cash flow projections were based on the assumption that by Iowa the race would be efffectively over; and over-reliance on smallish numbers of large donors (who will be hard to tap again if they perceive the campaign to be badly managed) as compared with the legions of small donors who support Obama and are likely to keep on giving as the campaign continues.

The details of what Clinton spent money on are fascinating. For example:

As part of their get-out-the-vote effort in Iowa, the campaign came up with a plan to have a local supermarket deliver sandwich platters to pre-caucus parties. It spent more than $95,384 on Jan. 1 at Hy-Vee Inc., a local grocery chain in West Des Moines, Iowa, in addition to buying loads of snow shovels to clear the walks for caucusgoers.

And,in the event, it didn’t snow! Wonder what they will get for the shovels on eBay.

Footnote: Clinton came third in Iowa.

Ignorance is bliss

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Yep. See this report from the Register…

The Economist has failed in its attempt to gain control of the internet address theeconomist.com.

The address was not transferred to it because the owner claimed that he had never heard of the magazine when he registered the name.

The site simply carries a picture of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, and a note calling him “the economist of the century”.

The Economist took a case under the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)’s dispute resolution service. Under WIPO rules a domain name can only be transferred if the name is identical or confusingly similar to a trade or service mark owned by the body trying to gain control of the address; if the person holding the address has no rights in it, and if the address was registered and used in bad faith.

Anyone hoping to gain control of a domain must prove all three of these elements in order to be handed the address. The Economist failed to show that the address owner Jason Rose registered the domain name in bad faith.

Rose claimed that he had never heard of The Economist in 1996. The Economist disputed this, claiming it would be almost impossible for someone interested in current affairs and economics not to know the magazine, but WIPO panelist Sir Ian Barker, a QC, said that he had to be believed.

Barker said that the claim was hard to believe, but that the WIPO system was not designed for ruling on such questions of fact.

Social mobility

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Ah, the proved advantages of scholarship

whereas his dad took cold tea with his snap

he slaves at nuances, knows at just one sip

Chateau Lafite from Chateau Neuf du Pape.

Tony Harrison, Collected Poems, Viking, 2007.