I wonder whether this kind of alarmism is meant purely to scare people into accepting increased defence spending, or whether the people at the top honestly believe what they are saying?
If you read TFA all the way through, Hersh is clearly making the case that the entire body of 'cyberwar' rhetoric is little more than a power (and budget) grab. One of the more interesting quotes comes from a security analyst who says most of the electronic espionage we see these days comes from allied countries, and it's mostly economic in nature.
I didn't read the whole thing but the first 10 paragraphs or so strike me as nothing but a bunch of half-informed fear mongering from a journalist who doesn't know what they are talking about.
If you only read the first 10 paragraphs, then you haven't done the article justice. Hersh is renowned for his long-form journalism. It's old-school, I know, but he takes his time to investigate and analyse. He doesn't foist his conclusions on the reader; he presents his take on the available information and leaves the reader to think it through.
I'll be the first to admit that he's more patient -and more deliberately objective- than most of us. In fact, that's exactly what I wrote about him earlier today.
This is the same guy who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre as well as many of the most important stories about the American military over the last few decades. His sources are impeccable, and his research is world class. Do yourself a favour: load the page onto your favourite e-book reader and take the time to follow his argument all the way to the end.
like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.
It'd be interesting to see how much of a dent this makes in their total income - it may be feasible that this was, in fact, simply a clerical error depsite the fact it'd be huge for the vast majorit of us. This doesn't justify it, of course, but I wouldn't rush to assume it was obviously malicious and intentful.
You know, I'd love to agree with you, but tell me this: What are the odds that they would be willing to allow a clerical error that lost them a similar amount of money?
Well put. A friend of mine who's worked extensively as a war photographer as well as other things once told me that, "Photography hasn’t significantly improved since the early years. It’s just become more convenient.”
So Martin Broughton went to the Wizard of Oz and got courage, the TSA could go get brains and a heart and air-travelers could wish to go home without being extensively cavity searched?
Oh! OH! OH! I so want to be the Tin Man, so the TSA can kiss my shiny metal ass.
This really reads like something out of fiction. I did not think I'd see the day of such a government, but here I am at 22 years old and already, a modern, 1st world country is to the point where it feels the need and justification to monitor every action of it's populace. The precedent here is staggering, terrifying and morally bankrupt.
There are only two things new about this:
The technology used to perform the surveillance; and
The fact that the government is even asking Parliament for permission.
Son, if you live long enough, you'll see 'free' and 'democratic' nations perform a lot of acts that will make you ashamed, that will make you fear for the future. In my lifetime, I've seen Nixon bomb Cambodia, the Reverend Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood, along with Medgar Evers, Bobbie & John Kennedy and a bunch of others; I've seen students shot dead merely for expressing their opinion. I've seen government admit to selling drugs in order to finance guerrilla operations to subvert a foreign, democratically elected government. I've seen governments sell anti-tank missiles to their enemies.
I've seen enough appalling and apparently senseless miscarriages of justice to understand that human society --that chimera we call civilisation-- is a fragile, ephemeral thing.
Danger lies on both sides of a very narrow path. Oh it's all well and good to check the safety on your handgun and make noises about getting ourselves a new government, but when it comes right down to it, mythology notwithstanding, violence almost always begets more violence. Once that cycle starts, the one most willing to keep shooting is most likely to be the last one standing.
On the other side lies complacency and a willingness to buy a stake in the game. This may be inconceivable to you now, but the people who screamed loudest for deregulation of the finance system, for off-shoring labour and for vengeance post 9/11 were the very same ones placing daisies into the muzzles of M-16s just few decades ago. People change; they learn to acquiesce. They just want to be secure. They'd rather join a party than a cause.
The only thing holding things together is common decency, and even that is failing --at least in the US. When it's no longer possible to object in civil tones, when disagreement is more about affiliation than information, when dissent and disenchantment are met not only with disapproval but disenfranchisement... it becomes harder and harder to keep the ship of state on an even keel.
The answer? read your Thoreau. Understand the tactics that Gandhi and King used. Their tactics were not about Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman; they were dry-eyed assessments of the most effective way to move policy when violent rebellion seemed to be the only option --and a losing option at that.
Grow up, kid. Brace yourself. We're living in one of the best, most prosperous times in human history, yet humanity is still the venal, nasty selfish brute that wandered the veldt millions of years ago. Enjoy the miracle of our success, then devote some time to understanding in detail what it is that keeps us from wiping ourselves off the face of the planet.
... And welcome to the world. You're going to love it, even if it doesn't always love you.
This does appear to be a solution in search of a problem. Today's dishes are already tiny enough to easily mount on an RV.
One potential use for these would be with the upcoming O3B network of MEO satellites. Currently, the ground station design is very expensive, because the dishes need to target the next satellite coming over the horizon about once every 20 minutes. A flat panel such as this would remove the need for mechanical elements in the antenna array. Definite win.
O3B is a very interesting service to the developing world, where the odds of pulling a fibre-optic cable any time in the next decade are often close to nil.
I mean if the US really could control every other nation on the planet like people on slashdot think then he would have had a tragic car accident long ago.
'Accidents' like that breed martyrs and heroes. Sex scandals and related FUD breed contempt and disillusionment.
It's only a matter of time before the high and mighty types put him on the blacklist.
I even heard that he lost control of his own server wikileaks.org, and that the technical difficulties are a result of an act of sabotage. I said it before and I'll say it again, it might be best for the future of wikileaks of Julian Assange steps down, he allowed himself to go public and accept all that media attention, he's the one who killed wikileaks.
Just thought I'd paste your own words back to you, so you'd have time to spot the inherent contradiction in your argument. Wikileaks' difficulties, which you attribute to outside parties, parties who you assert have blacklisted and actively sabotaged him, are somehow Assange's fault?
So he's being punished for receiving media attention, not for the leaks? How, pray tell, do you think one could release tens of thousands of documents which are embarrassing to the military establishment of the most powerful nation on the planet and not get a lot of media attention?
Has it occurred to you that he might have seen the attention coming and realised that it was better to run cover for the dozens or hundreds of others who contribute to the project? Did you think that maybe putting a single face on the organisation was a deliberate choice by Assange, so that he could take the bullet (and I hope I don't mean that literally) for his colleagues?
Mod me flamebait if you must. I could be wrong, but with the illogic that you've presented, you can't be right.
There are a lot - a lot - of people who feel that Free Software is inherently superior to its proprietary cousins, and those people believe they're helping their company by advocating it.
I agree that this is likely true, but I'm sure that most people reading this will have spotted the flaw: FOSS is not a better product; it's a better process - most of the time.
Having a better process won't save you from second-rate work, and there is a vast amount of second-rate, FOSS licensed software out there. This includes very popular software like PHP, MySQL and Joomla. (They may be adequate -even appropriate- for a given task, but they are decidedly second-rate.)
So even those like myself who have made their livelihood with FOSS still have to be intellectually honest. We need to evaluate every proposed solution every time.
Now, factoring in the FOSS process (open standards, transparent bug-management, significant programmer resources, the option to 'go it alone' if need be), one can rationally maintain a default bias in favour of FOSS. I know I sure do. But I recommend -and use- use proprietary software on those rare occasions when it's more appropriate.
If nothing else, it makes my pro-FOSS decisions less contentious, because people know that I'm not just recommending it blindly and without reflection.
This type stuff has been going on for years. It is nothing new! I used to own xg.nu, on it I ran a large anon server averaging 3.5 million unique hits a month and 500,000 messages a day.
The island state of Niue Who owns the.nu domain notified me that Anonymity was not permitted and took the domain back. Point is, this happens a lot more than it is reported. There is no real recourse for this, you live, learn, and move on.
I knew the guy who helped establish and run the.nu domain. He's done a lot for the people of that island, and in so doing, he's had to respect the cultural predilections of his fellow islanders, who have been strongly influenced by evangelical Christian beliefs in recent years.
'Nu' means 'nude' in French and 'now' in Swedish. Guess which country the registrar focused on? Guess which one it had to defend against?
Revenues from the domain registrations went to provide free wireless Internet access to the entire island, and since then, the island has purchased XO laptops for every single school child, making them the first country to achieve 100% distribution (albeit for only 500 kids).
But over the years, the government has tried to get its hands on the profits, leading to successive disputes. If the.nu registrar didn't keep a squeaky clean reputation for that ccTLD, he would have been pilloried for his failure. I find it hard to imagine how arguments about Free Speech rights would have improved this particular situation.
Also there's the simple matter that GUIs work better for unfamiliar situations.
Ah, therein lies the rub.
In the Unix/Linux world, there are no unfamiliar situations. Not once you're done with them. I mean this in the sense that you are expected to:
Know, or find out, which commands/utilities/configurations apply to your problem.
RTFM. (Gripe all you like about the so-called arrogance of admins who have no patience for those who haven't read the manual. Then settle down and Read The Fucking Manual.)
Test.
Test.
Test.
Then -and only then- script the steps to be taken (to make them replicable) and begin to deploy.
Yes, it's expensive and time consuming. Once. Every subsequent time it's cheaper and more effective than any off-the-shelf solution.
GUIs, contrarily, encourage the user to explore a limited set of options which might or might not actually help. Wizards are worst of all, because you're often well down the garden path before you discover that you can't do what you intended to.
Nothing will protect an organisation from an incompetent sysadmin. The problem with GUIs is that they often encourage people (and by people I mean managers) to believe that they can get by with a nominally trained admin who becomes downright dangerous the minute the system needs to do something the wizard didn't foresee.
It's not misleading; it's the headline's purpose to get straight to the author's point, and the point is that the unintended consequence of our domestic policies has been to enable authoritarian regimes to enforce policies of their own.
To further refine your point: At the core of this lies the implication that, because of such policies, there is very little to separate us from authoritarian regimes. It's a quantum distance, to be sure, in the sense that although it's very small it would require something fundamental to change. But the distance between where we are today and a digital version of the Alien and Sedition Acts is short enough to make many people uncomfortable.
One point that irks me, though, is the contention that we're only now seeing this link. That, frankly, is bullshit.
The head of GCHQ (Britain's SigInt agency) under Tony Blair wrote an entire book on the topic last year. I myself wrote a series of threecolumns on the topic, all of them dealing with the diminishing gap between authoritarian policies and those of more democratic nations. Forgive me while I quote at some length...
Nokia-Siemens, defending its role in the creation of a centralised mobile telecommunications network, stated recently that:
In most countries around the world, including all EU member states and the U.S., telecommunications networks are legally required to have the capability for Lawful Intercept and this is also the case in Iran. Lawful Intercept is specified in standards defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).
Yes, decentralised communications come at a cost. They make surveillance efforts of all kinds more difficult. The two competing questions we need to ask ourselves are:
How far are we willing to compromise ourselves in the pursuit of state security?
How much are we willing to compromise state surveillance capability in order to protect our own freedom to communicate?
These are knotty issues with complex and often subtle ramifications on society. They demand a level of public engagement on the principle - and more importantly, the practice - of free speech that we haven't seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.
Technology feels like magic to most of us. We don't - and don't want to - to know how our communications come about. We just want them to happen.
But in order for them to happen, we must inform - and arm - ourselves with the knowledge, understanding, law and policies that make it possible. Facile observations like Manjoo's do little if anything to support such an effort.
The Revolution will indeed be digitised, but only if we want it enough.
What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).
It's spin because it's plausible, but factually incorrect. From the Wordpress.com website:
There are over 27 million WordPress publishers as of September 2010: 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software....
According to Quantcast, over 260 million people worldwide visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over 2.1 billion pages on those blogs each month....
(Bolded for your convenience.)
A chart showing Wordpress performance vis a vis Blogger, Movable Type and Typepad.
"Beginning immediately, all references to SPACER.GIF on the toofuckinghipformymother.com website will be renamed to 'Rubidium85.GIF'. This use of quantum technologies and cutting-edge physics should improve performance by at least 134% and promises an ROI of 7 or more. We estimate that the transition can be completed by Q1 2012 using our existing development resources, or by Thursday if we replace the bonobo with a human."
Considering that TFA says they are $4.3 billion debt, and trying to take their profit out of $3 phone cards, I'm not so sure I'd say they are succeeding AT ALL.
No, you're reading that wrong. Yes, they are carrying debts of $4.3 billion, but their operating profits are quite tidy. Almost all of the debt is capitalisation in new markets, which means their prospects are quite good, provided they don't do anything stupid.
Digicel SIM cards here in Vanuatu are $US 5.00 each, and they currently have over 100,000 active accounts in a country whose entire population is only 235,000. I've seen some numbers about their call volumes and I can assure you that their national operations are profitable.
How do they get wireless routers to operate in an environment filled with so much fear? I'd be dropping packets left and right. "Is that guy going to kill me?! checksum error." "That guy has a knife! No route to destination." Packet, packet, packet, pac--ARGH, THEY GOT ME!
Heh, yeah. Here in Vanuatu at least one tower was dragged down by locals because of a land dispute.
By and large, though, people tend to protect the things they value. This Forbes profile of Denis O'Brien reports that, during a period of rioting and looting in Haiti, people actually guarded the towers, because they saw Digicel as being on their side.
The point I find most interesting in all this is that Digicel succeeds by defying conventional wisdom about supply and demand. They simply create supply and trust local demand to rise. Here's the second paragraph of the original submission:
"If you just focus on risk, you can't do a thing," said Digicel's billionaire president Denis O'Brien in a 2008 Forbes profile. But O'Brien's small-market revolution should teach us another lesson, too: Traditional economic analysis doesn't work when it comes to communications. Telecommunications is a supply-driven economy. If you build it — no matter where you build it — they will come.
Vanuatu, for one. After a recent 7.3 earthquake a few weeks ago, one end of the island I live on rose by about 30 cm. Google 'Subduction' for an explanation of the effect, and 'Rocky Mountains' for an example.
Some Kiribatians might be interested to move there.
There are a number of I-Kiribati (as they prefer to be known) here in Vanuatu already. Thanks for the kind thought, though.
Neighbouring Fiji, whose islands are also rising, has already stated they would be happy to take a significant chunk of Tuvalu and Kiribati's populace.
... But all of this does little to alleviate the feeling one gets when the place to which you are bound by blood and culture subsides beneath the waves.
Over the past two years, President Tong has brought together 16 Pacific Ocean nations to develop the initiative, which seeks to maintain ocean health by improving management of fisheries, protecting and conserving biodiversity, furthering scientific understanding of the marine ecosystem, and reducing the negative impacts of human activities.
Whether you agree that closing this fishing area is good for the planet or not it looks like they are doing this because they want to do their part in keeping earth healthy and they consider this to be it, not to generate awareness or bring in tourists.
Thank you for understanding. The Pacific nations who stand most to lose from global climate change are making a symbolic gesture: They're saying, in effect, "Even though we have less than the rest of the world, we at least are willing to take action to protect the world's ecosystems."
Implicit in this action is the question, "So what have you done for the planet lately?"
Remember back in Copenhagen, it was neighbouring Tuvalu who exposed just how much of a farce the gathering was by leading a walk-out on the second day. They deliberately timed it early in the conference so that the negotiations among the largest nations didn't steal their thunder. With a bit of principle and a canny sense of timing, they controlled an entire news cycle.
Pacific nations are becoming increasingly adept at the politics of public opinion. They know they have no clout whatsoever on the world stage, and very little economic or geopolitical leverage, so the only alternative left to them is the noble gesture.
(Cute anecdote - The globe in the foyer of the main meeting venue in Copenhagen featured a huge hanging globe. The creator of the globe had, however, neglected to draw in all of the tiny Pacific islands. The Prime Minister of Tuvalu, seeing this, asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, "So I take it this is a representation of the UN's climate action plan?")
Slashdot Mirror
You pay to use GMail. You just don't pay cash. You pay by letting them whore you to advertisers.
Google is an advertising company. The tech ventures are just the bait.
Fine, so give them their ads back and you'll be even. 8^)
In Linux, I need .NET like I need shotgun blast to the face!
sudo aptitude install dick-cheney
If you read TFA all the way through, Hersh is clearly making the case that the entire body of 'cyberwar' rhetoric is little more than a power (and budget) grab. One of the more interesting quotes comes from a security analyst who says most of the electronic espionage we see these days comes from allied countries, and it's mostly economic in nature.
I didn't read the whole thing but the first 10 paragraphs or so strike me as nothing but a bunch of half-informed fear mongering from a journalist who doesn't know what they are talking about.
If you only read the first 10 paragraphs, then you haven't done the article justice. Hersh is renowned for his long-form journalism. It's old-school, I know, but he takes his time to investigate and analyse. He doesn't foist his conclusions on the reader; he presents his take on the available information and leaves the reader to think it through.
I'll be the first to admit that he's more patient -and more deliberately objective- than most of us. In fact, that's exactly what I wrote about him earlier today.
This is the same guy who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre as well as many of the most important stories about the American military over the last few decades. His sources are impeccable, and his research is world class. Do yourself a favour: load the page onto your favourite e-book reader and take the time to follow his argument all the way to the end.
like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.
It'd be interesting to see how much of a dent this makes in their total income - it may be feasible that this was, in fact, simply a clerical error depsite the fact it'd be huge for the vast majorit of us. This doesn't justify it, of course, but I wouldn't rush to assume it was obviously malicious and intentful.
You know, I'd love to agree with you, but tell me this: What are the odds that they would be willing to allow a clerical error that lost them a similar amount of money?
Well put. A friend of mine who's worked extensively as a war photographer as well as other things once told me that, "Photography hasn’t significantly improved since the early years. It’s just become more convenient.”
So Martin Broughton went to the Wizard of Oz and got courage, the TSA could go get brains and a heart and air-travelers could wish to go home without being extensively cavity searched?
Oh! OH! OH! I so want to be the Tin Man, so the TSA can kiss my shiny metal ass.
This really reads like something out of fiction. I did not think I'd see the day of such a government, but here I am at 22 years old and already, a modern, 1st world country is to the point where it feels the need and justification to monitor every action of it's populace. The precedent here is staggering, terrifying and morally bankrupt.
There are only two things new about this:
Son, if you live long enough, you'll see 'free' and 'democratic' nations perform a lot of acts that will make you ashamed, that will make you fear for the future. In my lifetime, I've seen Nixon bomb Cambodia, the Reverend Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood, along with Medgar Evers, Bobbie & John Kennedy and a bunch of others; I've seen students shot dead merely for expressing their opinion. I've seen government admit to selling drugs in order to finance guerrilla operations to subvert a foreign, democratically elected government. I've seen governments sell anti-tank missiles to their enemies.
I've seen enough appalling and apparently senseless miscarriages of justice to understand that human society --that chimera we call civilisation-- is a fragile, ephemeral thing.
Danger lies on both sides of a very narrow path. Oh it's all well and good to check the safety on your handgun and make noises about getting ourselves a new government, but when it comes right down to it, mythology notwithstanding, violence almost always begets more violence. Once that cycle starts, the one most willing to keep shooting is most likely to be the last one standing.
On the other side lies complacency and a willingness to buy a stake in the game. This may be inconceivable to you now, but the people who screamed loudest for deregulation of the finance system, for off-shoring labour and for vengeance post 9/11 were the very same ones placing daisies into the muzzles of M-16s just few decades ago. People change; they learn to acquiesce. They just want to be secure. They'd rather join a party than a cause.
The only thing holding things together is common decency, and even that is failing --at least in the US. When it's no longer possible to object in civil tones, when disagreement is more about affiliation than information, when dissent and disenchantment are met not only with disapproval but disenfranchisement... it becomes harder and harder to keep the ship of state on an even keel.
The answer? read your Thoreau. Understand the tactics that Gandhi and King used. Their tactics were not about Peace, Love and Bobby Sherman; they were dry-eyed assessments of the most effective way to move policy when violent rebellion seemed to be the only option --and a losing option at that.
Grow up, kid. Brace yourself. We're living in one of the best, most prosperous times in human history, yet humanity is still the venal, nasty selfish brute that wandered the veldt millions of years ago. Enjoy the miracle of our success, then devote some time to understanding in detail what it is that keeps us from wiping ourselves off the face of the planet.
... And welcome to the world. You're going to love it, even if it doesn't always love you.
This does appear to be a solution in search of a problem. Today's dishes are already tiny enough to easily mount on an RV.
One potential use for these would be with the upcoming O3B network of MEO satellites. Currently, the ground station design is very expensive, because the dishes need to target the next satellite coming over the horizon about once every 20 minutes. A flat panel such as this would remove the need for mechanical elements in the antenna array. Definite win.
O3B is a very interesting service to the developing world, where the odds of pulling a fibre-optic cable any time in the next decade are often close to nil.
I mean if the US really could control every other nation on the planet like people on slashdot think then he would have had a tragic car accident long ago.
'Accidents' like that breed martyrs and heroes. Sex scandals and related FUD breed contempt and disillusionment.
Just thought I'd paste your own words back to you, so you'd have time to spot the inherent contradiction in your argument. Wikileaks' difficulties, which you attribute to outside parties, parties who you assert have blacklisted and actively sabotaged him, are somehow Assange's fault?
So he's being punished for receiving media attention, not for the leaks? How, pray tell, do you think one could release tens of thousands of documents which are embarrassing to the military establishment of the most powerful nation on the planet and not get a lot of media attention?
Has it occurred to you that he might have seen the attention coming and realised that it was better to run cover for the dozens or hundreds of others who contribute to the project? Did you think that maybe putting a single face on the organisation was a deliberate choice by Assange, so that he could take the bullet (and I hope I don't mean that literally) for his colleagues?
Mod me flamebait if you must. I could be wrong, but with the illogic that you've presented, you can't be right.
Well, you know what they say: Business is wharfare. Any port in a storm, I suppose.
I agree that this is likely true, but I'm sure that most people reading this will have spotted the flaw: FOSS is not a better product; it's a better process - most of the time.
Having a better process won't save you from second-rate work, and there is a vast amount of second-rate, FOSS licensed software out there. This includes very popular software like PHP, MySQL and Joomla. (They may be adequate -even appropriate- for a given task, but they are decidedly second-rate.)
So even those like myself who have made their livelihood with FOSS still have to be intellectually honest. We need to evaluate every proposed solution every time.
Now, factoring in the FOSS process (open standards, transparent bug-management, significant programmer resources, the option to 'go it alone' if need be), one can rationally maintain a default bias in favour of FOSS. I know I sure do. But I recommend -and use- use proprietary software on those rare occasions when it's more appropriate.
If nothing else, it makes my pro-FOSS decisions less contentious, because people know that I'm not just recommending it blindly and without reflection.
Oh my. So what you're saying is you actually had to cope with colonel panics?
To be fair, the Colonel wasn't really to blame. He was just following his orders from General P. Fault.
And the Colonel usually called on Major Payne, who ensured that Corporal Punishment paid a visit to Private Parts.
Isn't chain of command wonderful? 8^)
This type stuff has been going on for years. It is nothing new! I used to own xg.nu, on it I ran a large anon server averaging 3.5 million unique hits a month and 500,000 messages a day. The island state of Niue Who owns the .nu domain notified me that Anonymity was not permitted and took the domain back. Point is, this happens a lot more than it is reported. There is no real recourse for this, you live, learn, and move on.
I knew the guy who helped establish and run the .nu domain. He's done a lot for the people of that island, and in so doing, he's had to respect the cultural predilections of his fellow islanders, who have been strongly influenced by evangelical Christian beliefs in recent years.
'Nu' means 'nude' in French and 'now' in Swedish. Guess which country the registrar focused on? Guess which one it had to defend against?
Revenues from the domain registrations went to provide free wireless Internet access to the entire island, and since then, the island has purchased XO laptops for every single school child, making them the first country to achieve 100% distribution (albeit for only 500 kids).
But over the years, the government has tried to get its hands on the profits, leading to successive disputes. If the .nu registrar didn't keep a squeaky clean reputation for that ccTLD, he would have been pilloried for his failure. I find it hard to imagine how arguments about Free Speech rights would have improved this particular situation.
Ah, therein lies the rub.
In the Unix/Linux world, there are no unfamiliar situations. Not once you're done with them. I mean this in the sense that you are expected to:
Yes, it's expensive and time consuming. Once. Every subsequent time it's cheaper and more effective than any off-the-shelf solution.
GUIs, contrarily, encourage the user to explore a limited set of options which might or might not actually help. Wizards are worst of all, because you're often well down the garden path before you discover that you can't do what you intended to.
Nothing will protect an organisation from an incompetent sysadmin. The problem with GUIs is that they often encourage people (and by people I mean managers) to believe that they can get by with a nominally trained admin who becomes downright dangerous the minute the system needs to do something the wizard didn't foresee.
It's not misleading; it's the headline's purpose to get straight to the author's point, and the point is that the unintended consequence of our domestic policies has been to enable authoritarian regimes to enforce policies of their own.
To further refine your point: At the core of this lies the implication that, because of such policies, there is very little to separate us from authoritarian regimes. It's a quantum distance, to be sure, in the sense that although it's very small it would require something fundamental to change. But the distance between where we are today and a digital version of the Alien and Sedition Acts is short enough to make many people uncomfortable.
One point that irks me, though, is the contention that we're only now seeing this link. That, frankly, is bullshit.
The head of GCHQ (Britain's SigInt agency) under Tony Blair wrote an entire book on the topic last year. I myself wrote a series of three columns on the topic, all of them dealing with the diminishing gap between authoritarian policies and those of more democratic nations. Forgive me while I quote at some length...
What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).
It's spin because it's plausible, but factually incorrect. From the Wordpress.com website:
There are over 27 million WordPress publishers as of September 2010: 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software....
According to Quantcast, over 260 million people worldwide visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over 2.1 billion pages on those blogs each month....
(Bolded for your convenience.)
A chart showing Wordpress performance vis a vis Blogger, Movable Type and Typepad.
Smells like enterprise to me.
Because I couldn't see it..
Cool! It's a next-generation SPACER.GIF!!
I'm sending a memo to corporate right now:
"Beginning immediately, all references to SPACER.GIF on the toofuckinghipformymother.com website will be renamed to 'Rubidium85.GIF'. This use of quantum technologies and cutting-edge physics should improve performance by at least 134% and promises an ROI of 7 or more. We estimate that the transition can be completed by Q1 2012 using our existing development resources, or by Thursday if we replace the bonobo with a human."
Considering that TFA says they are $4.3 billion debt, and trying to take their profit out of $3 phone cards, I'm not so sure I'd say they are succeeding AT ALL.
No, you're reading that wrong. Yes, they are carrying debts of $4.3 billion, but their operating profits are quite tidy. Almost all of the debt is capitalisation in new markets, which means their prospects are quite good, provided they don't do anything stupid.
Digicel SIM cards here in Vanuatu are $US 5.00 each, and they currently have over 100,000 active accounts in a country whose entire population is only 235,000. I've seen some numbers about their call volumes and I can assure you that their national operations are profitable.
How do they get wireless routers to operate in an environment filled with so much fear? I'd be dropping packets left and right. "Is that guy going to kill me?! checksum error." "That guy has a knife! No route to destination." Packet, packet, packet, pac--ARGH, THEY GOT ME!
Heh, yeah. Here in Vanuatu at least one tower was dragged down by locals because of a land dispute.
By and large, though, people tend to protect the things they value. This Forbes profile of Denis O'Brien reports that, during a period of rioting and looting in Haiti, people actually guarded the towers, because they saw Digicel as being on their side.
Original submitter here.
The point I find most interesting in all this is that Digicel succeeds by defying conventional wisdom about supply and demand. They simply create supply and trust local demand to rise. Here's the second paragraph of the original submission:
"If you just focus on risk, you can't do a thing," said Digicel's billionaire president Denis O'Brien in a 2008 Forbes profile. But O'Brien's small-market revolution should teach us another lesson, too: Traditional economic analysis doesn't work when it comes to communications. Telecommunications is a supply-driven economy. If you build it — no matter where you build it — they will come.
1 bit operating systems are totally impossible to infect though.
That's true!
... Or false...
O RLY? Care to tell where?
Vanuatu, for one. After a recent 7.3 earthquake a few weeks ago, one end of the island I live on rose by about 30 cm. Google 'Subduction' for an explanation of the effect, and 'Rocky Mountains' for an example.
Some Kiribatians might be interested to move there.
There are a number of I-Kiribati (as they prefer to be known) here in Vanuatu already. Thanks for the kind thought, though.
Neighbouring Fiji, whose islands are also rising, has already stated they would be happy to take a significant chunk of Tuvalu and Kiribati's populace.
... But all of this does little to alleviate the feeling one gets when the place to which you are bound by blood and culture subsides beneath the waves.
Over the past two years, President Tong has brought together 16 Pacific Ocean nations to develop the initiative, which seeks to maintain ocean health by improving management of fisheries, protecting and conserving biodiversity, furthering scientific understanding of the marine ecosystem, and reducing the negative impacts of human activities.
Whether you agree that closing this fishing area is good for the planet or not it looks like they are doing this because they want to do their part in keeping earth healthy and they consider this to be it, not to generate awareness or bring in tourists.
Thank you for understanding. The Pacific nations who stand most to lose from global climate change are making a symbolic gesture: They're saying, in effect, "Even though we have less than the rest of the world, we at least are willing to take action to protect the world's ecosystems."
Implicit in this action is the question, "So what have you done for the planet lately?"
Remember back in Copenhagen, it was neighbouring Tuvalu who exposed just how much of a farce the gathering was by leading a walk-out on the second day. They deliberately timed it early in the conference so that the negotiations among the largest nations didn't steal their thunder. With a bit of principle and a canny sense of timing, they controlled an entire news cycle.
Pacific nations are becoming increasingly adept at the politics of public opinion. They know they have no clout whatsoever on the world stage, and very little economic or geopolitical leverage, so the only alternative left to them is the noble gesture.
(Cute anecdote - The globe in the foyer of the main meeting venue in Copenhagen featured a huge hanging globe. The creator of the globe had, however, neglected to draw in all of the tiny Pacific islands. The Prime Minister of Tuvalu, seeing this, asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, "So I take it this is a representation of the UN's climate action plan?")