µblog - archive for 2006-05 🏳️‍🌈

Ellis Sharp:

The US military and political establishment has, of course, a long record of conspiracies and mass murder, but these all involve operations in foreign lands. These actual historical conspiracies – in Indonesia, Chile, Iraq etc etc – were exposed years ago. But they attract no media coverage. The media would far rather concentrate on ludicrous death-of-Diana conspiracy theories than coups in foreign countries. American civilians or military personnel abroad are certainly expendable and the corporate media can be relied on to screen such events through a neutralising filter. But I simply don’t believe that these elites would countenance the mass killing of civilians on American soil, especially when so many of the victims were their kind of people – white, middle class professionals.

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Scary:

PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud ‘pay per click’ systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).

The bots are controlled remotely through several Web servers. This allows the perpetrators to define, for example, the web pages on which the adverts are hosted or the maximum number of clicks from any one IP address in order not to arouse suspicions. Similarly, the number of clicks from the bot can be monitored as well as the computers online at any one time. The system used can evade fraud detection systems by sending click requests from different, unrelated IP addresses.

(Source: Help Net Security).

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Bruce Schneier:

Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

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Rui Carmo updates the two cows meme:

Corporate Support:

Someone sold your customer two pigs with horns stapled to their foreheads and you have to milk them.

Sarbanes-Oxley:

You can’t even think of having a single cow without having its impact on the company’s bottom line assessed by a team of expert chicken breeders.

These are so true, it’s not even funny.

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Nick Carr:

So how do we ensure that good, well-paying jobs will be around in the future? Schrage says that our educational institutions need to focus on “creative differentiation.” If that sounds vague, it’s because it is. Where Schrage’s diagnosis of the problem is incisive, his prescription for solving it is sketchy. He talks about using business ingenuity and the prestige of our top universities to harness the power of the cheap technical talent residing elsewhere in the world. But while that may help the bottom lines of multinational corporations, it leaves unanswered the bigger question: Where are the good jobs required to support a healthy middle class going to come from? I admit that I don’t have an answer for that question, either. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: We can’t all make a living writing blogs and shooting silly videos.

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Mark Dominus:

People sometimes say “well, I like to put [parentheses] in anyway, just to be sure.” This is pure superstition, and we should not tolerate it in people who purport to be engineers. Engineers should be capable of making informed choices, based on technical realities, not on some creepy feeling in their guts that perhaps a failure to sprinkle enough parentheses over their program will invite the wrath the Moon God.

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Rui Carmo on the black MacBook:

… it’s a scratch magnet several orders of magnitude larger than the nano…

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Jeff Atwood:

Thank goodness for my old friend, CTRL+Z, but editing a Word document is a nerve wracking experience not unlike walking through a field of formatting land mines.

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Nick Carr:

If Google wants to fully live up to its ideals - to really give primacy to the goal of user choice in search - it should open up its home page to other search engines.

What ideals are these? I believe Google has the same ideals as any public company: maximising shareholder value. Doing what Carr suggests would mean that Google is an exceptional company, instead of just another product of the capitalist system. My bet is on the latter.

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