Category: family fun

blackmailing, the new way

The party of integrity, wah?

Think Progress » The Minnesota GOP’s Stealth Attack On Privacy:

This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: “So if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are.”

These practices fall way below the standard for today’s polling firms and web sites. The norm for polling firms is to anonymize the data and report only statistical totals. The norm for commercial web sites is to have a privacy policy, with Federal Trade Commission enforcement if the web site breaks its privacy promise.

Without a privacy policy, the state party can tell your views to anyone at all. If you give the “wrong” answers on abortion or other issues, they can tell your boss, members of your church, or anyone else. In fact, these answers could get distributed to campaigns in your town during get-out-the-vote efforts – precisely the place where “wrong” answers can be most damaging.

Sure, that will be a great thing, to have some slimy operative calling your neighbors to tell them how you answered some of their questions . . . .

Of course, where this would have been national news during the Clinton years, it will barely rate a mention except on “far-left” websites.

your tax dollars at work

Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects – New York Times:

Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
[…]
No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.
That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official’s stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official “had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash,” the report says.
Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. “One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office,” the report says.
The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein’s government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

This is the party of conservatism and fiscal discipline? Could Bill Clinton, flawed as he is, have asked for a successor more likely to burnish his reputation?

Why does the 82nd Airborne hate America?

A few bad apples?

New Reports Surface About Detainee Abuse:

Two soldiers and an officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division have told a human rights organization of systemic detainee abuse and human rights violations at U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, recounting beatings, forced physical exertion and psychological torture of prisoners, the group said.

A 30-page report by Human Rights Watch describes an Army captain’s 17-month effort to gain clear understanding of how U.S. soldiers were supposed to treat detainees, and depicts his frustration with what he saw as widespread abuse that the military’s leadership failed to address. The Army officer made clear that he believes low-ranking soldiers have been held responsible for abuse to cover for officers who condoned it.

Or a systemic, routine culture of abuse and humiliation?

does anyone at MSFT get security?

So Windows Genuine Advantage has a hole in it:

Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’:

Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’
Cory Doctorow: AV sez, “This week, Microsoft started requiring users to verifiy their serial number before using Windows Update. This effort to force users to either buy XP or tell them where you got the illegal copy is called ‘Genuine Advantage.’ It was cracked within 24 hours.”
Before pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:
javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’)

It turns off the trigger for the key check.

Link (Thanks, AV!)

And then read this:
Schneier on Security: Microsoft Builds In Security Bypasses:

I am very suspicious of tools that allow you to bypass network security systems. Yes, they make life easier. But if security is important, than all security decisions should be made by a central process; tools that bypass that centrality are very risky.

I didn’t like SOAP for that reason, and I don’t like the sound of this new Microsoft thingy:

We’re always looking for new things that can allow you to do things uniquely different today. For example, this new feature tool we have would allow me to tunnel directly using HTTP into my corporate Exchange server without having to go through the whole VPN (virtual private network) process, bypassing the need to use a smart card. It’s such a huge time-saver, for me at least, compared to how long it takes me now. We will be extending that functionality to the next version of Windows.

That’s Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s general manager of platform strategy, talking.

Read that again: a new feature that is designed to bypass VPN authentication, all for the sake of convenience, is considered so cool, it will be in the next release of Windows. What IT manager is going to read that and not want Martin Taylor’s head on a pole?
Continue reading “does anyone at MSFT get security?”

Well, it’s official

Apple’s OS X will run on some unnamed (at least I can’t find it) Intel chip.

I had to re-read this post and comment thread from almost three years ago. So it’s running on x86, as many of us have assumed, and we’ll see where the roadmap takes us.

Bottomline? Who cares what it runs on? Even the so-called tech press is making this into something more than it really is: Apple has never sold the PowerPC architecture as the main draw. The user experience is the selling point, and this is a bid to improve that.

<update> It was Pentium 4 in the onstage demo, apparently. I’m trying to get my mind around the supposedly aging x86 family being considered a replacement for the future-proof Power CPU family.


[composed and posted with ecto]