Cornficker: A ‘Digital Pearl Harbor?’
Hide Your Women and Children – Time to Hit Your Electronic Bunkers
Is the New York Times trying to scare me?
Their coverage today of the Cornficker internet worm had some of the following hot licks:
Hot Lick 1 -
Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters. “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” said Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer security consulting firm based in San Francisco.
Hot Lick 2 -
“I don’t know why people aren’t more afraid of these programs,” said Merrick L. Furst, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. “This is like having a mole in your organization that can do things like send out any information it finds on machines it infects.”
Hot Lick 3 -
Computer security researchers expect that within days or weeks the bot-herder who controls the programs will send out commands to force the botnet to perform some as yet unknown illegal activity.
Bush Administration Got One Right with Rebuff of Israeli Requests for Aid to Attack Iran
Filed under: Bush Foreign Policy, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The New York Times is reporting that Israel asked the U.S. for special munitions and overflight privileges over Iraq last year in either an effort to launch its own raid against Iranian nuclear sites or to goad the Bush Administration in taking an offensive action against Iran before the expiration of George W. Bush’s term. According to the Times report, the Israelis were refused on both accounts, but an increase in intelligence has begun with respect to Iran.
At some point, perhaps in the near future, a U.S. president will have to make the decision on whether or not to take out Iranian nuclear sites. Let’s say it’s a given that a nuclear-armed Iran is untenable. If the U.S. is to be involved at all in removing such a capability were it to exist, the worst thing we could do is to aid any Israeli effort to take out Iranian nuclear sites. If and when action is taken it needs to be either the Americans or the Israelis, preferably the Americans who make the move.
The Middle East is enflamed enough with anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiments that we don’t need to tie ourselves any more than necessary to the Israeli millstone.
Please, Not a CNN Wire Service
Unhappily, I read a story today on the New York Times website reporting that the venerable Associated Press is taking another hit – not from its member news organizations – but from CNN. CNN wants to start a wire service. Yikes. I mean if you care about information over infotainment, yikes.
Fifteen or 20 years ago a CNN wire service wouldn’t have seemed so horrific. Back then, they were full time in the news business. Today, they’re in the Rick Dirty Sanchez Twitter My No Bull Keepin’ Em Honest flailing catch phrase business. Of the major three cable networks, CNN airs more news programming on a daily basis, but there are still too many gimmicks and not enough 24-hour news.
CNN wants to leverage its relationships with TV stations around the country and the world to provide copy for the new wire service. Double Yikes. The average local TV news reporter or news director is newstarded. In years of dealing with the media, give me a thoughtful print reporter or someone from the local NPR affiliate any day.
The problem with the Associated Press is that they are not adapting to the changing needs of their newspaper members. Some of their recent policies, such as instructing bureaus to provide more enterprise reporting and less spot news, has them in hot water with the local papers. See this post for more.
Finally, we have the newspaper editors. There are quite a few major U.S. dailies who are now threatening or have already pulled the plug on their AP contracts. Ben Marrison of the Columbus Dispatch is one of them and has been vocal in the pages of his own paper and now the New York Times. Marrison is rightly indignant on behalf of his reporters who have had their enterprise stories thrown on the wire as if they are the work of AP staff. He also has a legitimate negotiating point in the fees the AP charges its membership.
What I’d like to see from editors like Marrison is for them to fix their cooperative. The AP is a cooperative after all. Isn’t there a mechanism in the bylaws for a group of members to petition for change? Is there not a mechanism – other than destroying the purest news organization we have – to hold the management of the cooperative accountable to its members? I think part of the problem is that too many editors have become business managers first and newspersons second.
Marrison was in Atlanta to take a look at CNN’s wares. Hopefully what he and other editors saw left them thinking more about reforming the AP and less about adopting the vacuousness and lax journalistic standards of TV news.
Who’s At Fault for Economic Crisis – Everyone: Tom Friedman
I would encourage everyone to read Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times today. Along those same lines check out PBS’ Now and their report on the credit rating agencies and their role in the financial crisis.
The first three grafs:
I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a great piece of Times reporting by Eric Dash and Julie Creswell about Citigroup. Maybe brooding isn’t the right word. The front-page article, entitled “Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk,” actually left me totally disgusted.
Why? Because in searing detail it exposed — using Citigroup as Exhibit A — how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.
So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.
The article he spent his afternoon brooding over is here. The more we know and understand this complex set of circumstances bringing our country’s economy to a standstill, the better we can advocate in our own ways moving forward.
Sunday Papers – November 9, 2008
Filed under: Barack Obama, Bush Foreign Policy, Iraq, Obama Transition, Sarah Palin, U.S. Congress, U.S. Economy
New York Times Magazine
- After the Imperial Presidency– Jonathan Mahler
- Payday Lenders, Check Cashers – Redeemed?– Douglas McGray
- Deprogramming Jihadists– Katherine Zoepf
New York Times
- Obama team weighs what to take on first
- Harsh words about Obama? Never mind
- Citing workload public lawyers refuse new cases
- How Merrill fell
- Pelosi, Reid want aid for U.S. automakers
- Op-Ed, Frank Rich: It still felt good morning after
- Op-Ed, Al Gore: The climate for change
- Op-Ed, Thomas Friedman: Show me the money
- Op-Ed, Nicholas Kristof: Obama and the War on Brains
- Rice visits West Bank
- U.S. electricity project in Afghanistan
- Back home, Palin finds landscape changed
- After push for Obama, Unions seek new rules
Washington Post
- Preparing for the Obama era
- Reid, Pelosi urge Treasury to extend aid to automakers
- Self-sufficiency evades Iraqi security forces
- Obama positioned to reverse Bush actions
- Medvedev calls Obama; Kremlin describes call
- Congressional Democrats say economy first priority
- Op-Ed, Rich Lowry: The right needs to get centered
- Op-Ed, Joseph Stiglitz: More pain to come even if he’s perfect
- Op-Ed, Ron Suskind: U.S. has power – it could use authority
- Op-Ed, David Broder: Governors know best
- Op-Ed, George Will: Democratic ironies and Republican Afflictions
Los Angeles Times
- Democrats set sights on Texas
- Public works on the table once again
- Obama relies on a close-knit inner circle
- Op-Ed, Norman Ornstein: The GOP’s deep hole
- Op-Ed, James Rainey: Right-wing media feeds its post-election anger
- Political blogger be nimble, be quick
- Election leaves gay couple feeling isolated
Krugman Wins Nobel Prize
Congratulations today to Princeton Prof. Paul Krugman for winning the Nobel Prize for Economics. Through his columns in the New York Times since 1999, Krugman has clearly and succinctly explained an increasingly complex economy in ways that are easy to grasp and meaningful to those of us not steeped in the vocabulary and process of today’s markets and the economy.
Here in the dwindling American middle-class we’ve all known that things are different, the prospects for the American Dream have become elusive. Krugman has had an uncanny ability to understand this at a high level and explain it at a broad level.
Krugman has become so well-known in the mainstream and new media for his abilities that we sometimes forget that his day job is “Professor.” Academics get a bad wrap for living in “Ivory Towers.” Krugman on the other hand has done the public a service by translating his Ivy League intellect into the language of us all. His Nobel is a reminder to me that there is an accomplished theorist behind the Times columns and appearances on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Perhaps Krugman’s greatest accomplishment, when all is said and done, will not be the Nobel-quality academic work. It may end up being his ability to translate a transformational economy to the rest of us. What I’m going to do in honor of Krugman’s Nobel is see if I can continue my Economics self-education by understanding more of what he’s accomplished in academia.
Some of Krugman’s Recent Work in the New York Times:
- The Conscience of a Liberal (Blog)
- Op-Ed: Cash for Trash – New York Times, September 21
- Op-Ed: The 3 a.m. call - New York Times, September 28
- Op-Ed: Moment of truth – New York Times, October 10
David Brooks Column Today Very Insightful on John McCain as Candidate
Filed under: Energy Policy, John McCain, Peak Oil, Presidential Campaign 2008, U.S. Economy
I’m someone who has more admiration for Americans of generations past or nearly past, than just about anyone in any sort of public or private leadership position I can think of today. John McCain’s story of heroism in Viet Nam, the narrative of a grandfather, father and son all wrapped up in the tradition of the U.S. Navy and service to country – these threads in the fabric of the man that is McCain appeal to me. As a former journalist, I admired the way he handled the media in 2000. I admired the way he stood up to George W. Bush and the cynical machine that Rove built.
Frankly, I always thought that John McCain – because of all the genuine American qualities about him – could be the sort of leader who could help bridge the country from one century to the next.
Somewhere along the way, John McCain changed. I no longer think that way anymore and it’s not just because I’m in the tank for Barack Obama. McCain hasn’t been a maverick for around six years. He’s operated on either a ‘go-along, get-along’ basis with the Bush Administration or stooped to the sort of political gimmickry he used to decry in others.
David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times wrote a great column today that has a lot of good to say about John McCain but comes down to this conclusion:
No, what disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.
McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.
Brooks has it spot-on. We are in a time made for big thinkers and grand strategists. The United States is in decline in many ways while other nations are on the rise. There’s not a better basic system of governing or preserving freedom than the American way, yet the system(s) aren’t working the way they used to. From education to foreign policy we are backsliding. The greatest threat – our dependence on fossil fuels – is just the sort of big problem groaning for the American innovation of old.
America needs a central argument and it’s not a trumped up ‘War on Terror.’ America needs to return to a shared framework for prosperity, not our current backslide into a culture of greed.
You can read Brooks’ entire column here. I believe he feels like so many Americans do: John McCain has changed and he’s not the leader to take us in to the next decade of the 21st Century.
Listen to Krugman
Princeton economist and New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman has some points on the current economic crisis worth hearing. The op-ed column is from Sunday and contains an excellent summary of what the problems are facing Wall Street and Main Street.
Op-Ed, Paul Krugman: Cash for Trash
from The New York Times, Sunday, September 21, 2008
Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson’s $700 billion rescue plan for the U.S. financial system “cash for trash.” Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq. Read more
Democratic National Convention: News Coverage – Ohio and National
Filed under: Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, Presidential Campaign 2008
From the Columbus Dispatch
- Black Ohio Delegates Full of Pride
- ‘We are a better country than this’
- Obama attempts to offer specifics and inspiration
- Ohioans salute Tubbs Jones
- Corporations convene to treat Ohio delegates
- Arrested reporter got start in Athens
From the Cleveland Plain Dealer
From the New York Times
- Obama takes aim at McCain, Bush with a forceful call to change America
- In speech bringing lofty words down to earth
- Politics, spectacle and history under an open sky
- The Godfather
- On the small screen, intimacy and welcome silence for Obama’s Big Rally
- Editorial: Mr. Obama’s Party
- Op-Ed, David Brooks: A speech to the delegates
- Op-Ed, Paul Krugman: Feeling no pain
From the Washington Post
- Obama, accepting nomination, draws sharp contrast with McCain
- The message that the party wanted to hear
- A new day for King’s dreams
- Op-Ed, Tom Shales: A big moment for the small screen
- Op-Ed, Charles Krauthammer: The Perfect Stranger
- Op-Ed, Eugene Robinson: So many miles from Selma
- Op-Ed, E.J. Dionne: Rekindling the flame
- Editorial: The message from Denver
Monday Brown Bag – Iran: Rice & Brown, Drudge reporting on NYT & McCain, Obama in Iraq, Ohio villages feel cuts & high fuel cost
Filed under: Barack Obama, Iran, Iraq, John McCain, Ohio Economy, Presidential Campaign 2008
More Iran Ballyhoo …
- U.S. Warns Iran on nuke deadline - BBC
- Iran may face further sanctions, Brown tells Knesset – Bloomberg
Drudge Report making news …
Apparently NYT has spiked a rebuttal piece from Johnny Mac regarding Obama’s op-ed from last week. Drudge has the story.
- Obama arrives in Baghdad to discuss strategy - Washington Post
Obama and Petraeus over Iraq
