This DHS announcement illustrates the tremendous costs of a computing monoculture.
The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer. Mozilla and Opera are two excellent browsers. Mac users can choose from those as well as Apple’s excellent Safari browser. There’s also Netscape.
Business Week’s Stephen Wildstrom also says that IE is too risky.
Cassini Rings
Madison Air Service – Update
Mike Ivey nicely summarizes the current state of Madison Air Service. The Northwest Airlines request for Wisconsin subsidies is humorous – They’ve received extensive subsidies in Minnesota. Perhaps the Gopher state will subsidize Air Wisconsin and Midwest Air…
Spaceship One Photos
Richard Seaman posted some beautiful photos of last week’s historic spaceship one flight.
Forsaking Privacy
If the government had access to the communications between a client and his lawyer, the lawyer would be nothing but a government agent, like Soviet defense attorneys, whose official role was to serve as adjuncts to the prosecution.
Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, “The Tyranny of Good Intentions”
Once upon a time, the U.S. Justice Department respected the legal rights that make law a shield of the innocent rather than a weapon of government. No more. What the great English jurist William Blackstone called “the Rights of Englishmen” have been eroded beyond recognition.
The last remaining right ? the attorney-client privilege ? is under full-scale assault by Justice Department prosecutors in the tax shelter case involving the accounting firm KPMG. The Justice Department has demanded, and the accounting firm has agreed to, a waiver of the attorney-client privilege for communications between lawyers and KPMG employees involved in marketing tax shelters the Internal Revenue Service has challenged.
The attorney-client privilege was long championed by jurists because they realized the privilege promoted equality under the law. Convictions can result from lack of access to legal knowledge as well as from actual wrongdoing. To ensure defendants would avail themselves of legal counsel, their communications with attorneys were made confidential, outside the reach of prosecutors.
I’ve written about tax issues before, including this article on our very odd SUV subsidies.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Dean campaign architect Joe Trippi’s new book discusses the power of the internet and how individuals and organizations can benefit.
A Marine’s View of the Major Media in Iraq
Interesting article by writer Eric M. Johnson, a Marine Corps Reservist on the Washington Post’s Iraq coverage (if it can be called that).
Don’t take my word for it that the Post?s reporting is substandard and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post’s assistant managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6 piece, he admits that “the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis.” Further, “we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation.” Translation: we are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location dozens of miles away from the fighting.
UPDATE: The article was also published in the NY Post on Saturday, 7.3.2004.
EFF: Illegitimate Patents
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Patent Busting Contest:
Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called ?prior art?) is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as:
- One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.)
- Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
- The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
- Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
- Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
- Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
- Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
- Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
- Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.) and
- Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)
Making Public Data Would “Crash the System”
The Justice Department today denied Freedom of Information Act requests to make public data on foreign lobbyists, claiming that ‘[i]mplementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating’. The requestor responded that ‘[t]his was a new one on us. We weren’t aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them.
Senator Kohl spends some time on baseball issues…
Steve Fainaru continues his series on the monopoly that is baseball, including Bud Selig’s all powerful role in the game and public financing of stadiums. Today’s article includes quotes from Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis) regarding a potential baseball team in Washington, DC (nice to see the Senator spending time on important issues….)
I continue to be amazed that it took a newspaper 700 miles from Wisconsin, The Washington Post, to write this series on the fleecing of taxpayers. Perhaps former Governor Tommy Thompson helped out – he’s quoted in the articles.