Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Dec 2, 2003: Mile-high lies?. The Bush White House has a curious habit of embellishing their accounts of the President's activities. Recounting President Bush's trip to Iraq this past week, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told journalists of an unexpected encounter between Air Force One and a British Airways flight. Now, British Airways pilots say the incident never happened. Revising accounts of the President's travels and Air Force One has been a recurring pattern with this White House. When Bush was taking office in January 2001, White House officials encouraged media accounts that Clinton staffers had vandalized Air Force One-claims that were later confirmed as baseless by the President himself. More gravely, in the September 13, 2001 issue of the New York Times, columnist William Safire wrote that there were credible phone threats against Air Force One on September 11, according to senior Bush advisor Karl Rove and other administration officials. Administration officials were forced to later retract that account, saying no record of such a call existed. [Kicking Ass] Restoring integrity, part 27,181. 8:30:03 PM    comment []

Jorn Barger is missing. (This, via MeFi and bOing bOing.) If you have heard from Jorn since the end of September, or have any notion of his whereabouts, please contact Eric Wagoner at whereisjorn@ericwagoner.com I'd been wondering about this. Hadn't been over to Robot Wisdom itself, but it hadn't been updating on my Palm. It attributed it to something flaky with AvantGo, but apprently that's not it. 8:23:44 PM    comment []

A history of celebrity sex tapes, real and fake, from Joan Crawford to Paris Hilton. By Ed Halter, in The Village Voice, via [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 8:18:38 PM    comment []

Update: Researchers Find Serious Vulnerability in Linux Kernel, by Dennis Fisher, eWeek. The vulnerability is in all releases of the kernel from Version 2.4.0 through 2.5.69, but has been fixed in Releases 2.4.23-pre7 and 2.6.0-test6. The vulnerability itself is an integer overflow in the brk( ) system call, which is a memory-management function. When the call invokes the do_brk( ) function, using user-supplied address and length variables, the call does not check for integer overflows when adding the variables, according to an analysis of the problem by Symantec Corp., based in Cupertino, Calif. According to Symantec, this weakness would allow any local user with shell-level access to the system to escalate his privileges to root. 4:55:44 PM    comment []

Sniffed password used for Debian server compromise, by Sam Varghese, Sydney Morning-Herald. A member of the Debian GNU/Linux system administration team believes there is an unknown local root exploit for the Linux kernel circulating in the wild and says it may have been used to compromise four servers belonging to the free software project, after initial unprivileged access was gained by using a sniffed password. 4:55:39 PM    comment []

Veritas expands R&D in India. BANGALORE, INDIA -- Storage software vendor Veritas Software Corp. announced Tuesday that it plans to expand its research and development (R&D) operations in India by hiring 300 new staff at its Pune facility over the next year. Veritas, in Mountain View, California, currently has 500 engineers involved in the developing the company's products at its Pune center. [InfoWorld: Top News] 4:34:39 PM    comment []

A brilliant tale from PhilG, titled, Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT.... Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India.  But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort:  OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given).  During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system.  In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology. The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show.  A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them.  The answer:  "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering." Students began to wake up. A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi".  It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server. Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers. A-maz-ing, no? But so familiar. 7:16:06 AM    comment []

iRATE Radio: Collaborative Filter, Legit MP3 Downloader. This is what we need! iRATE radio enables you to find music you'd like and download it, all legitimately. The more people use it, the better it works. (Via Techdirt) [Smart Mobs] 7:11:34 AM    comment []

Hack the Vote. You don't have to believe in conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system. By Paul Krugman. [New York Times: Opinion] 7:07:58 AM    comment []

The digital divide:Why the "don't-wants-tos" won't compute: Lessons from a New Zealand ICT project, by Barbara Crump and Andrea McIlroy, in First Monday. 7:02:28 AM    comment []

More on the release of the Stainless Steel Mouse That Roared. China frees an online dissident who wrote under the computer name 'Stainless Steel Mouse,' after imprisoning her for over a year for criticizing the government. Two other cyberdissidents are also freed, about a week before Premier Wen Jiabao is to visit the United States. [Wired News] 6:57:12 AM    comment []

Robert Fulghum, SIDEWALK NEWS (no permalink -- it's from November 24, 2003): I am afraid of Vikings and parrots. That sentence was written in white chalk on the sidewalk two blocks from my house. Several blocks away I found another message: I have three dead mittens. And in the street many blocks further one, these words: My teeth sometimes leave my body at night. So I bought some chalk . . . Why not get into this person's game? Are they crazy or poetic or imaginative or looking for someone like them or just confused about the messages the world needs to be getting? I don't know. Maybe it's a secret code between members of a non- sequitur club or a message from an alien. Who cares? It would be interesting to know. Why miss the opportunity? Ah, but what to write? Maybe some questions? This morning early I wandered around Queen Anne Hill on the standard walker's route and wrote close by the Unknown Chalker's statements, these inquiries: Will I ever learn? Whatever became of me? If you love me still, will you love me moving? Who knew? How do you plead? Will the circle be unbroken? Granted, my words are not quite as wiggy as the Unknown Chalker's, but maybe I've raised the intellectual level of discourse. Each to his own style. Now it's a day later. . . . . (thanks, Gerard!) 5:40:25 AM    comment []

Melanie Mills (Elisabeth Von Hullessem) update: Boynton writer's hopes dashed when literary agent arrested, by Scott Travis, Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel. North Myrtle Beach investigators told the Myrtle Beach Sun News that Von Hullessem, 49, is wanted in North Myrtle Beach, two counties in Arkansas and Stone County, Mo., on charges including fraud and attempted murder of her mother. . . . She also faces attempted murder charges in Arkansas, where police say she tried to run her mother over in a car. Weinstock said he first made contact with Von Hullessem in April 2002. He had sent query letters to about 100 literary agents, whose names he had found on the Internet. Von Hullessem, identifying herself as Melanie Mills, was one of only two that expressed interest in his novel. The two spent the next year exchanging e-mails and phone calls. She told him the book needed revisions and offered to edit them for a fee. He paid her $1,004. A woman who identified herself as Mills' assistant sent him an e-mail in May 2003 saying that Mills was out of the country, but the manuscript had been sent to St. Martin's Press. Then, earlier this year, that same person sent an e-mail saying Mills had died in a car accident in Germany. Weinstock started chatting with other writers on the Internet who had worked with her and became suspicious. He checked with German authorities and the Myrtle Beach newspaper and found no evidence that anyone with that name had died. St. Martin's Press had never heard of the book, Weinstock said. He learned from a Canadian newspaper that she had been arrested. Weinstock said he was surprised he fell victim to what he thinks is a scheme. She seemed very legitimate and very professional for the most part, he said. NMB literary agent nabbed in Canada: Woman may duck U.S. fraud charges. By Phil Watson, The Sun News (Myrtle Beach). There isn't much Weinstock can do but wait. He realizes that if von Hullessem doesn't come back to the United States, he will probably never see justice. I'm taking a pause on this, he said of his writing career. I was pretty much disillusioned. And, for a limited time, I presume, FUGITIVE VON HULLESSEM/HACKNEY/MILLS on eBay with a $10,000 reserve -- or buy a book together with pictures of Mills at the same url. (The direct url is http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3568464068&category77#ebayphotohosting but these always seem to break in transit. It's ViewItem & item = 35 68 46 40 68 in there, without the spaces, i.e. ending in equalsthreefivesixeightfoursixfourzerosixeight.) And, according to a comment received previously, there's much, much more on the case on this page at Digital Banff. 4:40:17 AM    comment []