Monday, May 17, 2004

Iraqi Governing Council President Killed. From the Washington Post: The president of the Iraqi Governing Council was killed early Monday in a huge explosion set off by a suicide bomber outside the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation authority here. At least 10 Iraqis were killed and six were wounded, and two U.S. soldiers were slightly injured, in a devastating attack on Iraqâs political leaders six weeks before the scheduled handover of limited political power to a new Iraqi government. Izzedine Salim was a Basra-based leader of the Dawa Party, a Shiite political faction. He'd held the rotating presidency of the Governing Council since May 1. Whole thing here. [Hit & Run] This is a pretty impressive victory for the Iraqis. They've gone after "high value targets" before, but this is the first time they've pulled it off. 2:14:27 PM    comment () Sarin Found In Iraq. The Iraq Survey Group confirms that the nerve agent sarin has been found in a 155-millimeter shell attached to an exploded roadside bomb. Sarin was released into the atmospher and two U.S. soldiers have been treated for minor exposure. "It is a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time," says Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, "and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED... when it exploded it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it." [Hit & Run] Very interesting! Kimmitt's claim is particularly interesting--Sarin doesn't last that long, as he must know. I don't suppose the Feds are too eager to point out that their conquest has introduced "weapons of mass destruction" into Iraq, though. Hopefully the guerillas who set this up will keep trying, and the death toll will go down. The sarin in this bomb most likely saved the life of the two soldiers who would have been killed if it was a standard explosive shell. 9:46:55 AM    comment () Slashdot | Attacking WinZip AES Encryption. bden writes "As another tidbit from Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram, remember back in January when WinZip was Slashdotted for moving forward with its new AES-based encryption technology? Everything sounded good since we all knew that AES is secure, right? Well, a cryptographer took a look at how WinZip uses AES and found lots of problems. Regardless of how many people actually plan to use WinZip encryption, the lesson, according to Schneier, is that "cryptography is hard, and simply using AES in a product does not magically make it secure." So how can we distinguish between an application that simply uses the right buzzwords, like AES, from an application that is actually secure?" [Privacy Digest] This is why I consider closed-source software that uses AES, like "Skype", to be insecure. Without any peer review, there's no way to tell if they've done it right, so it's necessary to presume that they didn't. 9:16:24 AM    comment () The German Response to US POW Torture. Story courtesy of Sean Corrigan: GERMAN FORCES ADVISED NOT TO TAKE AFGHAN PRISONERS; REPORT 2004-05-15 06:44 (New York) Hamburg (dpa) - Military lawyers have advised German elite soldiers in Afghanistan not to take prisoners to avoid having to turn turn... [LewRockwell.com Blog] Since it's only a recommendation, it will be interesting to see if the Germans follow it. At any rate, there's considerable historical irony in the Wehrmacht refusing to turn over prisoners to the Americans because they're afraid the prisoners will be mistreated. 9:01:51 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:01:27 PM.