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Tuesday, September 23, 2003 |
The news was somewhat buried -- reading page 8 or 9 of USA Today -- Rumsfeld sees no link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11 and Bush: No proof of Saddam role in 9/11. Well, it's really big of them to come clean on this, two years after the fact, and long since it was shown that 70% of Americans thought that Hussein was responsible for the attacks. Exactly why would the people have thought that? Because the Pentagon dropped Afghanistan like a hot potato when the going got non-productive, and pursued Saddam instead? Because the insinuation was made over and over again that there absolutely was a connection? [birdhouse.org]
2:26:07 PM 
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Not only has Verisign betrayed their trust by hijacking all the .NET and .COM typos, they've also tossed out the privacy of every fumblefingered netizen by putting a web-bug on their SiteFinder page, so that anyone whose session is stolen by Verisign is thereafter marked with a tracker-cookie that is used to spy on you as you traverse the Web.
The query string of the URL contains the usual things such as the Web page URL, the referring URL, browser type, screen size, etc. This query string is built on the fly by about 50 lines of JavaScript embedded in the Verisign Web page.
The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.
[via Boing Boing Blog]
2:17:56 PM
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Salon is running an astonishing interview with Bev Harris, the whistle-blower who broke the news that the computerized voting machines in use across America are not only insecure, but deliberately so, because insecure machines are easier for the techs from Diebold and other suppliers to "fix" when they have embarassing failures (of course, they're also easy for anyone else who wants to "fix" an election). Diebold hasn't denied that the leaked memos that Harris published are real -- rather, they've owned up to them and asserted a copyright on them, threatening her with a DMCA suit if she doesn't take them off the web.
Well, I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted...
...[T]hey have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don't mention [a problem] you may "skate through" certification. And talking about doing "end runs" is not a good thing either.
And what's disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about -- overwriting the audit log -- in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.
[via Boing Boing Blog]
2:15:42 PM
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The 3,000-year-old Ward Hunt ice shelf, the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, has broken up, report U.S. and Canadian scientists. The researchers say local climate warming is to blame, and casualties include species of plankton and algae. [Wired News]
2:08:16 PM
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The bureau's cybercrime unit, trying hard to convict a suspected cracker, is telling reporters who have interviewed him to expect a subpoena, raising age-old First Amendment issues. [Wired News]
2:07:54 PM
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Coming to a courtroom near you: Patriot Act II. As the Bush administration pushes to expand federal powers, the director of the ACLU charges it with misrepresenting the facts about the first Patriot Act. [Wired News]
2:07:12 PM
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Millions of passenger records served as the basis for a data-mining prototype that resembles Darpa's Terrorism Information Awareness project -- and one company has ties to both. [Wired News]
2:06:34 PM
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Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. [Slashdot]
1:38:05 PM
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© Copyright 2003 The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.
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