Just another nerd.
Friday’s Salon.Com had an excellent example of its own irrelevance. While web logs, e-zines, and other web sites were producing a lot of often compelling material on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Salon.Com went with what it knows best — sex.
That’s right, Sex in a time of terror is actually a serious attempt to look at how the 9/11 attack affected people’s sex lives. I.e. — just another stupid excuse for Salon.Com to provide more annoying pseudo-titillating material.
Wired has a story about broadband providers simply cutting off access to users whose systems become infected with Code Red or Nmida. Wired mentions that Speakeasy and DSL Inc. simply yank access to users whose systems are infected with such viruses/worms.
This is a big problem, but an even bigger problem is that most broadband providers a) do almost nothing to educate their users about the security problems associated with broadband service, and b) actually forbid users from using the best security methods to ward off infestations and attacks.
I’ve been through the process both with DSL and cable and neither provider even so much as hinted that I might want to think about any sort of software or hardware solution to prevent attacks on the computer(s) hooked up to my broadband connection. Both providers had information on firewall software buried deep in their web sites, but I assume they were afraid providing any security information might turn off potential customers.
Since I am very concerned about security, I run a small NAT router. The problem is that this is in direct violation of my agreement with the cable company which strictly forbids using any sort of router.
That restriction is added because they don’t want people using the cable access to run web, ftp, and game servers. The problem with servers is a legitimate concern — the first week the students cam back to the university here, my cable connection was almost nonexistent because the bandwidth was being used by students setting up bandwidth-munching servers.
But it’s stupid to simply ban routers because of this. Routers, after all, don’t make it difficult to find the people abusing the system. Talking with a tech support guy about the problem, he said they could identify neighborhood-sized areas where the traffic was thought he roof and then run port scans to determine who was violating the terms of service.
The ban on routers, then, simply makes the average home users system less secure, while really doing very little to fight the bandwidth hogs. Rather than fighting routers, broadband providers should be encouraging people to buy them as an important part of general network security.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently announced a breakthrough in fuel cell research — they became the first to develop a fuel cell that runs on a readily available liquid fuel source. In their case, the prototype fuel cell they
built runs on diesel fuel.
Fuel cell technology has always been one of those up and coming technologies that is supposed to transform how the world uses energy. The main drawback to current technologies is they tend to require exotic fuel sources, often using some sort of highly compressed hydrogen which has a number of drawbacks above and beyond the problems of creating a supply system.
Researchers Raymond J. Gorte and John M. Vohs earlier created the first fuel cell that ran on something other than hydrogen when they published a paper in Nature in March 2000 describing a fuel cell that ran on butane. Their newest research with diesel fuel moves the technology closer to being a viable energy alternative to existing combustion engines and batteries.
Gorte and Vohs envision that their technology might someday use natural gas to power a basement generator that would supply 5 kilowatt hours and use the excess heat the fuel cells produce to heat the home and provide hot water, all much more efficiently than current power generation schemes.
Source:
Much more bang for the buck possible from fuel cells. Unisci.Com, Press Release, September 7, 2001.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Paul McCartney is one of many celebrities trying to help raise money to benefit the families of firefighters killed while trying to save people from the two World Trade Center towers.
McCartney notes that his father was a fireman in Liverpool during World War II, and his benefit concert scheduled for October in New York City is a welcome aid. But there’s another thing McCartney could do for firefighters — publicly distance himself from the extremist animal rights activists, including within People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who endorse so-called direct action, including arson.
Groups such as the Animal Liberation Front have long used arson as a means of terrorism against people involved in animal enterprises, including farms and medical research laboratories. The activists have longed claimed that arson is a non-violent means of protest since they only torch buildings they think are unoccupied. But as the events at the World Trade Center put in stark contrast, whenever there is a fire of any kind, firefighters, police and others often end up putting their lives in immediate danger. Along with the attack on the World Trade Center, many still remember the New York firefighters who died while trying to rescue people from a burning building — it later was revealed that the people the firefighters died trying to evacuate had exited the building earlier.
Yet despite the dangers posed to rescue officials by arson, such activities by the ALF have found plenty of support within the mainstream of the animal rights movement. Although PETA is careful to keep its distance from actual acts of terrorism, it paid part of the defense of |Rodney Coranado|, who was convicted of fire bombing a research laboratory at Michigan State University, and lately people who work for PETA, such as … have come out strongly in favor of such acts of terrorism.
If McCartney truly cares about the lies of firefighters, as he almost certainly does, why does he continue to associate with an organization which endorses activities that regularly put the lives of those firefighters at risk?
Source:
McCartney plans firefighters’ benefits. Reuters, September 21, 2001.
James Cromwell, the actor best known for playing the farmer in the 1995 film “Babe,” has lately been very active in the animal rights movement. He has worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and was among a number of people arrested at a PETA-sponsored protest of Wendy’s this summer. And like a number of other PETA-affiliated celebrities, Cromwell is a rank hypocrite, condemning people who eat meat but turning around and defending other uses of animals when it impacts his lifestyle.
In a profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cromwell says that, “I’m a vegan with an asterisk.” The asterisk? Among other things, Cromwell enjoys wearing leather shoes and dairy products in baked goods.
So it is okay to kill a cow to produce leather for Cromwell’s shoes, but wrong for you or I to eat the meat produced from that same animal. Come on, Cromwell, why be so wasteful? Lets use the whole animal.
Source:
Television column. The Plain Dealer, September 23, 2001, p.33.
After the 9/11 terrorist attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. According to an MSNBC report,
Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, also has incentives to cooperate. For siding with the U.S. against the Taliban and bin Laden, Islamabad stands to get as much as $3 billion in debt relief, emergency aid for refugees and the removal of sanctions that were imposed when they tested nuclear weapons and staged a military coup. That would enable Pakistan to also get military aid, including spare parts for its F-16’s, Tow missiles and armed personnel carriers.
Before we climb into bed with Pakistan, however, lets remember that Pakistan shares many of the features that President George W. Bush so eloquently noted plague Afghanistan, especially in the way its legal system treats women.
Two years after General Zia-ul-Haq took power in Pakistan in 1977, Pakistan’s criminal code was modified with what are called the Hudood Ordinances. These encapsulate some of the anti-female attitudes that are so derided in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan, extra-marital sex is illegal and the age of majority for women is 16 or the onset of puberty, whichever comes first. In practice what this means is that if a 30-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl, rather than prosecute that as statutory rape, Pakistani authorities will in fact go after the 12-year-old girl as well. There are a couple dozen girls 12 and up in Pakistani prisons due to precisely such charges.
And unbelievably the girl cannot even testify in her own defense at such a trial. As a 1999 State Department report on Pakistan noted,
Likewise, the testimony of women, Muslim or non-Muslim, is not admissible in cases involving Hadd punishments. Thus, if a Muslim man rapes a Muslim woman in the presence of several women, he cannot be convicted under the Hudood ordinances because women cannot testify. Similarly, if a Muslim man rapes a woman in the presence of non-Muslim men and women, he cannot be convicted because women and non-Muslim men cannot testify.
And these folks are going to be our new allies?
Sources:
U.S. Department of State Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999: Pakistan. Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Washington DC, September 9, 1999.