Microsoft Says "Happy New Year"!

Microsoft greeted the New Year with only a moderate number, three, of patches.

Microsoft Corporation today released two security updates that patch three vulnerabilities in Windows. Only one of the three flaws is rated "critical," the highest ranking Microsoft uses, and the other two are only "important" and "moderate," the next two lower steps in the company's four ranks.

MS08-001 is the critical update that addresses two bugs in a trio of Windows' TCP/IP protocols.

Most of the issues are resolved unobtrusively for most users because these patches can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services. However, most ordinary users will receive the updates if they have their automatic updates enabled. The more problematic machines are for company or corporate computers in which the administrator would need to check that the updates were installed.

31 December 2007 Order of Battle of Coalition Troops in Iraq

Graphic source: The Long War Journal

For informative purposes, I posted the latest Order of Battle in Iraq.

The Hand That Rocks the Bombs

The hand that rocks the cradle.

Daily Report from Amiriya

7 January 2008
The alliance between the US army and Sunni former insurgents is being credited with forcing Al Qaeda out of Baghdad. Murders in the capital have decreased by 80% and calm is being restored.
"It all kicked off when we gathered the men of the area and decided to stand up to Al Qaeda", recalls Abu Tariq. "That was the start of the awakening". Tariq is the media agent and official cameraman for the Knights of Amiriyah, (also known as the Amiriyah Freedom Fighters), the jihadi insurgents who turned against Al Qaeda to help the Americans. While still ambivalent towards US forces, thousands of Amiriyah's erstwhile freedom fighters have signed up. They receive 0 every month from the Americans in exchange for cleaning out Al Qaeda. "The Amiriyah Freedom Fighters have done a great job", raves Capt Brian Wayman. "In the month that I've worked with them, they've caught and killed more Al Qaeda members than we've been able to do for quite some time". In recent months, the Knights have spread beyond the boundaries of Amiriyah into other neighbourhoods, where Al Qaeda are now on the run. As Abu Tariq states; "Things are 90% better now. You can see for yourself".

Muslim Clerics Speak

This is a clip of Muslim clerics preaching.

The Future: Middle Eastern Children's Performance

This clip features the performance of children at a rally. The children are our future.

Sears Gets it Half Right

I blogged before about the criticism that Sears ran into and they addressed the issue. Sears plugs the Web site's privacy hole.

The problem was that Sears Holdings appeared to violate privacy concerns, and as a result, they took part of its Managemyhome.com Web site offline.

A customer's purchase history on Manage My Home might have been able to be accessed by unauthorized persons.

The feature, although handy for customers, is a violation of Sears' own privacy policies.

On the other hand, Sears, the third-largest retailer in the U.S., has left intact its My SHC Community portal, which downloads invasive ComScore Web tracking software to some users.

The criticism is that the company does not fully disclose what the software actually does.

As the Sears 2005 merger with Kmart progresses, there are apparently some rough spots. At least partially, Sears is making the effort to right the ship.

Note On: "The Looming Tower"

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, an excellent book by the way, has a touching scene when Ali Soufan, the Lebanese American FBI agent who interrogated Abu Jandal, the Yemeni source for much of what we know about the 9/11 hijackers, where Ali finally breaks him.

Ali got Abu to identify the hijackers in a brilliant ploy.

But Wright builds up to the identification of the hijackers by beginning his story six decades ago with the first Middle Eastener to attack the West.

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian who was offended by the decadent Americans while attending college in Colorado. Qutb's jail time manifesto justified takfir which held that Islam was the only true religion and that true believers had the religious obligation to kill everyone—including women and children—who disagreed with the true faith (29).

Wright describes Bin Laden's youth and evolution as a thinker when in 1980 Osama adopted the doctrine of takfir as al-Qa’ida’s operating principle.

The Americans are slow to understand Bin Laden but when they do FBI terrorist experts Dan Coleman, John O’Neill, and to a lesser extent Michael Scheuer and Richard Clarke are quick to identify him as a significant threat. They first learned of al-Qa’ida from a Sudanese defector, Jamal al-Fadl, shortly after bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. While al-Qa’ida evolved and planned its terrorist operations—the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks in Lebanon, Africa, and on the USS Cole—leading up to 9/11, the FBI and CIA came to realize that al-Qa’ida planned terrorist attacks against America itself.

Wright documents that on 11 September 2001, the Bureau had only one analyst working full time on the al-Qa’ida account.

Wright demonstrates that the failure of the FBI and the CIA to cooperate at key junctures and the failure of Clinton to aggressively identify and attack Bin Laden provided him a loophole to escape.

In the words of Scheuer in his own work Imperial Hubris, American policy makers failed to smoke Bin Laden in the dust of history. Americans were failed by the tepid investigation and muted response by American policy makers. The tragedy of 9/11 is the result.

Texas Teen Girls Slain for Honor?

Graphic source: The Dallas Morning News

The faces that peer out of the photograph may look like typical American teen age girls but they are not.

The two slain Lewisville High School students, near Dallas, Texas, sisters were mourned at services. Sarah, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, both excelled in academics and athletics but their Egyptian-born father, Yaser Abdel Said, is still on the loose. They were both found shot to death in a taxi at an Irving motel.

There are rumors and media reports that the Muslim father's religion may have been the reason for the killings as "honor killings," a practice in which a man kills a female relative who he believes has somehow shamed the family.

Irving police are investigating but they have acknowledged that the family had some previous domestic problems.

Gail Gartrell, the sisters' great-aunt, charged that Mr. Said physically abused the two girls for years. The father was upset recently to discover that the girls had boyfriends.

The mother and girls had fled the father thinking he would kill them.

At the funeral, Dr. Yusuf Kavacki, head of the Richardson mosque, told mourners that all living things are destined to die. He did not address the Muslim issue of honor killings.

These are strange days in America when no one questions the death of children.

Juan Cole Addressed the AHA on the "Lessons Not Learned in Iraq"

Juan Cole spoke yesterday at the American Association of Historians.

Biography:

John "Juan" Ricardo I. Cole (born October 1952 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on television, and testified before the United States Senate. He has published several peer-reviewed books on the modern Middle East and is a translator of both Arabic and Persian. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment (formerly Informed Consent).

Cf. Wikipedia.

Criticism

Alexander H. Joffe in the Middle East Quarterly has written that "Cole suggests that many American Jewish officials hold dual loyalties, a frequent anti-Semitic theme." Cole argues that his critics have "perverted the word 'antisemitic,'" and also points out that "in the Middle East Studies establishment in the United States, I have stood with Israeli colleagues and against any attempt to marginalize them or boycott them."

According to Efraim Karsh, Cole has done "hardly any independent research on the twentieth-century Middle East", and Karsh characterized Cole's analysis of this era as "derivative." He has also responded to Cole's criticism of Israeli policies and the influence of the Israel lobby, comparing them to accusations that have been made in anti-semitic writings. Cole responded directly to Karsh in his blog, dismissing one of Karsh's charges, that Cole's criticisms echo themes in the antisemitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a "propaganda technique," adding that "No serious person who knows me or my work would credit his outrageous insinuations for a moment." Cole also defended his knowledge of modern Middle Eastern history, comparing his experience "on the ground" in the modern Arab world favorably with that of Bernard Lewis, a historian he said is "lionized" by Karsh.

AAH Features a Non-Expert to Present on Contemporary American Foreign Policy

Bruce Cumings spoke yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association of Historians.

He is a historian and a professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations in East Asia. In this instance, I'm not sure why he is considered an expert in American presidents or in Middle Eastern affairs. This is not his area of expertise.

During his talk, he stated that he is not sure why he is so "nervous" but he has been on a "liquid diet."

Criticism

Cumings' scholarship on Korea has been challenged by some academic critics, and in general his work has stirred up more controversy than that of most other historians.

Paul Hollander has argued that Cumings' has a left-wing, pro-North Korea bias. He cites the example of Cumings' discussion of the North Korean gulag system, noting that "in a triumph of selective perception, he manages to interpret the most damning indictment of the North Korean gulag available--The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot--as providing support for his views of the system. As he sees it, the book is 'interesting and believable' because it is not the 'ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers ... meant it to be.' But it is precisely and resoundingly that, as any reader without a soft spot for North Korean tyranny would readily discover. Cumings writes that "conditions were primitive and beatings were frequent [in the camp described in that book] but the inmates also were able to improvise much of their upkeep on their own ... small animals could surreptitiously be caught and cooked." He delicately refrains from mentioning that these small animals were mostly rats, and a regular part of the narrator's diet. That book makes abundantly clear that hunger and malnutrition were endemic; inmates stealing food or trying to escape were executed. Cumings also fails to mention these public executions the inmates were obliged to attend, stressing instead that families were commendably kept together and that "death from starvation was rare." In any event, he suggests, these deprivations are put into the proper perspective by our "longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons"--which should disqualify us from "pointing a finger."

Historian Allan Millett has argued that Cumings' "eagerness to cast American officials and policy in the worst possible light, however, often leads him to confuse chronological cause and effect and to leap to judgments that cannot be supported by the documentation he cites or ignores."

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Korea expert B.R. Myers lambasted Cumings and in particular his book North Korea: Another Country. Myers argued that, in the book, "Cumings likens North Korea to Thomas More's Utopia, and this time the wrongheadedness seems downright willful; it's as if he were so tired of being made to look silly by forces beyond his control that he decided to do the job himself."

Cf. Wikipedia article: Bruce Cumings.

Santa Knows How to Navigate and Shows Me How

Graphic source: Magellan.

Finally haven taken the GPS plunge, thank you Santa, I now plot my current location, so that my Magellan Maestro 4210 North America can acquire at least three different satellite signals. The more signals it grabs, the more accurate its positioning will be. The device allows you to see your current GPS signal reception, the number of signals, the direction from which they're being received, and your current longitude and latitude. You can touch a Point of View (POI) icon for nearby services on the interactive map and see the address and phone number (when available) and get an instant route. The SiRFstarIII™ GPS receiver and built-in high-sensitivity antenna provide quick position acquisition for reliable navigation. QuickSpell™ intelligently searches and checks spelling so you can enter your destination with just a few touches of the screen. SmartDetour™ prompts you to route around sudden slow freeway traffic. The SD/MMC card slot may be used to Backup or Restore your receiver’s address book and store Custom Point of Interests (POIs). Backup and Restore is available in the receiver’s User Options from the Main Menu.

Firefox 3 Beta 2, A Tweak or Two

Graphic source: Computerworld

I'm a big fan of Firefox so with a new release in the offing I took a look. One handy new feature is the downloading information. In order to keep better track of downloads the upcoming Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes a handy Mozilla tweak. Not only the file name is listed but also the URL it was downloaded from, and the download information includes an icon that leads to information about when and where you downloaded it. The Remove link has been removed from the Download manager although you can still delete by right-clicking. I would have let it as it is but I'm quibbling here. I look forward to more development to see what Mozilla comes up with. I do like the increased security features as well.

Internet Is a Mixed Blessing for Politics

In Iowa, as I think has been the case building up to the caucus, is that however interesting novel uses of the Internet may be, the number of Facebook "friends" or the number of YouTube video views that campaigners have elicited, has not resulted in solid results. The candidates seem to be stuck in the same quandrey as businesses. They don't know how to effectively exploit the unbelievable amount of free time that people expend online into purchasing, or electoral support. The Web 2.0 world has been a mixed blessing for politicians.

A note on: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005; ISBN 1-4000-6317-5) by Robert Pape is a cogent analysis of suicide terrorism. Pape compiled a database at the University of Chicago where he directs the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism.

Pape claims to possess the world’s first “database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 — 315 attacks in all” (3).

He states: “what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland” (4).

It is imperative that Americans understand his point.

How can the U.S. respond? Pape has a few suggestions.

Victory should be defined as defeating the current crop of terrorists and preventing a new group arising.

He states: “the taproot is American military policy” (244).

Pape suggests a policy of “‘off-shore’ balancing”: establishing local alliances while maintaining the capacity for rapid deployment of military forces (247-50).

The local alliances, this is my point, Pape is not responsible for this, should be to increase the involvement of Middle Eastern states, the Russians, and Chindia.

Sears and Kmart Nabbed in Spyware Controversy

Graphic source: screen shot by Benjamin Googins

Sears and Kmart are old-time companies that do not grasp the implications of the technology that they are using. This is not to excuse what they did, as they have recently been embroiled in a spyware controversy but it is what it is.

This is unfortunate for Sears since I've been really been impressed recently with Sears' sensitivity and support for our military personnel but here they are in the midst of spyware.

How so? Apparently, customers who sign up for a new marketing program may be giving up more private information according to a leading anti-spyware researcher.

According to a story released by Computerworld, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ben Edelman, Sears Holdings' My SHC Community program falls short of U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) standards by failing to notify users precisely what occurs once they download the company's marketing software. Sears does not tell customers that the software "tracks every site you go to, every search you make, every product you buy, and every product you look at but don't buy. It's just spooky."

CA senior engineer Benjamin
Googins wrote in a late December blog entry that criticized the software. The Sears software was written by VoiceFive, a subsidiary of Internet measurement firm ComScore.

In his blog, Googins states his conclusion:

Sears.com is pushing software with extensive user tracking capabilities and doing a very poor job of obtaining informed consent – if at all. After the proxy software is installed on the user’s system there is nothing on the user’s desktop to indicate their every move on the Internet is being collected and sent to a third party market research company, comScore.

Although the software was not written by Sears they are still clearly responsible for the content and application of the contracted software. Oops, it looks like the old-time companies who foster good customer relations need to work harder.

Graphic source: another screen shot by Benjamin Googins

Acceptable Costs of War?

There are those that would say there are acceptable costs associated with war. The key is of course that the current sentiment in America does not allow for complex answers, unspeakable horrors, and relentless warfare. This new type of American would be unrecognized by historical figures such as Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, et. al.

Islamofascists Testify

A recent video introduces us to some Islamofascists.

Considering a Hard-Drive Erasing?

Looking for a disk-wiping program, preferably one that meets the U.S. Department of Defense's standards for disk sanitation? The DOD suggests that a hard drive should be wiped clean seven times so these programs will overwrite your entire hard disk with data multiple times, ensuring that the original data can't be retrieved. I hope you can be patient because it can take several hours to wipe the hard disk.

One to consider is Darik's Boot and Nuke which is free down loadable software that creates a boot disk which wipes everything cleanly on the hard drive. It can be used with floppy disks, USB flash drives, as well as CDs and DVDs. A similar program is Eraser which I have not seen or used so at some point I may be able to compare the two.

FBI Abuses Biometrics

Graphic source: Bob Shaw For The Washington Post

The FBI is preparing to abuse a vast database of biometric data in a $1 billion project which includes images of irises and faces. The FBI has consistently had a truly abysmal IT record so I would not imagine this can be a good development.

The basic procedural protocol and etiquette between our top two crime and espionage units, The Company, and the FBI, is so much more a cultural and organizational priority that I can see little good to come out of the new project. It also seems inherently flawed along Orwellian lines.

With the FBI possessing the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, I can envision a government with an unprecedented ability to monitor individuals in the United States and abroad.

Apparently, digital images of faces, fingerprints, and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement.

A 10-year contract will be announced soon that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information the FBI receives. World-wide policing will rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even individual characteristics and personal traits such as the unique way that people walk and talk will be included. At an employers request, the FBI will also retain the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees encounter the law.

The project has alarmed some, such as Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union because: "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society."

The system planned by the FBI is called Next Generation Identification and it looks like its here to stay.

The servers in the Appalachian underground facility which houses the project, the size of two football fields, receives a hit every second from somewhere in the United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints against the FBI's database of 55 million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match is made--or ruled out--as many as 100,000 times a day.

If the system works well at all, the information would be collected from a wide variety of sources and would subsequently available to multiple agencies which increases the chances to catch criminals. This procedure was not done in 2001 which allowed the 9/11 hijackers to escape detection. The FBI will make both criminal and civilian data available to authorized users and there are now 900,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers who can query the fingerprint database.

Orwell, anyone?