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Last Tuesday we had an enforced electrical inspection during which power was abruptly removed from the server rack. All servers were fine save one, the mail server, which had a damaged power supply. A replacement supply was purchased on Friday and installed. Testing over the weekend proved operational readiness and we are now back online with email.

– The Slamlander

Win7 pricing has been released.

This is getting bad folks.

Those who want to upgrade to Windows 7 on a older PC will pay a reduced price for the software. Stand alone versions of Windows 7, that can run on more than one PC, will also be available.

Microsoft said these upgrade options will not be available to Europeans.

"We will not be able to offer an upgrade product within Europe," said John Curran, Windows business lead at Microsoft UK, adding that only the full version of the software will be available to Europeans.

This is market discrimination at its worst.

The upgrade option was not available, Microsoft said, because it was trying to comply with European competition regulations.

Which is pure bullshit! Microsoft didn’t like being called a monopolist and paying billions of dollars worth of fines. Now they are trying to get the fines back out of European customers.

A Commission spokesman dismissed Microsoft’s claim that it was taking the action to comply with European laws.

"For them to claim that this is somehow imposed by the Commission or is going to resolve the problem with the Commission is far from clear," he said. "It’s certainly not because we’ve asked them to do it."

It appears that the commission agrees but will not yet go so far as to state what I just said. This is Microsoft trying to get back at us for those billions of dollars of fines that they were supposed to pay¹

M$ willfully violated the law, was found guilty in court and then willfully refused to pay the resulting fine. They then got fined for failure to pay the fine, with interest, and only made token payment when about to be levied a fine for failure to pay the fine, which was for failure to pay the fine, which was for failure to pay the original fine. All in all, some +20B$² .

1. They still haven’t paid all of them. [↩]
2. I’m not sure of this, it seems low and I thought the total remuneration was upwards of +90B$ [↩]

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

Governor Sanford has an affair, big deal! Especially since his wife already knew about it. If it is^okay with her then why is anyone else concerned?

He said his wife and family had known of the affair for the past five months and that he was resigning his post of chair of the RGA.He said his wife and family had known of the affair for the past five months and that he was resigning his post of chair of the RGA.

Mitterand¹ had a lady on the side that even bore him a daughter. She gets along great with the other siblings and even with his wife! In fact, long past his death, they still live close to each other². The line Bill Clinton should have used is “It’s between me, Hillary, and no one else!”

American society doesn’t allow polygamy but they allow divorce, which is a form of serial polygamy. In Italy, Enzo Ferrari had a mistress that he spent most of his later years with. His first wife had personality issues but she bore him children and she was his wife of record. However, the mistress also bore his children but she was only his mistress. The kids all got along fine.

I developed a relationship with… a dear, dear friend from Argentina and as a consequence I hurt her, I hurt you all, I hurt my wife, I hurt my boys, I hurt a lot of different folks.

That’s the part that I don’t get. The wife being hurt is natural, sometimes. At other times it can be a relief, as in Mitterand’s case. The kids aren’t hurt unless a divorce ensues. If the wife is okay with it, why the fuck should anyone else care?

I should note that Mitterand was more henpecked than most, since both of his wives got along too well. Think about it.

1. Past President of France. [↩]
2. I should also note that it is extremely likely that if both women love the same man than they probably are relationship compatible with each other as well. [↩]

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

There is a bogus email

I got it twice. The first one was with an attachment that ClamWin auto-stripped in my hMailserver (I love ClamWin). The second one was with bogus link only.

People should know, Microsoft NEVER sends either update attachments or links to updates. They ALWAYS make you go through the normal update process.

Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721)

Brief Description

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.

Instructions

• To install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721) please visit Microsoft Update Center:

ht://update.microsoft.com/microsoftofficeupdate/isapdl/default.aspx?ln=en-us&id=69856679253865343173165925879729351302763190300486843409431 ¹

Quick Details

• File Name: officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe²
• Version: 1.4
• Date Published: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:21:29 -0300
• Language: English
• File Size: 81 KB

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows 98; Windows ME; Windows NT; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP; Windows Vista

This update applies to the following product: Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

Regardless of what the link text says, the actual link goes to illlihff.com. This is strange because WHOIS gives me this³ .

Domain Name: ILLLHI1.COM

Registrant [1938512]:
        mary ramsden Jamiesonrl@yahoo.co.uk
        410 charlton ave
        south orange
        NJ
        07079
        US

Administrative Contact [1938512]:
        mary ramsden Jamiesonrl@yahoo.co.uk
        410 charlton ave
        south orange
        NJ
        07079
        US
        Phone: +1.973451855

Billing Contact [1938512]:
        mary ramsden Jamiesonrl@yahoo.co.uk
        410 charlton ave
        south orange
        NJ
        07079
        US
        Phone: +1.973451855

Technical Contact [1938512]:
        mary ramsden Jamiesonrl@yahoo.co.uk
        410 charlton ave
        south orange
        NJ
        07079
        US
        Phone: +1.973451855

Domain servers in listed order:

        NS1.2-PROFESSIONAL.COM
        NS1.COMPARE-TRANSLATED.COM

        Record created on:        2009-06-22 12:14:59.0
        Database last updated on: 2009-06-23 09:24:59.823
        Domain Expires on:        2010-06-22 12:15:00.0

–
Pinging the DNS name gets me this

C:\Users\Slamlander.CASELLE-NET>ping update.microsoft.com.ILLLHI1.COM

Pinging update.microsoft.com.ILLLHI1.COM [95.76.65.228] with 32 bytes of data:

Now I take the IP number that DNS gave me and look it up

C:\Users\Slamlander.CASELLE-NET>whois 95.76.65.228

OrgName:    RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgID:      RIPE
Address:    P.O. Box 10096
City:       Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country:    NL

ReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43

NetRange:   95.0.0.0 – 95.255.255.255
CIDR:       95.0.0.0/8
NetName:    95-RIPE
NetHandle:  NET-95-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType:    Allocated to RIPE NCC
NameServer: NS-PRI.RIPE.NET
NameServer: SEC1.APNIC.NET
NameServer: SEC3.APNIC.NET
NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET
NameServer: NS2.LACNIC.NET
Comment:    These addresses have been further assigned to users in
Comment:    the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can be found in
Comment:    the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
RegDate:    2007-07-30
Updated:    2009-05-18

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2009-06-22 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.

Found a referral to whois.ripe.net:43.

% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: This output has been filtered.
%       To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to ‘95.76.64.0 – 95.76.67.255′

inetnum:        95.76.64.0 – 95.76.67.255
netname:        ASTRAL
descr:          ASTRAL TIMISOARA
country:        RO
admin-c:        UPC1-RIPE
tech-c:         UPC1-RIPE
remarks:        ***********************************
remarks:        *  report abuse to abuse@upc.ro   *
remarks:        ***********************************
status:         ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by:         ASTRALTELECOM-MNT
mnt-lower:      ASTRALTELECOM-MNT
mnt-routes:     ASTRALTELECOM-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

role:           UPC Romania LIR
address:        62D, Nordului St.
address:        District 1, 014104
address:        Bucharest
phone:          +40-31-1018100
fax-no:         +40-31-1018101
org:            ORG-ATS4-RIPE
admin-c:        AH1598-RIPE
admin-c:        HMCB1-RIPE
admin-c:        SB666-RIPE
admin-c:        LPT7-RIPE
tech-c:         LPT7-RIPE
nic-hdl:        UPC1-RIPE
remarks:        ***************************************
remarks:        *  for abuse please use abuse@upc.ro  *
remarks:        ***************************************
abuse-mailbox:  abuse@upc.ro
mnt-by:         ASTRALTELECOM-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

% Information related to ‘95.76.0.0/15AS6746′

route:          95.76.0.0/15
descr:          UPC Romania
origin:         AS6746
mnt-by:         ASTRALTELECOM-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

People should know and it bears repeating, Microsoft NEVER sends either update attachments or links to updates. They ALWAYS make you go through the normal update process.

UPDATE: I looked at the headers again, using SquirrelMail, which has a much better source view than Outlook. This time I got the correct DNS name. Since this is a live server and definite attempt to obfuscate the DNS name then this may indeed be the actual culprit.

UPDATE1:  I ran it again, using the full DNS link address and got an IP address in Romania. I am reasonably confident in this one.

1. Dangerous malware Link removed. The text that you see is the link text. The actual link goes somewhere quite dangerous. [↩]
2. This is the stripped attachment [↩]
3. It was definitely an obfuscated DNS name [↩]

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

Well, my email network is running again. One perforce has to watch and maintain such systems, not because they are unreliable, but because they are under constant attack and will erode over time. It would be nice if, like the old days, one could assemble a server that would stand for ten or more years. However, there is always some twat that is trying to break it. No matter how sound your system is, they will eventually succeed.

This is what happened to my systems and they succeeded during a low point for me, when I wasn’t watching. To be honest, the constant supervision is getting wearying. Gone are the days when you can get ten plus years of uptime on a server.

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

The mail server has been upgraded to the latest hMailserver and appears to be stable. Outlook 2007 clients also appear to work.

We are still using SquirrelMail for a Webmail client.

— The Slamlander

Mail service, for the moment is down. The Mail server got hit with a Wyrm. Although it didn’t get taken over it was still crashed and I haven’t got it back up again. It is being worked on as I write this. The problem is that the Wyrm is still out there and hitting the system about 3-4 times a minute. Until I get the new upgrades, it will have to remain FUBAR.

This is not a fault of hMailserver. Rather, it is the fault of a Wyrm author. I am getting many incoming malformed  packet length errors.

It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been dealing with other issues. True, they are not as grievous as some on my friends list but for me, they are still some things that I can’t ignore.

Some of you may have noticed that my Econ and Politicks posts have tapered off or just plain stopped. They will remain stopped for the moment. Where I used to be glued to the dataflow, both online and on television, I no longer track either. The reason is that it is no longer healthy for me to do so.

The worst that can happen to an Oracle during bad times is for them to NOT BE WRONG. I was highly accurate and correct, I still am. The data flows into my head, it gets processed analyzed and integrated, and a result comes out. I haven’t been wrong, accept for some timing¹ , for years. I said that the jobless recovery was going to go bust, and it did, in a major way. I predicted the housing market crash, albeit years before, and it happened in exactly the manner predicted, even if not on time. At the moment, even the good news is only a little less bad news. The downward slope is only getting a little less steep. In times like this, Oracles want to be wrong² !

Three months ago, I asked the doctor whether the diabetes was causing my symptoms. I hadn’t written anything for months and I was feeling really defocused and having difficulty managing my time. He immediately said, definitively, that it was not a side effect of the diabetes. It was depression. I have never before in my life been diagnosed with depression. Even when my company had to be killed³ , I weathered the storm. My divorce was just another conflict. I never believed that anything could do that to me and here I was diagnosed with depression and put on Cipralex. Yes, it’s situational depression but the situation isn’t going away anytime soon.

That’s about the same time that I finally started the current book. You might have also noticed that was about the time that I dropped out of sight. It also coincided with my email going FUBAR⁴ . 

Well, I actually finished the book and it’s not bad. It’s a whole lot less controversial than the other two but this is just a decent story that isn’t trying to make a social statement. Codewise, I’m still getting it together. That level of focus is still marginal but getting better.

1. Some of that timing shift was caused by pre-emptive corrective action on the part of the participants. It only served to delay the inevitable. [↩]
2. Especially if they are living in the same system that is crashing. Knowing that the crash is coming is no comfort. Being correct is sometimes a curse. [↩]
3. DOT COM and Telco crash casualty. [↩]
4. I figured: small loss there since I wasn’t handling things well anyway. [↩]

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

Megan isn’t the only one that doesn’t like Anne Coulter. That’s Megan McCain.

Among many other Centrist Republicans, Anne Coulter leaves me mystified. Where does she get the ideas that Liberals are godless¹ ? In fact, I really want to know why Liberals are akin to fascists when G.W. Bush wasn’t. During eight years of steady incursions and erosion of our individual rights by the “freedom loving” Republicans of the far right; How can anyone claim that they are not fascist? Neoconservative and neofascist, what is the difference?

As much as she espouses Religious Right ideals, Ann Coulter should  be barefoot, in the kitchen, and forced to make babies until she dies in childbirth² . Instead, she is a high flying lawyer/pundit that makes Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal. Anne Coulter does not practice what she devoutly preaches and that makes her a fraud!

1. Anne’s book where she confuses secularism with atheism. [↩]
2. Typical Christian Religious Right ideals [↩]

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

Suzie Sparks is nothing like you. She isn’t really very cool: she blends into crowds, she hangs out on the fringes at parties, and wearing shades after dark makes her run into things. She may have sometimes thought that she was special, or destined for greater things, but probably dismissed the idea as a fantasy. She’s got no emotional scars to speak of. And she’s gotten no slack from you.

In general, you care deeply about Suzie Sparks, but you’re smart enough to let her stand on her own, without burdening her with your personal fantasies or propping her up with idealization and over-dramatization. Suzie Sparks is a healthy character with a promising career ahead of her.

Score Breakdown
Do I Know This Guy? 2
You Mean Plaid Is Out? 8
I’m Destined For What? 11
Healthy as a Horse 2
Momma HATES Her! 1
Total: 24

–

The Mary Sue test and more about Mary Sue.

Originally published at The Slamlander. You can comment here or there.

I found this hilarious. Some Hollywood writing is okay but, there is a lot of schlock out there.

I haven’t been around much because I’ve managed to crank out 35K words in the last three weeks. It’s a new novel, based on a single scene in Jerry Pournelle’s “King David’s Spaceship”.

I was always dissatisfied with the way he did the blockade runner’s sequence and the story ending is weak as well. This one is a bit better and enough different (95%) to claim it as an original work. The Pournelle work was only the inspiration.

Yes, I am still among the living.

In only a few business days after the House passed the 90% tax, eyeing the AIG bonuses, the laws of unintended consequences strikes. Regarding the AIG debacle, people¹ should read this before reaching for their pitchforks. The people responsible for this mess aren’t there anymore; you’re gunning down the firefighters, not the arsonists.

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have always maintained that they didn’t need TARP funds. In fact I remember the reports where they, along with Wells Fargo were dragged into Washington DC and told that they they were going to take the money and start lending it out. No, they weren’t really asked and their patriotism was appealed to.

With that intro, watch this video.

For their effort and in exchange for this money, all seven of them were hauled before US Congress to be pilloried. These firms are not those that originally had anything to do with CDS’ and CDOs. Is it any surprise that they want to stop lending this money out and simply return it? I promise you that this is not what Mr. Bernanke intended when he asked them to take the TARP money.

And now B of A joins the exiting hoard.

Congress’ treatment of Bank of America is even more ungrateful. BofA was weakened at government request first by absorbing Country-Wide, one of the key players behind the toxic assets. Were it not for that BofA would very little if any toxic assets on its books. That wasn’t enough, when they were asked to take on Merrill Lynch, Thane managed to poison the plate on the way out and Ken Lewis was blamed for it. Granted, Ken Lewis should have said No to the Fed. Because of these events, BofA² is seriously weakened to the point where it really does need some TARP monies. However even they, intend to reduce their loan book³ enough such that they too can return the TARP money, as soon as possible.

Edit: Sorry about this but I first tried to embed the video streams and it wouldn’t work with Windows Live Writer and I had to reduce the feeds into links.

1. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi [↩]
2. Bank of America is not one of my favorite players and I do hold a grudge against them However, this isn’t right, [↩]
3. This means that they will NOT be making the loans for which the TARP money was given them [↩]

In news this morning: IBM in discussion to buy Sun Microsystems.

IBM has major buy-in to Sun’s Java and considers that a strategic technology. It will be the largest acquisition in IBM’s history. Sun has been looking for a buyer for some time, even approaching Hewlett-Packard¹ . Sun wholly owns the Java platform and should it liquidate, would throw an entire technology sector into disarray. However, Sun hasn’t exactly been a good steward for Java since they let Java’s designer and chief architect escape a few years ago. Since then, Java has been getting increasingly marginalized. IBM, with it’s large stake and sunk.cost in Java technology, may yet turn this trend around.

1. They declined. [↩]

Well, a good clue can be had by Blue Gal. Her arguments are no more rational than that of the far right. Yes, I am an unabashed centrist. Looking at the Israeli thing objectively; The Brits did it by promising the same land to two antagonistic people.

This came via the Carnival of Liberals.

From Greta Christina’s article:

When we bought our apartment three and a half years ago, of course we applied for a mortgage (what with the whole "not having the cash up front to buy a San Francisco apartment" thing). We found a mortgage broker, filled out the applications, provided all the pertinent information.
And we trusted the bank to tell us if we qualified.
We trusted the bank to tell us if they thought we had enough income, and a stable enough income, and a solid enough history of paying off our loans and bills and such, to pay off the mortgage on this apartment. We thought we could, obviously; but we also didn’t know any more than the average person about the complexities and finer points of the financial world. Which is to say, we didn’t know much. We trusted that the bank — being a bank and all — knew more about the financial world than we did. We trusted that they were doing a careful evaluation of our financial prospects, based not only on the information we gave them, but on their own extensive experience of loaning people money. And we trusted that, if they thought we couldn’t pay off our mortgage, they’d tell us.
A trust that, as it turns out, was grossly misplaced.

This is where many people get it completely wrong. You are not supposed t trust the banks any more than you should trust the Federal government, which is to say Not at all. The legal reality is that you are responsible for putting your signature on the contract, no one else. California, at least, has disclosure requirements for all loans¹ and the law requires that you be aware and understand all of it² . However, that doesn’t relieve you of the requirement of doing some of your own homework. You know your budget better than anyone can. It is up to YOU to look at the terms and decide whether or not you can afford it.

Now, did you fill out the forms truthfully or only State your income without providing the previous year’s form 1040? What about your recurring monthlies, did you declare ALL of them? What about the tons of food that your Saint Bernard eats?

1. Why do you think that is? Could it be that banks have proven themselves untrustworthy in the past? [↩]
2. This is so that you can’t reneg later. You are not allowed to later claim that you didn’t know. [↩]

Igor Panarin has an abysmal understanding of the US.

The only thing that I find disturbing, from a marketing perspective, is that my current book includes a breakup and secession war. The difference is that, I know that my scenario is pure fiction. However, while slightly different, The fragments look about the same as Panarin’s. But then, I did base it on known demographics and what I know about the US cultural substructure¹ .

Yes, after eight years of GW Bush (The Great Divider), we have an empowered Religious Right on one side and the radical left on the other. The breakup, if it ever happens, will more likely be along secular v. theocratic lines. But, at no time do I see Texas tolerating becoming a part of Mexico once more² . Neither do I see Alaska rejoining Russia or the Westcoast willingly bowing to China. All of those places are rich and heavily armed. Even if they seceded, they are more likely to strive for independence. The West, in particular, wasn’t tamed all that long ago³ .

Anyway, I thought that this might be amusing for some.

1. Which BTW, is a great deal more than what Panarin knows. [↩]
2. Besides, I have New Mexico siding with Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah [↩]
3. As we all know Texans are too obnoxious clan up with anyone [↩]

I got up this morning to listen to Barack Obama’s first speech to the Nation¹ , before a joint session of the US Congress.

I initially shared some of the post speech disappointment as I was expecting a bit more clarity regarding Obama’s specific recovery plans. Listening to the post speech analysts, it occurs to me that I wasn’t the only one, as I watched severe disappointment develop into a mild disappointment, on the air and in real time, along with the realization that Mr. Obama has barely finished his first month in office.

Perhaps our expectations were a little optimistic. But then, like with Timothy Geithner, our expectations were not managed properly. To be honest, it sounded a lot like a campaign speech and I ask myself, why should I expect more from him at this stage? I think that this points out a weakness in the Obama administration, at least initially. They are not doing well at managing the public’s expectations and if they don’t start doing a better job of it then the resulting disappointments could be even more damaging than anything the current economic crisis could do on its own. This could wind up being the Obama administration’s Achilles Heel.

After watching Bernanke’s testimony earlier and listening carefully to what he had to say there, I realized also that the entire Obama administration should be taking Expectation Management lessons from Chairman Bernanke² . During that testimony, Bernanke strongly hinted at details of an economic recovery plan that he and Tim Geithner have been working on together and which should be revealed this week.

That said, Obama delivered a very eloquent speech, as I have come to expect, and it did serve the required cheerleading functions.

1. Also reported in The Wall Street Journal , the video can be seen here. [↩]
2. After my initial dislike of Bernanke, I’ve watched him grow in his office. He executes it well and he has risen to meet the challenges as they arose. Kudos to Bernanke! [↩]

But they are still twits. These are the same cruds that supported the arms ban into Bosnia and stood by while thousands of Bosniaks were ethnically cleansed by the Serbs¹ . They are being used as tools by Hamas. I know their flawed thinking, disarm everyone and the violence will stop. This is patently not true on many levels. It is a false proposition. You would think that, after the mess in the former Yugoslavia, that Amnesty International would have learnt some fundamental realities, especially regarding the nature of war.

The charity’s report said it had found fragments and components of artillery, tank shells, fins from mortar rounds and aircraft-launched missiles and bombs in school playgrounds, hospitals and homes in Gaza.

No shit Sherlock! The last I looked, Gaza is a war zone and Hamas is the reason for that. Hamas has chosen the path of asymmetric warfare and they are allied with Hezbollah and Syria. One could almost say that they are the tools of Hezbollah and Syria. Israel would have been decades closer to the two-state solution were it not for Hamas, who only want all of Israel and the death of all Jews everywhere. Hamas is not interested in a two-state solution nor is Syria and Hezbollah.

Mr Regev told Reuters news agency the Amnesty report was "fundamentally flawed" and "tainted" because it used data provided by Hamas.

He said Israel made every effort to avoid civilian casualties.

"The report ignores the fact Hamas deliberately used the Palestinian civilian population as a human shield," he told Reuters.

That last sentence is one that I have no problems believing, as it is consistent with previous Hamas behavior. Hamas took pains to launch rockets from the neighborhoods of their political opponents, letting them take the brunt of the return fire.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum called the report "unfair", telling Reuters there was no comparison between the Israeli forces’ weaponry and Palestinian "people who defend themselves with some rifles and other primitive means".

He denied that Hamas had acquired weapons from other countries.

Here is where Hamas are revealed as liars. There is no capacity to make the higher-end extended range rockets, like the Grad, in Gaza. Hamas obviously has them as they have been launched by Hamas recently. Rockets like the Grad must have been imported.

It is because of arguments and positions like this that Amnesty International carries very little weight with me and many others.

1. On a separate note: I am mystified at the shock that Serbians feel as the non-Serb populations no longer wish to be ruled by Serbia and strike for independence. Don’t Serbians realize that non-Serbs do not trust them anymore and instead see them as psychopathic homicidal maniacs? That Serbs still do not realize that ethnic cleansing was a bad-thing amazes me. Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Croatia have all broken off and become independent. [↩]

I haven’t been writing in this category for a while because there is very little news these days. The reason is that the media does not think it very news worthy and the world’s LEOs¹ are hampered in their efforts by the lack of sufficiently strong sentencing laws.

A New Zealand teenager accused of being the ringleader of an international cyber-crime network has been convicted.

This is all well and good, on its face, but then you read that;

Walker faces up to five years in prison for several of the charges, but Judge Arthur Tompkins indicated he was not considering a custodial sentence² .

Police allege the group infiltrated more than one million computers and used them to skim at least $20.4m (£10.3m) from private bank accounts. Excuse me folks, that’s not petty theft. It is serious crime and should have serious consequences.

I have long maintained that cyber-crime and cyber-terrorism takes sufficient knowledge and intellectual persistence that even a minor must realize that what they are doing is wrong or at least unethical. That if they are able to conceptualize and develop the software that they are making, they are also able to understand the ethical consequences of what they are doing. Software development is hard work and requires a certain amount of talent, intelligence, and persistence.

But then, society has to send out non-confusing messages as well, non? This kid looks set up to only get a slap on the wrist. What is that telling the rest of the world? What is that telling the LEOs?

The teenager, who is 18, cannot be named for legal reasons but was known by an alias as "Akill".

He was detained as part of an FBI crackdown on hi-tech criminals who run botnets - networks of hijacked PCs.

While not having the details, it is not difficult to infer that the FBI spent millions of USD catching this crook, only to watch him walk away scot-free, even after he was convicted and found guilty! These cyber-criminals are not stupid and not easy to catch. Many of them factor in the risk and some even plan on getting caught, knowing that they will get little to no sentence and even get to keep most of the loot! I also doubt that they have the entire gang or have even identified all of the loot. This criminal will still get out of this a millionaire. How is that going to deter anyone?

Update on the McKinnon³ case

If you recall the British hacker, Gary McKinnon, who the US insists on extraditing from the UK for trial in the US. Well, he has lost his appeals and will indeed be extradited. What I had failed to note at the time was that this is the second time that the US DOD has gone through this. The first was the case of Mathew Bevan⁴ .

US computer security investigators caught up with Mr Bevan, or Kuji as he was known, and he was arrested on 21 June 1996. He was held in a police station for 36 hours, charged under the Computer Misuse Act, and then freed to wait 18 months until the case came to trial. Like McKinnon, Bevan also admitted to his crime and the only remaining issue was his sentencing.

Although there were efforts made to extradite Mr Bevan, his case came to trial in the UK in 1998 but he was acquitted as it was judged not in the public interest to pursue the case . He now runs his own computer consultancy business.

I submit that, had the Brits properly prosecuted Mr Bevan, then the US DOD would not be so anxious to extradite McKinnon. In both cases, the scum had already confessed to their crime and there is no mitigating circumstance and Mr Bevan, like McKinnon, was definitely over 18 years of age.

Should Mr McKinnon face trial in the US and be sentenced to decades in jail, Mr Bevan feels such a sentence would be too harsh for what he has confessed to doing.

Of course Bevan would feel that way. They are of the same stripe. At least McKinnon will get to see decades in a US jail, which are not as nice and safe as a British jail. Mr Bevan should be thankful that there are statutes of limitation and protections against double-jeopardy. Otherwise, he might be on the same flight as McKinnon⁵ .

There is something wrong with a system that incarcerates people for getting a little high and yet let’s thieves of millions of dollars get away with their crime and keep their loot.

1. LEO=Law Enforcement Officer [↩]
2. This means that they are not considering jail time. [↩]
3. Gary McKinnon on Wikipedia [↩]
4. Mathew Bevan on Wikipedia [↩]
5. Which I truly think he should be. [↩]

The weaknesses in the Euro are starting to surface. From Martin Baccardax’s article, Eastern Europe is suffering severe contraction. The other problem is not having a coordinated stimulus and management plan. In the EU, the ECB calls the shots for the money supply and interest rates but the other half of the machine, a strong central treasury, is completely absent. This means that the coordinating regulatory body, the EC along with the European Parliament, don’t, in fact have their own money. All of the funds are in the hands of the disparate governments and run by individual national treasuries. The EC cannot, in fact, raise money¹ or sell EU-wide bonds.

For Americans, this would be like States funding the US Federal Government with no Federal taxes or bond issuance allowed. There is also no large Federal pool of cash. This was actually intentional. The EU is not a Federal government, it is an economic confederation, like what the US was before the US Constitution. As a direct result, Tim Geithner and Bernanke were dismayed, at the recent G7 meeting, to find a patchwork quilt of approaches to EU stimulus plans, with no two countries having any sort of coordination, in either timing or amounts.

In the US, it was difficult enough to pass the recent 800BUSD stimulus plan. Imagine first having to pass that through each state’s legislature. The only good thing is that, once passed in each country, that country can immediately implement it. However, if the EC wanted to apply a EU-wide stimulus, it has to first ask for funds and permission from, the member states² . Also, even if the EU has the money, it has to depend on each member state for implementation.

This makes it extremely difficult to have a uniform stimulus plan or package and it requires a structural change in the Euro Zone. Step one for this is to have an easier source of funds. This would be a mechanism long rejected by the EC and that is the EU equivalent of the US Treasury Bill, a EU-wide bond that can be sold. This is being discussed by economics analysts now.

However, I doubt that it can be implemented in time to help with the current crisis. That said, more than half of EU member states are actually monarchies³ and while most of the aristocrats have been keeping well out of the politics. Given a crisis, they can move unilaterally and quickly. This is mitigated by the fact that the other half, like France and Germany, are not and they have widely differing economic views.

1. via taxes [↩]
2. Almost exactly the inverse of the structure in the US [↩]
3. These are monarchies with democratic forms but the rulers still retain the power to short-circuit governmental processes (I do not include the UK in this group). [↩]

At a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met with senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad centered on Gaza. Disingenuously, they called it the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, a meeting where they called for violent and aggressive jihad against Israel and regimes in the Arabic world. How is that anti-aggressive?

"Gaza is a gift," the Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy told me. He and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as "a victory".

"Gaza," he continued, "gives us power, it solves our differences. We are all now in a unified front against Zionism."

In closed meetings after sessions delegates focused on the creation of a "third Jihadist front" - the first two being Afghanistan and Iraq. The intensity of the Israeli attack had "awakened all Muslims," Mr. Awajy claimed.

These guys want nothing more than violent conflict leading to Islamic theocracies everywhere. They don’t care about the people; their own people.

Mohammed Nazzal, a senior Hamas leader based in Damascus, told his audience: "Don’t worry about casualties."

The 23 days of bombardment of Gaza, in which some 1,300 people, many of them civilians and nearly 300 of them children, are believed to have died, was "just the beginning" of the struggle, Mr Nazzal said.

To laughter in the audience, another speaker noted that twice as many babies were born as children were killed during the war.

Every death, I was told, was a martyrdom on the road to liberation.

It is well past time that these sorts of meetings were denounced by the rest of the Islamic world or risk suffering the same fate as them, when the rest of the west really begin to believe the message of the films Fitna and “What Islam is not”. It is only if the majority of Islam distances itself from these sorts of activities that the western world will perceive their innocence. They need to be repeatedly, publically, and vigorously denied by the general body of Islam or Islam risks being identified exclusively as these radicals.

What western authorities need to do is to hold Syria to task for the actions of Hamas, as they are the one granting Hamas leadership succor.

For the hard-line sheikhs, it was an opportunity to underline what they see as the growing gulf between Arab regimes who are hesitant to back Hamas and the people of the region who, they say, embrace Hamas as heroes fighting against overwhelming odds.

More importantly, this conference represented something of a coup for Hamas. They were promised weapons, money and fighters.

Which is what this Anti-Aggression convention was really all about, in the end; how to aggress against everyone else.

If I were to start a peace movement, for the purposes of raising money, arms, and recruits, either here¹ or in the US² then I would, at the least, be watched if not arrested. Turkey let these guys get away with it. To some, that is tantamount to tacit assent and I am sure that it weighs in on the EU accession talks. Many in the EU are already nervous about Turkish secularism³ and hosting meetings like this does not make anyone feel more comfortable.

1. I am living in Switzerland [↩]
2. I am a US citizen [↩]
3. Frankly, they do not trust it. [↩]

The CNBC Investigative Documentary “House of Cards”, by David Faber, is a must-see for anyone wanting to know about the origins of the current financial crisis.

At once infuriating and wise, "House of Cards" uses a balanced, clear-eyed approach to chronicle a tale of greed and deception unprecedented in American history. Thursday evening’s two-hour broadcast deftly unfurls the chronology as a ticking time bomb replete with bait-and-switch villains and stoked by pure blind denial.

CNBC correspondent David Faber has gathered an impressive collection of those who participated in and provoked the financial nosedive, several of whom clearly are purging their own demons in agreeing to go on camera. It makes for some unusually raw television that’s more bracing than any 10 so-called reality shows.

I see David Faber every day, on CNBC, and he strikes me as a diligent reporter and an astute business analyst. He also has contacts with the gods of Wall Street. Note that I called a lot of this for 2005 but it didn’t hit until 2007, as Blackbird2 () claimed. BB2 was closer.

Remember the word TALF and here is the Wall Street reaction.

Treasury Secretary Geithner is expected to announce an expansion of the TALF tomorrow. It depend heavily on Hedge Funds and is making them sweet deals in order to get them to invest in the program. Hedge Funds are even less regulated than the scum who caused this mess that we are all in. I am willing to cut him some slack but he’d better have a better explanation than what I see so far.

One that I am unsure what to make of; is it bigotry or is it a legitimate concern? It is the ‘What Islam is not’ video. I would particularly like to hear from both real_skeptic;(Real Skeptic) and </lj>ozanbaba(Ozanbaba).</lj>

The pattern discussed in the video is one that I have been seeing the edges of for a while.

As one of two new servers in the LAN, we now have a cleanly installed Mail Server, dedicated to the task. After last September’s disk crash, we moved the Mail Server co-resident with our Web Application Server (WAS). This caused some serious performance impact on the WAS because every email that comes in gets scanned for virii by the ClamWin anti-virus checker. ClamWin is not very well behaved and tends to hog the CPU when it runs, hindering IIS and PHP operations; seriously slowing down our web sites.

New internal server and Domain Controller.

We now have a new Primary Domain Controller and it’s running on RAID1¹ . Hopefully, disk crashes will now impact us a lot less than they have previously. It also has a DVD burner for backups .

New old web client.

We went back to Squirrel Mail from MailBee. Squirrel Mail uses IMAP and MailBee only uses POP3. Now that we have a dedicated Mail Server, we can afford to implement IMAP. What this means for us is that we can manage our folders with the Outlook client. There are a few people that use Caselle-Net.

— The Slamlander

1. Promise TX2300 SATA RAID controller with a 250GB RAID1 Array. [↩]

Sweden is only the latest country to come back to the nuclear fold.

Leaders of the coalition government say new reactors are needed to help combat climate change and secure the nation’s energy supply.

Yes two requirements that are on a head-on collision; energy requirements and reducing CO2 emissions.

Sweden was one of those countries that actually voted bans on nuclear power, in the 80’s. One by one these measures are being over-turned.

Britain, France and Poland are planning new reactors and Finland is currently building Europe’s first new atomic plant in over a decade.

This is a growing trend. Like the others, the other energy source is hydro power. At the time that the bans were emplaced it was felt that hydro power could be expanded. Between population growth and ecological impact¹ , hydro power isn’t able to keep up, let alone catch up. Other alternative energy sources are still being developed but not fast enough to meet demand. This is the main problem with “renewable” energy sources, the technology is still being developed and it’s not just a simple matter of implementation.

"Swedish electricity production currently stands on only two legs - hydro power and nuclear power. The climate issue is now in the spotlight and nuclear power will therefore remain an important part of Swedish electricity production in the foreseeable future."

This places them in a pickle. They will need more power but it has to be ecologically sound power. There is no more room for the luxury of denial. A source of energy with 100% containment of by-product is needed and nuclear is the only thing that fits the bill² . It may take 10-15 years to build a plant but it adds huge capacity, something that renewables can not hope to match without decades of further development.

"The phase-out law will be abolished. The ban in the nuclear technology law on new construction will also be abolished," the government said in a statement.

The only other source of high capacity energy is, theoretically, fusion power. Fusion power is yet decades away in the future. Fusion power produces substantially less radioactive by-products. However, the only real fusion project is the ITER, for which the EU is footing half the bill. That said, the project is still woefully underfunded. The other point is that ITER is only one avenue of research. There are at least two other approaches that are not getting much funding at all and I find that exceedingly strange. Fusion research needs much more funding, with two or three other approaches being pursued in parallel.

“I am doing this for the sake of my children and grandchildren," said Centre Party leader Maud Olofsson said.

"I can live with the fact that nuclear power will be part of our electricity supply system in the foreseeable future.”

Nuclear fission is not long-term sustainable. I see it as a stop-gap until we develop fusion technology. Mostly this is due to the radioactive by-products. Yes, we have a 100% capture, which is substantially better than with fossil plants. But then it needs to be sequestered until it decays to a safe level³ .

1. you can only flood  just so many valleys [↩]
2. I have always maintained that if you place the 100% containment requirement on other energy sources, like coal, then nuclear fission becomes amazingly cost-competitive. [↩]
3. The good news is that it does decay and eventually becomes safe. [↩]

Protectionism wasn’t the problem or so says Stephanie Flanders, of the BBC.

In a classic work, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz say the US downturn of the 1930s was the Fed’s fault, by failing to inject cash into a fragile banking system after the crash of 1929.

At a party for Friedman’s 90th birthday, Bernanke (then a Fed Governor), said: " I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression - you’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again."

But what made it a global problem was the gold standard at the time;

Bernanke, Barry Eichengreen and other distinguished economists have established pretty convincingly that it was the gold standard that helped turn a mismanaged US stock market crash into a global slump - by causing a prolonged and devastating period of falling prices.

It was the gold standard - in effect, a fixed exchange rate system anchored by the price of gold - that led the world’s leading economies into a deflationary spiral. That was because the only way for deficit countries to stem the resulting flow of gold - money - out of the country was by shrinking domestic demand, which led to a further downward spiral in prices and incomes.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why we have a floating currency standard today. I remember when the US went off the gold standard, in 1971¹  .

After the Second World War, a system similar to the Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the US dollar. The US promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold.

So, all of western Europe and the US were really on a gold standard, until 1971² .

The first countries to dump the gold standard were also the quickest out of deflation and the quickest to recover.

I will disagree with Stephanie here because Europe went to the dollar standard, which was fixed to the price of gold. Other currencies floated around the dollar. It was more indirect but it was still a gold standard.

1. I know, y’all thought that it was earlier but until then, the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. The Great Depression had only caused them to raise it there from $20 per ounce. Richard M. Nixon released the fixed gold price, in 1971. [↩]
2. This also provides an eye opening realization of exactly why the US Dollar is the major global currency. It was the $35 per ounce gold price peg that everyone else was revolving around. The US, in breech of Bretton Woods, unilaterally cut the economic anchor-line of the entire western world. [↩]

It is carefully choreographed to dance around the word “Xenophobe”. Actually, I think that Ahmadinejad and Bush deserved each other, but he’s Obama’s problem now. I guess that “Ahmadinejad” is just another way to spell the word “Asshole”. However, that does not detract from the masterful way that the article was written. My hat is off to that writer.