Ramblings & ephemera
From “Report: China’s botnet problems grows” (SecurityFocus: 21 April 2008):
Computers infected by Trojan horse programs and bot software are the greatest threat to China’s portion of the Internet, with compromises growing more than 20-fold in the past year, the nation’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CN-CERT) stated in its 2007 annual report released last week.
The response [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, security | No Comments »
From Charles Glass’ “The New Piracy:Â Charles Glass on the High Seas” (London Review of Books: 18 December 2003):
Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | No Comments »
From George Pendle’s “New Foundlands” (Cabinet: Summer 2005):
Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect. The Republic of Counani, Furstentum Castellania, Palmyra, the Hutt River Province, and the Empire of [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, law, politics, weird | No Comments »
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (III: 4):
Scene: Paris - The Palace
BASSET:
Villain, thou know’st the law of arms is such
That whoso draws a sword, ’tis present death,
Or else this blow should broach thy dearest blood.
Blackstone in his Commentaries (IV. 124): “By the ancient law … fighting in the king’s palace … was punished with [...]
Posted on January 15th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history, law | Comments Off
From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006):
Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. …
Electronic voting is not transparent - it is not even translucent. There is no way [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From D. Ghirlandaio’s “Comment to Stephen Griffin’s ‘Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb’” (10 October 2006):
The Syrians had a technique for the ticking bomb scenario. Give the man who knows where the bomb is a cell phone. “Call your mother.” At the mother’s house, a man picks up the phone.
Related posts
Why the US toppled Iran’s [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):
A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, law, weird | Comments Off
From Louis Menard’s “From the Ashes: A new history of Europe since 1945″ (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 168):
[Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945] notes that France, a country with a population of some forty million, was administered by fifteen hundred Nazis, plus six thousand Germen policemen. A skeleton [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Mica Rosenberg’s “Guatemala forces end 10-year prisoner rule at jail” (The Washington Post: 25 September 2006):
Guatemalan security forces took over a jail run for over 10 years by inmates who built their own town on prison grounds complete with restaurants, churches and hard-drug laboratories.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic weapons [...]
Posted on September 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, weird | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “MacDonald triad” (26 July 2006):
The MacDonald triad are three major personality traits in children that are said to be warning signs for the tendency to become a serial killer. They were first described by J. M. MacDonald in his article “The Threat to Kill” in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Firestarting, invariably just for [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, law, science | Comments Off
From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Varieties of Open-Source Licensing” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):
MIT or X Consortium License
The loosest kind of free-software license is one that grants unrestricted rights to copy, use, modify, and redistribute modified copies as long as a copy of the copyright and license terms is retained in all modified [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, law | Comments Off
From Seth David Schoen’s “Wiretapping vulnerabilities” (Vitanuova: 9 March 2006):
Traditional wiretap threat model: the risks are detection of the tap, and obfuscation of content of communication. …
POTS is basically the same as it was 100 years ago — with central offices and circuit-switching. A phone from 100 years ago will pretty much still work today. [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Mitigating Identity Theft” (Crypto-Gram: 15 April 2005):
The very term “identity theft” is an oxymoron. Identity is not a possession that can be acquired or lost; it’s not a thing at all. …
The real crime here is fraud; more specifically, impersonation leading to fraud. Impersonation is an ancient crime, but the rise [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, law, security | Comments Off
From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005):
The Supreme Court’s decision in 1980 to allow for the patenting of living organisms opened the spigots to individual claims of ownership over everything from genes and protein receptors to biochemical pathways and processes. Soon, research scientists were swooping into patent offices around the [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law | Comments Off
From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005):
For a century or more, the white-hot core of American innovation has been basic science. And the foundation of basic science has been the fluid exchange of ideas at the nation’s research universities. It has always been a surprisingly simple equation: Let scientists do [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
Instead, the firm is also one of the world’s most intrusive, jealous, fastidious micromanagers, and its aim is nothing less than to remake entirely how its suppliers do business, not least so that it can shift many of its own costs of [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
As the industrial scholar Alfred D. Chandler has noted, the vertically integrated firm — which dominated the American economy for most of the last century — was to a great degree the product of antitrust enforcement. When Theodore Roosevelt began to limit [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law | Comments Off
From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law | Comments Off
From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006):
It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America’s century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics | Comments Off
From Nate Anderson’s “Hacking Digital Rights Management” (Ars Technica: 18 July 2006):
The attacks on FairPlay have been enlightening because of what they illustrate about the current state of DRM. They show, for instance, that modern DRM schemes are difficult to bypass, ignore, or strip out with a few lines of code. In contrast to older [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, law, security | Comments Off