Ramblings & ephemera
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
Filed under: business, 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
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From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006):
Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been affected [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business, law, science | Comments Off
From Noam Chomsky’s “Why It’s Over For America” (The Independent: 30 May 2006):
… the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, “the American ’system’ as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
The unrepublican veneration of our presidential “leader” has made it uniquely difficult for Americans to see their country’s behavior as others see it. The latest report from Amnesty International - which says nothing that the rest of the world doesn’t [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
[Andrew] Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University. He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 August 2004):
Here’s an interesting hardware security vulnerability. Turns out that it’s possible to update the AMD K8 processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) microcode. And, get this, there’s no authentication check. So it’s possible that an attacker who has access to a machine can backdoor the CPU.
[See http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=35446&threadid=35446&roomid=11]
Related posts
Why disclosure laws [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off
From Feds Hack Wireless Network in 3 Minutes (Slashdot: 5 April 2005):
At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes.
Related posts
Quick ‘n dirty explanation of onion routing
Windows Metafile vulnerability
Why airport security fails [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Sol Terra’s [IP] Use the Dots, Go to Jail - that’s the law (Interesting People: 24 October 2005):
Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.
Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, security | Comments Off
From Stuart Staniford, Gary Grim, & Roelof Jonkman’s “Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet” (Silicon Defense: 16 August 2001):
In a recent very ingenious analysis, Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a Warhol Worm that could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less than 15 minutes (much [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Nadya Labi’s “Want Your Kid to Disappear?” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):
RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer’s son to Tranquility Bay in [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, law | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
On Dec. 27, 2005 a Windows Metafile (.WMF) flaw was discovered affecting fully patched versions of XP and Windows 2003 Web Server. Simply by viewing an image on a web site or in an email or sent via instant messenger, code can [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Spam Daily News’s “Spam zombies from outer space“:
Spammers could soon use zombie computers in a totally new way. Infected computers could run programs that spy into a person’s email, mine it for information, and generate realistic-looking replies.
John Aycock, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, and his student Nathan [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off
From Noam Eppel’s “Security Absurdity: The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security“:
In 2001, the infamous Code Red Worm was infecting a remarkable 2,000 new hosts each minute. Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a “Flash Worm” which could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Why Simply Making Spam Illegal Won’t Work“:
Software patents have become inordinately important for something that 25 years ago we didn’t even believe could exist. After several software patent cases had gone unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, the general thinking when I got in this business [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history, law | Comments Off
From TechWeb News’s “One In Four Identity-Theft Victims Never Fully Recover“:
Making things right after a stolen identity can take months and cost thousands, a survey of identity theft victims released Tuesday said. Worse, in more than one in four cases, victims haven’t been able to completely restore their good name.
The survey, conducted by Nationwide [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“:
The situation with patents is similar. Business is a kind of ritualized warfare. Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most early traders switched on the fly from merchants to pirates depending on how strong you seemed. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business | Comments Off
Added 2 products to their wishlist:
Bookmarked 2 links
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Shared an image: like a record...
Bookmarked a link: 10 useful jQuery plugins :: ENHANCE
I now have one week to finish my book on Google. Freak out mode has officially begun. (I'll finish it ... I'm just gonna freak out during)
Bookmarked a link: FILExt - The File Extension Source
Just had two Wash U students & a HS student stop by asking me to help the Obama campaign. I said yes. Good to see kids involved in politics!
3 1/4 hrs! Best show I've ever seen. Amazingly physical, & the audience loves him. Not hard to; he's amazingly trusting & generous with 'em.