A Trick For Quick Comments And Footnotes

There's a famous quote from H. L. Mencken to the effect that for any problem there's a solution which is straightforward, easy to understand, and useless. [DWL!]

A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen

August 14, 2003
Office of the Inspector General

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UNCLASSIFIED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I. Introduction

In this report, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) examines the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in deterring, detecting, and investigating the espionage of Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent. Hanssen's espionage began in November 1979 - three years after he joined the FBI - and continued intermittently until his arrest in February 2001, just two months before his mandatory retirement date. In addition to its management responsibility to detect espionage among its employees, the FBI is the lead agency for detecting and investigating espionage committed in the United States.

Hanssen became an FBI agent in 1976. During his 25-year FBI career, he principally served in Soviet counterintelligence assignments in New York City and Washington, D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hanssen held positions at FBI Headquarters and the State Department that gave him access to a broad range of highly sensitive counterintelligence and military information. On February 18, 2001, after a three-month investigation of Hanssen, he was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the intelligence service of the former Soviet Union) and its successors. On July 6, 2001, Hanssen pled guilty to espionage charges pursuant to a plea agreement in which he agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government and submit to debriefings. On May 10, 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hanssen's espionage spanned three separate time periods: 1979-81, 1985-91, and 1999-2001. Over more than 20 years, Hanssen compromised some of this nation's most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human sources, at least three of whom were executed. Hanssen gave the KGB thousands of pages of highly classified documents and dozens of computer disks detailing U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, information on active espionage cases, and many other aspects of the U.S. Intelligence Community's Soviet counterintelligence program.
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Experts Asking Why Problems Spread So Far

By MATTHEW L. WALD, RICHARD PERÉZ-PEÑA and NEELA BANERJEE

The power collapse that stilled a large swath of North America Thursday apparently began with a failure in the Midwest that cascaded into Canada, and from there into New York, power industry officials said yesterday. They said they were trying to determine why it spread so far.

An enormous, instantaneous reversal of the power flow — huge amounts of electricity that had been moving east over the Great Lakes and was suddenly sucked back — overloaded one or more power lines, which quickly took themselves out of service.

In seconds, parallel lines were overloaded as well and shut themselves down, and then generating stations disconnected themselves. Ultimately, dozens of lines and about 100 power plants, with a staggering 61,800 megawatts of generation, had shut down — apparently before any human being could react. The series of major failures began about 4:08 p.m., and was over within roughly five minutes. The failures were triggered by a few seconds of tremendous instability in energy flows.

"This whole event was essentially a 9-second event, maybe 10," said Michehl R. Gent, president and chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, describing how the problem started. His organization was founded after the 1965 blackout to establish rules and procedures to prevent repetitions.

Mr. Gent and other officials could offer no explanation for the failure of a series of systems that are supposed to isolate such problems, keeping a blackout in one region from dragging its neighbors into darkness, as happened Thursday. Some of those systems worked, notably in northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania, preventing the failure from spreading southward, and in Connecticut, protecting New England. But others clearly did not.

And so, as some government officials squabbled over what went wrong first, experts and energy officials were urgently trying to answer the more serious question of what, in effect, went wrong second — the inability of the system's computers and human operators over the next few minutes to isolate and limit the trouble.

"If we've designed the system for this not to happen, how did it happen?" Mr. Gent said. "I can't answer that question." He added, "I am embarrassed."
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Wean Yourself

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think of how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

.................................Listen to the answer.

There is no "other world,"
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating."
- Jalaluddin Rumi

AND BRAVUS NAILS IT ON ITS POINTY LITTLE HEAD

Yesterday's blog, that is.

'But more than that, I think he was making quite a funny joke about 'close your eyes and think of England' (the advice allegedly given to Victorian women for enduring sex). I think maybe he'll be a little disconcerted to see all this analysis of what he dislikes (which may well be projection of what we dislike, at least in part), when the intention was probably to make a (wry) funny.'

Yep. Indeed, I was attempting a wry funny. In fact, I continued to attempt them all day, privately, having constructed the following blurbic boilerplate :

'[TITLE] is like watching [AUTHOR 1] worry the bloated corpse of [AUTHOR #2].' And some of them were *really* funny, or so I thought, but I'd never post them here, else someone assume I had it in for whomever I'd happened to plug into slots #2 and #3. (Filling #1 is at once the most challenging and rewarding, you'll find.)

Weird -- We Just Got Back, And Now The Page Doesn't Load

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Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 14, 2003; Page A04

Scientists in China have, for the first time, used cloning techniques to create hybrid embryos that contain a mix of DNA from both humans and rabbits, according to a report in a scientific journal that has reignited the smoldering ethics debate over cloning research.

More than 100 of the hybrids, made by fusing human skin cells with rabbit eggs, were allowed to develop in laboratory dishes for several days before the scientists destroyed them to retrieve so-called embryonic stem cells from their interiors. Although scientists in Massachusetts had previously mixed human cells and cow eggs in a similar attempt to make hybrid embryos as a source of stem cells, those experiments were not successful.

Researchers said yesterday they were hopeful that the rabbit work would lead to a new and plentiful source of embryonic stem cells for research and, eventually, for medical use. But theologians and others decried the work as unethical.

Some wondered aloud what, exactly, such a creature would be if it were transferred to a womb to develop to term.

The vast majority of the DNA in the embryos is human, with a small percentage of genetic material -- called mitochondrial DNA -- contributed by the rabbit egg. No one knows if such an embryo could develop into a viable fetus, though some experiments with other species suggest it would not.
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SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF ENGLAND

'Imagine Tom Clancy mated with William Gibson, with James Michener acting as a midwife, and you begin to get the idea.'

--SEATTLE TIMES review of CRYPTONOMICON

New Version Of The Blaster Worm Reported

The Viral Blog Interview Continues

1) If you want to participate, leave a comment saying "interview me."
2) I will respond by asking you five questions (not the same as you see here).
3) You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions.
4) You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5) When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1) Where do you live, why do you live there and where to you want to live?

2) Have you written any books? (which ones?) What book are you working on now? (Or, if you're not working on one, what would you like to be working on?)

3) What are the best and worse features of your blog?

4) What three blogs would you pick to read every day if you could only read three?

5) If you could solve any problem you wanted to, what problem would you solve?

EFF and Stanford law center launch DirecTVdefense.org

I'll leave by quoting part of a poem that I wrote one day in grad school, having stuffed my brain with the chiral aspects of optical spectroscopy. What came out was a version of a Lewis Carroll poem which was itself a parody of Wordsworth:

. . .And if now I chance to put
My tongue in super glue
Or madly cram my chiral foot
In its enantiomeric shoe,
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old class I used to know,
Of ligand fields and planar nodes
And symmetries of normal modes.

Oh yeah. I should post the whole thing. Hang around here long enough and I'll eventually haul out my molecular-orbital-theory version of 'The Raven.' Wouldn't want to miss out on that, would you? Corante's traffic is just going to explode. . .

Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to. - Mark Twain

Questions dog me today (yes, Aurora, walkies soon!). The first to irritate my craw is why, given the advanced state of EMP weapons development, the UKUSA forces did not spare countless lives and employ them? The only answer I can come up with is that mass casualties are in some twisted way expedient to the occupying forces. There is nothing secret about these non-lethal weapons - I could create my own in an afternoon from readily available components a la Radio Shack.

Another fatal mistake is that the bevy of other non-lethal technologies ubiquitously available to (and abused by) our domestic law enforcement personnel have not been supplied to the military forces occupying Iraq. Why not?

"I see now that my turbulent mind needs activity, that it must break out and try a hundred different ways before reaching the goal towards which I am always straining. There is an old leaven working in me, some black depth that must be appeased. Unless I am writhing like a serpent in the coils of a pythoness I am cold. I must recognize this and accept it, and to do so is the greatest happiness. Everything good that I have ever done has come about in this way."
- Eugene Delacroix

EXPERIENCE > FICTION

Visiting San Francisco shortly before I began writing ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, I had the experience, in Market Street, that the novel's Taoist assassin has:

"Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century, and this quite clearly another girl, some newly minted stranger, one with whom he will never speak."

The woman I momentarily mistook a much younger woman for is neither dead nor a former lover, but the experience, I immediately understood, never before having had it, is one that you can't have until middle age.

At this point I had neither the character of the assassin nor a narrative in which to find him.

But soon, still in San Francisco, I happened to be introduced to an FBI sniper.

He was a small man, much smaller than FBI agents were allowed to be in Hoover's day. In the right clothing, he might have passed for a young teen, and I wondered how useful that might be, in certain situations.

He explained that he was required to constantly re-qualify, to an extremely high level of proficiency, with a variety of firearms.

He mentioned "cold shots", the first shot out of the barrel of a rifle, and how these differ from subsequent shots, when the barrel has warmed up, and how a sniper has to train to cope with that, as his first shot should also be his last.

But what most struck me about him was his serenity.

Alert, relaxed. Present.

There was nothing that would suggest anything about my Taoist. Nothing but that sense of some inner transparent stillness.

And then somehow the ">" of imagination, connecting the two experiences.

Notes On DCOM Exploits From Stanford

DMCAbots Are Idiots

Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 12:37:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ryan Finnie
To: gentoo-mirrors@gentoo.org
Subject: [gentoo-mirrors] Notice of Claimed Infringement (fwd)

Greetings,

Redundant Networks (www.redundant.com / oss.redundant.com) currently is in the official rsync pool, and we are waiting on becoming an official dist mirror. Nonetheless, I currently have a copy of the gentoo distribution available via http and ftp. Earlier today we received this by way of AT&T (since our gentoo mirror is on an IP block allocated from them).

The short of it is, their DMCAbot(TM) found /distfiles/INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip, picked out the words 'Pac' and 'Man', and is now threatening us under the DMCA for distributing a pirated version of Pacman. While I'm not too worried about this (in fact, I'm rather amused), I'm just wondering if any other dist mirrors have received any threats similar to this.

RF

MSBLAST Infections Per Hour

Cartoon Of The Day

Spybot DDoS zombie using dll injection and RPC/DCOM exploit

INTERVIEW FARCE, the SEQUEL.

As a condition of being interviewed, I must now become an interviewer of another blogger out there. If you agree to be interviewed (by leaving a comment to this post), you must also agree to the following conditions, or I will be hunted down by the people who started this thing and slapped silly:

1) If you want to participate, leave a comment saying "interview me."
2) I will respond by asking you five questions (not the same as you see here).
3) You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions.
4) You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5) When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I'm only going to come up with a single set of five questions. As many commenters within the next 24 hours can participate in feeding this exponentially growing viral interviewitis.

Here's Norbizness's Questions (And My Answers)

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR OUR INTREPID GUESTS

We have four weblogger participants for the five questions. Each of the following people will post responses to the following questions on their own weblog (Kriselda of Different Strings, Seb of Sadly, No!, Gary of the TFS Reluctant, and our Aussie homeboy Jon of G'Day Mate.) I think these are the four, but I'm doing it from memory, because the comments are broken right now. Remember the ground rules, posted below.



(1) If you could have dinner with four contemporary public figures, where everybody's entree (except for yours) was heavily flavored with strychnine, who would the guests be and why?

(2) If you could learn a musical instrument that you don't currently know, what would it be and who would be your ideal instructor?

(3) Old Uncle Giblet up and died and left you $3 million tax free bucks, which can only be spent on a piece of property (land, house, business). What do you spend it on?

(4) What's the one thing you think you offer on your weblog that zillions of other weblogs don't? Really?

(5) If you were limited to only reading three weblogs a day, who would they be and why? Please don't mention me, unless it's some sort of pity-based "honorable mention".

Sorry I couldn't make it more person-specific, but hey, there's four of you and I'm lazy. Now spread the disease! 

Anybody else seeing this blogger error?

Internet Providers Question Subpoenas to Stop File Swapping

By AMY HARMON

Arguing that the record industry is trying to force its members to become the "police of the Internet," a group representing over 100 Internet service providers plans to deliver a letter to the industry's trade association today. The letter asks a series of pointed questions about plans to sue people suspected of illegally trading music files online.

The letter from NetCoalition is the latest objection from Internet service providers to a flood of subpoenas from the record industry seeking the identities of Internet subscribers suspected of swapping files.

"There are understandable fears among many in the Internet community that the real purpose of this legal campaign is to achieve in court what the association has not yet been able to accomplish in Congress — to make Internet companies legally responsible for the conduct of individuals who use their systems," the NetCoalition letter says.

The group includes the Internet service provider associations of Virginia, Washington and Wyoming, as well as several companies, including Bway.net in New York.

Record industry officials said they could not comment on the specifics of the letter because they had not yet received it.

But Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer for the record industry group, said Internet providers were protesting the subpoenas because file-swapping attracts customers, now accounting for more than half of the traffic over broadband cable networks. "We're not asking them to police the Internet," Mr. Oppenheim said. "We're asking them to comply with the law. If they were policing we wouldn't have this problem."

A 1998 copyright law sought to limit the liability of Internet providers over how subscribers use their resources, while making it easier for copyright holders to pursue online infringers. The law allows copyright holders to obtain subpoenas from court clerks, without first filing a lawsuit or going before a judge, compelling Internet providers to release subscriber contact information.

The record industry has taken advantage of that in recent weeks as it seeks to crack down on Internet piracy. Verizon and SBC Communications, two major Internet providers, have argued in court filings that the subpoena provision is unconstitutional because it violates the due process rights of its subscribers.

The NetCoalition letter instead focuses on the details of how the record industry is carrying out its goal of filing thousands of subpoenas in the coming months. It asks for a meeting to discuss how the industry trade group ensures the accuracy of the subpoenas, how it decides whom to target, and it raises concerns over the cost of compliance.

"There has to be a better answer than litigation," the letter says.

On Friday, a federal judge granted a request by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College not to comply with the subpoenas they had received because the record industry group had filed them in a Washington court.

FBI lobbies for new wiretap rules targeting cable, DSL providers

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Lunation

Credit & Copyright: Antonio Cidadao


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Explanation: Our Moon's appearance changes nightly. This time-lapse sequence shows what our Moon looks like during a lunation, a complete lunar cycle. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The Moon always keeps the same face toward the Earth. The Moon's apparent size changes slightly, though, and a slight wobble called a libration is discernable as it progresses along its elliptical orbit. During the cycle, sunlight reflects from the Moon at different angles, and so illuminates different features differently. A full lunation takes about 29.5 days, just under a month (moon-th).

Role of Politech in the Apple iTunes issue, from New York Times

SPEWS And Something Awful -- A Humor Site's Take Of Spamblock Woe

OK, How About A Little Bit Of Everything For Everybody?

And as Pfizer becomes second only to General Electric in corporate mega goliath-ness, I look forward to their CEO writing a book along the line of GE’s Jack Welsh’s “Who Stole My Cheese”. I presume Hank McKinnell (The Incredible Hank?) will be calling it something like “Buy Everything, Buy Everybody”. That seems to be their strategy. They can’t invent decent drugs, so they buy up the companies that can. They buy up the politicians to push through the legislation to get their drugs approved (and keep competitors off the market). They buy up all the airtime and adspace and buy up all the celebs to promote their wares. And of course, they buy the clinicians and researchers with lots of lovely research grants, consultancies and good old wining and dining.

Which reminds me, I was talking to a Pfizer rep recently and made a joke about their bulging corporate war chest. Having bought up other companies like Pharmacia, Parke Davis and Upjohn, they would now be able to market a mega pill that contained all their blockbusters in one tablet. A bit of a statin (Lipitor), a bit of an antibiotic (Zithromax), bit of a COX-2 (Celebrex), bit of an antidepressant (Zoloft), some ACE inhibitor and a bit of an anti-ulcer drug (???can’t be bothered to find out if they have one). Bob’s your uncle. The health service could save billions by having nurse practitioners dispense these to allcomers. Tired all the time? Take this. Next! Cough? Here you are. Next! Heartburn again? Blood pressure up? Next ….

Strangely enough, the rep said we could expect an anouncement along those lines in the very near future. I wonder what they’ll call it?