Saturday, November 29, 2003

Two holes are critical and could allow an attacker to run a program that would delete files, crash the machine or take control of it from a remote location, said Russ Cooper of TruSecure Corp. who edits the NTBugTraq e-mail list.

9:53 AM |

9:46 AM |

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

The study said black Americans accounted for more than half of 102,590 people diagnosed with HIV in 29 states between 1999 and 2002. The rate of Aids[sic] cases for blacks was 10 times greater than that among whites, and three times greater than that among Latinos.

But the study also showed "significant" increases in new HIV diagnoses among Latinos (26 per cent) and non-Hispanic whites (8 per cent). Diagnoses also increased by 17 per cent among gay and bisexual men, and by 7 per cent among men overall.
[. . .]
The CDC estimates that between 850,000 and 950,000 Americans are now living with HIV: the largest number since the epidemic began more than two decades ago.

9:28 PM |

The Bush divorce, completed in April, was prompted in part by Bush's relationship with another woman. He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.

The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and engaged in sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.

"Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," Brown said.

"It was very unusual," Bush said.

5:43 PM |

Lebanon -- Boone County officials are searching for an answer to the computer glitch that spewed out impossible numbers and interrupted an otherwise uneventful election process Tuesday.

"I about had a heart attack," County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said of the breakdown that came as an eager crowd watched computer-generated vote totals being projected onto a wall of the County Courthouse rotunda.

"I'm assuming the glitch was in the software."

A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.

"It was like 144,000 votes cast," said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

"Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was."

12:29 PM |

Of particular interest is Garner's discussion of the firing of State Department employee Tom Warrick, the author of the Future of Iraq Project, a multivolume collection of reports and documents put together by a series of working groups during the lead up to the war.

In retrospect, Warrick's groups' work -- though disparaged and warred with at the time by hawks at the Pentagon -- predicted much of what's transpired in the last six months.

In fact, a source intimately familiar with these conversations recently made clear to me that he believed the person applying the pressure in this case was none other than Vice President Dick Cheney.

11:43 AM |

Dean Scorecard No. 2: Race relations. Dean finally gets it right: "Don Payne, who's � a member of the Congressional Black Caucus from New Jersey, told me once that he thought Southern white males were the most under-represented people in Congress, because they vote for conservative right-wing Republicans. ... We have to make people understand that what we have in common is the economic problems of this country that face both African-American, white, and Latino working people. ...They need health insurance and decent health care, and they need jobs." Color of the person quoted by Dean: black. Description of Southern white males: "Southern white males." References to Confederate flag: Zero.
[. . . ]
Says little but looks good: Kerry. Somebody seems to have removed his pole. He talks like a normal human being, which is doubly difficult since he appears by remote feed. Demotion from the front of the pack has been good for his character.

11:30 AM |

Wherever there is a big candidates' debate there is Spin Alley. After the debate, journalists have to write stories, produce TV packages. For this they need quotes and authorized knowers who can talk on camera.

There to provide such are the spinners: hired guns, stand-ins, soulmates who agree to meet the press after the debate to explain why their candidate "won." Of course this is a verdict known in advance; however that fact too is known in advance, so no one really minds. Spin Alley will live again in whatever large, air-conditioned room is next designated for the ritual. Unless it's stopped.

11:25 AM |

Monday, November 24, 2003

Now, being of the liberal persuasion, I believe the ways to stop corporate rip-offs and harm caused to the public by greed is government regulation and suing the bastards. But let's suppose for a moment here that we try The Wall Street Journal's preferred methods for fixing all this -- transparency, accountability and responsibility. And let us apply these methods to the Bush administration, which proudly bills itself as the CEO administration. It is certainly an administration of CEOs. After the unspeakable Harvey Pitt was forced to resign as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bush brought in Bill Donaldson as corporate watchdog, the CEO of a huge Wall Street firm, Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, currently under investigation by the SEC for fraud. Ooops. Transparency: We started with Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, then Bush decided neither his father's presidential papers nor Reagan's could be made public, then we got the PATROT Act, and everything went to hell. We couldn't find out who had been "detained" when, where, why or for how long, with no lawyers and no family notification. And of course, secret phone taps, wiretaps, sweeps, etc., all on "suspicion."

Accountability: What does it take to get fired by this administration? Outing a CIA agent for petty political revenge? Completely contravening administration policy with jackass statements about Islam, like Gen. Boykin, while you're the head of a sensitive Pentagon department on the subject?

Obviously, you can get fired for standing up for the environment -- or at least not lying down quickly enough for those who are busy trashing it. RIP, Christine Todd Whitman. And for standing up and saying something populist, like the IRS should quit going after working poor people and try nailing a few rich tax cheats, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill did.

Responsibility: Have you ever heard this administration admit it has made a mistake? It won't even take responsibility for dumb stuff like the "Mission Accomplished" sign, much less admit it had no idea what it was doing in Iraq after Saddam fell. Even now, administration folks keep trying to wiggle out of their own ... I don't know whether it was lies or misinformation -- there was no nuclear weapons program, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there were no ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. But there they come again, with some leaked list of questionable intelligence trying to prove what isn't true.

11:10 AM |