Saturday, December 06, 2003

10:28 PM |

Some spammers have taken to inserting decidedly non-spammy words in e-mail to try to convince the filters they are not junk mail.

As a result spam is starting to appear with phrases such as "bernadine rustle lappet" and "arboretum severe acerbity henri" inside them.

A few words are unlikely to make a lot of difference to the filters so some spammers load their junk mail with huge amounts of random words. One recent message had 780 words of nonsense in it.

By including random text the spammers hope to fool the filters into thinking that a human, not a spammer, wrote the message.

But as Clive Thompson points out, automatically generating text that reads like it was written by a human hand is difficult. This is perhaps why some spammers are turning to out-of-copyright novels for their text. It is an ideal source of real writing.

6:16 PM |

Let's recap. A guy who has no foreign policy experience, opposed the war in Iraq, and went skiing after he escaped the Vietnam draft because of a bad back is calling a wartime president soft on defense. And despite cries of outrage from Republican pundits, luminaries, and party organs, he isn't letting up. Monday on Hardball, Dean said, "This president, I don't believe, has any idea how to fight terror. � This president has wasted 15 months or more doing nothing about the fact that North Korea is almost certainly a nuclear power, [and] we can't tolerate North Korea as a nuclear power." On Crossfire, Dean adviser Steve McMahon reiterated that Bush had tried to cut veterans' benefits. Coming to McMahon's aid, Democratic pugilist James Carville charged that Bush has "stretched our military to the point that we're weaker today. And he's created terror."

Where did Dean and his lieutenants get this kind of gall? Maybe from the guy they're attacking. In February 2000, Bush, a governor with no foreign policy experience, faced ex-POW John McCain in the do-or-die South Carolina Republican presidential primary. What was Bush's military record? He had joined the Texas Air National Guard to escape the Vietnam draft. A former speaker of the Texas House had sworn in an affidavit that he had made phone calls, at the behest of a friend of Bush's father, to get Bush into the Guard. As the Boston Globe later discovered from interviews and government documents, Bush "was all but unaccounted for" during the latter part of his Guard service. "For a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen," the Globe reported.

Now Republicans go around quoting Cleland on how Dean "weaseled out" of Vietnam. And they accuse Dean of chutzpah.

It's been said before that Dean and Bush share an aristocratic Yankee heritage. To the unwary, this means they're soft. Democrats learned the hard way that when it comes to politics, if not war, Bush has no shame and takes no prisoners. Now Republicans will learn the same about Dean.

4:49 PM |

Marnie and Ramsey just made the world a little bit better by adopting a dog in need of a home.

Here she is (she has some Shar-Pei in her):



Now they just have to decide what to call her.

posted by jeev |

4:30 PM |

Friday, December 05, 2003

But the labour market is still far from strong. Strikes afflicting California�s grocery stores no doubt distorted November�s payroll figures, but they were disappointing nonetheless. With output roaring away, analysts had expected hiring to move up a gear, adding 150,000 to 200,000 people to the payrolls. Instead, the labour market remains in neutral. There may be a few more jobs than a month ago, but there are also more people to find jobs for. About 140,000 people enter the labour force on average every month, in part because of America�s growing population.



As a result, the economy has to run to stand still. According to Friday�s figures, 5.9% of this growing labour force are now unemployed, a little lower than a month ago, but still almost two percentage points higher than when George Bush took office.

3:37 PM |

One thing you have to say about George W. Bush: he's got a great sense of humor. At a recent fund-raiser, according to The Associated Press, he described eliminating weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and ensuring the solvency of Medicare as some of his administration's accomplishments.

Then came the punch line: "I came to this office to solve problems and not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." He must have had them rolling in the aisles.

In the early months of the Bush administration, one often heard that "the grown-ups are back in charge." But if being a grown-up means planning for the future � in fact, if it means anything beyond marital fidelity � then this is the least grown-up administration in American history. It governs like there's no tomorrow.

11:54 AM |

We've become the Wal-Mart nation, a place where everybody -- business, investors, consumers -- wants everything done on the cheap, no matter the consequences.

The way it all works can be seen on a very small scale at a very large company.

Hewlett-Packard was looking to save money when it hired Black Box Network Services to handle telecommunications at some Silicon Valley campuses. Black Box took over the work last summer from NetVersant Solutions and initially kept many NetVersant workers. Black Box figured it eventually could beat NetVersant's costs with layoffs and pay cuts.

But there was a problem. The workers were union members and, says the union representing them, entitled to bargaining rights. Black Box refused to negotiate and the situation blew up.

11:47 AM |

Thursday, December 04, 2003

President Bush's Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating.

In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.



The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.

But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 21/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate.

4:08 PM |

Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software � which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary � on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.

An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.)

Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.

12:41 PM |

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

10:35 AM |

10:29 AM |

Monday, December 01, 2003

1:18 PM |

Congress approved a bill on Friday that expands the reach of the Patriot Act, reduces oversight of the FBI and intelligence agencies and, according to critics, shifts the balance of power away from the legislature and the courts.

A provision of an intelligence spending bill will expand the power of the FBI to subpoena business documents and transactions from a broader range of businesses -- everything from libraries to travel agencies to eBay -- without first seeking approval from a judge.

1:12 PM |