Geodog's MT Weblog

Conducting "secure" financial transactions with Internet Explorer isn't safe

The latest exploit is a file called "img1big.gif" that decompresses into a malevolent Browser Helper Object (BHO) that captures your financial transactions. According to a report from SANS, this BHO:

watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries. When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to http://www.refestltd.com/cgi-bin/yes.pl and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location.

There are only two choices left with IE: Either don't browse the web with it, or don't use it for financial transactions. Thank goodness there are choices like Mozilla, Firefox and Opera, for those of us still chained to Windows.

Jailing of Dr. Jiang Yanyong starts to get some media attention

I was delighted to see today that the Washington Post is running on its front page a well-written article by Phillip P. Pan on the detention of Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the hero of the 2003 SARS epidemic in China.

The officials have detained Jiang Yanyong, 72, a semi-retired surgeon in the People's Liberation Army, in a room under 24-hour supervision, and they have threatened to keep him until he "changes his thinking" and "raises his level of understanding" about the Tiananmen crackdown, said one of the sources, who described the classes as "brainwashing sessions."

But Jiang, who became a national hero last year after blowing the whistle on the government's efforts to hide the SARS outbreak, has refused to back down, and said in a recent note to his family that he would continue to "face the problems confronting me with the principle of seeking truth from facts," according to a person close to the family.

The standoff is the culmination of an extraordinary battle of wills that has been quietly unfolding for months between China's ruling Communist Party and an individual who has already challenged the authorities and forced them to back down once.

China's state-controlled media have not reported Jiang's detention, which began June 1. In response to questions submitted by The Washington Post, the government said in a brief statement: "Jiang Yanyong, as a soldier, recently violated the relevant discipline of the military. Based on relevant regulations, the military has been helping and educating him." ...

One senior military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was broad support for Jiang even within the party and that it will be increasingly difficult for the leadership to hold him as news of his detention spreads. "I consider him a man of honesty and courage," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of the people support him."....

The security officials have forced Jiang to write daily statements and watch videotapes as part of the indoctrination process, sources familiar with the situation said, and they have scrutinized his datebook and other materials for information to use against him. One source described the process as a milder version of the high-pressure, sometimes violent tactics that Chinese security agents have successfully used to force members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement to give up their beliefs.

On June 15, several hours after CNN broadcast a telephone interview with the couple's daughter, Jiang Rui, and the Associated Press moved an interview with their son, Jiang Qing, the authorities released Hua. She immediately urged both children to stop talking to reporters, saying she had been told that Jiang's fate would depend in part on their silence, sources close to the family said.

The amount of detailed inside information that Mr. Pan has uncovered and published gives me some hope that the Chinese authorities are divided about the wisdom and morality of jailing a man who has already once saved China from the mistakes of her rulers. Like the unnamed military officier, I consider Dr. Jiang a hero and a man of honesty and courage, and I encourage people in the United States to write or call their senators and congresspeople, and to write the Chinese embassy at 2201 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C. 20007, or to call Minister Counselor Yang Youming at the political affairs division, at (202) 328-2548 and Major General Chen Xiaogong, the Defense Attache at (202) 295-2525, and urge that the Chinese government release Dr. Jiang Yanyong.

Evil: Google goes over to the dark side

Google's new privacy policy has a loophole a good lawyer could manuver a battleship through:

We do not rent or sell your personally identifying information to other companies or individuals, unless we have your consent. We may share such information in any of the following limited circumstances:
...

* We have your consent.
...
* We conclude that we are required by law or have a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public.

What happened to "Do No Evil?" I sure hope that my GoogleAnon Bookmarklet is working.

Dr. Jiang Yanyong, hero of the SARS epidemic, imprisoned in China

During the 2003 SARS epidemic, I did my best to stay out of the politics of SARS at SARS Watch Org, in order to be able to serve more people with helpful information, but there are times when I felt I had to speak up. Today I once again feel compelled to speak out, perhaps emboldened by the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday finally rejected Bush's tyrannical claim that the US government could indefinitely detain people incommunicado and without recourse to judicial review of their incarceration, so I now I don't feel like such a hypocrite talking about human right violations in other countries.

According to several sources, the Chinese authorities have detained Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the retired surgeon, People's Liberation Army veteran, and long-time Communist Party member who was one of the heros of the SARS epidemic. As you may recall, at a time when the Chinese government was lying and denying that there were more than a handful of SARS cases in China, and was driving SARS patients around Beijing in ambulances to hide them from the World Health Organization, Dr. Jiang Yanyong wrote and signed a letter to the Beijing TV station and Time Magazine telling the truth about the magnitude of the SARS epidemic in Beijing. This simple act of truth telling did as much as any other act to stop the spread of SARS, and to begin the process of containing the epidemic. As I noted earlier, given that the party line became that the officials who concealed the SARS epidemic were the wrong doers, Dr. Jiang Yanyong was not punished for speaking out, and was even faintly praised in a People's Daily article.

Apparently Dr. Jiang Yanyong has been truth-telling again, and the response of the authorities has been considerably harsher. In February he wrote a heart-felt and heart-rending letter to the Chair of the National People's Congress detailing his experiences as a surgeon on duty the night the troops started killing the students in Tiananmen Square, and calling for a reassessment of the June 4th Incident. A few quotes from the a translation of the letter, which is worth reading in its entirety:

At about 2200 when I was in my dormitory, I heard continuous gunshots from the north. Several minutes later, my pager beeped. It was the emergency room's call. So I rushed there. I could not believe my eyes--lying on the floor and the examination tables were seven young people with blood all over their faces and bodies. Two of them were later confirmed dead after an EKG test. My brain buzzed and I almost passed out. I have been a surgeon for more than 30 years. ...

However, lying before me this time were our own people, killed by children of the Chinese people, with weapons given to them by the people, in Beijing, the magnificent capital of China. But I could not afford the time to think at that time. After another salvo of gunshots, more wounded young people--I didn't know the exact number--were brought to the emergency room by people in the vicinity with pull carts and pedicabs....

During the two-hour period from 2200 to midnight, our hospital's emergency room accepted 89 patients with bullet wounds. Seven of them later died despite emergency treatment....

In 1998, I called on [former Chinese President] Comrade Yang Shangkun at his residence ... Yang indicated that the June 4th Incident was an incident in which the CPC committed the most serious mistakes in its history. He said he could not do anything to correct the mistake, but said that the mistakes would be corrected in the future. ...

Since the new party and state leading collectives formed after the 16th National Party Congress have stressed on all occasions the need to act on the Constitution and be people-centered, then the NPC Standing Committee, the CPPCC Standing Committee ["standing committee" as published], the members of the 16th CPC Central Committee Political Bureau and members of its standing committee must reassess the June 4th Incident in light of the criteria in the PRC Constitution and the party's three most fundamental principles -- "integrating theory with practice (or seeking truth from facts), maintaining close ties with the masses, and making criticism and self-criticism." Our party must address the mistake it has made. The earlier these mistakes are resolved and the more thorough they are resolved, the better.

As a result of writing this letter, Dr. Jiang was detained before the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has been held incommunicado since. His daughter told the Washington Post that the Chinese authorities had "asked her brother to deliver her father's dentures and his razor" and "passed him a note from their mother indicating that the couple would not be able to visit her in California this summer as they had planned". As far as I have been able to find out, nothing has been heard from him since.

I ask my readers to join Human Rights Watch in calling for the immediate release of Dr. Jiang. He saved countless lives, in China and outside, with his selfless actions during the SARS epidemic. Plus, telling your own version of the truth should not be a cause for incarceration, in China or the United States.

Do not surf the web using Internet Explorer

Seriously. This is not just Open Source zealotry. It is dangerous to your financial security to use Internet Explorer to browse the web. From an article on CNET:

Security researchers warned Web surfers on Thursday to be on their guard after uncovering evidence that widespread Web server compromises have turned corporate home pages into points of digital infection.

The researchers believe that online organized crime groups are breaking into Web servers, surreptitiously inserting code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer that Microsoft has not yet fixed. Those flaws allow the Web server to install a program that takes control of the user's computer....

... This time, however, the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer, because Microsoft has not yet released a patch. Moreover, the infectious Web sites are not just those of minor companies inhabiting the backwaters of the Web, but major firms, including some banks ... the malicious program uploaded to a victim's computer is not currently detected as a virus by most antivirus software. With no patch from Microsoft, that leaves Internet Explorer users vulnerable.
... That server uses the pair of Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerabilities to upload and execute a remote access Trojan horse, RAT, to the victim's PC. The software records the victim's keystrokes and opens a backdoor in the system's security to allow the attacker to access the computer.

There are lots of other good choices for a browser. I am currently using Firefox 0.8, and find it much better than IE, especially after adding the Ad-block and Tabbrowser extensions. Highly recommended.

Found via Techdirt.

But it's not torture?

From the Washington Post report on the torture memos released today:

On Oct. 11, 2002, for example, the commanding general at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, asked his commander to approve the use of death threats against detainees and their families, wrapping a detainee in wet towels to "induce the misperception of suffocation," stress positions, exposing them to cold weather and water, and using dogs.

These techniques had been reviewed and deemed legal under the Geneva Conventions by Dunlavey's legal adviser, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who wrote that they would be permissible "so long as there is an important governmental objective" and the tactics are not used "for the purpose of causing harm or with the intent to cause prolonged" mental or physical suffering.

Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Lt. Col. Diane Beaver should have been involuntarily retired on October 12, 2002. Kudos to Gen. James T. Hill for not going along with the worst of these abuses. Still, is it any wonder why the whole world is suspicious of what is happening at the prison in Guantanamo?

The Ants of 9-11

One of the themes of Supernova is decentralization, and in preparation for the conference I've been rereading Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I had a strange experience tonight where just before picking the book up I ran into this interesting op-ed, The Best Anti-Terror Force: Us in the Washington Post today arguing for the power of decentralization in so-called "homeland defense".

On Sept. 11, 2001, American citizens saved the government, not the other way around ... While the U.S. air defense system did fail to halt the attacks, our improvised, high-tech citizen defense "system" was extraordinarily successful.

Confronted by a cruel and diabolical surprise that day, those with formal responsibility for protecting our country from air attack could not defend us. ... This is not surprising given that the command-and-control structure required so many baton handoffs in the 77-minute response window between the crashes of the first and fourth terrorist aircraft.

What is surprising is that an alternative defense system, one with no formal authority or security funding, did succeed, and probably saved our seat of government. The downing of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania was a heroic feat executed by the plane's passengers. But it was more: the culmination of a strikingly efficient chain of responses by networked Americans.

Requiring less time than it took the White House to gather intelligence and issue an attack order (which was in fact not acted on), American citizens gathered information from national media and relayed that information to citizens aboard the flight, who organized themselves and effectively carried out a counterattack against the terrorists, foiling their plans. Armed with television and cell phones, quick-thinking, courageous citizens who were fed information by loved ones probably saved the White House or Congress from devastation.

It is an interesting take on decentralization. I'm not sure that I buy the whole argument, but it is a nice illustration of the power of decentralization, and how rapid a response you can get when people tied together in an efficient decentralized communications infrastructure can do what Johnson argues ants do, which is act locally based on local knowledge.

Genocide is happening today in Sudan

Kudos to Senators McCain and Dewine, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post today calling for action to stop the genocide that is happening in Sudan.

The U.N. Security Council should demand that the Sudanese government immediately stop all violence against civilians, disarm and disband its militias, allow full humanitarian access, and let displaced persons return home. Should the government refuse to reverse course, its leadership should face targeted multilateral sanctions and visa bans. Peacekeeping troops should be deployed to Darfur to protect civilians and expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid, and we should encourage African, European and Arab countries to contribute to these forces.

The United States must stand ready to do what it can to stop the massacres. In addition to pushing the U.N. Security Council to act, we should provide financial and logistical support to countries willing to provide peacekeeping forces. The United States should initiate its own targeted sanctions against the Janjaweed and government leaders, and consider other ways we can increase pressure on the government. We must also continue to tell the world about the murderous activities in which these leaders are engaged, and make clear to all that this behavior is totally unacceptable.

For all my anger at Bush's War on Iraq, this is a much more important issue. A lot more people are going to die in the Sudan if the world doesn't take action now.

NYT: Bush is a liar

The NYT finally says it plainly:

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide....either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world.

Headed back to Supernova again next week

I had told myself no more geek and/or digerati conferences this year. Too much money spent (and too little coming in) already. Also, I sometimes find being at the conferences difficult because, unlike so many other people there, I don't have anything to sell. I don't have an idea or product that I am trying to promote. I just like to learn. In addition, I'm pretty shy -- I've sat next to Esther Dyson, sat behind John Gilmore, and had lunch sitting next to David Weinberger, all people I admire tremendously, and barely exchanged a word with them.

However, when the opportunity to do a little work for Mike Masnick of Techdirt at Supernova 2004 came up, I jumped at the chance. Reporting is a role I am very comfortable with, and something I enjoy doing. Plus, Supernova 2002 was the first tech future conference I ever went to, and it was one of the best. Kevin Werbach has a pretty good finger on the pulse of technology, and he is very well connected. In the depths of the tech recession, he brought together a lot of very smart and interesting people to talk about the future of technology, and there were some great moments. Certainly a lot of the themes that were discussed at that first conference have blossomed since - decentralization, citizen journalism, (lousy, IMHO) social software, and a world of pervasive connection to the internet (it was the first conference that I went to besides the Wireless Planet conference that had Wi-Fi, or 802.11b as we called it back then). Supernova was also the place where for the first time I got to see in person a lot of the people whose writing I had been reading for years, which was fun. It was where, in spite of my shyness, I made friends with two of the nicest journalists in technology, Mike Masnick and Glenn Fleishman, and met one of the most prominent journalists, if not the cheeriest, Dan Gillmor.

It looks like this time Kevin has assembled another interesting group of smart people as speakers, and looking at the wiki, I imagine that Supernova 2004 will be a reunion of sorts, as well as an opportunity to see and hear a bunch of new people. I'm looking forward to it, to seeing some of you again, and to learning and reporting back on what I learn to those who aren't there.

The only thing I'm not looking forward to is the grief I'm going to catch from some of my online friends who haven't been afforted this opportunity.

Bill Clinton coming to Cody's Books in Berkeley

Former president Bill Clinton will be at Cody's bookstore in Berkeley for a book signing on May 29. You have get tickets in advance by buying a copy of his book, details on Cody's Books website.

Clinton looks better and better as time goes on, and in comparison. As the bumper sticker says, "When Clinton lied, nobody died, " to which I would add, "or was tortured."

Anne Applebaum explains why we should write our senators and representative today

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content of a few items now easily found on the Internet. ....

connect the dots: They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House. They don't, it is true, make a complete picture. They don't actually reveal whether direct White House and Pentagon orders set off a chain of events leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, prisoner deaths in Afghanistan or other uses of torture we haven't learned about yet.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

... in the end, it is public opinion that matters, and it is on public opinion that the fate of any further investigations now depends. Voters have some items of information available to them, as listed above. Voters -- ultimately the most important source of pressure on democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen, their senators and their president for more. If they don't, the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without a real national debate, without congressional approval, without much discussion of what torture actually means and why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few secret committees will have changed the character of this country.

Applebaum's brilliant essay motivated me to write Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer again -- I hope it has a similar effect on everyone else who reads it.

Fox News review of Fahrenheit 9/11: "a film that members of all political parties should see without fail"

Will wonders never cease. Roger Friedman reviewed Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" tonight on Fox News:

a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail. As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice....

Before anyone's even seen it, there have been partisan debates over which way Moore may have spun this or that to get a desired effect. But, really, in the end, not seeing "F9/11" would be like allowing your First Amendment rights to be abrogated, no matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat...

On the other hand, there are more than enough moments that seemed to resonate with the huge Ziegfeld audience. The most indelible is Bush's reaction to hearing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, that the first plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush was reading to a grade-school class in Florida at that moment. Instead of jumping up and leaving, he instead sat in front of the class, with an unfortunate look of confusion, for nearly 11 minutes.

Moore obtained the footage from a teacher at the school who videotaped the morning program. There Bush sits, with no access to his advisers, while New York is being viciously attacked. I guarantee you that no one who sees this film forgets this episode.

How times have changed. It seems like the establishment is finally wising up to Bush's incompetence. At least I hope so. Or maybe Friedman's body will be found floating in the river tomorrow. I hope not.

Via Strangelove.

Kozinski fans of the world rejoice! We have a home on the web.

Judge Alex Kozinski is one of the more interesting and entertaining characters on the federal bench, and in spite of being miles apart from me ideologically on many issues, he is one of my favorite judges. Although he starts from a strong ideological viewpoint, he is clearly a man who hungers for new experience, and learns from those experiences. Plus, I have a weakness for people who can write well, and Judge Kozinski is a brilliant writer. If someone could get him to write a weblog, I'd bet it would be in Technorati's top 10 in a few weeks.

I corresponded with Judge Kozinski briefly over the revolt he led against Leonidas Ralph Mecham's attempt to monitor Federal Judges' internet usage, saw him in action at the Spectrum Policy debate at Stanford, frequently read his decisions when they come to my attention via Findlaw, and I am a regular reader of his former law clerk Eugene Volokh's weblog. Frankly, unlikely as it might seem, I am a Kozinski fan. So it was with great pleasure that I discovered that another fan, Aaron Swartz, had put together an excellent Alex Kozinski fan website, collecting some of Kozinski's best writing, as well as articles about him. I am delighted that we Kozinski fans of the world now have a home on the web. Thanks, Aaron.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants a taste of legal writing at its best.

I really hope that it isn't true, but I have no reason to believe it isn't

A thirdhand report on a talk by Sy Hersh, hero of My Lai and now Abu Ghraib:

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

But I'm afraid the we are far from the bottom of this pit. When will the American people rise up and throw out this government that has taken America so far away from its core values? November isn't soon enough.

Documentation of the routine use of torture as Bush Administration policy, or how we lost the war on terrorism

Human Rights Watch has issued a chilling report documenting how George W. Bush has turned the United States into a nation that uses regularly tortures and "disappears" people. As the summary says:

In fact, the only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed. Detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan have testified that they experienced treatment similar to what happened in Abu Ghraib -- from beatings to prolonged sleep and sensory deprivation to being held naked -- as early as 2002. Comparable -- and, indeed, more extreme -- cases of torture and inhuman treatment have been extensively documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross and by journalists at numerous locations in Iraq outside Abu Ghraib.

This pattern of abuse did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules. It resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside....

Among the most disturbing cases, perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history, are the detainees who have simply been "disappeared." Perhaps out of concern that Guantánamo will eventually be monitored by the U.S. courts, certainly to ensure even greater secrecy, the Bush administration does not appear to hold its most sensitive and high-profile detainees there. Terrorism suspects like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused architect of the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a close aide of Osama bin Laden, are detained by the United States instead in "undisclosed locations," presumably outside the United States, with no access to the ICRC, no notification to families, no oversight of any sort of their treatment, and in most cases no acknowledgement that they are even being held. Human Rights Watch has pieced together information on 13 such detainees, apprehended in places such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, who have "disappeared" in U.S. custody...

the administration is now finding that it may be losing the war for hearts and minds around the world precisely because it threw those rules out. Rather than advance the war on terror, the widespread prisoner abuse has damaged efforts to build global support for countering terrorism. Indeed, each new photo of an American soldier humiliating an Iraqi could be considered a recruiting poster for al-Qaeda. Policies adopted to make the United States more secure from terrorism have in fact made it more vulnerable.

I couldn't say it any better myself -- actually I have already written similar things. It is terrible to have all one's worst fears confirmed.

How to make Gmail useful

One of the big reasons for my comment yesterday about being underwhelmed by gmail was the data portability issue. One of the reasons that I have stuck with buying upgrades to Eudora on Windows since version 2.0, in spite of its many bugs, was that it kept my email stored locally in what was essentially a text format that I can access with any text editor, and manipulate with any text editing language, from awk to Perl. I already have over 2 gigabytes of archived email, and the email I recieved in 1988 is as accessible to me today as what I recived yesterday. Just like I have always followed Robb's law, I never want to have my main store of email data be somewhere that I don't control. Plus, I like working with email using the greater power of a desktop application. So, until Google offers easy export of mail data, I didn't think I would use my gmail account for anything other than a throwaway email address.

However, via TinyApps, today I discovered Jon Barker's POP to Gmail. I had forgotten about the ingenuity and generosity of all the developers out there who start off by scratching their own itches. POP to Gmail is a clever little application that logs into gmail, scrapes your email, and downloads it into a local POP3 server, from which you can access it from any email client. Brilliant! Now the application itself still has a few bugs, and it unfortunately relies on the Microsoft dot net framework, but what a clever idea. Jon is improving it at a rapid pace, and I suspect that it will push Google towards offering POP3 access at a reasonable price. In the meantime, POP to Gmail works (mostly) and makes Gmail usable.

Is it just me, or has Firefox gotten worse with the last two releases (since 0.7)?

I just finished reading Neil Turner's the review of the latest version of Firefox, and my first thought is, "I'm not installing that." Of course, I probably will end up doing so at some point, but it is so disappointing to see a project that started with such promise getting worse and worse with every release (although to be fair, it is also getting faster). Still, I'm still running Firebird .7 on one of my computers, and on the whole I prefer it to 0.8. If this review and the release notes are accurate, it looks like the situation just worsens with 0.9. The new download dialog foisted on users in 0.8 has been kept, the theme has been changed to one that looks quite ugly and is acknowledged as being worse than the current one, and the disregard for the most popular extensions and current users that was demonstrated when 0.8 was released is strikingly repeated. From the release notes, "when you run 0.9 for the first time all of your extensions will be automatically disabled." There were a lot of comments a year ago about all the problems with design by committee -- now we are starting to see some of the problems with design by dictatorship, and disregard of users. As someone said on the mozzilazine forum, "The capacity of this project to repeatedly shoot itself in the foot never ceases to amaze me." As an open source enthusiast, this is really disappointing.

I hope that I am wrong, and that when the dust settles there is still a superior product to Internet Explorer in there somewhere, but the current direction isn't promising. At the moment I am considering returning to Mozilla as my default browser, or testing the Opera waters again.

Gmail invite available to a friend

If any of my online friends haven't received an Gmail invite and would like one, I have one to give away -- just send me an email. First come first served, friends or regular readers only. I'm not interested in selling it.

I'm not particularly wowed by the service, but maybe you are as curious as I was to see what all the fuss is about.

Update, June 19, 2004: I came by three more Gmail invites today, and also ran into Jonas Luster's inspiring Gmail for good give-away. I have donated all of my Gmail invites to him, so for those of you arriving every hour from Google, I suggest heading over to his site and letting him know what you are ready to do for the world.

George Bush Senior gets it:

One of George Bush senior' closest aides, long-time CIA officer Donald Gregg, writes in today's NYT:

Recent reports indicate that Bush administration lawyers, in their struggles to deal with terrorism, wrote memos in 2003 pushing aside longstanding prohibitions on the use of torture by Americans. These memos cleared the way for the horrors that have been revealed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo and make a mockery of administration assertions that a few misguided enlisted personnel perpetrated the vile abuse of prisoners.

I can think of nothing that can more devastatingly undercut America's standing in the world or, more important, our view of ourselves, than these decisions. Sanctioned abuse is deeply corrosive — just ask the French, who are still seeking to eradicate the stain on their honor that resulted from the deliberate use of torture in Algeria. ... As Alistair Horne put it in "A Savage War of Peace," use of torture may have won the battle of Algiers for the French, but it cost them Algeria.

This is as close to a public repudiation by George Bush Sr. of his son's criminal policies as I can imagine seeing, similar to the Brent Scowcraft anti-Iraq war Op-ed just before the Bush launched his war on Iraq. The price that America has paid for this Oedipal battle is stupendous.