August 26, 2005 – 8:43 am
Over the last few days I’ve seen several stories published (CNET/Reuters, CNN, and others) about the supposed threat to US computer systems from hacking attempts originating in China. What they don’t seem to mention is that it sounds like most of these “attacks” are just routine scans and non-targeted attempts to exploit known vulnerabilities; the kind of thing that happens everywhere on the internet every second of the day, and has nothing to do with any particular country. Reporting this as “news” is like the LA Times publishing a front page story about how the traffic on the 405 was really bad yesterday.
The conspiracy theorist in me worries that this is an attempt to scare the public into thinking negatively about the potential for problems that is there with such an interconnected system as the internet, and wondering if there will be a move to cut off access from countries that are deemed to be a “threat”. If this happens, there better be some serious protesting by free speech advocates. The internet is (in some cases) the only avenue of expression for people in oppressive countries to let everyone else know what is going on; without that we would have to rely on what the big media organizations tell us about international events, which is almost always watered down and filtered at many levels.
August 25, 2005 – 7:18 pm
In case anyone was worrying that I was going to stop blogging, don’t. I would say that I’ve been really busy, but actually I just didn’t want to push my creative formatting on that last post down the page for a while.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
August 10, 2005 – 4:06 pm
Just listened to another interesting story (this time from yesterday’s Democracy Now broadcast) about William Laurence, a correspondent who won a pulitzer prize at the time for his coverage of the atomic bombings, which was considered authoritative at the time. Turns out that at when he was writing these articles, employed by the New York Times, he was simultaneously on the payroll of the US war department, essentially writing propoganda pieces in the NYT.
August 10, 2005 – 4:06 pm
Just listened to another interesting story (this time from yesterday’s Democracy Now broadcast) about William Laurence, a correspondent who won a pulitzer prize at the time for his coverage of the atomic bombings, which was considered authoritative at the time. Turns out that at when he was writing these articles, employed by the New York Times, he was simultaneously on the payroll of the US war department, essentially writing propoganda pieces in the NYT.
As you can see, I haven’t been blogging much lately. This is due to the combination of being very busy at work and making a concious decision not to spend so much time blogging at home also.
Don’t worry, I still intend to write, and definitely more than I have this week, but in the meantime if you’re really missing my posts, be sure to check out the podcast below. I’m going to attempt to stay away from the novels I tend to write and focus more on easy to digest articles, which I’m sure some people will be happy about.
Anyway, this weekend I will be away again (going to San Diego), so expect another slow couple days of blogging activity from me, just like last weekend.
… I’m still getting comments on this post. (Nathan - I would reference it by name, but that would only lead to more traffic on that subject).
Someday I need to go back and finish tagging my old posts, so that the tag cloud above is accurate.
I haven’t been on the computer much this weekend, thus no posts. I just went and quickly got caught up on blog comments, etc. tonight.
I have been hovering around 30K hits per month for the last several months, until last month, when it jumped up to 81,902. I’m guessing it’s because of the plugins; maybe it’s time to revamp my pages about my plugins to make them look a little better. I’ve been wanting to group them all together and put a better, more consistent presentation on them, so I guess I will have to find the time to do that.
I’m now using WP 1.5.1.3, which I think will fix that annoying trackback issue. Let me know if you experience any errors. I need to make some slight CSS changes, but otherwise it should be pretty painless.