Sometimes it’s hard to tell if these are just unfortunate errors, or if they are done by design. Today’s entrant: a shoehorn bought at a 100-yen shop:
It doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be that way, but come on… could this have really gone all the way through the design process without anyone saying, “hey, that looks kind of phallic, doesn’t it?”
Via Think Progress: The New York Times reported that of the Iraqi troops that went to fight in Basra, fully 1,000 either deserted or refused to fight, including dozens of officers and “at least two senior field commanders.” Newt Gingrich complained angrily to Alan Colmes:
Let me give you an example, Alan, of the stunning bias of the American news media. 15,000 Iraqi troops went in to Basra, 1,000 of them didn’t fight very well. 14,000 of them fought very well and, in fact, were defeating the militias. Guess what the report essentially was in the elite news media? It was the 1,000 that didn’t fight very well. And the 14,000 that were risking their lives on behalf of their own country, without American forces present, didn’t get very much credit.
“Stunning bias,” he says–to report that in its first major test, the Iraqi military suffered a 7% desertion/mutiny rate, including two senior field commanders? Either Newt Gingrich has such low standards and expectations for the Iraqi military that he expects such horrific rates of insubordination to be considered normal, or he’s doing what he does best: playing the “Liberal Media” card to make an embarrassment to the Republican party seem like it’s not nearly as bad as it is. And of course, the latter is true.
This is the essence of the entire “Liberal Media” lie: it is a strategy to change the rules of the game and to call a failure a success by claiming that the referees are playing unfairly. Of course a 7% desertion/mutiny rate is newsworthy; imagine if 7% of U.S. troops did that–it would be considered unthinkable. What if, when the U.S. had about 150,000 troops in Iraq during the surge, about 10,000 of them deserted or refused to do their jobs? Including a few hundred officers and a couple of generals? Could we criticize the press for covering that astounding news, and not instead focusing on the 93% of the soldiers who didn’t desert? Certainly, the Iraqi military is not up to that standard–and that’s precisely the story, that the Iraqi military is not operating up to snuff.
This is bad for Republicans, who have tried to perpetuate the fiction that Iraq is shaping up, that the government is in control, that their military is up to the challenge, that things are progressing so our troops can eventually come home, or at least some of them, and the rest won’t have to take the brunt of the combat in Iraq. News that the Iraqi military, after years of training and building up, still suffers such high desertion rates, belies that fictional portrayal, and makes Republicans who say otherwise look bad. So naturally party hacks like Gingrich have to come forward and make the same old tired claim that it’s not really so bad, it’s just that big, mean liberal media trying to make things look bad.
Remember back in the early days of the war, when Republicans tried the same thing? They protested against the liberally-biased media only focusing on the mass slaughter and deaths of American soldiers, when there were all of those new schools being opened! The irony was that the reporters actually wanted to cover those school openings–but the U.S. military warned them not to, because reports on such events would simply make the facilities a target for militias; otherwise, reporters found that going to such events was far too dangerous for them just in terms of falling prey to violence on the streets. And, as it turns out, such repairs to Iraqi infrastructure were unsuccessful overall–even after the Mahdi Army cease fire, things have continued to get worse and worse for Iraqis.
It is an old standard Republican tactic to claim that the media is slanted, and is only reporting the bad news and not the good. And it is as dishonest a lie now as it ever has been.
Obama would be disappointed:
This was taken at a pastry shop I always pass when I visit my doctor’s office. In case it isn’t apparent, this is supposed to be a sign stating that the cashier can’t make change without a purchase. Funny thing is, you see these signs a lot in Japan. For some strange reason, most are bilingual, though most other signs in supermarkets (except those for style or display) are not–I guess they must get a lot of foreigners asking for change or something. But the weird thing is, I don’t think that I have ever seen a sign stating a no-change policy at a cash register in Japan that was worded correctly. Every such sign I have seen has English which is wrong in some fashion–most often the noun-verb confusion seen here.
There’s an old saying: a man with one clock always knows what time it is; a man with two clocks never knows what time it is.
Well, in the race for Pennsylvania, we’ve got a good half-dozen clocks, easy. Here are seven polls that have come out in the past week or so:
Rasmussen: Clinton +5
SurveyUSA: Clinton +18
ARG: Tied
Quinnipac: Clinton +6
InsiderAdvantage: Clinton +3
Muhlenberg: Clinton +10
PPP: Obama +2
So, either Pennsylvanians are shifting massively on a near-daily basis, or some of these polls are figuring things wrong–unless the margin of error spans a full 20%. Worse, any poll relative to its own precursor might say things are moving in opposite directions; SurveyUSA has Clinton surging ahead 6 points over her last poll, while PPP shows Obama surging by 18 points. Rassmussen has virtually unchanged numbers over the same time span, whereas Quinnipac shows Hillary gaining 3 points, and ARG has Obama gaining 12 points.
In short, these numbers are all over the place. One can only guess that each pollster is making different adjustments to the data, trying to factor in race, gender, age, the new population of recently-registered voters, etc., and coming to different conclusions about who will come out and in what strength. If the state were an open primary, things would probably look even more crazy, I’m guessing.
I am kind of surprised at the continued talk about having Condi Rice run as VP with John McCain. Why? Is Rice so popular? Does she have such a huge following? This is a person who is so integrally involved in the George W. Bush administration, first as National Security Advisor, then as Secretary of State, that you might as well have Bush himself run as McCain’s VP. Nothing would signal a stark continuation of Bush’s policies and failures more than having Rice on the ticket–and along with that, the administration’s sub-30% popularity rating. Rice’s personal ratings have been higher–around the 50% mark–but that may well reflect her image relative to the Bush administration, rather than viewed from a perspective of her having come from that administration.
Coming on as a VP candidate, Rice would carry with her the baggage of Bush, like a defense witness opening the door to a whole new line of questioning. Obama would be able to smash such a ticket with every failure of the past eight years. Rice would really not add anything substantial–McCain is already supposed to have (note: supposed to have, not actually have) foreign policy and security credentials that Rice would not be able to add to.Whatever positives she brings in experience are more than dragged down by the heavy debacles of the past two terms; Rice has no sterling accomplishments to glide on, nothing that makes her stand out except her experience. And if Obama wins the nomination, then he’ll have shown that claims of experience are not enough to turn the trick.
So why, again and again and again, does Rice’s name come up in conservative circles above anyone else’s? The answer, of course, is so blindingly obvious that one really does not have to say it. Republicans have been trying to paint the Obama campaign in racial terms, claiming that his color is really the only important thing about him. When it comes down to it, that’s simply the way they think… and it shows in their enthusiasm for an otherwise unappealing VP choice.
I posted a review of Apple’s “Numbers” software last August:
I haven’t used Numbers yet in a real-world situation, but will over the next semester as I use it to calculate grades in my classes. I am sure there’s a lot more good and not-so-good to be found yet–missing features, extra touches, and so forth. But from just playing around with it for a few days, I am more than ready to dump Excel and work exclusively with Numbers. And with Numbers topping off the iWork suite, I find myself considering simply ditching MS Office altogether and switching completely over to iWork (except for when I have to teach Office in my Computer course).
Let it not be said that I readily admit when I’m wrong. Sure, I’ll usually put up a fight, but when there’s no doubt, there’s no doubt. And I was wrong about Numbers: now that I have used it in real-world situations, I can see that it’s not quite ready for prime time.
And the kicker of it is, it’s in the simple stuff where Numbers falls short. Take, for example, the fact that in Numbers, you can hide columns and rows individually, but you can’t unhide them individually. When working with my class grades (as I just finished doing today), I hid a number of columns, all across the spreadsheet. In Excel, if I want to unhide specific columns, I just select the columns around that one and select “Unhide,” and out it comes. In Numbers: you must unhide every single column in a spreadsheet, or none at all. Which means that if I want to unhide a single column, I have to choose “Unhide All Columns”–I have to bring all of them out, then go about re-hiding all the ones I don’t need, a laborious project. And that’s just stupid–Apple should not have overlooked such an obvious function. Not to mention that there is no menu bar selection for hiding and unhiding, meaning you cannot assign keyboard shortcuts for either command–a big shortcoming for me, as I use those features regularly.
Another example is how you can change formulas. In Excel, when you select a formula, you can see the referenced cells outlined–but then you can grab the outlines and change them, and the formula changes in kind. In Numbers, you can’t do that–you can see the referenced cells as shaded, but you cannot then grab them and change them–instead, you have to re-type the formula itself. Why not do things the easier way?
Numbers
Excel
The strange thing is, these go against Apple’s style, which is to do things more intuitively. These are not arcane features used only by power users, they are basic features that should not have been missed. There are still more intuitive bits in Numbers, like the ability I described last August, where you grab basic functions from the sidebar and drag them to make an easy calculation on the spreadsheet. But the two problems I outlined above are exactly that kind of feature–the easier, more natural, intuitive way of working that Apple should do better, but in this version of Numbers, Apple does very much worse. I can only hope these are oversights, soon to be rectified. But for now, they get in the way far too much, and make using the Apple program difficult and unwieldy.
There are also bugs in the program. For example, I can use the Fill handle to repeat a number, equation, or anything else downward–but not upward. Again, stupid–it should go both ways. Also, when you are in another app and want to go back into Numbers, you naturally click anywhere on the Numbers window that is visible–but this results in the cell you happened to click getting highlighted, as opposed to Excel (and most other apps) which ignores that first app-switching click, keeping the cell that you had left highlighted still in focus–a much better and more intuitive result.
Otherwise, Numbers just feels sluggish. You click, and it takes a second to react. You open a document, and it takes too long to open. The column- and row-manipulation arrows don’t appear as quickly as they should, and are harder to select than they should be. The lack of WYSIWYG font menus doesn’t help, either.
With Numbers being still in version 1.0, I guess I should not be so surprised–it still has a good ways to go, a long lag behind Excel’s functionality, But that doesn’t help me do my work. Sadly, I’ll have to go back to Excel–somewhat but not terribly improved in its 2008 reworking–to do my grunt work, at least until Apple does a lot more to get things right.
Side note: the first post to this blog using blog software was five years ago to this day. Not my first blog post ever, though–that was August 5th, 2002, just shy of a year before I started nonstop blogging, and I was coding the pages by hand then. Reading it, can you tell I was upset about something?
Obama has now led in the Gallup tracking poll for 15 days, the longest stretch he’s maintained to date (Obama has held an unnaturally steady 49% for five days). Previously, he had held the lead for 17 days in the latter part of February, but Hillary had jumped a point ahead on one day and tied him for the lead on another day, breaking the stretch. During Obama’s February lead, he was ahead of Hillary an average of 3.7% per day; in Obama’s latest stretch, he has led Hillary by an average of 4.6%, including a 10% lead where Obama sat at 52% (on March 29th), his highest lead in the race so far, a number Hillary herself enjoyed for only one day in her campaign (on February 5th) before Obama started seriously challenging her nationally.
10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don’t):1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”
5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.
6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.
7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0–yes, zero–from the League of Conservation Voters last year.
Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design [in Dover, PA]. What’s your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?A: “I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”
Well said.
Rev. Earl Blackwell of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Coatesville: Just speaking personally, the controversy with Wright was created by the media. You can take excerpts from my sermons, and I would be considered a Rev. Wright. But when you listen to the whole content of his sermons, he was speaking directly to the prejudiced, racist, biased community of our nation. And what he was saying, in fact, was generally the truth. The thing is we need to start facing is the reality of situations rather than running from them … What is also significant is that the media would pick that as some way to degrade or make a negative about Obama, and he wasn’t even there, sitting in the congregation. He’s never endorsed his pastor to be his spokesman. For the media to pick and nick, that only encourages me even more to push and prod forward with the support of Sen. Obama.
Read the rest.
I was going to post that they can take his gun away now, but I see that thousands of others have already seen the obvious joke there and beaten me to it.
Final exams have finished this semester, but I still have quite a lot of grading left to do by Monday. Didn’t get much done today because of a doctor’s appointment and a school event–a local fair where the college could put up a table and try to sign people up for our evening classes. It was free for us because we advertise in the local newsletter, and we got about a dozen bites and maybe a chance at better publicity for the school after talking to a local filming team. But I was tasked to put together a 5-minute movie showcasing the school, and that took up all of yesterday evening and night. So tomorrow and Monday will be mostly for getting those grades done. After that, there are various events, but I’ll have much of the month off.
That said, let’s look at some bits & pieces from today’s political news.
The papers mention that the Clintons gave more than the Obamas to charity as a percent of their overall income, but it’s a lot easier to give 9.5% of $14 million per year and enjoy the remaining $12 million-plus, than it is to give the same from an income of half a million per year while you’re still paying off massive college loans. The Clinton’s $109 million makes the Obama’s $3.9 million seem paltry in comparison.
Remember, Obama got slammed in the media for a good week or so when a low-level advisor was characterized in notes taken by a conservative foreign government as saying that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the trail should not be taken so seriously. This was successfully spun by Clinton and the media to mean “Obama lied on NAFTA and will screw all you hard-workng Ohioans.” This despite the fact that the context of the whole memo more or less followed exactly what Obama had been promising publicly and indicated no contradiction–and then there was the fact that Hillary was the first one reported by Canadians as saying she was not really against NAFTA.
And let’s not forget what Hillary said back then:
I would ask you to look at this story and substitute my name for Sen. Obama’s name and see what you would do with this story… Just ask yourself [what you would do] if some of my advisers had been having private meetings with foreign governments.
Um… yeah, what would we do, Hillary?
However, Clinton seems to be getting yet another break in the media (they don’t want her campaign to die, it would be less interesting and would not sell as many ads that way), as her chief advisor, a major player in her campaign, lobbies for a trade deal beneficial to a foreign government–and the MSM barely pays notice. This should be twice the embarrassment for Clinton that the Canadian thing was for Obama, but so far, not much is being said that’s going to hurt her too much. Most stories bear headlines that stress Penn’s “apology” and Clinton’s opposition to such a deal. Strange Obama did not get the same break when something far less troubling happened to him before a big blue-collar primary.
Not that this will help Clinton in Pennsylvania, of course.
Already Obama is seeing more support–Jimmy Carter, for example, left little doubt that he will pledge his superdelegate vote for Obama. And Hillary is starting to hurt even more in the pocketbook, as she raises less relative to Obama than before, and is said to be in serious debt while Obama’s coffers overflow.
If Obama even comes within a few points in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s support will probably begin to collapse–and if Obama wins there, more people will probably forego their reticence in calling for Hillary to step down.
What McCain is doing is returning money donated for the general election period, and he’s returning it with a request to re-donate it to a different fund he’ll use for other purposes. The biggest impact of this news seems to be that McCain is thinking seriously of going the public-finance route for the general election–he seems to think this will be something he can use against Obama, and with the media’s willingness to give McCain a break for his past public-financing legislation, it could even work. Despite the fact that Obama does not take any money from federal lobbyists or PACs, and that the vast majority of his donations are small ones by private persons–the antithesis of campaign finance corruption. Meanwhile, McCain continues to surround himself with swarms of lobbyists, and again, the MSM fails to notice.
McCain has little to lose here, considering that Obama has been out-raising him by something like five-to-one. And Obama could potentially use McCain’s lobbyist swarm and his violation of campaign finance law to blunt McCain’s strategy, while outspending McCain even more than Republicans have outspent Democrats in the past.
I’ve said it before here, and I’ll say it again: movement on a web page is bad. It started with the beginning of HTML, and the dreaded–and thankfully now defunct–“blink” command, which would make text blink on and off continuously. Even the guy who created that is said to have lamented that it was “the worst thing I’ve ever done for the Internet.” The dreaded animated GIF followed close behind, and has powered who knows how many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of annoying, blinking ads. The present-day scourge is the Flash animation, which–while cool and productive if used sparingly and correctly in the right context–is most often used to maddening effect.
Maybe some people can get by reading a web page with stuff flashing an moving all around the periphery–I cannot. It drives me up the fracking wall. And yes, that’s the whole point of an ad, to draw attention to itself–but ads are getting far too intrusive, like those animated ads they have on TV now, where you’re trying to watch a show and characters from some other show walk on to the bottom one-third of the screen and dance around for several seconds. Sorry, but that’s like coming up to someone while they’re reading a book, shaking their shoulders, and then dancing around, saying, “look at me!” You get their attention, but you also piss them off. I understand the necessity of ads, but ads which compete with the content they support are self-defeating–ads should be separate from the content, not taking your attention away from it.
Fortunately, there are measures that one can take. Various browsers have various ad-blocking software; I have settled on using Safari, liking its appearance and overall feature set. For that browser, I use PithHelmet, and have gladly paid the $10 for it (even though just clicking on “I Paid” would stop the nagware element). It does an excellent job of giving the user power over the browsing experience. You choose an overall set of ad-blocking preferences, but you can also change the settings for each individual site. You can choose to switch plug-ins, Java, and/or Javascript on or off for any given site, and there are a dozen or so settings for ad-blocking, by size, source, or type. If there’s a site you visit with any regularity, you can tweak the settings to allow for maximum accessibility and maximum ad-blocking.
An ad blocker can make a difference like night and day. I have been blissfully unaware of how many ad have invaded so many web pages, and was shocked to see how bad things had become when a new version of Safari temporarily disabled my blocker, and the ads suddenly appeared. That demonstrated to me so clearly that a good ad blocker can change a web page strewn with flashing, annoying ads into a nice, simple, quiet place to read your favorite content.
There are drawbacks, of course. For some reason, I can’t get any blocker to stop animated GIFs on my computer, and I can’t figure out why. Fortunately, they are less common today, but the occasional ones on my favorite political blogs (like the EFF button on Daily Kos or the “Listen” mini-ad on Kevin Drum’s blog) annoy me; usually they are small and minimally distracting, but I have a low distraction threshold, and they still bug me. I have to either zoom in on the text (another great use of Apple’s brilliantly-executed zoom feature), move the window so the movement is put out of frame, or suffer through it just long enough so I can scroll past it.
Another drawback is when wanted features and annoying ads use the same resource that your ad blocker can opt the block. Disabling plug-ins will do away with nasty Flash ads, but it will also disable YouTube videos, now a standard component of many blogs. When plug-ins are disabled, there’s no way to even link to the video, so you either have to fish around in the page’s source code and copy it, or temporarily turn the ad blocking off long enough to copy the URL from the YouTube menu. Similarly, when you disable simple image ads, other design-element parts of the page will also disappear. Getting rid of all the ads on Daily Kos, for example, will also get rid of the title banner at the top. Too much of this can make the page look a lot worse, but is still better than having to bear through ads.
But nowt here’s a new development: about a week or two ago, a series of related sites introduced a new version of their code which severely breaks the site’s appearance if you switch off the ads. I’m not sure how they did it, but it’s annoying as hell. LifeHacker, Wonkette, and Gizmondo are among the cross-linking group that use the same base code, and now all look like this:
If you scroll down, you can see the content, against a broken background image; it’s viewable, but only just. The annoyance factor reaches close to that of the ads being blocked. It’s impossible to say whether this was an accidental breakage due to bad coding, or if it was an intentional ploy to tell users, “pay by watching the ads or get the frack out of here.” Sadly, it will probably make me leave those sites for good–maybe what they want, as if I do them no adly goodness, then they make less money.
I have no problem with ads per se, just the annoying ones. If ads had only sat still on the periphery from the start, I probably would never have resorted to an ad blocker. Google does it best–unobtrusive and limited text ads off to the side, and relevant to content the user is looking at–I have even clicked through to some of them, which is a huge thing–I usually, as a matter of principle, never patronize ads on the Internet. But if they’re done right, they’ll work for me. And that’s the magic secret to good advertising: make it palatable, make it so it pleases, not so that it annoys. Advertise right and you can make money. Do it wrong and you drive customers away. The problem with ads is that it’s a lot easier to be an annoying attention-stealer than it is to be a quietly persuasive reminder. And the problem with web sites comes when people get so goddamned greedy that they smother their content with crap so annoying it overrides the enjoyment of the content itself.
Next month, my college moves into a new and bigger building than we’re in now, in part due to the fact that after getting Japan Ministry of Education recognition and the ability to grant student visas has increased our student numbers. (Another might be the fact that a second subway line is opening this summer just a few meters from our doors, and probably rents are going up too high).
One thing that we both will and will not miss (for very different reasons) is the drama going on in the streets around us. We are now located on an east-west avenue in northern east Shinjuku, not too far from Kabuki-cho. As I drove my scooter up to school today, I saw a tall guy standing in front of our building, looking intently down the sidewalk past me, talking on a cell phone. His look instantly prompted the reaction, “yakuza!” He was wearing a well-tailored pinstripe suit, and was tall, beefy and, well, rather yakuza-ish looking.
I pulled into our little side alley and parked, and a staff member who joined us not too long ago was observing from the alley way, noting surprise. He told me that someone had just chased a woman (who was at that time nowhere I could see), shouting at her. I replied, “well, maybe not too surprising considering the number of digits some gentlemen in this area have,” referring to the well-known yakuza habit of chopping off one’s pinky as a show of contrition or as punishment. And sure enough, when we looked at the hands of the men in front of our building (a guy in a jogging suit had joined the pinstripe guy), one of them was missing a pinky. Yow.
Actually, in recent days, the yakuza are not as prominent around these parts as they used to be. In the past, every few months we’d suddenly get about a half-dozen and more expensive sedans parking in the immediate area, each one guarded by a beefy yakuza-looking guy standing next to it. The cars would bring and then take away suited men also apparently of the yakuza persuasion. I heard second-hand that there was some incident a year ago, and the police cracked down on the area soon after that, maybe that’s why they moved their meetings somewhere else.
Not that any of this presents a risk to us or our students. In the ten years we’ve been in this location, I have never heard of a single instance of anyone in the student body or the faculty being harassed in any way by these guys; they seem to stick to their own business. Still, it adds a dash of adventure to the environment. Like I said, this is one reason to like the area–often some excitement happening without any real danger–but also is probably not a bad reason to be glad we’re moving to a new location.
New headline in the tech news today:
Another Trojan Targets Mac OS XYet another unscrupulous chunk of malicious software is being aimed at unsuspecting Mac users.
Security firms Sophos and Trend Micro are calling attention to a new Trojan application aimed at Apple Mac users. This Trojan, dubbed Imunizator, is similar to a previous attack called MacSweeper.
Wow! Yet another trojan for the Mac! This makes, what, three? With the first two being so incredibly lame that probably fewer than a dozen Mac users in the entire world have fallen for them? If even that many?
There are two monumental pieces of irony in this particular “malware” story. The first is: This … is … not … MALWARE. Calling it a “trojan” is, to say the least, an enormous stretch. Sophos actually calls it a “Trojan” in the “category” of “Viruses and Spyware,” which is completely ludicrous.
This is software that you have to actively locate, download, and then run. And then it does… nothing. It does not infect your system, does not inject any code into anything, gets past no security barriers, nothing. All it does is try to make you believe you have malware on your Mac, and prompts you to buy their software to get rid of it.
The second major irony here is that the Mac “security” vendors are warning people that this software “tries to scare Mac users into purchasing unnecessary software by claiming that privacy issues have been discovered on the computer.” The irony? That’s exactly what the Mac “security”vendors do all the time!!! I can see why they’d want to warn people away from this software–it’s trying to muscle in on their turf!
Judicial prudence (at least where the courts have not been stacked with right-wing loons) seems to be one of the only things holding back the nutcases in many instances. Like the courts deciding that a brain-dead woman’s body should be allowed to die, especially if the preponderance of evidence says that’s what she would have wanted. Or that a boy should be returned to his father according to law, instead of being put on display by relatives as part of a major political PR game. Or that creationism dressed up as fake science should not be taught in Science classes alongside scientific theories tried and tested for over a century, as if they were somehow equal.
In this case, the courts decided that a person must actually commit a crime before they can be sued for committing a crime, as opposed to being sued for a crime simply because there was the potential for a crime to be committed. In this case, it was the RIAA claiming that they could sue someone literally out of house and home for making a few CD’s of music available over the Internet, even if there was no evidence of any sort that anyone actually stole anything. The court disagreed, saying that there had to be evidence that file sharing actually took place.
However, the judge still gave the RIAA an out: he said that if someone made “an offer to distribute, and that the offer to distribute was for the purpose of further distribution, public performance, or public display,” then a suit could be filed. I suppose that’s under the same category as arresting someone for solicitation without the crime being solicited actually taking place.
Now, what that means may be open to interpretation, but the one that seems evident is that one must prove that there was the intent to distribute copyrighted material–and that could be pretty hard to prove. The RIAA can sue based on that claim, but proving that claim might be a lot more difficult.
A few months back, I reported on how my DVR’s hard drive suddenly crapped out, taking with it a few hundred hours of programming I had saved up. As it turned out, the disk came back to life after a few days, and I got the data back.
Well, a similar thing happened a few weeks ago with a hard drive on my computer. As it happens, it’s my biggest–a 500 GB drive–and I had not backed up the full disk when it suddenly blanked out. At first, it just wouldn’t show up on my computer, and then it did show up–completely blank. Fortunately, I knew better than to write a single bit of data on the disk, and instead kept it pristine so I could attempt to restore the data… but no luck there. Attempts to repair whatever damage had occurred failed, and data-retrieval software looked futile–the trial version of such software that I tried either couldn’t recognize the disk format, or took hours to catalog thousands of fragments, but few usable files.
I was all set to give up when I plugged the disk in yesterday in one last attempt to retrieve the data–and suddenly the drive returned with all the data intact. Provisionally, however–the computer reported an error and that the disk would only be semi-functional. But that turned out to mean that the disk is now just read-only, with all the data being copiable–and so I’ve been busy copying and backing up on DVD-Rs.
I have to say, I’ve been pretty damned lucky in this area the past several months.
Reading Snopes every day, one gets the very strong sense that right-wingers do a hell of a lot of propagandizing via email, and this under-the-media-radar stuff verges on the explosive–and often goes way over the edge. I mentioned this within a previous omnibus post.
In fact, I posted on this kind of thing two and a half years ago, but focused more on the propensity of right-wingers to vilify Katrina victims. Back then, there was a wave of rumors spread by email claiming that blacks from New Orleans were living high off the FEMA hog, blowing their aid money on luxuries or gambling it away, refusing to accept jobs, and instead spreading crime and disease to good-samaratin victims trying to help them.
A lot of fake emails making the rounds are hoaxes or scams–pleas for emails for sick children which are probably spam address harvesting ploys, or frightening stories about abuse to animals which have no basis in reality. However, those which seem politically slanted far more often slant to the right wing ideals, with racial overtones often in overt display.
Many seem to be political attempts to dampen criticism of Republicans by heaping blame and scorn on Democrats or even those who are victims of Republican mismanagement. The many attacks on destitute blacks out of New Orleans after Katrina was almost certainly intended to blunt criticism against the Bush administration by making the victims seem despicable and deserving of what they got, or otherwise portrayed them as stupid and lazy, making their misfortune their own fault.
But a lot of it is politically motivated, like the flood of fake propaganda emails assailing Barack Obama, no doubt responsible for so many thinking he’s a Muslim. Or the one I pointed out that paints a starkly racist picture of his family, equally fake. Similarly, criminal acts by Bush and fellow Republicans are responded to by making Democrats seem worse, like this email claiming Clinton was a felon who somehow got “pardoned” (by whom?), or that he was the real Enron beneficiary.
However, it was a Snopes story from a few days ago which prompted this post, as it had yet another viral email from the right wing which perfectly exemplified this kind of thing. It was an email which has appeared in blogs, forums, newspaper letters-to-the-editor–you name it, it’s been there. The basic claim is that more soldiers died while Clinton was president than did under Bush–the obvious implication being that Bush is not costing soldier’s lives with his botched con-job in Iraq. Here’s how it’s laid out:
These are some rather eye-opening facts.Since the start of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sacrifice has been enormous. In the time period from the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 through today, we have lost over 3,000 military personnel to enemy action and accidents.
As tragic as the loss of any member of the US Armed Forces is, consider the following statistics: The annual fatalities of military members while actively serving in the armed forces from 1980 through 2006:
1980 ……..2,392
1981 ……..2,380
1984 ……..1,999
1988 ……..1,819
1989 ……..1,636
1990 ……. 1,508
1991 ……..1,787
1992 ……..1,293
1993 ……..1,213
1994 ……..1,075
1995 ……..2,465
1996 ……..2,318 Clinton years @14,000 deaths
1997 ……….817
1998 ……..2,252
1999 ……..1,984
2000 ……..1,983
2001 ……… 890
2002 ……..1,007
2003 ……..1,410
2004 ……..1,887
2005 ……….919
2006………. 920 Bush years (2001-2006): 7,033 deathsIf you are confused when you look at these figures, so was I.
Do these figures mean that the loss from the two latest conflicts in the middle East are LESS than the loss of military personnel during
Mr. Clinton’s presidency; when America wasn’t even involved in a war? And, I was even more confused; when I read that in 1980, during the reign of President (Nobel Peace Prize winner) Jimmy Carter, there were 2,392 US military fatalities!These figures indicate that many members of our Media and our Politicians will pick and choose. They present only those “facts” which support their agenda-driven reporting. Why do so many of them march in lock-step to twist the truth? Where do so many of them get their marching-orders for their agenda?
(These statistics are published by Congressional Research Service, and they may be confirmed by anyone at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf )
The funny thing about this is that whoever it was who wrote this included the URL for the actual data on military casualties–a report which shows the numbers claimed are not just wrong, but clearly faked.
As you might expect, military deaths under Clinton were not higher than they are under Bush. In fact, they were the lowest under Clinton than they were under any other president since 1980. Furthermore, the data cited is flawed in another fundamental way. Before getting into that, however, one wonders at the idea that hundreds of right-wing bloggers and forum-goers would repeatedly post the fake data, right along with the URL to the proof the data was fake, and never bother to check it out. Is there that little capacity to self check, that great a desire to believe what they want to believe that so many would do something so lame-brained?
A quick look at the relevant table on page 11 of the linked PDF file shows that the figures in the right-wing rant have been clearly altered to make Clinton’s numbers higher and Dubya’s lower.The number of deaths on both lists remains mostly consistent up until 1994… after which Clinton’s numbers are fictionalized as being higher, and Bush 43’s numbers are artificially lowered.
The real numbers show the following: in total deaths, average per year:
Reagan: 2150
Bush 41: 1556
Clinton: 938
Bush 43: 1465
In accidental deaths, average per year:
Reagan: 1332
Bush 41: 872
Clinton: 494
Bush 43: 521
And in hostile deaths, in combat, average per year:
Reagan: 7
Bush 41: 43
Clinton: 0*
Bush 43: 433
*Clinton’s zero figure comes from the fact that while he was president, only one soldier died from hostile fire–despite harsh Republican criticism that Clinton was putting U.S. soldiers in harm’s way in the Balkans.
In fact, counting by almost any category–homicide, suicide, illness, accident, or hostile fire–fewer soldiers died under Clinton than did under either Bush or Reagan. The only exception is in the category of terrorist attacks, in which fewer died under Bush Sr. But that’s it.
Even if the creator of this forged polemic had been honest in reporting the numbers, the basic premise is still flawed–as it counts not just casualties from fighting, but all casualties. The idea being that a president is going to be held responsible for all servicemen who died in accidents of any kind, for example.
But the obvious gist of the article is that Bush is not being irresponsible with the troops, with the natural assumption being that the Iraq War is not as hard on soldiers as was duty under Clinton–and this is patently false, under any pretense, but especially under the only reasonable comparison, which is counting deaths under hostile circumstances.
Now, when you think about it, you don’t even need to look at the tables to see that the numbers have been faked; just look at the purported number of total deaths for 2005 and 2006 that the right-wingers are claiming: 919 and 920? In years where 846 and 822 U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War, respectively? Supposedly we are to believe that the number of soldiers who died in accidents or other causes fell to nearly zero under Dubya after being in the thousands in other years?
The whole thing is an example of the blatant lies that ardent right-wingers so fiercely embrace, even when the evidence they are flat-out wrong is staring them in the face, so long as the fake “truths” tell them what they want to hear.
The On This Day… widget in this blog’s sidebar is showing its worth; in addition to acting as a record of what I was thinking, doing, or seeing at this time in years past (not bad for birdwatching, for example), it reminds me of a lot of stuff I have written on but forgotten about, stuff that is worth commenting on. For example, there was a story three years ago about a “fast-charging battery” that would almost fully recharge in one minute. They said it would be available in 2006. Well, here it is, 2008, and I don’t see the battery around. Maybe it was released but is too expensive, or has limitations which keep it from being widely used, I don’t know. But it is worth noticing that so many of the stories of new, revolutionary technology that we see eventually come to nothing. Good reason to take such stories with a grain of salt, or at least a wait-and-see attitude.
Another story from the same day highlights the worthlessness of all the stories about how vulnerable the Mac is to attacks. Here’s a report released by an antivirus software company three years ago:
Security vendor Symantec is warning that Apple’s OS X operating system is increasingly becoming a target for hackers and malware authors. …Symantec believes that as the popularity of Apple’s new platform continues to grow, so too will the number of attacks directed at it,” the report said.
Symantec’s concerns were echoed by James Turner, security analyst at Frost & Sullivan Australia, who said many of the people who bought Apple products were not concerned about security, which left them wide open to attack. … As soon as you start seeing mass deployment of any technology you are going to see exploits.”
According to Biviano, while there have not been any mass outbreaks of viruses targeting the Mac, the potential does exist. …
“Look at where mobile viruses are going and they are not targeting Microsoft – they are targeting the market leader, which is Symbian,” he said.
That was three years ago. The Mac market share has more than doubled since then, and now the iPhone is a major player in the mobile market. We have trumped-up publicity stunts like this one (thoroughly debunked here and here) still trying to tell us how vulnerable Macs are and how secure Windows is, but the fact remains that Vista is far from secure, and about 80% of Windows users are still vulnerable to more than 100,000 real-world malware packages… while the Mac has suffered from only two real-world attacks, both trojans (the easiest type of attack to carry out because it bypasses OS security instead of defeating it), and neither of those trojans is known to have done much if any damage at all. The first affected a total of one person. The second has been reported as existing in the wild, but I have heard no reports of anyone actually falling prey to it. Both require several steps to be taken by a naive Mac user to allow the trojan to attack their system, including typing in administrator passwords for no good reason whatsoever.
In short, the Mac has remained virus-free and virtually malware free, despite increasing its market share far beyond what the naysayers guessed at three years ago. The promised wave of malware attacks has completely failed to materialize. And yet we still get regular reports from the same people saying the same thing–the Mac has all these vulnerabilities (which somehow never actually get turned into real-world exploits), it’s going to get creamed any day now! Look!
Apple Macs running the Mac OS X operating system are just as vulnerable to viruses and other threats as Windows PCs are. That’s according to Symantec software architect Ollie Whitehouse who made the claims in an interview with Tech.co.uk.“Apple has been demonstrated to suffer a number of vulnerabilities over the years,” he said. “Suffice to say that Symantec and other software security vendors do produce anti-virus software for the Mac because we believe there is the potential of a problem.”
That was last August, two and a half years after the first Symantec warning that I posted about–and I am certain there were scare stories from Symantec and others well before three years ago.
We’re still waiting for the massive onslaught of viruses on the Mac.
Remember those millions of White House emails that happened to get lost? And the backups were lost too? And then the hard disk drives these were all stored on accidentally destroyed? And the emails from the alternate email system many used were also lost, along with their backups if there ever were any? And that the lost emails just happened to cover periods of time that happened to coincide with likely periods of White House lawbreaking?
I suspect that even anyone unfamiliar with technology would find this all unlikely, unless you were so biased in favor of the Bush administration that you would believe excuses involving the Easter Bunny. But to those who have even a rudimentary understanding of how computers work, this all comes across as such a stupid, blatant load of BS that it is rather unbelievable that criminal prosecutions are not already in progress.
If you would like a more detailed explanation of much of that story with the perspective of experts in such things, then read this post from Daily Kos. If you want the story from a less biased source, I was only able to find this article from the AP; for some strange, unexplained reason, the MSM doesn’t seem to be covering this story much at all. Go figure. A few tech blogs have covered some aspects of it, however.
Though we caught a glimpse of the cherry blossoms last week as they were just starting to bloom, Sachi and I figured that we’d see them in their prime this week. We decided to go to two different places. Sachi dislikes Shinjuku, so we didn’t go back to Shinjuku Gyoen (though I think that’s really the best place for cherry blossom viewing, as it’s big, well-kept, has lots of trees and varieties, and has elbow room to spread out in–a big thing when you see the other places), and we decided that Ueno would be too crowded.
For some reason, we thought Inogashira Park in Kichijoji would not be. Big mistake.
You really can’t understand the press shown in this photo, it isn’t done justice here. There’s a quaint, narrow shopping street going from near Kichijoji Station to Inogashira Park, and it was packed enough most of the way–but the last 50 meters or so was intolerably jammed. We virtually inched along, with some jerk at my back apparently thinking he’d move faster if he pressed up against me and pushed. The jam was caused more by the large number of people on the street lining up for yakitori at a place called Iseya, near the entrance to the park.
Once inside, the park was little better–it was sardine time, worse than I’ve ever seen it. To top things off, the park has adopted a new don’t-feed-the-birds policy, which meant the loaf of bread we’d brought would go to waste, and there was little else left to do. Forget going out on the lake in a boat, the line was tremendous. Even just walking along was bad enough. Still, a few shots did result from the visit:
In addition to the blossoms, some Oshidori (Mandarin Ducks) were in attendance, though they were just about the only birds there; since the no-feeding policy, the number of birds in the park has plummeted. Clever idea they had there.
So after walking through the park for about fifteen minutes, we’d had enough, and went back to the station, and on to Meguro. Sachi knows the location well because she lived nearby for a while. There’s a river lined for a good distance with cherry blossom trees, and so we enjoyed ourselves there, somewhat better because it was far less crowded.
One thing we did notice was that it was Crazy Day. First, there were accidents on both train lines we wanted to use–the Yamanote and the Inogashira. In fact, as we took the Inogashira Line, we passed a station where, at the end of the platform, there appeared to be two human bodies completely covered over by tarps, apparently explaining the accident delay. A bit of a shock there.
Then, a little later on the same train, some guy came racing through the car; we thought he needed to get from one end of the train to the other fast, but he stopped at the end of our car… and started touching advertisements. Only the ones on either side of the doors–first the ads on one side, then the other, then to the next set of doors, all down the length of the car. Obsessive-compulsive or something, I suppose.
Then, in Meguro, there was quite a bit of craziness brought on by simple drinking, including these guys pictured below (apparently just back from a wedding), who had one member pretend to climb over the railing while the rest, for some reason, sang the Hanshin Tigers baseball team song.
Nevertheless, Sachi and I enjoyed ourselves with a pleasant few hours’ walk, and then dinner at a nice restaurant before heading back.
One last image. Just before we finished up in Meguro, we passed a taxi parking lot, and spotted several cats who had learned about warm car hoods. Two were on one taxi, and another underneath; I caught the couple on the hood.
As you probably know or can guess, I hate web advertising that goes beyond simple text ads. Anything that moves or blinks or gets in your way annoys the hell out of me. I use PithHelmet for Safari, and make sure the settings are optimized so that all the sites I regularly visit are defanged of any ads.
However, one form of in-your-face advertising which is so far immune from such blockers are “content links,” those double-underline links which show pop-up ads when your mouse travels over them. These get set off a lot just because you move your mouse from point A to point B without being extra cautious to avoid the double-underlines.
But at least there can still be comedy to be had from them. From what I can observe, these ad links are created by some program without human intervention, which would explain the weird way that various words are chosen and somehow linked to various ads.
All I can say is that if I were Shopping.com, I would ask for my money back for this ad:
Unless, of course, they enjoy brisk sales of toxins.
New story out today:
Nagoya-based Aiphone chose this week to tell the world that it has been in talks with Apple since last summer about giving the US firm the right to use the ‘iPhone’ trademark in Japan.
You say iPhone, we say…The possible conflict arose because, although ‘Aiphone’ and ‘iPhone’ are spelled differently in English, the Japanese rendering of both is exactly the same.
Aiphone says it has “reached a friendly agreement with Apple” that allows both to use the Japanese version within Japan.
Aiphone is not a telephone, but the name of a communications company founded in Japan in 1948. Since they seem to primarily make building intercom systems, you won’t be seeing any crossover, no cell phone “iPhone vs. AiPhone.”
The real importance of this announcement, as noted in the quoted article, is the fact that this proves the iPhone is indeed coming. While there is no confirmation that the iPhone will be coming to Japan in June (when it is rumored to come out in 3G in a variety of new countries), every new news tidbit suggests the loosening of the lid on the secret, which suggests a more imminent release.
