photo credit: 708718

From Annie Karni’s “Gabbing Taxi Drivers Talking on ‘Party Lines’” (The New York Sun: 11 January 2007):

It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their cab driver colleagues on group party lines. Taxi drivers say they use conference calls to discuss directions and find out about congested routes to avoid. They come to depend on one another as first responders, reacting faster even than police to calls from drivers in distress. Some drivers say they participate in group prayers on a party line.

…

It is during this morning routine, waiting for the first shuttle flights to arrive from Washington and Boston, where many friendships between cabbies are forged and cell phone numbers are exchanged, Mr. Sverdlov said. Once drivers have each other’s numbers, they can use push-to-talk technology to call large groups all at once.

Mr. Sverdlov said he conferences with up to 10 cabbies at a time to discuss “traffic, what’s going on, this and that, and where do cops stay.” He estimated that every month, he logs about 20,000 talking minutes on his cell phone.

While civilian drivers are allowed to use hands-free devices to talk on cell phones while behind the wheel, the Taxi & Limousine Commission imposed a total cell phone ban for taxi drivers on duty in 1999. In 2006, the Taxi & Limousine Commission issued 1,049 summonses for phone use while on duty, up by almost 69% from the 621 summonses it issued the previous year. Drivers caught chatting while driving are fined $200 and receive two-point penalties on their licenses.

…

Drivers originally from countries like Israel, China, and America, who are few and far between, say they rarely chat on the phone with other cab drivers because of the language barrier. For many South Asians and Russian drivers, however, conference calls that are prohibited by the Taxi & Limousine Commission are mainstays of cabby life.

The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage — raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an investigation by The Washington Times has found.

The Government Printing Office’s decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for blank passports than it actually costs to make them, according to interviews with federal officials and documents obtained by The Times.

The profits have raised questions both inside the agency and in Congress because the law that created GPO as the federal government’s official printer explicitly requires the agency to break even by charging only enough to recover its costs.

Lawmakers said they were alarmed by The Times’ findings and plan to investigate why U.S. companies weren’t used to produce the state-of-the-art passports, one of the crown jewels of American border security.

…

Officials at GPO, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department played down such concerns, saying they are confident that regular audits and other protections already in place will keep terrorists and foreign spies from stealing or copying the sensitive components to make fake passports.

“Aside from the fact that we have fully vetted and qualified vendors, we also note that the materials are moved via a secure transportation means, including armored vehicles,” GPO spokesman Gary Somerset said.

But GPO Inspector General J. Anthony Ogden, the agency’s internal watchdog, doesn’t share that confidence. He warned in an internal Oct. 12 report that there are “significant deficiencies with the manufacturing of blank passports, security of components, and the internal controls for the process.”

The inspector general’s report said GPO claimed it could not improve its security because of “monetary constraints.” But the inspector general recently told congressional investigators he was unaware that the agency had booked tens of millions of dollars in profits through passport sales that could have been used to improve security, congressional aides told The Times.

…

GPO is an agency little-known to most Americans, created by Congress almost two centuries ago as a virtual monopoly to print nearly all of the government’s documents … Since 1926, it also has been charged with the job of printing the passports used by Americans to enter and leave the country.

…

Each new e-passport contains a small computer chip inside the back cover that contains the passport number along with the photo and other personal data of the holder. The data is secured and is transmitted through a tiny wire antenna when it is scanned electronically at border entry points and compared to the actual traveler carrying it.

According to interviews and documents, GPO managers rejected limiting the contracts to U.S.-made computer chip makers and instead sought suppliers from several countries, including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands.

…

After the computer chips are inserted into the back cover of the passports in Europe, the blank covers are shipped to a factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand, north of Bangkok, to be fitted with a wire Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, antenna. The blank passports eventually are transported to Washington for final binding, according to the documents and interviews.

The stop in Thailand raises its own security concerns. The Southeast Asian country has battled social instability and terror threats. Anti-government groups backed by Islamists, including al Qaeda, have carried out attacks in southern Thailand and the Thai military took over in a coup in September 2006.

The Netherlands-based company that assembles the U.S. e-passport covers in Thailand, Smartrac Technology Ltd., warned in its latest annual report that, in a worst-case scenario, social unrest in Thailand could lead to a halt in production.

Smartrac divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America’s e-passports.

Transport concerns

A 2005 document obtained by The Times states that GPO was using unsecure FedEx courier services to send blank passports to State Department offices until security concerns were raised and forced GPO to use an armored car company. Even then, the agency proposed using a foreign armored car vendor before State Department diplomatic security officials objected.

…

Questionable profits

…

The State Department is now charging Americans $100 or more for new e-passports produced by the GPO, depending on how quickly they are needed. That’s up from a cost of around just $60 in 1998.

Internal agency documents obtained by The Times show each blank passport costs GPO an average of just $7.97 to manufacture and that GPO then charges the State Department about $14.80 for each, a margin of more than 85 percent, the documents show.

The accounting allowed GPO to make gross profits of more than $90 million from Oct. 1, 2006, through Sept. 30, 2007, on the production of e-passports. The four subsequent months produced an additional $54 million in gross profits.

The agency set aside more than $40 million of those profits to help build a secure backup passport production facility in the South, still leaving a net profit of about $100 million in the last 16 months.

…

GPO plans to produce 28 million blank passports this year up from about 9 million five years ago.

It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in North America. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was one of the primary forces behind Jamestown’s eventual success. The worms hint at a third, still more important role: Rolfe inadvertently helped unleash a convulsive and permanent change in the American landscape.

Like many young English blades, Rolfe smoked – or, as the phrase went in those days, “drank” – tobacco, a fad since the Spanish had first carried back samples of Nicotiana tabacum from the Caribbean. Indians in Virginia also drank tobacco, but it was a different species, Nicotiana rustica. Virginia leaf was awful stuff, wrote colonist William Strachey: “poor and weak and of a biting taste.” After arriving in Jamestown in 1610, Rolfe talked a shipmaster into bringing him N. tabacum seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela. Six years later Rolfe returned to England with his wife, Pocahontas, and the first major shipment of his tobacco. “Pleasant, sweet, and strong,” as Rolfe’s friend Ralph Hamor described it, Jamestown’s tobacco was a hit. By 1620 the colony exported up to 50,000 pounds (23,000 kilograms) of it – and at least six times more a decade later. Ships bellied up to Jamestown and loaded up with barrels of tobacco leaves. To balance the weight, sailors dumped out ballast, mostly stones and soil. That dirt almost certainly contained English earthworms.

…

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geologic forces broke this vast expanse into pieces, sundering Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two halves of the world developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Columbus’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred Crosby, to reknit the torn seams of Pangaea. After 1492, the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian exchange, as Crosby called it, is why there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and hot peppers in Thailand. It is arguably the most important event in the history of life since the death of the dinosaurs.

…

But the largest ecological impact may have been wreaked by a much smaller, seemingly benign domestic animal: the European honeybee. In early 1622, a ship arrived in Jamestown that was a living exhibit of the Columbian exchange. It was loaded with exotic entities for the colonists to experiment with: grapevine cuttings, silkworm eggs, and beehives. Most bees pollinate only a few species; they tend to be fussy about where they live. European honeybees, promiscuous beasts, reside almost anywhere and pollinate almost anything in sight. Quickly, they swarmed from their hives and set up shop throughout the Americas.

Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their crews and insurers, appears to notice that pirates are assaulting ships at a rate unprecedented since the glorious days when pirates were ‘privateers’ protected by their national governments. The 18th and 19th-century sponsors of piracy included England, Holland, France, Spain and the United States. In comparison, the famed Barbary corsairs of North Africa were an irritant. Raiding rivals’ merchant vessels went out of fashion after the Napoleonic Wars, and piracy was outlawed in the 1856 Declaration of Paris (never signed by the US). Since the end of the Cold War, it has been making a comeback. Various estimates are given of its cost to international trade. The figure quoted most often is the Asia Foundation’s $16 billion per annum lost in cargo, ships and rising insurance premiums.

The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which collects statistics on piracy for ship owners, reports that five years ago pirates attacked 106 ships. Last year they attacked 370. This year looks worse still.

…

In waters where piracy flourished in the past, the tradition embodied in figures such as Captain Kidd has persisted: off the Ganges delta in Bangladesh, in the Java and South China Seas, off the Horn of Africa and in the Caribbean. Three conditions appear necessary: a tradition of piracy; political instability; and rich targets – Spanish galleons for Drake, oil tankers for his descendants. A fourth helps to explain the ease with which it happens: ‘The maritime environment,’ Gunaratna said, ‘is the least policed in the world today.’

The IMB has not been able to persuade the international community or the more powerful maritime states to take serious action. The Bureau’s director, Captain Pottengal Mukundan, believes there is nothing crews can do to protect themselves. National maritime laws are not enforced beyond national boundaries – which is to say, over more than half the earth’s surface. Beyond territorial waters, there are no laws, no police and no jurisdiction. Many countries lack the will or the resources to police even their own waters. The IMB advises all ships against putting in anywhere near states like Somalia, for instance, where there is a near certainty of attack. … Piracy is a high-profit, low-risk activity.

The IMB urges crews to take more precautions, but owners can’t afford every recommended improvement: satellite-tracking devices, closed circuit cameras, electric fencing and security officers on every ship. Owners and trade unions discourage the arming of merchant ships in the belief that firearms will put crews’ lives at greater risk. Only the Russians and the Israelis are known to keep weapons aboard. Competition in the shipping business forces owners to minimise expenditure on crews as on everything else. A commission of inquiry into the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill that nearly destroyed the Alaskan coast reported that ‘tankers in the 1950s carried a crew of 40 to 42 to manage about 6.3 million gallons of oil . . . the Exxon Valdez carried a crew of 19 to transport 53 million gallons of oil.’ [Quoted in Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas by John Burnett] With the automation of many shipboard tasks, vessels today carry even fewer seamen than they did when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. That means fewer eyes to monitor the horizon and the decks for intruders.

…

Air and land transport routes have come under tighter scrutiny since 11 September 2001, but improvements to maritime security are few. An oil tanker can carry a load that is far, far more explosive than any civil aircraft. And most piracy, including the seizure of oil tankers, takes place near countries with powerful Islamist movements – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Yemen and Somalia. Lloyd’s List reported on 4 November that Indonesia is ‘the global black spot’ with 87 attacks in the first nine months of this year – ‘the number of attacks in the Malacca Straits leaped from 11 in 2002 to 24 this year.’ Indonesia, which consists of two thousand islands, is the world’s most populous Muslim country. It has experienced decades of repression by a kleptocratic military, communal violence and the degradation of a once vibrant economy. Radical Islamists have made it the focus of their activity and recruitment in Asia.

This book is written for intermediate to advanced System administrators managing Microsoft networks who are deploying Microsoft’s new flagship desktop operating system: Vista. This book is appropriate for system administrators managing small networks of fewer than 10 machines up to enterprise-class networks with tens of thousands of systems. This book is also appropriate for readers preparing for the Microsoft exam MCDST 70-620.

I contributed two appendices to this book:

• Appendix A: Microsoft Vista: The International Community
• Appendix B: Changes to the Vista EULA

Appendix A, “Microsoft Vista: The International Community”, was about Microsoft’s legal troubles in Europe and Asia, and the changes the company had to make to Vista to accommodate those governments. Appendix B, “Changes to the Vista EULA”, explained that the EULA in Vista is even worse than that found in XP, which was worse than any previous EULA. In other words, Vista has a problematic EULA that users need to know about before they buy the OS.

Read excerpts: Front Matter (350 KB PDF) and Chapter 1: Microsoft Vista: An Overview (760 KB PDF). You can flip through the entire book, although you’re limited to the total number of pages you can view (but it’s a pretty high number, like 50 or so).

[Stephen Kinzer's] Overthrow is an infuriating recitation of our government’s military bullying over the past 110 years – a century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governments – in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, and … Iraq. …

Most of these coups were triggered by foreign combatants and then taken over and finished by us. But four of them, in many ways the worst of the lot, were all our own, from conspiracy to conclusion. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen – certainly not in the same way or at the same time – if Washington had not acted as it did.

Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam) …. They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans hold dear. They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them …. The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws.

But it does raise the question, what do you mean by spiritual? And what do you mean by mystical?

By spiritual and mystical — I use them interchangeably — I mean any effort to understand and explore happiness and well-being itself through deliberate uses of attention. Specifically, to break the spell of discursive thought. We wake up each morning, and we’re chased out of bed by our thoughts, and then we think, think, think, think all day long. And very few of us spend any significant amount of time breaking that train of thought. Meditation is one technique by which to do that. The sense that you are an ego, busy thinking, disappears. And its disappearance is quite a relief.

Well, it’s interesting to hear this description of mysticism because I don’t think that’s how most people would see it. I mean, most people would play up the more irrational side. Yes, you’re losing yourself, but you’re plunged into some larger sea of oneness, of perhaps transcendent presence. Obviously, you’re staying away from that whole supernatural way of thinking.

Well, it’s very Buddhist of me to do that. The Buddhists tend to talk in terms of what it’s not. They talk about it being no self, they talk in terms of emptiness. But the theistic traditions talk in terms of what the experience is like. There, you get descriptions of fullness and rapture and love and oneness.

At first it seemed to be nothing more than a routine, if damaging, case of counterfeiting in a country where faking it has become an industry.

Reports filtering back to the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese electronics giant NEC in mid-2004 alerted managers that pirated keyboards and recordable CD and DVD discs bearing the company’s brand were on sale in retail outlets in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Like hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers now locked in a war of attrition with intellectual property thieves in China, the company hired an investigator to track down the pirates.

After two years and thousands of hours of investigation in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in China, Taiwan and Japan, the company said it had uncovered something far more ambitious than clandestine workshops turning out inferior copies of NEC products. The pirates were faking the entire company.

Evidence seized in raids on 18 factories and warehouses in China and Taiwan over the past year showed that the counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In the name of NEC, the pirates copied NEC products, and went as far as developing their own range of consumer electronic products – everything from home entertainment centers to MP3 players. They also coordinated manufacturing and distribution, collecting all the proceeds.

The Japanese company even received complaints about products – which were of generally good quality – that they did not make or provide with warranties.

NEC said it was unable to estimate the total value of the pirated goods from these factories, but the company believed the organizers had “profited substantially” from the operation.

“These entities are part of a sophisticated ring, coordinated by two key entities based in Taiwan and Japan, which has attempted to completely assume the NEC brand,” said Fujio Okada, the NEC senior vice president and legal division general manager, in written answers to questions.

While IT managers may not see the importance of security software for themselves, you would think they would be a little more careful with things like interns and contractors. Not so, apparently. Over in Japan, a lot of people are not happy after discovering that a lot of classified technical data on nuclear power plants was leaked onto the internet by a contractor using a computer with a file sharing app that was apparently left open to sharing everything on the machine. First off, what kind of nuclear plant contractor is putting a file sharing app on his work laptop? Also, the article notes that the laptop was infested with viruses, but later seems to blame the file sharing app rather than the viruses — so it’s not entirely clear what the viruses have to do with this story. Update: Another article on this story notes that it was the virus that made the material available via the file sharing app. It also notes that the guy was using his personal computer — and somehow this was allowed. It also details the information leaked, including inspection data, photographs and names of inspectors, as well as where they stayed when they did the inspections. No matter what, you have to wonder why the guy was allowed to use his personal computer or to use any computer for this data that hadn’t been checked first for viruses or other vulnerabilities.

From Mike’s “Security Through Begging” (techdirt: 16 March 2006):

Last summer, the surprising news came out that Japanese nuclear secrets leaked out, after a contractor was allowed to connect his personal virus-infested computer to the network at a nuclear power plant. The contractor had a file sharing app on his laptop as well, and suddenly nuclear secrets were available to plenty of kids just trying to download the latest hit single. It’s only taken about nine months for the government to come up with its suggestion on how to prevent future leaks of this nature: begging all Japanese citizens not to use file sharing systems — so that the next time this happens, there won’t be anyone on the network to download such documents.

I was being hit up for a handout by one of this country’s many hijras.

They are eunuchs or otherwise transgendered people by birth, accident or choice. Something between male and female, they are shunned by Indian society as unclean. Many make a rough living through prostitution or by crashing weddings, birthday parties and other festive occasions, threatening to disrupt the celebrations with vulgar behavior and to bring bad luck unless they are paid off. …

India has somewhere between half a million and a million eunuchs. The estimates are very approximate, because the hijras live in a secretive, shadowy world they’ve created for themselves away from the abuse and persecution of general society.

They gather in public in large numbers only at their annual conventions, which always attract media attention for the skillful dancing, the raucous atmosphere and the sight of gaudy clothing draped around burly shoulders and dainty jewels hanging off overly thick wrists.

In antiquity, India’s eunuchs dressed as men, and a few were granted royal jobs — for example, as guardians of harems. But today’s hijras make themselves up as women. In the West, they would probably be identified as something between a cross-dresser and a transsexual; in India, they often describe themselves as a third sex, and refer to themselves as “she.” …

Only a handful of outsiders have managed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the hijra community. The writer William Dalrymple, in his book “City of Djinns,” describes an often well-ordered sisterhood divided geographically into local “parishes” whose members, overseen by den mothers, diligently work their beat. …

The short one continued to appeal to me directly, gazing at me meaningfully and sprinkling her Hindi with unmistakable English phrases like “a thousand rupees” (about $22). At one point she knelt down and touched my feet in a sign of obeisance or importunity. Then, growing frustrated by my stinginess, she drew up the hem of her sari, perhaps to warn me that she was ready to flash her mutilated parts, a common tactic among eunuchs to hurry horrified partygoers into forking over cash to get their uninvited guests to leave.

How the hijras come by their condition varies. Some are born hermaphrodites, considered by many Indians to be a terrible curse. Others feel as though they are feminine souls trapped in masculine bodies and undergo voluntary castration — the luckier, better-off ones through chemicals or by trained surgeons, the poorer ones in dangerous back-alley operations involving little more than booze and a dirty knife. There are also hushed stories of boys being kidnapped and mutilated against their will.