Not your typical TPRC speaker. His heroes include “risk takers” Rupert Murdoch and Pat Buchanan, but not Ted Turner. Netflix was not mentioned. I was the first (but not the last) to stand up to question what he said.
Picture by John S. Quarterman, 27 September 2013.
-jsq
At 10:30 AM GMT yesterday, 29 November 2012,
routing to Yemen suddenly changed from London to Dubai through FLAG
to New York to Dubai through ETISALAT,
as shown in the animation here and
detailed in the PerilWatch from InternetPerils.
That timing closely matched the
10:26 AM GMT Syrian disconnect time reported by Renesys.
This is very reminiscent of
Mubarak disconnecting Egypt 22:30 GMT 20 January 2011.
This tactic didn’t help Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, and it probably won’t
help Assad’s regime in Syria; rather the opposite: people don’t like
their Internet being turned off.
And it tends to cause the international community to rally around the rebels.
-jsq
At a meeting on a completely different subject, I was interviewed
about
SpamRankings.net.
Here's
the audio,
and here's the blurb they supplied:
John S. Quarterman, long time Internet denizen, wrote one of the
seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.
Quarterman took some time during Georgia River Network's Weekend for Rivers to speak with the Nonprofit Snapshot about spam-mapping and small town politics.
More about Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-prize-winning work on organizing the commons, and how that applies to SpamRankings.net.
The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:
WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.
-jsq
These ecrime meetings are always interesting and useful. -jsq
Press release of 29 March:
Continue readingContaining the Global Cybercrime Threat is Focus of Counter eCrime Operations Summit (CeCOS VI) in Prague, April 25-27
CeCOS VI, in Prague, Czech Republic, to focus on harmonizing operational issues, cybercrime data exchange, and industrial policies to strengthen and unify the global counter-ecrime effort.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—The 6th annual Counter eCrime Operations Summit (CeCOS VI) will convene in Prague, Czech Republic, April 25-27, 2012, as the APWG gathers global leaders from the financial services, technology, government, law enforcement, communications sectors, and research centers to define common goals and harmonize resources to strengthen the global counter-cybercrime effort.
CeCOS VI Prague will review the development of response systems and resources available to counter-cybercrime managers and forensic professionals from around the world.
Specific goals of this high-level, multi-national conference are to identify common forensic needs, in terms of the data, tools, and communications protocols required to harmonize cybercrime response across borders and between private sector financial and industrial sector responders and public sector policy professionals and law enforcement.
Key presentations will include:
Davos, the annual conclave of the hyper-rich and famously elected,
has also discovered Severe income disparity
and Water supply crisis, so maybe they’re becoming
more realistic.
However, in Figure 17 on page 25 they’ve got Cyber attacks as an origin risk, along with Massive incident of data fraud or theft and Massive digital misinformation. I think they’re missing the point, which is the real origin risk is poor infosec, and the origin of that is vendors like MSFT knowingly shipping systems with design flaws and people and organizations running them while hiding such problems.
Interesting comment on page 26: Continue reading
FuelFix posted from AP on 23 December 2011, SEC requiring coal firms to report safety problems
Earlier this week, the SEC announced new rules that require miningWhat problem does this reporting solve? As the article points out: Continue readingcompanies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try to increase corporate accountability.
The rules take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. They require companies to report within four days any “significant and substantial” violations, citations, flagrant violations and imminent-danger orders issued by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Coal operators must also include the dollar value of proposed fines, whether the company has been or may be designated a pattern violator by MSHA, and any pending cases with the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.
Egypt returned to the Internet
about 09:30 GMT today (2 February 2011).
This sudden return after being as suddenly disconnected
one week ago (27 January 2011)
is obviously not due to ordinary causes such as congestion,
cable cut, or router failure.
This political disconnection of an entire country does not seem
to have helped the regime responsible for it; quite the opposite.
-jsq
Our friend represented his agency in the matter of procuring and forwarding the communications “as a public act, dealing with the public correspondence of public men.” His accusers were having none of it:
His accusers made him out to be a vindictive destroyer of public confidence. He had “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men” and was not a gentleman, rather a common thief.Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye &em; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters…
I am happy to hear our friend has been released by the court in London, although two days later he was fired from his job as deputy postmaster general of North America. Continue reading
Regarding
Perry’s comment to the previous post,
the point is that the specific example on which Hardin based his thesis,
the one everyone cites in support of it, is not borne out by the evidence,
not that he presented any evidence for it in the first place.
Further, that it’s not a tragedy in the sense Hardin meant: that of a Greek tragedy in which a flaw of character inevitably leads to the demise of the protagonist. Individuals are not inevitably disposed to claw out their own at the expense of everyone else. Sometimes people realize that there really is such a thing as the common good; that benefiting everyone benefits themselves.
Yes, I know about the Sahara and the Sahel; I’ve been there; I’ve seen the goats gnawing away at everything.
The solution is not state central planning: you cite Chinese lakes; I’ll cite the Aral Sea.
The solution is also not privatization of the commons: look at the wildfires in the U.S. west exacerbated by subdivisions built in forests.
Solutions that work seem to involve combinations of innovation, education, and especially cooperation. Like this one:
In the late 1970s, when the problems of desertification, combined with population growth, drought and grinding poverty in West Africa first began to get sustained global attention, the prognosis was mostly gloom and doom. And as has been well documented, foreign aid has been less than successful in improving matters. In Yahenga, Reij and Fabore note, efforts to modernize agriculture through large-scale mechanized operations usually failed, for a variety of reasons. The spread of zai hole planting spearheaded by Sawadogo was mostly carried out by the local farmers themselves, with limited support from the government or foreign donors. Those with access to labor dug the holes, and used local sources of organic manure to fill them.A tree grows in the Sahel, Andrew Leonard, How the World Works, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006 11:22 PDT
The “free market” isn’t enough. Cooperation on scales from local to global is also needed. And it does happen, despite Garrett Hardin’s myth that it can’t.
-jsq
The Internet Archive has for a decade been a cornerstone of the Internet,
and the FBI was foolish to try to break it:
The FBI has withdrawn an illegal National Security Letter seeking information from an online library and has lifted a gag order that until Wednesday prevented any discussion of the information request.The article goes on to say that the FBI has issued 200,000 National Security Letters, that almost none of those NSL have been challenged, yet every single time someone has challenged an NSL in court, the FBI has withdrawn it.Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the Internet Archive push back against what they say was an overly broad and unlawful request for information on one of its users. The FBI issued its National Security Letter in November, but ACLU, EFF and Archive officials were precluded from discussing it with anyone because of a gag order they say was unconstitutional.
After nearly five months of haggling, the FBI eventually withdrew its NSL, which requested personal information about at least one user of the Internet Archive. Founded in 1996, the archive is recognized as a library by the state of California, and its collections include billions of Web records, documents, music and movies.
— Watchdogs prompt FBI to withdraw ‘unconstitutional’ National Security Letter, Nick Juliano, therawstory, Published: Wednesday May 7, 2008
How do these NSL represent “Security”?
In any case, National Security Letters were authorized by the mis-named Patriot Act. Brewster Kahle has shown us how a real patriot acts: Continue reading