Microsoft takes on pirates

Brilliant. If users want Microsoft to plug the criminal number of security issues in its products then they must jump through Microsoft hoops to be sure MS has extracted its full extortionary fees. Users whose installations are not certifiable will remain infected and infect other machines. Obviously, MS does not care about security, only about its profits.

It is increasingly common that we see appeals to alter anything and everything that terrorist might be able to make use of. As any and all information services are possibly useful to some technology savvy baddie somewhere this would effectively stifle information technology and its use by the rest of us in order to keep it from being used by terrorists. We have heard such urgent appeals before with pedophiles, for instance, substituted for terrorists.

Server technology, along with many other quite useful things, is merely a tool. It can be used for good, bad or indifferent purposes just as a very low level tool like a box cutter can. Saying we must somehow make the tool able to distinquish the intentions and/or identity of the user is the way to make the tools useless and the level of prying into the lives of all users utterly odious and dangerously invasive.

The place to stop terrorism is in its planning and commission of acts of terror, not in its mere communications. Communication and information tools must be unencumbered if they are to be truly and maximally useful.

It also should raise suspicion when the very things that make governments a bit uneasy such as open internet empowerment of all the people are precisely what it declares as needing radical revision and to be under its control to "fight terrorism". Terrorism makes a convenient excuse for massive increase of governmental control (industry "policing itself" is not an really effectively different) and attendant massive decrease of individual access to information, communication and distributed computational resources.

This is certainly not remotely the answer and I frankly find it more than a little suspicious that a supposedly savvy publication like Technology Review would mostly simply parrot such a suggestion.

One of the more disturbing trends to be observed in the US media is the way that news, especially news regarding the Bush administration, is "unreported". The below article on a change to Social Security for instance never bothers to actually explain what the proposed change is. The reader is left to guess what calculating SS benefits on "inflation" instead of wages would mean. My own guess is that it would mean the government gives you whatever amount it believes a generic retiree needs based on some inflation based formula regardless of how much you may have paid in. So those who have paid the most get shafted the most. But this is only my guess. The non-news piece below doesn't actually bother to say.

White House ponders changing the way benefits are calculated - Jan. 4, 2005