A new report from the Department of Justice has good news and bad news. The good news is that the DEA had “a 50 percent reduction in the frequency with which laptops are lost and stolen” since 2002. Of course they can’t actually figure out what was on all those stolen computers, unlike the 160 laptops the FBI has lost or had stolen during the last 4 years — they think at least 10 of those actually had sensitive information on them. It is known that at least one of the missing DEA computers did in fact have sensitive data on informants. That’s the kind of thing that could get people killed. For those keeping count, there are 231 laptops missing from the DEA in the last 5 years. New policies include encryption of some data, but frankly this is one of those cases where the best security is to minimize the data that can be breached in the first place.

Oh, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that even though they are losing fewer computers, they are losing more guns: 22 lost and 69 stolen. Many of the weapon thefts could have been prevented by simply following policies already in place, which is frankly inexcusable.

This was a follow-up to a study done in 2002, when they found a total of over 775 weapons and 400 laptop computers missing from various Department of Justice agencies — including the DEA. If you are curious, here’s the official executive summary from the OIG.

Maybe things work differently at the Department of Justice, but I think I would be fired if I lost a laptop full of company data, or if my own stupidity in the workplace caused a firearm to be stolen. Mistakes happen, sure. But sometimes you can’t afford to make mistakes at all. “Oh gee, I’m sorry!” won’t put an outed investigation back on track, or bring back a human being killed with a stolen gun.

If you peruse this list of policy initiatives provided by The White House in relation to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address last night (transcript is here; C-SPAN video is here), you may notice that two topics concern science and technology, two topics concern education and no topics concern the arts.

[NB: The final topic on that list, about worldwide compassion, stands out to me because I recently read about Compassion, which is a faith-based initiative that will use word of mouth blog power in Uganda next month. (If you’re interested in how non-profits are trying to leverage blogs and blogging and bloggers’ enthusiasm, you might want to follow Beth Kanter’s blog and read about How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media; she is one of the top experts in this area.) But I digress.]

So, while it’s nice that President Bush leaves us with his thoughts on science-related issues and makes sure to mention education (given No Child Left Behind’s continued existence, it’s unlikely we could forget Bush’s role there), some groups are demanding (or trying to demand) that the presidential candidates pay attention to their specific issues: Science Debate 2008, Ed in ‘08 and Arts Vote 2008 are three examples. Read the rest of this entry »

From Middle Earth Journal’s Jazz Shaw:

We’ve been doing a bit of background research here at MEJ, and a story that started out looking like yet another case of taxpayer dollars being shuffled into the hands of questionable private contractors has taken a few turns which have made the plot thicken. The first issue was this story stuck back on page 4 in the wapo about a $475M no-bid contract being improperly awarded to “a little-known company” in Alaska for the maintenance of x-ray and nuclear radiation monitoring equipment at border checkpoints for the Department of Homeland Security. This tale takes a few turns…. but please bear with me. It gets interesting.

Read the entire post to find out the intriguing details…

Randy Pausch is a man of his time, a popular computer-science professor who lectures about time management and has done pioneer research in robotics and virtual reality. He is 46 years old, happily married and has three young children. A year ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and now has only months to live.

For almost everybody else, dying is the most private experience of a lifetime. Aldous Huxley once wrote about terminal illness: “We live in one universe and die in another.”

Not Randy Pausch. He is sharing his final days as a joyous celebration of life, on his web site, in a lecture for his students and a YouTube encounter for the rest of us.

Knowing him is an unforgettable experience.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Bill Clinton, Oprah and Angela Jolie are often in Africa these days, with reporters and camera crews in their wake. This week the Christian Science Monitor is taking a long look at what they are doing:

“The world’s poorest, sickest, most war-ravaged continent is now the charity of choice for many of the West’s best-known political, pop, and Hollywood stars. Outside attention to the continent has fueled thousands of successful programs. But, despite the aid, the number of poor people in Africa has almost doubled in the past decade, and skeptics wonder whether some stars are most interested in boosting their own profile in the eyes of a public that expects a moral dimension to its heroes.”

In a two-part series, reporter Danna Jarman tries to go beyond the reflexive sigh or sneer at their efforts and offer insight into who is doing what and to what effect.

As she follows him on a week-long four-country tour, Bill Clinton tells her, “It’s easy … to say, ‘Oh, this is not serious, they are just trying to get press’ My experience has been this is not true. Not everything every actor does, works. Just like not everything I do works. Not everything Bill Gates does works. But it’s not true that it’s not genuine. By and large, it just is.”

A visiting scholar observes, “The bang for the buck is high in Africa. You can leverage your money and time. So you are not only bringing in more mosquito nets, but potentially shaping the entire national policy.”

For the open-minded and/or star-struck, the Monitor series is a whirlwind tour of what George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Mia Farrow et al are doing on a continent where nothing can be enough. If it stirs readers without big names to write small checks, that would add to their efforts.

Cross-posted from my blog

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. NOTE: Broken link has been FIXED on this post.

Information Overload and The Race For President

By Alex Hammer

Bill Gates a while back wrote a memo to Microsoft employees detailing a new era for software. Software 1.0 (not his term, but he does speak in striking terms about the shifting paradigm) was about getting consumers more information. Software 2.0, he states, which is the future of software and a huge market opportunity, is about organizing the information that we already have, so that it is useful.

Actionable.

I’ve never heard anyone accuse Bill Gates of being stupid. He knows, as we all do, that we’re inundated - overwhelmed - with information. I know people, for example, that refuse even to use email anymore because they just can’t get through all the spam.

Welcome the 2008 race for President. As the owner of Politics 2.0, which focuses on the race for President in 2008, how do we traverse across the sea of Presidential 2008 information to provide readers what is useful to them and the type of information they are looking for and want to know?

In this day of information overload that is the question we all must answer.

We seek to do it, most essentially, by being hooked into the broadest relevant network of informational sources upon which to draw upon that we can, and then employing developed processes and tools of sorting, analyzing and implementing those informational sources in an efficient manner.

I trust that the candidates for President are likely doing a lot of the same.

When you look at the websites of the top Presidential candidates they are generally well organized, but there are differences. Barack Obama has the most sophisticated online social network on his site, and as Politics 2.0 details, Obama competes with Hillary Clinton and yes, Ron Paul, for the most Internet traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »

“While installing firewalls and antivirus software on your computer may keep it safe from conventional threats such as worms and viruses, these security tools do not inspect data downloaded through browsers - a loophole that attackers can exploit,” says New Scientist.

” ‘The firewall is dead,’ says Google security specialist Niels Provos.

“As a result of this loophole, PCs are increasingly becoming infected with ‘bot’ software, creating networks of zombie computers, or botnets. Bots are ‘the Swiss army knives of the underground economy’, because they are so versatile, says Nick Ianelli, an internet security analyst at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“Bots first establish a link to a remote ‘botmaster’ before probing your computer for email addresses and personal data, and even logging your keystrokes. Most zombies are used to churn out huge amounts of spam email, while some target business websites with so-called ‘denial of service’ attacks.”

Read more…

(A file photo…)

For those above 30 years of age the above headline means that “13-year-old school girl is new US text messaging champion”. Got it?

While competitive text messaging may not have quite gained Olympic status, the hundreds of mostly teenagers who took part in the US championships in New York Saturday could think of little but the 25,000-dollar prize money, reports James Hossack of the AFP.

“In the end, 13-year-old Morgan Pozgar faced off against Michael ‘Cheeser’ Nguyen in the east coast final, with Pozgar slipping past her challenger to face west coast champion Tirosh, a law student from Los Angeles.

“Wearing a satin boxing robe before her championship bout against Pozgar, she said success would come down to who could marry lightning speed and accuracy. She said she owed her success to relaxation and deep breathing.

“So dedicated is she to the art of the text message that Tirosh apparently unwittingly uses abbreviations such as BTW (by the way), TTYL (talk to you later) and LOL (laughing out loud) in her normal speech.

“Pozgar said she trained by sending on average 8,000 text messages a month to her friends — an astonishing rate of one every five and a half minutes. She pays 10 dollars a month for an unlimited text package on her cell phone.”

To read more click here…

India on Thursday tested a nuclear capable intermediate range ballistic missile, named Agni-III, which is 85 per cent indigenously developed.

Indian scientists would now work on squeezing in a third stage into the missile system so that the range was increased from the 3,000 km plus (achieved on Thursday) to 5,000 km [which is the range for an ICBM] over the next three years, says The Hindu.

Now the question: Why India is showing its nuclear muscle? Who will be its main target? Will this lead to nuclear race in this part of the world or elsewhere?

These questions have been answered in detail by Gwynne Dyer in The Hamilton Spectator.

“India is just doing what great powers do. It wants to play with the Big Five, and playing the great-power game means you end up playing the nuclear-war game, too.”

But no one seems to be complaining…including India’s next door neighbours - Pakistan and China. Why?

Please click here to read it all…

Excerpts: “The Agni-III missile failed its first flight test last July, but this one seems to have gone off very well. The missile, which reportedly can carry a 300-kiloton nuclear warhead, was not tested at its full range of more than 3,000 km on this occasion, but that is the number that gets people’s attention.

“India’s main potential enemy is Pakistan, which is right next door, and it already has missiles that can strike anywhere there. The Agni-III gives India the range to strike the Middle East (but it has no enemies there) or southern Russia and Central Asia (likewise) — or China….”

The Times of India has a related story about the progress (or the lack of it) of US-India nuclear deal.

That’s the question of the day in the navel-gazing world of the blogosphere. But let me assure you that this question/allegation does not come from the White House/politicians/establishment!!! This question is posed by a fellow blogger, and he answers it himself.

Nicholas Carr, who says he ’scavenges’ at his blog named roughtype, writes: “It is worth remembering that, in a literary context, another word for ‘parasitic’ is ‘critical.’ Blogging is, at its essence, a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every molecule of sense, whether real or imagined, is distilled and consumed.

“So if someone wants to call my blog parasitic, or even bacterial, that’s fine with me. I’ll consider it not an insult, but a compliment.

“Robert Niles, the editor of the Online Journalism Review, recently decried what he sees as a tendency by journalists to characterise blogs as ‘a parasitic medium’ that feeds off the work of traditional newspapers and magazines (tinyurl.com/yv67v). He calls the charge ‘a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work.’

“Maybe so, but Mr. Niles’ protestations notwithstanding, blogs are largely parasitic. Yes, a handful of bloggers do original reporting, usually on highly specialised topics, but most simply react to the news of the day. The blogosphere, as others have pointed out, acts as a kind of global echo chamber. An idea gets swatted around like a ping-pong ball for a few hours until a fresh one takes its place.

“But is that really so bad? I used to think of blogging’s reactive nature as a flaw in the medium. I’ve changed my mind, though. I’ve come to believe that being a literary parasite is no bad thing. I’d argue, in fact, that parasitism is blogging’s most distinctive and probably its most valuable feature…”

Please click here to read the full article…

Online Journalism Review is organising on March 30 a Conference on Entrepreneurial Journalism at Los Angeles to discuss “Can independent online news sites make money… and a difference?”

OJR conferences, the website says, bring together writers and editors to share their passion for online media in group discussion sessions and to learn from colleagues how to improve the quality, visibility and profitability of their work.

Interesting…How I wish I could take a flight from India and attend the conference as interesting and diverse people are participating. Check here for details… But the travel and stay expenses are far beyond my budget!!!

A very interesting article by Cass Sunstein on wikis in the Washington Post is available here.

This week there was yet another ‘It’s The End Of The World’ comment on newspapers — this from Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the New York Times:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.

The fact is: newpapers are on very hard times. The Times and other papers are seemingly cutting corners. The L.A. Times (my favorite newspaper) seems to be morphing more into my former employer The San Diego Union-Tribune and the San Diego UT, which once prided itself on vigorous zoning coverage, seems to be consolidating at a time when it is offering buyouts to some longtime employees.

Unquestionably, the Internet is having an impact. (Sorry that TMV is putting so many journalists out of work). However, predictions that newspapers will vanish have been around for many years. We’ve told it before and we’ll tell it again:

In 1982, I moved to San Diego from Wichita, Kansas to switch from working for the (now defunct) Knight-Ridder chain to the Copley-owned newspaper here. My former political-science professor invited me to Los Angeles, where he was going to be at a get-together that would include one of the region’s biggest names in journalism education. He wanted to introduce me to one of the country’s top journalism profs.

I like professors (I had, for a period of time at Colgate University, considered becoming one). But when this guy heard I worked for a newspaper and wasn’t 21 years old, he literally looked down his nose and me and said to me with a sneer:

“We give out scholarships and maybe you know of some young journalists that’ll qualify. You don’t. You’re too old. And you’re also a dinosaur. Within five years newspapers in print form will be gone. You’re going to be out of a job.”

He talked about newspapers soon being delivered by being beamed into homes where they would be printed out, or read only on computer. He talked about experiments by newspaper companies using cable technology. This was the era when Knight-Ridder, The Christian Science Monitor and others tinkered with other options but the big stampede to other forms didn’t happen.

Fast foward to 2007. It’s clear that young people are NOT reading newspapers the way they used to (if at all). Even the once sacred comics page has changed. (Get the bull book reprints of Popeye and Dick Tracy and you can see how comics once contained a lot more printed dialogue than they do now).

But lest we forget:

There was a time, shortly before the Internet took off, where some folks wondered if the printed word would survive. But then came the Internet and blogs with their lure of nonstop posts and open comments were people can scream and demonize each other to their heart’s content on a regular basis. How could people refuse THAT? The printed (or cyberspace) word is making a huge comeback, even if magazines seem ill. This year — for the first time ever — I got a Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes envelope that did not offer a SINGLE magazine — just small, often junky, merchandise items.

But the written word lives and thrives.

And never forget: predictions of a grandiose future don’t always actually materalize.

Look at cable television. When I was at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism going for my masters, one paper I had to write was on the upcoming revolution cable television would bring when it hit the scene. My paper was written during the days of broadcast television, when you had three main networks and limited channels. Cable, it was predicted, would offer all kinds of channels to enrich viewership.

And today? You can choose from 500 channels — 85 percent of them lousy.

Also, look at old films and TV shows (watch The Jetsons sometime) and it’s clear that the vision of the future at a given time is usually a tad more radical than what actually materializes.

Most likely, newspapers will continue to downsize by consolidating and doing away or reducing things such as zoned coverage.

The news hole will continue to shrink due to shrinking readership and ad revenues. Staffs will be trimmed via attrition, buyouts or layoffs.

But there are some thing about newspapers that can’t be duplicated. For instance, did you ever try and read news from a computer while sitting on a toilet?

PREDICTION: It’s highly unlikely that in 2012 the New York Times won’t be available in printed form anymore. Yes, the print edition maybe part of a larger picture where a lot has changed — and weblogs such as this will have to adapt as well. Are readers going (even young ones) going to be increasingly satisfied with weblogs that are usually op-ed pages and/or rants from a partisan viewpoint? Most will be forced to start offering a bit more — such as ORIGINAL reporting.

In other words, don’t go to Vegas and bet that five years from now Maureen Dowd will be emailing bloggers to exchange links, writing “heh” at the end of her sentences, or punching a cash register at Wal Mart.

But, Maureen, if there is a time when you want to exchange links, just drop me a line.

I received e-mails from several people wondering whether there was something wrong with the site. The answer to that question: yes, sorry for the inconvenience but there was a problem which caused TMV to be offline for - as I understand it - several hours. To be exact just about 4 hours: from 6:15a - 10:15a EST. Our technical crew worked hard to solve the problem and…they fixed it! They will also try to make sure that this sort of thing won’t happen again.

Thanks to them for their hard work and to you-all for your patience!