You can’t be friends with a squirrel. A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit.
— Sarah Jessica Parker

Corporate white-hat hackers and the Mossad have set back Persian plans for nuclear bomb production by at least three years according to an article in today’s New York Times. Fact checking the Times puff piece on Stuxnet, a worm crafted for cyberwar on the Iranian nuclear establishment that targets Siemens equipment used to control centrifuges, led me to blogger Dawn Lim, so the time spent reading the fatuous nonsense from the Times wasn’t completely wasted.

Microsoft and other commercial antivirus vendors brought public attention to Stuxnet last July. The time required to develop the malware before it was dropped into the wild isn’t publicly known, but the US and Israel couldn’t have whipped it up overnight. In 2024 the flaws in Microsoft Windows exploited by the worm’s designers were brought to public attention. According to ABC, in July 2024 the worm first appeared in the wild in Belarus, a year after the Microsoft flaws were made public. The time lag between discovery of the Windows problem and the remedy suggests that the company was cooperating with the US and Israel while the worm was being developed.

Last September, Eric Byres reported that “…the Stuxnet malware attacks on Siemens Simatic WinCC SCADA and PCS7 DCS systems that came to light this past July were not the first time industrial control systems have been targeted by hackers.” Byres cites attacks going back to the early days of the Bush administration, including sabotage of Venezuela oil tanker loading control systems in the winter of 2024-2003. That sabotage coincided with efforts to destabilize the country and oust left wing leader Hugo Chavez.

More information on Stuxnet and its effect on the Iranian nuclear program is of course available on Wikipedia.

The Deepwater Horizon accident will cause billions of dollars of damage and have incalculable effects on planetary systems. The reflectivity of massive oil slicks will shift the planetary albedo. The ecology of the Caribbean may be permanently altered. The economy of the gulf coast will take a hit as seafood supplies vanish and snowbirds take a pass on their winter trip to the redneck Riviera.

It all adds up.

BP management has assured us that they’ll ignore statutory caps on liabilities and pay all claims. BP shareholders have not been heard from on the matter of their management’s largesse. The best guess is that the shareholders will force management to an about face on any generous gestures made during this time of crisis. The legal beagles at 1 St. James Square are even now digging in for a protracted battle to protect their shareholders’ asses and assets. The Attorney General of the United States owes it to the world to freeze the assets of BP and any rogue corporation that ignores environmental and safety regulations in pursuit of profit.

Freeze their assets now. Seize them later when the total amount of damages is settled.

Steve Jobs, Disney Director and famous iCrapper, is a baby boomer. Bram Cohen, who wrote BitTorrent, Shawn Fanning, who developed Napster, Sergei Brin and Larry Page who founded Google, and Linus Torvalds famous Linux dude are all much younger than Jobs. Steve Jobs represents entrenched interests. The aforementioned Millennials famously promote open systems and free exchange of ideas. Jobs is a “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) kind of guy, the sort who believes the Disney copyrights on that mouse should be extended to the corporation in perpetuity.

Jobs leads a cult of dedicated customers, people who will buy his products regardless of performance because they’re marketed so well. In upscale malls across the US you can get Apple products the day they are released simply by standing in queue at the Apple outlet and reinforcing the belief of those around you that the iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad or iWhatever is the NEXT BIG (retail) THING. Sadly, the Church of Apple’s profits are tied to a strict program of Digital Rights Management and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with the NEXT BIG (retail) THING, patent it, and control its release in the marketplace.

Okay, the iPods, those stored music thingies, were pretty cool. Initiates and communicants could identify each other by the little white carbuncles blossoming from their ears, growths that presumably excluded the echoing chant and drumbeat of the marketing weenies who tweet and IM and Facebook, and blog the news that the NEXT BIG (retail) THING that you bought last month will soon be passé, because the NEXT BIG (retail) THING is about to be introduced by Jobs at the next big iHoopla and Marketing Festival (BTOBS).

For the last month or two, under pressure by the need for big numbers on the iPad launch, Jobs has been on a tear spreading fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about competitive products. Now he’s added injury to insult with a patent infringement suit against HTC, his leading competitor. Well, it looks a little like an iPhone, but wait! It’s so much better!

Some of Jobs’ success is based on his creative adoption of Xerox’s mouse and graphical user interface. Will he prevail against HTC which seems to be taking a page from his own book?

Karoli has an informative post about Comcast’s amoeba-like feeding on the industries around it. (See Comcast: All your media are belong to us. Your internets and your politics, too).

I am afraid that the United States of America today lacks any meaningful regulation of capital. If it profits the shareholders of Comcast to own NBC/Universal, who is to stand in their way? The old anti-trust laws were written to prevent monopolies from forming to control an industry. The old “trust busters” are long gone. The Clayton Act doesn’t address the kind of integration of products and services that Karoli describes.

We need legislation that will force the divestiture of properties held in conflict of public interest, and we need to get the giant communications companies, AT&T and Comcast, under the control of FCC and various state Public Utilities Commissions.

I hope Joel has an appeal coming based on incompetent representation. The whole Mister Chips thing is great in the classroom, but Nesson doesn’t seem to have brought any discipline to the courtroom. He certainly hasn’t been an effective advocate so far. Maybe tomorrow he will save Joel’s bacon with a brilliant summation or something.

Here’s a short list of what sux so far:

• No expert witnesses have been called by the defense to speak to economic issues. Did Joel’s downloading of thirty bucks worth of music cause CD sales to drop by half over the last decade?
• The defense intended to call John Perry Barlow as an expert witness on the zeitgeist or something. Since Barlow couldn’t focus on what he intended to present, couldn’t provide a report for the plaintiff’s attorneys on just what the heck his expertise was intended to reveal, the judge ruled that he couldn’t appear.
• The kid has admitted he’s guilty of downloading thirty songs so the whole issue now seems to pivot on willfulness. The verdict is pretty clear, but the amount of damages remains to be decided and they could go as high as a four and a half million bucks. Just based on his admissions, statutory damages could be awarded of thirty thousand per work, so that would be $900,000. But if willfulness is factored in the damages could go to $150,000 per song.

Tune in to twitter on Friday to hear what Nesson has up his sleeve.

It has been five years since this was created. We seem to be pretty much on target.

America needs more than a reboot. We need some snazzy new peripherals–new energy generation and distribution system, new mass transit system, new telecom infrastructure, massive clean-up and realignment of wealth–it’s time to tear down the blue drapes that have given our statue of Justice a false aura of modesty and put the old girl to work again for all of us.

Tom Friedman borrowed Obama’s “reboot America’s image” trope and applied it more broadly. We need to reboot America, he says, and I like the concept; but I have trouble accepting at face value anything Tom Friedman suggests. Tom Friedman is so much part of the problem that when the boat sails for Elba with Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Wolfowitz aboard, Tom should have a berth as the cabin boy.

Friedman is one of those fellows who goes along and gets along, a great moralizer in step with the dominant power of capital. As we balance that power with democracy over the next few years, as we reveal the oligarchy and let folks decide what to do with them, how to manage their wealth, whether or not it’s worth it to bring them to justice, Tom should be tried with the rest of them and allowed to travel first class in one of the first tumbrel’s to justice.

But we do need to reboot. We need to reexamine the insane emphasis we have put on “business,” the reduction in support for our mutual welfare. We need great programs of public investment, and sound regulation where now there is outlawry. monopoly, and market manipulation. We need to freeze the assets of all who benefited from the Bush giveaways, tear down the wall of shame he erected on our southern border, nationalize the energy industries, and in general do things entirely ddiffernet from the way they are done today. We need to look to Europe and Asia for working models and follow their lead. We need to return to the forty hour work week, or why not thirty-five? We need to assure income and health care and education for all.

We need a reboot alright, and one of the first boots we should give should land squarely on the ass of that pontificator, Tom Friedman.

[tags]raving lunacy[/tags]

Our nation is in trouble:

Economic inequality is at its highest level since the Great Depression. The U.S. economy has shed 600,000 jobs this year. Food banks and homeless shelters are turning people away. While our nation spends $720 million a day on the Iraq war, millions of households face a winter without heat because social programs have been starved of funds for eight years. In our global household, 26,000 children under 5 die from preventable causes every day.

Principles which may provide a helpful lens through which to evaluate proposals to strengthen the economy include:

1. Human rights. Solutions should nourish the dignity and human rights of all people as called for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This includes an inherent human right to food, shelter, health care, and an adequate standard of living. People should be free to exercise political and civil rights in order to obtain these economic rights.
2. A seat at the table. How can we solve this problem in a way that moves toward greater transparency and justice? Taxpayers who will be expected to foot the bill for solutions should have a say in the process. Congress should heed public input and take a strong oversight role. People can call Congress and join groups working on this issue. Over the long run, we can all help “democratize the economy” as members of credit unions, cooperatives, labor unions, community groups, and as shareholders and voters. Civic engagement increases democracy. Undue political influence by corporate and financial interests limits it.
3. The common good. Solutions should benefit the many, not the few. As feminist activist Barbara Deming once wrote, “We are all part of one another.” The way the crisis on Wall Street is resonating on Main Street and around the world is a poignant example of this truth. A society cannot move ahead when it leaves anyone behind.
4. Social responsibility. Solutions should include a role for a strong public sector and a responsible private sector that sees itself as part of a community of people accountable to each other. A business ethic that supports worker rights, protects the environment, and pays livable wages nurtures human dignity and rights. Those rights are harmed by unethical practices which transfer resources away from workers, shareholders, and communities.

McNish suggests that a plan to strengthen the economy viewed through this lens would include limits on executive pay, fair and progressive taxation, strengthened regulation and public control, and measures to reduce foreclosures, create jobs, and re-fund human needs.

She concludes,

We are all part of one another. Our society cannot abandon people and communities and expect to remain healthy and whole. We cannot afford to keep accumulating debt while giving tax breaks to the most affluent and paying for a $720 million-a-day war. We have to make choices. Congress should not rush into hasty solutions as it rushed into the Iraq war. Rather, solutions must come from a place of our deepest values and with the utmost care.