democratic views

Lipstick On A Pig: How Memes Make The News

If you came to this piece thinking it would be about Sarah Palin, well, it's not. But now that you're here, there is a scathing post from Shannyn Moore that blasts Palin for enough things to make it hard to see the lipstick on a blushing pig. Unlike the heavyweights of the Republican establishment – Rove, Huckabee, Kristol, and countless others have opined on what Princess Sarah is up to - Moore is based in Anchorage and has something to say about how Palin laid waste to the state's governance and finances with her abrupt resignation.

Before I move on to the real story, Hendrik Hertzberg steals a line from Cyndi Lauper when he writes of Palin in the forthcoming New Yorker that "this is one girl from the north country who just wants to have fun." His comparison of statements on political change made by Thomas Jefferson and Governor Palin show how far she has to go before a sixth-grade grammar teacher would give her credit for uttering a complete sentence with a subject, verb and predicate. She may be "crazy like a fox" as Bill Kristol tried to argue – or she may not be so foxy after all.

China Dams Green Dam – For Now

After a large number of protests from governments, industry, and consumers, China delayed indefinitely its requirement that all computers sold starting July 1, 2009 come with monitoring and censoring software known as Green Dam. This is good news, but leaves open the question of whether China will persist in trying to control the flow of information to computer users using Microsoft's Windows operating system. (Note to Apple and Linux vendors: Prep your marketing plans. Green Dam is a potential bonanza.) After getting over the shock of a government mandating something so intrusive, one wonders about the lack of planning exhibited by the Chinese government and its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Neither Chinese officials nor the software developers working on Green Dam seem to have thought through how such a program could be installed on every computer in the country (not just new ones, and not just Windows-based machines). I won't give away any of the trade "secrets" that constitute best practices and working models for software deployment in the U.S., because it would help Chinese autocrats compromise free markets, privacy, security, and individual liberty. Don't be surprised if Beijing comes back with another attempt on this front once they think they've got it figured out. On the other hand, maybe they will quietly walk away from this blundering effort at censorship wrapped in the cloak of "protecting children" and hope that we will politely refrain from reminding them about it in the future.

Black

The power grid is down. The Internet is dark; web sites are gone, internet banking and all online resources have disappeared. No lights, no power, no traffic control. Airports are running on backup systems with limited capability, talking down airplanes one by one. Hospitals, military bases and public safety facilities are humming on backup power, hoping their emergency generators are resupplied by fuel companies they can't reach. No phones, no texting, no twittering.

Military communications are disrupted under the pressure of a flood of attacks of many different kinds, exacerbated by the loss of civilian network capacity. Some computers have stopped working, their guts eviscerated by electronic attacks. And this is just for ground-based systems. So far no direct attacks have been mounted on satellites.

No More Dirty Pix

No, I'm not writing about pornography. If you watch the movie "Taken" you'll see Liam Neeson, a former CIA agent trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter, obtaining a picture of one of the abductors from the evil-doer's reflection when he takes a picture of the daughter and her friend that ends up on the memory card of the girl's cell phone. Presumably Neeson or his buddies back at the agency have some fancy image-processing forensics software like Ikena that they use to clean up the picture enough to get a good ID of the bad guy.

On a more sinister note, if you've been watching the Iranian protests - too early to call it a revolution - through New York Times coverage that leads to various videos, or DemotixImages pictures, you can be sure the Iranian government is busy enhancing its own images in order to identify and start taking protest leaders off the streets.

For $50, you too can have that software, now on the market as vReveal, which is nicely described in a New York Times article by Anne Eisenberg. Don't buy before you try it: the company offers a free 30-day trial. If you're just a home video enthusiast, this program is nice to have; if you're a blogger or trying to get pics or videos up on the web to promote your work, it's a must-have.

All A-Twitter over Iran

News flash: Iran's authoritarian regime steals an election; populist candidate defeated.

OK, maybe the results will hold up and Ahmadinejad really won. There wouldn't be much of a story if it ended there. Tom Friedman points out that a number of surprising developments are bringing democratic initiatives to the forefront throughout the Middle East. People are pushing back against both authoritarian governments and Islamist groups seeking power in a number of countries.