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EU proposes anti-terror measures
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The European Commission has said it is drafting new Europe-wide measures to bolster the fight against terrorism, including sharing air passenger data.
EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said that all states needed to co-operate more closely.
The measure is expected to require air passengers travelling into the EU to submit data for security agencies.
Mr Frattini said attacks recently foiled in the UK and a bomb in Yemen underlined the need for new steps.
He said he would propose a draft bill in October to create a European Passenger Name Record (PNR) system comparable to the one in use in the US.
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“We will find a better way to discourage and to detect terrorists,” Mr Frattini said.
Really, Mr Frattini? You will? Then why are you wasting time on security theater and destroying our liberties?
Who kneads a dictionary when you half built in spell chequers???
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Vista aligned with good IT practice
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A recent management-level survey on IT service delivery threw up the question, “when do you think you are likely to roll out Windows Vista in your organisation?”
At a summary level, the responses to this question were not particularly interesting. Just under a quarter of organisations said they would adopt within the next year, with the remainder spread out over a three to four year period - pretty much in line with other forecasts we have seen and not hugely different to the timeline for adoption we saw previously with Windows XP in the business sector.
However, in another part of the same survey, we had a line of questioning about the way in which IT is managed and delivered within the respondent’s organisation, and while playing with the data, one of the research team spotted some interesting patterns.
This led us to dig a bit deeper and before long we had uncovered a number of very striking correlations between the way in which IT is managed and intended adoption timeline for Vista.
To take an example, the more formally you monitor how well the IT department is delivering, the more aggressive your Vista adoption plans are likely to be - by quite a significant margin. More than 40 per cent of those who formally monitor IT performance across the full scope of IT delivery, a typical indicator of IT departments that have their act together, say they are intending to deploy Vista in the next 12 months. This compares to less than three per cent for those at the other extreme with no formal monitoring processes in place.
There is a similarly strong correlation between Vista adoption and other behaviours that are commonly considered to be indicators of good or best practice. We can sum this up by saying that an organisation is significantly more likely to be adopting Vista in the short term if the following are true:
- A service oriented approach to IT service delivery exists
- Overall performance of the IT function is monitored formally
- The IT function is considered to be well tuned into the business
- There is a clear focus on the quality and efficiency of IT delivery
One of the things that makes these results particularly interesting is the fact that the survey was never designed to investigate this kind of alignment, yet there were the correlations leaping out at us (it doesn’t take much to excite us number crunching types).
More to the point though, it suggests that those organisations that are more culturally switched on to good IT management practice seem to be saying that Vista has a positive contribution to make. We can’t tell from this data what that contribution actually is, but we can hazard a guess that it will have something to do with improved security, better manageability, and the general streamlining of the systems management process, which are the main areas Vista was designed to address in an IT management context.
I have another explanation. The IT departments that are being “monitored formally” have gotten “targets” assigned to them so they can be “measured”. Imagine what happens in november 2006, when managers need to set “targets” for IT departments. These managers have no real grasp of technology, so what’s it going to be? I know, vista migration!
This has nothing to do with any of the qualities of Vista, and everything with normal large-company politics.
Math problems? Call the police.
Forget impeachment; let’s ‘commute’ bush’s term
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clearly, having bush ‘serve’ out his term for another 18 months constitutes cruel and unusual punishment on this great republic.
George W. Bush is One Tough Hombre
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Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker — and then laugh about it. Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial — and then snicker when asked about it in a debate. Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband — after he abused her. A friend of mine at the time asked Bush to commute her sentence, telling him, “Betty Lou ain’t a threat to no one she ain’t married to.” No dice.
Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.
But if you’re rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.
What does it say about America in the age of Bush when Judith Miller spends more time in jail over the Valerie Plame smear than Scooter Libby?
Iraq draws up plans for privatisation gold rush
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The Iraqi government has begun preparing the groundwork for what could be one of the biggest privatisations of state-owned assets.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that officials from the government have recently held talks with banking and legal advisers in London. City sources said Iraq’s minister for industry, Fawzi Hariri, was looking to appoint advisers to draw up a memorandum of understanding to sell off the country’s non-oil assets, ranging from petrochemical plants to construction companies, hotels and airlines, as early as this month.
The privatisation proposals could also include a massive extension of foreign participation in the oil industry. Sources close to the foreign ministry said the government believed it had struck a deal on the long-awaited hydrocarbon law which could see Parliament vote the legislation through in two weeks’ time. If the legislation is passed, arrangements to allow foreign oil majors to enter into production-sharing agreements with Iraq’s national oil company could then make it into the memorandum.
An executive at one of the smaller Western oil companies operating in Iraq said: “As you would expect, most of Iraq’s non-oil assets are outdated and in pretty bad shape. But this would give people who wanted to operate in Iraq an opportunity to get in.” The source added that Iraq’s nationalised cement industry could be particularly attractive because the country’s reconstruction will require a building bonanza.
However, sources cautioned that the move could simply be a sop to the American administration. The US Congress will consider a report on progress in Iraq in September and a privatisation programme could be presented as some kind of progress in lieu of any real improvement in the security situation.
Claiming “progress” has nothing to do with it. President Bush and his cronies have spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears to earn a slice of the Iraqi pie and they aren’t leaving till they get it.
Opus
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Canceling t-mobile
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Getting an iPhone meant I’d be leaving tmobile after four years of service, and I re-upped my contract last year for a blackberry pearl, so unfortunately that also meant I’d get hit with a $200 contract charge. Today I called to cancel and I knew it might be painful so I decided to record it. The total call was 12 minutes long, about half of that spent with a retention specialist. The best part of the call was both the first support rep and the retention guy saying “you got an iPhone! how is it?” and sounding genuinely interested.
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He gives me the following offers:
- $299 for a Tmobile Wing (”more compatible, more features than the iPhone”)
- 1 month of free service
- transfer phone to someone else
- monthly service reduced from $59/mo to $20/mo
Click to hear the call - but here’s the interesting bit: if you’re on t-mobile right now, and want your rates slashed from $59 to $20, just claim you bought an iPhone!
The Octapult
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The Octapult is a kinetic sculpture made mostly of wood by Bradley N. Litwin. It has 8 synchronized catapults that can launch plastic balls at a rate of 160 per minute. Once launched, these balls are caught and recirculated. I think it’s one of the most amazing piece of wooden contraption out there today.
Wikipedian Protester
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Beavis and Butthead in London jihad
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Police and securocrats know that there aren’t enough real terrorists in the world, which is why they have to keep manufacturing them. This is because citizens tire of being watched by cameras, frisked and x-rayed, having their belongings searched, giving fingerprints to so-called friendly nations on entry, contemplating the myriad government databases where their details and activities are preserved, and wondering if some dour little bureaucrat is reading their email or listening to them on the phone.
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Bomb disposal specialists made it safe, and police officials and politicians began slyly invoking the terrorist bogeyman. Heaven forbid the public should be starved of their regular fear rations.
“As the police and security services have said on so many occasions, we face a serious and continuous threat to our country”, day-old PM Gordon Brown said. “But this incident does recall the need for us to be vigilant at all times and the public to be alert at any potential incidents.”
And what an incident. “It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been serious injury or loss of life”, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke intoned gravely.
Ah, if it had detonated. Yes, it could have been a real horror. Only, the device could not have detonated. Not under any circumstances. You see, the terrorist wannabe clown who built it left out a crucial element: an oxidiser. The device was pure pre-teen boy fantasy.
“We’ll heat up these propane cylinders with burning petrol, and they’ll go off like bombs”, boys the world over have remarked with glee. They don’t realise that air is a poor oxidiser, and the only “explosion” they will get is when gas pressure inside the cylinders is great enough to burst them. Then the propane will ignite, and a nice fireball will blossom. A fireball, not an explosion.
Oh, the Piccadilly fireball would have blown the car’s windows out, and popped its doors open, and sent various bits like mirrors and so forth into the air at velocities possibly fatal to people nearby. It would have looked really cool, that’s for sure. But an explosive event…a detonation? Not in a million years. Sorry lads: you failed car bombing 101; you did not attend a single lecture; you did not even open the textbook.
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So why is this such big news? Because clowns have got to be passed off as terrorists. Because a vast industry depends on terrorists, real and imagined, to justify its existence. We live now in the grip of the security-industrial complex, and that hungry beast demands to be fed. We feed it money hand over fist, and in return, it feeds us fear biscuits, which we are expected to accept with gratitude.
Roll over. Sit up and beg. See the bad man? Good citizen; here’s your bickie.
Bruce Schneier asks: Is there a Special Olympics for terrorists going on in the UK this week?
PvdA schorst deelraadsleden tijdelijk
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De PvdA-fractie in de stadsdeelraad in Amsterdam-Zuidoost heeft drie leden tijdelijk geschorst. Fractievoorzitter Lourens Burgers maakte dat dinsdagavond bekend tijdens een vergadering van de stadsdeelraad.
De tijdelijke schorsing volgt op een vorige week verschenen rapport van de Rekenkamer Stadsdelen Amsterdam. Daaruit blijkt dat de drie zich schuldig hebben gemaakt aan belangenverstrengeling en daar persoonlijk financieel van hebben geprofiteerd.
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De raadsleden moeten tijdelijk uit de fractie, hangende een “contra-expertise” die wordt uitgevoerd door “een gerenommeerd bureau”. Dat nieuwe onderzoek moet eind augustus klaar zijn. Een van de geschorste PvdA’ers is voorzitter Andre Bhola van de stadsdeelraad.
Eind augustus is ook iedereen de kwestie al weer vergeten, dus kan de PvdA ze dan zonder problemen weer gewoon hun werk laten doen, en geen haan die er naar kraait. Wat een perfecte manier om elkaar de hand boven het hoofd te houden.
Wees blij dat je niet in dat stadsdeel woont.
Ik woon er namelijk wel: diverse processen gevoerd tegen dit stadsdeel (over bestemmingsplannen, samen met de hele wijk), altijd gewonnen, nooit iets aan gehad (komen structureel geen beloftes na).