Dowbrigade

Remember when Google was brand new, and it seemed
like the ultimate, definitive search engine? Well, maybe Google is
just scratching
the surface. Maybe we are evolving towards a search engine that can READ
YOUR MIND and inticipate what you will be searching for before you even
want it! The New York Times says searching is sexy again! Just ask the
airport security personnel…

Suddenly, the computer world is interesting again. The
last three months of 2004
brought
more
innovation,
faster, than users have seen in years. The recent flow of products and
services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two
ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated
in the newly sexy field of "search."

from the New York Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan (Reuters) – Daredevil climber Alain Robert, known as the French Spiderman, defied stiff winds and rain to climb the world’s tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, in the Taiwan capital Saturday.

Robert, dressed in a red rain jacket, tights and climbing shoes, shimmied up ropes hung down the sides of the 101-story, 1,667-foot office tower, reaching the top in around four hours.

The 42-year-old Frenchman has scaled scores of well-known structures around the world including the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower — often without permission or any safety equipment or ropes.

This time Robert was wearing a harness attached to safety ropes for the entire climb. He used the ropes to pull himself up most of the way, using his hands and feet to climb up the walls for only short sections.

“Everybody knows me throughout the world for my ascents climbing free solo without using safety devices, just with my bare hands, but this time the game was a bit different,” Robert said.

He said the management had requested he wear the ropes and safety equipment, which had also become necessary due to rain making the windows and frames very slippery.

from Reuters

Hey, what’s up with Bit
Torrent? Although a little hit-and-miss, this technology and the various
front ends developed to make it easier to use, were the most reliable
way to download, er, review copies of music, movies and television
shows. For example thanks to bit torrent we can clearly state that the DVD-rip Chinese language
version of House of Flying Daggers is better quality than the VCD English
subtitles version, although it’s subtitles are difficult to understand
unless one reads Dutch. Actually, we have gotten lots of video snippets
this way which we have used in class to illustrate various aspects of
modern
American
culture
and language.

We know that the RIAA and the MPA are putting
lots of pressure on hosting sites and ISP’s to try to get a handle on
this exploding phenomena. It appears to be having an effect.

Since early yesterday (Christmas Eve) we have
been unable to get a single torrent to hookup with any of our "peers". Normally,
we get a successful download about half the time, an operational inconvenience
which makes fishing for files somewhat akin to fishing for bass, albeit
with a considerably higher rate of success. We imagined that the technical
complexities and unpredictability were
what was keeping bit torrent in the province of the geeks and protecting
it from the full wrath of the copy police. Dream on.

Our current hypotheses are:

• Our ISP (cable company) got one of those nasty
  cease and desist letters and is blocking torrent downloads somehow
• The Mac OS system upgrade (10.3.7) which we installed
  just before noticing the shutdown contained a torrent-download block
  (we have no idea if this is technically possible)
• The copy police have flooded the net with faux
  .torrent files which don’t connect to anything
• It’s all a bad dream/unfortunate coincidence and
  things will be back to normal as soon as we can wake up or change
  our luck.

Any info, rumors or opinions out there?

I
often ask my father, the Dowbrigade, why he spends so much time blogging. It
seems like such a waste of time. Even if people are reading it, they
don’t
affect your life so what differnce does it make?

He said a blog is like a magic box that can
get you anything in the world you need, if you know how to ask it
the right way. I told him I needed a job and a place to live
before my step-mother Norma gets back from Ecuador. He told me to write
it as a blog posting so here goes.

I am 20 years old and have just returned to
the states from helping my brother build and administer a small hotel
in the Andes mountains of Peru. I am studying Psychologyat a local
community college (Bunker Hill) but most of my classes are in the evenings
so I can work different times. At least until I am sure I can handle
all my classes I don’t want to commit to more than 25 hours a week,
so what I really need is a part-time job.

I am pretty good with a keyboard and know Office
and doing research on the Web. I am friendly and get along well with
people. I am also strong and healthy and not afraid of physical
work. Also, I am fluent in Spanish and have supervised Spanish-speaking
workers at construction sites.

So far, I have interviewed at a temp agency for a permanent
job in their headquarters, at a theater company that needs a stage manager,
at an environmental PAC and with two start-up companies, plus some restaurants.
I have been offered two positions so far, but unfortunately both of the
offers said they would be unable to pay me until some time in the future.

Finally, I am also looking for a roommate situation
since living with the Dowbrigade and Norma Yvonne in their one-bedroom
apartment in Watertown definitely isn’t going to work. However, I would
like to remain nearby so I can wash my clothes, raid the refrigerator
and ask Dad for loans.

posted by Gabriel
Feldman

Putin Defends Yukos Deal as ‘Perfectly Normal’

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia today strongly defended the purchase
by a state-controlled company of the winner of Sunday’s auction for the largest
subsidiary of the oil giant Yukos.

"Today, the state, using absolutely legal, market mechanisms, is ensuring
its interests – I consider this perfectly normal," Mr. Putin told reporters
at a news conference in Moscow, referring to the purchase by Rosneft of the Baikal
Finans Group, which had widely been thought to be a shell company.

from the New York Times

Teenagers convicted last week of setting up a huge
network of compromised Windows PCs used it to gain an unfair advantage
in online gaming – not to send spam.

Detective Sergeant Steve Santorelli, of Scotland Yard’s Computer Crime
Unit, said the two principal suspects were members of a gaming clan which
used illicit access to an estimated 30,000 PCs to generate clicks and
therefore gain more points in a game called Outwar.

Outwar is an online game which you get farther ahead
by getting people to click your "special link." The more people
that click your link, the more money you get per hour, the more stuff
you can buy, and the more people you can attack. If you are the top player
in any of the three characters, you win an x-box.

Suspects in the case used the Randex worm to establish a 30,000 strong
botnet used to carry out "low profile DDoS attacks" and steal
the CD keys for games, he explained. "They had a huge weapon and
didn’t use as much as they could have done," Santorelli told El
Reg.

from The Register

This morning, temporarily freed from the need to go
to the office, we were watching Fox news. We confess to a weakness for
Fox, as opposed to CNN, which has become our parents news network, and
hell, we are past 50. Fox is hipper, faster and less attached to that annoying
illusion of objectivity.

Anyway, we swear we heard the promo announcer say "The
next terror attack is coming soon! Which US city will be hit?", like the
teaser to a coming attraction, like
"Which desperate housewife will die?" Anticipating the ratings pop, no doubt.

We opened the Boston Globe, recently retrieved from our
frigid front  porch. The
top story, front page above the fold, was
to the effect that a terrorist attack on a liquefied natural gas tanker (photo above)
— via methods such as internal sabotage, a rocket-propelled grenade,
a kamikaze flight, or a USS Cole-style suicide boat ramming — would cause
”major injuries and significant damage to structures" a
third of a mile away and could cause second-degree burns on people more
than a mile away.  It was illustrated by a map of East Boston, Everett
and surrounding towns showing the blast footprint for each level of damage.

Last week the departing US secretary of health and human
services said that he was surprised that terrorists had not
yet targeted the food supply. He practically issued an invitation and a
roadmap to potential psychos.

What the hell is going on here? Obviously, we are living
in a dangerous world, but it is becoming equally obvious that the American public
is being worked into a paranoid dither with constant warnings about the
fantastic variety of disaster which could befall us at any moment.  It’s
like the government and the main media have adopted and adapted that successful Hollywood standby,
the
horror/disaster
movie, for their own nefarious ends.

The result is that the country is deeply disturbed and
unsettled, mostly on a subconscious level. An atmosphere of cold unfocused
fear is permeating the American landscape, shadowing our days and haunting
our dreams. The most important lesson of the recently completed political
campaign is that the politics of fear trumps the politics of hope.

This is especially true when the electorate has as much
to lose as ours does. How many of our liberties will we be willing to do
without to preserve our standard of living? The politics of hope may have
a chance, once in a while, in the pockets of
poverty festering
like
the
pox
on the
face
of
the planet, where the only loss the people have to fear is the loss of
their lives, since the own nothing else.

But in America, hope doesn’t have a chance. With the national
psyche already deeply unsettled by the creeping subconscious realization
that we are hogging ten times our share of the world’s resources, and that
most of the rest of the human race hates us for it, the unspoken amorphous
fear is the realization that WE COULD LOSE IT ALL, in an instant, in one
insane
act, in a nightmare role reversal where the master becomes the slave. Payback
is a bitch.

The fear is not overt, but it is ever present.  It
tugs and gnaws at our minds. And it is the most powerful psychological
and political force in the land today. Are we in the killing zone? How
can we know? It could happen at any moment. In
the
meantime,
why do
we
have
the feeling we are being set up for a fall? What
are they
preparing
us
for?
We are
trying
not to
be paranoid, but will someone please explain what all those guys in black
suits are doing in the bushes?

Stay tuned…..

Jimi
Hendrix as a dentist removing Richard Nixons’s wisdom teeth? George C.
Scott as Jimi’s guidance counselor,"trying to prepare him for a viable
job market?"What twisted
shit is this?

Check out "Return
to Purgatory" from brownfish.com

The
US government is doing its best to drive the Dowbrigade back into international
exile. In addition
to dismaying us with Orwellian distortions of reality and scaring the
shit out of us with dire predictions of terroristic disaster, they are
scaring away our professional bread and butter – the teeming masses of
foreign students yearning to be educated…

Foreign
students contribute $13 billion to the American economy annually. But
this year
brought clear
signs that the United States’ overwhelming dominance of international
higher education may be ending.

Some of the American decline, experts agree, is due
to post-Sept. 11 delays in processing student visas, which have discouraged
thousands of students, not only from the Middle East but also from dozens
of other nations, from enrolling in the United States. American educators
and even some foreign ones say the visa difficulties are helping foreign
schools increase their share of the market.

"International students say it’s not worth queuing
up for two days outside the U.S. consulate in whatever country they
are in to get a visa when they can
go to the U.K. so much more easily. Now Australia, the U.K., Ireland, New
Zealand and Canada are competing for that dollar, and our lives have been
made easier because of the difficulties that students are having getting
into the
U.S."

In addition to the increasing competition from Anglophone
nations, we are up against an increasingly diverse and functional virtual
offerings and, more recently,the creation of tiny intensive English towns
built as English-only
zones for teaching the language to young Koreans
and
Japanese
without exposing them to the physical danger and corroding cultural influences
of the US. We may have to establish one of these private idiomatic fiefdoms
ourselves, perhaps in Thailand or some scenic South Seas island…

article from the New York Times

Some of our sources in the so-called intelligence
community are reporting horrible, twisted rumors of a Mossad/CIA plot
to plant a portable nuke in Houston and blame it on the Arabs. For the
record, we don’t believe a word of it.  However, it fits with a
post we are working on about the post 9/11 culture of fear which
has taken over our lives. Check it out. From a former Bundesnachrichtendienst
member– Intel Expert:

Paul Wofowitz will authorise the detonation of a nuclear payload in the
Houston area on December 27, 2004. The Hidden Hand network (Mossad/al-Qaeda/SAS)
of which he is the nominal controller has verified in advance every aspect
of operational integrity – a failsafe job with zero chance of discovery.

Houston has been primed for months via deliberate mismanagement, incompetence,
corruption and embezzlement at its FEMA-independent Emergency Center.
The police and fire services have been deliberately and systematically
sabotaged and thrown into administrative chaos so as to ensure maximum
fatalities in the aftermath of the detonation. However, the existence
of the center will provide the Bush administration with a "we did
everything we could" excuse.

All of our intercepts, field information and disclosures
from former (and not so former!) US diplomatic personnel, tell us that
the American people are being set up for another, but even more devastating,
9-11 tragedy in which a tiny group of people will gain enormously at
the expense of the rest of the world.

German guy
12/17/2004
5:05 pm EST

from INTL
News by Joe Broadhurst

Framistan
was a made up word that our father would slip into his explanations when
he didn’t know
the real jargon, or when he tired of our incessant variations on "How?"
and "Why." It was especially likely to crop up in technical or mechanical
explanations, not Dad’s strong suit. If the car was knocking, it was
probably the framistan acting up. If the TV was on the fritz, it was
because the framistan had come loose from the grundling screw. Eventually
we came to understand that a framistan was an essential element in a
complicated and inexplicable process that worked.

While the world and
American public opinion have been mesmerized by the morass
in Iraq,
a
quiet revolution
of another sort is taking place in the original target of the war on
terrorism – Afghanistan. Somehow,
that rarest of modern chimeras, an incipient Islamic democracy, seems
to be forming from the fog of war and the quicksand of shifting tribal
alliances.

Despite 20 years of incessant warfare, predictions of
Holy War, the unfortunate quagmire that sank the Soviet Empire and a
great wild landscape largely beyond the control of the central government
in Kabul, they have successfully held elections, convened a constitutional
convention, and restored basic services to a level above where they were
before the intervention began.

Where are the mujadeen who threw out the Russians and
vowed to do the same with the Americans? Where are the roadside bombs,
the kidnappings and beheadings, the suicide murderers and death squads
that have turned Iraq into hell on earth? Could this gun-shy creature
carefully crawling from beneath the rubble actually be Peace? And how
did it happen, while our backs were turned, without sending 150,000 troops
and emptying the US treasury?

One explanation is that the great internal divide in
Afghan society is different than that in Iraq. In Iraq the internal struggle
is between Shiites and Sunni’s, with those incorrigible Kurds kicking
up dust on the fringes.  The intracacies of Islamic internecine
warfare are so complex and foreign to our way of thinking that an entire
lifetime of research and practice are needed to even form an opinion,
let alone intervene. Religion has always been the stickiest wicket in
working out resources sharing arrangements, and when God gets involved
the quest for peace often ends up in the quest for a piece of the other
guy. When a minority sect has held ruthless sway for several generations,
there is some serious getting even to get our of the way before anything
else can get done.

In Afghanistan., the situation is quite different.  Here
we have a split between the Mujahedeen, who have spent the last 20 years
with a hot carbine in their hands, eating dirt and fighting the British,
the Russians, the Americans and anyone else who didn’t look, talk and
think like them, and the educated technocrats, who have spent the same
20 years in exile, mostly in western democracies, in universities and
jobs, accumulating money and knowledge and waiting for the shooting to
stop so they could go home.

The two groups have been jousting for power since the
fall of the Taliban.  The current crucible of conflict is the composition
of the Karzai cabinet. In an attempt to reach a functional compromise,
the two sides reached an ingenious and novel agreement. All cabinet members,
they decided, would have to have ONLY Afghan citizenship (no dual citizens),
and a college degree  According
to today’s New
York Times:

The conditions set by the Constitution are the results
of intense rivalry among the main groups that have been vying for political
pre-eminence in Afghanistan in the past three years. They can be roughly
split into the mujahedeen, who fought in the wars of the past 20 years,
and the Westernized technocrats, who often spent the past 20 years abroad.
The mujahedeen sought to exclude many Westernized Afghans by banning
anyone holding dual citizenship, while the technocrats sought to exclude
the roughest mujahedeen by adding the condition relating to higher education.

According to these conditions, the majority of the present
cabinet are unqualified to hold their posts in the newly elected government.  For
example, both the Minister of Education and the Minister of Higher Education
have to go; the former has no college degree and the later is a dual
citizen of Afghanistan. and the US.  In addition, major cabinet
members with dual citizenship, often American, include Finance Minister
Ahraf
Ghani, Interior Minister Ahmed Ali Jalali, Information and Culture Minister
Sayed Makhdum Raheen, and the ministers of reconstruction, urban development
and higher education. The governor of the Central Bank would also be
required to have only Afghan citizenship. At least five members of the
current cabinet whom Mr. Karzai had considered keeping do not have enough
education to continue. Among them are Minister of Commerce
Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, Minster of Agriculture Sayed Hossein Anwari, Minister
of Education Ahmad Mushahid and Minister of Public Works Gul Agha Sherzai
and Defense Minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim.

The bottom line seems to be that the only individuals
qualified to serve in the he new Afghan government are mujahedeen who
somehow managed to get a college education in between fighting foreign
invaders,
and technocrats who stayed in country for the duration or at least avoided
taking dual citizenship.

Almost despite themselves, they seem to have stumbled
on a formula to select the best of each group, and for the first time
in two generations hope seems to be rearing its hoary head in the blasted
landscape of Afghanistan.  Of course, the perfidy of local warlords,
the greed of carpet bagging capitalists, the convoys of raw opium snaking
out of the hinterland’s inaccessible hills and the great games of international
intrigue all argue against a happy outcome.But compared to the living
nightmare that Iraq has become, the scene in Afghanistan. shines like
a beacon of hope and a dim distant light at the end of the tunnel.  At
least as long as the framistan keeps working.

article from the New York Times

Framistan
was a made up word that our father would slip into his explanations when
he didn’t know
the real jargon, or when he tired of our incessant variations on "How?"
and "Why." It was especially likely to crop up in technical or mechanical
explanations, not Dad’s strong suit. If the car was knocking, it was
probably the framistan acting up. If the TV was on the fritz, it was
because the framistan had come loose from the grundling screw. Eventually
we came to understand that a framistan was an essential element in a
complicated and inexplicable process that worked.

While the world and
American public opinion have been mesmerized by the morass
in Iraq,
a
quiet revolution
of another sort is taking place in the original target of the war on
terrorism – Afghanistan. Somehow,
that rarest of modern chimeras, an incipient Islamic democracy, seems
to be forming from the fog of war and the quicksand of shifting tribal
alliances.

Despite 20 years of incessant warfare, predictions of
Holy War, the unfortunate quagmire that sank the Soviet Empire and a
great wild landscape largely beyond the control of the central government
in Kabul, they have successfully held elections, convened a constitutional
convention, and restored basic services to a level above where they were
before the intervention began.

Where are the mujadeen who threw out the Russians and
vowed to do the same with the Americans? Where are the roadside bombs,
the kidnappings and beheadings, the suicide murderers and death squads
that have turned Iraq into hell on earth? Could this gun-shy creature
carefully crawling from beneath the rubble actually be Peace? And how
did it happen, while our backs were turned, without sending 150,000 troops
and emptying the US treasury?

One explanation is that the great internal divide in
Afghan society is different than that in Iraq. In Iraq the internal struggle
is between Shiites and Sunni’s, with those incorrigible Kurds kicking
up dust on the fringes.  The intracacies of Islamic internecine
warfare are so complex and foreign to our way of thinking that an entire
lifetime of research and practice are needed to even form an opinion,
let alone intervene. Religion has always been the stickiest wicket in
working out resources sharing arrangements, and when God gets involved
the quest for peace often ends up in the quest for a piece of the other
guy. When a minority sect has held ruthless sway for several generations,
there is some serious getting even to get our of the way before anything
else can get done.

In Afghanistan., the situation is quite different.  Here
we have a split between the Mujahedeen, who have spent the last 20 years
with a hot carbine in their hands, eating dirt and fighting the British,
the Russians, the Americans and anyone else who didn’t look, talk and
think like them, and the educated technocrats, who have spent the same
20 years in exile, mostly in western democracies, in universities and
jobs, accumulating money and knowledge and waiting for the shooting to
stop so they could go home.

The two groups have been jousting for power since the
fall of the Taliban.  The current crucible of conflict is the composition
of the Karzai cabinet. In an attempt to reach a functional compromise,
the two sides reached an ingenious and novel agreement. All cabinet members,
they decided, would have to have ONLY Afghan citizenship (no dual citizens),
and a college degree  According
to today’s New
York Times:

The conditions set by the Constitution are the results
of intense rivalry among the main groups that have been vying for political
pre-eminence in Afghanistan in the past three years. They can be roughly
split into the mujahedeen, who fought in the wars of the past 20 years,
and the Westernized technocrats, who often spent the past 20 years abroad.
The mujahedeen sought to exclude many Westernized Afghans by banning
anyone holding dual citizenship, while the technocrats sought to exclude
the roughest mujahedeen by adding the condition relating to higher education.

According to these conditions, the majority of the present
cabinet are unqualified to hold their posts in the newly elected government.  For
example, both the Minister of Education and the Minister of Higher Education
have to go; the former has no college degree and the later is a dual
citizen of Afghanistan. and the US.  In addition, major cabinet
members with dual citizenship, often American, include Finance Minister
Ahraf
Ghani, Interior Minister Ahmed Ali Jalali, Information and Culture Minister
Sayed Makhdum Raheen, and the ministers of reconstruction, urban development
and higher education. The governor of the Central Bank would also be
required to have only Afghan citizenship. At least five members of the
current cabinet whom Mr. Karzai had considered keeping do not have enough
education to continue. Among them are Minister of Commerce
Sayed Mustafa Kazemi, Minster of Agriculture Sayed Hossein Anwari, Minister
of Education Ahmad Mushahid and Minister of Public Works Gul Agha Sherzai
and Defense Minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim.

The bottom line seems to be that the only individuals
qualified to serve in the he new Afghan government are mujahedeen who
somehow managed to get a college education in between fighting foreign
invaders,
and technocrats who stayed in country for the duration or at least avoided
taking dual citizenship.

Almost despite themselves, they seem to have stumbled
on a formula to select the best of each group, and for the first time
in two generations hope seems to be rearing its hoary head in the blasted
landscape of Afghanistan.  Of course, the perfidy of local warlords,
the greed of carpet bagging capitalists, the convoys of raw opium snaking
out of the hinterland’s inaccessible hills and the great games of international
intrigue all argue against a happy outcome.But compared to the living
nightmare that Iraq has become, the scene in Afghanistan. shines like
a beacon of hope and a dim distant light at the end of the tunnel.  At
least as long as the framistan keeps working.

article from the New York Times