Thanks to Judicial Watch, a few e-mails about Benghazi were released on a FOIA request. You can read these at http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-benghazi-documents-point-white-house-misleading-talking-points/
A couple of things to note when reading: (1) Quite a few people are involved in a decision to make a statement about anything in the White House, yet a series of articles were published by various press sources before that coordination could be completed. Lots of people talk too much about these sensitive things. People we never heard of, but would love to further identify, are on the CC line of some of these e-mails. (2) Susan Rice took the heat for what was said, but people other than her created the words. It is easy enough to go back to one of those news shows and compare them to the words written in the "prep" she was supposed to have been given. She got her words exactly right. (3) People were so intent on making the White House look good, that they forgot what they are there for. It reminds me of the comments by Warren Buffet, last week, when he said he disagreed with some Board decisions, but went along. The reaction from the news media was startling in their criticism of his view that it was OK to go along now and again, not raise your objections, or have them noted. Boards and White Houses are supposed to have due diligence, but nothing more. (3) Third, a favorite saying of late, "facts in evidence do not matter to the case".
I have been researching the persuasion of the Internet and came across Joe Keohane's article from the Boston Globe, July 2010. Researchers have long known that the wishful thinking of people engaged in a situation is that more facts produce a better quality analysis of events. Facts, as Keohane says, don't necessarily change our minds. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
The chains of e-mail go from the popular thought that Benghazi was the indicator of an outbreak of demonstrations, one of which ended our Ambassador's life, to the truth as we know it now. It had nothing do with a movie seen by Muslims who reacted to its contents, but that does not stop many people from still voicing that same line. Facts in evidence do nothing to change their minds. Amazon books:
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Yuan Dropping like a Stone
When it comes to currency manipulation, nobody beats the Chinese. The Yuan has dropped in the last few weeks, and four percent for the year, with the obvious intention of reviving China's economy. You can read the story in most of the financial press (See Fiona Law's story, Yuan Continues to Fall, and It Hasn't Hit Bottom, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal).
The Chinese are certainly adept at making their economy work, at the expense if everyone else letting their currency float along on market tides. In the zero sum game of global economics, it makes sense to have lower priced labor.
But, even those who didn't do so well in international finance, know the labor unrest in Adidas, Cooper Tire, and IBM are the consequence of squeezing labor between decreased purchasing power and higher expectations of a growing middle class. In Mao's day, they could just cart off some of those strikers to the country where they could be retrained, beaten, or neutralized. These days, that is getting harder to do.
This is actually good for the companies that use the cheap labor in China. Strikes, harassment from the government, currency fluctuations, all put a dent in those profits. Maybe they can bring some of that work back to their native countries - if they remember where those are.
This is actually good for the companies that use the cheap labor in China. Strikes, harassment from the government, currency fluctuations, all put a dent in those profits. Maybe they can bring some of that work back to their native countries - if they remember where those are.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Aereo, Secrets, and the United States Supreme Court
I'm was having trouble with the logic of why the Supreme Court decision on a case involving a distributor of television services, should have an impact on cloud computing. It turns out, Aereo is a cloud-based service distributing television programming, in a way that cable companies cannot. Cable pays for the right to rebroadcast, which is the way Congress intended in 1976. This curious case is described very simply in an accompanying video in the electronic version of the Wall Street Journal in analysis provided by Villanova law professor Michael Risch. [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304049904579517722557177420?mg=reno64-wsj]
Risch seems to think the case will come down to an issue about how Aereo segregates the streams of data, which may amount to an effort to skirt the copyright laws.
But, the odd thing about it was the Supreme Court decided cable companies could do the same thing. Congress debated whether new technology had overcome the 1909 Act and began discussions in 1955. It just took them until 1976 to pass something they could all agree to, and it appears to coincide with the decision running against the television industry. If that seems like a long time, think about how much technology has changed since 1976. Besides clouds, we didn't have an Internet then.
We all have seen the pronouncement at the beginning of a television show - I notice it on sporting events, where it is very clear- that a person cannot retransmit a show. But there is another issue, the Wall Street Journal article approaches:
"Because Aereo is a cloud-based service, the justices questioned whether the logic of the broadcasters' arguments would imperil popular and established cloud services like Dropbox and AppleInc's iCloud that give users online access to stored documents, pictures, music and other files."
I admit to a twinge when reading that part. I don't want to have to store all my music on my own system. I do store documents there, but not all of them I have. I watch some events from TV on my iPad, and got to thinking how it was that Apple could store that for me, when I pay Verizon for my service. What about that iPod music?
Now we get to the real set of problems this kind of case brings up. But, the one that sticks with me most is why we let laws stay on the books since 1976, and 1909 before that, without a change to update them for modern technology. The world of networks is full of these things.
The Copyright Law is a mess, and trying to solve it one little step at a time, laying on the Court to get a solution to a piece of this large pie, is a travesty of government inefficiency. It is one of the big secrets of the day. It affects what can be protected as proprietary information of businesses, our personal information on various electronic devices, and the government to secure information provided to it. Because it hasn't been fixed, we continue to allow information that should be protected to float around in the ether of clouds, without any possibility of protecting something of mine, even something I own. [See
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Secrets-Military-Business-Threaten/dp/1484131487/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398274807&sr=1-2
Risch seems to think the case will come down to an issue about how Aereo segregates the streams of data, which may amount to an effort to skirt the copyright laws.
But, the odd thing about it was the Supreme Court decided cable companies could do the same thing. Congress debated whether new technology had overcome the 1909 Act and began discussions in 1955. It just took them until 1976 to pass something they could all agree to, and it appears to coincide with the decision running against the television industry. If that seems like a long time, think about how much technology has changed since 1976. Besides clouds, we didn't have an Internet then.
We all have seen the pronouncement at the beginning of a television show - I notice it on sporting events, where it is very clear- that a person cannot retransmit a show. But there is another issue, the Wall Street Journal article approaches:
"Because Aereo is a cloud-based service, the justices questioned whether the logic of the broadcasters' arguments would imperil popular and established cloud services like Dropbox and AppleInc's iCloud that give users online access to stored documents, pictures, music and other files."
I admit to a twinge when reading that part. I don't want to have to store all my music on my own system. I do store documents there, but not all of them I have. I watch some events from TV on my iPad, and got to thinking how it was that Apple could store that for me, when I pay Verizon for my service. What about that iPod music?
Now we get to the real set of problems this kind of case brings up. But, the one that sticks with me most is why we let laws stay on the books since 1976, and 1909 before that, without a change to update them for modern technology. The world of networks is full of these things.
The Copyright Law is a mess, and trying to solve it one little step at a time, laying on the Court to get a solution to a piece of this large pie, is a travesty of government inefficiency. It is one of the big secrets of the day. It affects what can be protected as proprietary information of businesses, our personal information on various electronic devices, and the government to secure information provided to it. Because it hasn't been fixed, we continue to allow information that should be protected to float around in the ether of clouds, without any possibility of protecting something of mine, even something I own. [See
http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-Secrets-Military-Business-Threaten/dp/1484131487/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398274807&sr=1-2
Monday, April 14, 2014
Do Chinese Eat Donkey from Wal-Mart?
In the Wall Street Journal today, Laurie Burkitt and Shelly Banjo put together an interesting story about Wal-Mart operations in China. http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304157204579473272856969150-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwNDExNDQyWj
I have written about this before in my first book. China manipulates foreign businesses operating there, while not policing their own distribution channels. In that case it was tainted pork, weighted with water, being sold by Wal-Mart in some of its stores. The distributor eventually got the death penalty for that. This is a little different.
They seem to have allowed one of their distributors to sell fox (the red furry thing that keeps low to the ground seeking the squirrels in my neighborhood) mislabeled as donkey. This means, of course, that Chinese buyers thought they were getting donkey, when they were really getting fox. We don't have a lot of that in the U.S. since Wal-Mart does not offer donkey anywhere I can think of.
While it is true that the Chinese are taking shots at big multinationals and won't clean up their own act, I couldn't get past the idea that donkey was a regular offering at Wal-Mart, no matter where it was. Shame on them for substituting fox, which must have been really hard to come up with, since they are such small animals. It would take 100 of them to make enough meat to equal one donkey. But, donkey is not on very many menus anywhere I have ever been.
I did a little research and found that Muslims are allowed to eat wild donkeys, but not domesticated ones. [ http://islamqa.info/en/85534] But, not very many people eat them, largely because the meat is tough. Fox must be too. There are not very many references to eating either one of them. Do the Chinese really need to eat donkey? Amazon books:
I have written about this before in my first book. China manipulates foreign businesses operating there, while not policing their own distribution channels. In that case it was tainted pork, weighted with water, being sold by Wal-Mart in some of its stores. The distributor eventually got the death penalty for that. This is a little different.
They seem to have allowed one of their distributors to sell fox (the red furry thing that keeps low to the ground seeking the squirrels in my neighborhood) mislabeled as donkey. This means, of course, that Chinese buyers thought they were getting donkey, when they were really getting fox. We don't have a lot of that in the U.S. since Wal-Mart does not offer donkey anywhere I can think of.
While it is true that the Chinese are taking shots at big multinationals and won't clean up their own act, I couldn't get past the idea that donkey was a regular offering at Wal-Mart, no matter where it was. Shame on them for substituting fox, which must have been really hard to come up with, since they are such small animals. It would take 100 of them to make enough meat to equal one donkey. But, donkey is not on very many menus anywhere I have ever been.
I did a little research and found that Muslims are allowed to eat wild donkeys, but not domesticated ones. [ http://islamqa.info/en/85534] But, not very many people eat them, largely because the meat is tough. Fox must be too. There are not very many references to eating either one of them. Do the Chinese really need to eat donkey? Amazon books:
Friday, April 11, 2014
Heartbleed for Information Sharing
A number of outlets have picked up a story on cyber information sharing, and the inability to get agreement on how vulnerability information is being shared. You can get a flavor for these from Brent Kendall's article in the Wall Street Journal. What he says is that the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are telling companies they "aren't at risk of antitrust liability when the get together to pool information about security threats and ways to defend against them..."
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303873604579493980585969834-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMTExNDEyWj
For a number of years, starting in 2003, I worked on this same issue on the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee, which only means it is taking a long time to get to a point where channels within business sectors can share information. In the meantime, our credit card industry is being cut to pieces by Transnational gangs of very smart people. We see no evidence they have problems sharing information on vulnerabilities.
When the Deputy U.S. Attorney James Cole was asked to give examples of companies that cited antitrust issues with information sharing, "he declined to provide examples". No surprise there. I never heard the antitrust issue raised, until recently, when it appeared there might finally be agreement on a law to allow companies to share information. We never got the law. Now, we are getting "guidance" that information sharing will be OK as long as "companies aren't talking about competitive issue like price, purchasing and product innovations." The Feds seem to be missing the point of the industry argument. They don't want to share information about vulnerabilities for two reasons: (1) they are deathly afraid of liability for what may happen as a result of sharing, and (2) They are equally afraid of product liability that can arise from having competitors point out how insecure some of their products really are.
The real issue is more difficult. When companies share, they put a light on what businesses already know about the vulnerabilities of their products. How long did they know that software had a hole the size of Pittsburg that gave access to anyone who asked for it? What did they do when they found out? Who is responsible for developing the software they used? Vendors have been allowed to skirt these issues over and over because they have no liability for products they produce. Second, they don't want to know about vulnerabilities that might be hard to deny later. It does not look good for GM that they knew their ignition switch was not working quite right, but didn't repair it. There is no such liability for vendors in networks, but there could be if enough light is brought to the subject.
How many commercial vendors were using OpenSSL and have the Heartbleed vulnerability? [for an simple explanation of how this works, see http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/heartbleed-bug-exposes-passwords-web-site-encryption-keys/ ] They didn't write the code for it. They didn't know about the vulnerability, or they say that they didn't. When Google found that bug, they went to the group that writes OpenSSL and told them about it - not to any industry group or newspaper. They wanted it corrected before anyone made an announcement.
This is always a hard issue that everyone faces. How long can we allow a vulnerability to exist before it is corrected? Who has the responsibility for correcting it once it is known? How long to do they have to correct it, once they know? Who is liable if something happens before it is corrected? The industry would like the answer to be nobody is liable, and we can wait as long as it takes. What if GM could give that same response?
That is where we are with information sharing. Instead of addressing the real issues, they fein concern about antitrust, a bogus issue they invented. The Feds perpetuate this nonsense in the name of "government-industry cooperation". This calls for regulation, not letters and guidance. Amazon books:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303873604579493980585969834-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMTExNDEyWj
For a number of years, starting in 2003, I worked on this same issue on the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee, which only means it is taking a long time to get to a point where channels within business sectors can share information. In the meantime, our credit card industry is being cut to pieces by Transnational gangs of very smart people. We see no evidence they have problems sharing information on vulnerabilities.
When the Deputy U.S. Attorney James Cole was asked to give examples of companies that cited antitrust issues with information sharing, "he declined to provide examples". No surprise there. I never heard the antitrust issue raised, until recently, when it appeared there might finally be agreement on a law to allow companies to share information. We never got the law. Now, we are getting "guidance" that information sharing will be OK as long as "companies aren't talking about competitive issue like price, purchasing and product innovations." The Feds seem to be missing the point of the industry argument. They don't want to share information about vulnerabilities for two reasons: (1) they are deathly afraid of liability for what may happen as a result of sharing, and (2) They are equally afraid of product liability that can arise from having competitors point out how insecure some of their products really are.
The real issue is more difficult. When companies share, they put a light on what businesses already know about the vulnerabilities of their products. How long did they know that software had a hole the size of Pittsburg that gave access to anyone who asked for it? What did they do when they found out? Who is responsible for developing the software they used? Vendors have been allowed to skirt these issues over and over because they have no liability for products they produce. Second, they don't want to know about vulnerabilities that might be hard to deny later. It does not look good for GM that they knew their ignition switch was not working quite right, but didn't repair it. There is no such liability for vendors in networks, but there could be if enough light is brought to the subject.
How many commercial vendors were using OpenSSL and have the Heartbleed vulnerability? [for an simple explanation of how this works, see http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/heartbleed-bug-exposes-passwords-web-site-encryption-keys/ ] They didn't write the code for it. They didn't know about the vulnerability, or they say that they didn't. When Google found that bug, they went to the group that writes OpenSSL and told them about it - not to any industry group or newspaper. They wanted it corrected before anyone made an announcement.
This is always a hard issue that everyone faces. How long can we allow a vulnerability to exist before it is corrected? Who has the responsibility for correcting it once it is known? How long to do they have to correct it, once they know? Who is liable if something happens before it is corrected? The industry would like the answer to be nobody is liable, and we can wait as long as it takes. What if GM could give that same response?
That is where we are with information sharing. Instead of addressing the real issues, they fein concern about antitrust, a bogus issue they invented. The Feds perpetuate this nonsense in the name of "government-industry cooperation". This calls for regulation, not letters and guidance. Amazon books:
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Treasury Watching China Currency
In today's Wall Street Journal, William Maudlin and Bob Davis have a story on Treasury concerns about the motivation for Chinese currency dropping in value.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304819004579487900847199382-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwODEwNDgyWj
What is curious about it is the Treasury telling China we are watching what they are doing to manipulate their currency value, when this managed economy does it all the time. It is just going down in value this time. When it goes up, we don't mind a little manipulation. When it goes down it puts Chinese goods in a better position to compete with ours.
We put ourselves in a very poor position by selling our national debt to the Chinese. Russia owns $100M of our debt too. If we could get a balanced budget, or get more countries to buy our debt, we would be a in much better position to tell them we are watching what they are doing. They must take this with a grain of salt most of the time. When a person owes me money, I don't expect he will comment on how bad my front lawn looks. I guess Treasury doesn't see it that way. Amazon books:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304819004579487900847199382-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwODEwNDgyWj
What is curious about it is the Treasury telling China we are watching what they are doing to manipulate their currency value, when this managed economy does it all the time. It is just going down in value this time. When it goes up, we don't mind a little manipulation. When it goes down it puts Chinese goods in a better position to compete with ours.
We put ourselves in a very poor position by selling our national debt to the Chinese. Russia owns $100M of our debt too. If we could get a balanced budget, or get more countries to buy our debt, we would be a in much better position to tell them we are watching what they are doing. They must take this with a grain of salt most of the time. When a person owes me money, I don't expect he will comment on how bad my front lawn looks. I guess Treasury doesn't see it that way. Amazon books:
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