on losing everything to "the cloud"

The Risks of Cloud: Lessons from Wikileaks - Simon Says...:

I commented on Friday about the weakness that responses to Wikileaks have exposed in cloud computing, whatever your view of Wikileaks itself. While there are strong incentives to host critical infrastructure in the cloud or using web services, we saw last week both Amazon Web Services and PayPal - flagship brands in cloud computing and web commercial services respectively - suddenly toss customers off their services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse. I'm sure they breached none of their own (voluminous) agreements. We saw other, less well-known companies (Tableau, EveryDNS) follow suit too, and even a Swiss bank finding a handy loophole. We also saw the US Department of Homeland Security start to seize domain names - this time at least by sending a court order to Verisign, albeit sealed, but without useful explanation or workable recourse. I sense we will see more of this happening.

The British have also started a campaign of "stealing" domain names by cutting them off at the DNS registrar, though ostensibly for "copyright violation".  The possible validity of the reasoning doesn't change the dangerous nature of the precedent.

This demonstrates the fundamental flaw in web-mediated services. While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that's relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business. Beware those Terms of Service.

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The problem is that we have a society with the governments that it deserves, ready to encourage summary judgement rather than consider matters deeply. The only protection we can even hope to trust today is to take contractual measures and to be ready to self-host in the age of the digital lynch-mob.

on secrets...

US, Canada are close allies. That's classified? - Yahoo! News:

Sometimes, classified documents contained little more than summaries of press reports. Political banter was treated as confidential government intelligence. Information that's available to anyone with an Internet connection was ordered held under wraps for years.

Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, the White House received a classified message from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. It was a primer for the president's upcoming trip to Canada and it included this sensitive bit of information, marked confidential:

"No matter which political party forms the Canadian government during your Administration, Canada will remain one of our staunchest and most like-minded of allies, our largest trading and energy partner, and our most reliable neighbor and friend."

The document could not be made public until 2019, for national security reasons.

Such non-secrets have a cost. The more stuff the government classifies, the more money it takes to keep it all concealed. The government spent at least $9 billion keeping classified information under wraps last year, and that doesn't include the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others that keep their spending on classified information classified.

Most Americans can do little but take it on faith that those secrets are actually worth keeping. And advocates for open government say that when too much is classified, it makes it harder for the government to cry foul when legitimate secrets are leaked.

"The problem is, we've got a system that keeps way too much that is secret, and as a result we can't protect the real secrets nearly as well," said Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archives, a private research institute at George Washington University. "And the stuff we really need to know is buried under a mass of trivia."

Fox news boss a complete arse, film at 11...

LEAKED EMAIL: Fox boss caught slanting news reporting | Media Matters for America:

From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:23 AM
To: 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Subject: friendly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the "public option"

1) Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.

2) When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."

3) Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."

4) When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

on Palin's hunting expedition on that stupid show of hers

Aaron Sorkin: In Her Defense, I'm Sure the Moose Had It Coming:

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing.

[...]

And you didn't just do it for fun and you didn't just do it for money. That was the first moose [sic] ever murdered for political gain.

Actually, I think it was for the money. By inviting the wrath of PETA, that brings in controversy which may potentially bring in ratings as everybody goes to look at the train wreck. For Palin today, for the politics and for the money are utterly indistinguishable...and perhaps it was always thus.

Niagra Falls, Dec 2010

So work sent me to Toronto for a week, and I opted to, rather than direct flight, fly through Buffalo and do the border-crossing at Niagra instead of dealing with airport bureaucracy and stresses. Worked out pretty well, and gave me a Saturday afternoon (unfortunately, really cold and cloudy) to try to take the pictures of the Falls that we didn't take in our rushed exit through there back in 2003.



2010-12-04 A Gray Day in Niagra Falls

I'll do a more detailed write-up later. maybe.