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From the Good Blog: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go?
From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, July 27, 2010 (PDF):
Weaknesses in DoD's financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds it received for reconstruction activities in Iraq. This situation occurred because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds. The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.
Last night's episode of The Rachel Maddow Show (solidly guest-hosted by Chris Hayes of The Nation) focused largely on the Afghanistan war documents leaked on Sunday by Wikileaks.
I joined for a segment about the tech side of that story. As I said during that segment, if you zoom out beyond this specific leak, if you zoom out beyond Julian Assange (Wikileaks' highly public and highly polarizing figurehead), and if you zoom out even beyond Wikileaks—that's where this gets really interesting.
The incident marks the same kind of historic turning point in power distribution as when the music industry flipped out over Napster in the '90s, and the movie industry flipped out over BitTorrent in the early '00s. This moment feels like the same kind of apple-cart-upset, but for information control by military and political powers which, before this moment, we perceived as "in control." (It's no accident that the copyright maximalists and secrecy maximalists are often in agreement regarding internet restrictions and issues like net neutrality— and I'd expect to see new laws and controls soon proposed in that regard).
Did you see the Washington Post "Top Secret America" series (blogged on BB here)? Spend some time with it. This moment is the natural counterpoint to the massive, unprecedented buildup of secrecy and surveillance documented in that investigative report.
Do Wikileaks and other "distributed anti-secrecy networks" that will surely follow have the power to topple governments, or set into motion massive political change?
Wikileaks is a big story. But the story is bigger than Wikileaks alone, and it has just begun. What happens next, whether there's a backlash and a doubling-down of attempts to exert control, is one of the next big questions. Dan Gillmor digs into that here, a must-read essay. Jay Rosen's thoughts in this piece were referenced in the Maddow Show broadcast. Another meta-analysis piece worth reading today by C.W. Anderson at Nieman Lab. And another from David Carr, of the New York Times (one of the three news organizations that received early access to the "Afghan War Diaries" data-dump.)
Watch the video:"Wikileaks: BoingBoing.net's Xeni Jardin joins The Rachel Maddow show." (MSNBC)
Two categories in particular won't ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum's recovered from a carton in the basement. My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams. I don't care that the images are overexposed or badly framed, that the audio is poor quality, that I can barely read my 14-year-old self's handwriting. The things I made with my own hands and the things that represent my relationships with my community and loved ones are critical to my identity, and I won't trade them for anything. Second, the tailored. I have loads of little scripts, programs, systems, files and such that make perfect sense to me, even though they're far from elegant or perfect. There's the script I use for resizing and uploading images to Boing Boing, the shelf I use to organise my to-be-read pile, the carefully-built mail rules that filter out spam and trolls and make sure I see the important stuff. I am a market of one: no one wants to make a commercial proposition out of filling my needs, and if they did, your average curator would be nuts to put something so tightly optimised for my needs into the public sphere, where it would be so much clutter. But again, these are the nuts and bolts that hold my life together and I can't live without them.
My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams. I don't care that the images are overexposed or badly framed, that the audio is poor quality, that I can barely read my 14-year-old self's handwriting. The things I made with my own hands and the things that represent my relationships with my community and loved ones are critical to my identity, and I won't trade them for anything.
Second, the tailored. I have loads of little scripts, programs, systems, files and such that make perfect sense to me, even though they're far from elegant or perfect. There's the script I use for resizing and uploading images to Boing Boing, the shelf I use to organise my to-be-read pile, the carefully-built mail rules that filter out spam and trolls and make sure I see the important stuff. I am a market of one: no one wants to make a commercial proposition out of filling my needs, and if they did, your average curator would be nuts to put something so tightly optimised for my needs into the public sphere, where it would be so much clutter. But again, these are the nuts and bolts that hold my life together and I can't live without them.
Ryanair, the discount airline known for its dirt cheap prices, headline-making PR stunts and occasionally outrageous ideas for what passengers should pay fees for, is defending itself against allegations from a passenger who says he was detained by police at a Norwegian airport because he'd been vocally displeased with his on-board food service.
The 52-year-old Norwegian man was en route from Germany to Norway last week when he got the pleasure of paying for the meal on his Ryanair flight.
Explains the man:
At no time did I even raise my voice with the girl. I was very calm and in control and she was very nice and not angry at all. I first ordered a hot meal which they didn't have and then I asked for a second hot meal which they didn't have either. I asked the girl what they actually had and I ordered a "chicken premium sandwich", which cost €4.50 [$5.82] and was supposed to have been "freshly made".
My money was in my jacket in the overhead locker so I told her I would pay her when I was able to get up again. The sandwich looked nice and healthy but when I tasted it, it was soft and rubbery and nothing at all like it looked in the photo. I called the girl and said I was not paying for that. I asked if I could change it for a chocolate muffin. She said no.
At this point, the passenger says the cabin crew member informed him she would have to report him to the authorities if he didn't pay for the sandwich.
He continues:
When she told me the police would be contacted, I thought it was a joke and I fell asleep for a while. She wanted to take the sandwich and menu card back but I kept them to show to the police. Three men in orange police jackets came on board and took me to a room. I was not handcuffed.
The passenger says he was ultimately released by the police and that he doesn't expect any charges will be filed against him. He claims the airline overreacted to the situation by involving the authorities.
However, a rep for Ryanair sees it differently:
The captain on flight FR8904 requested police assistance on arrival after a passenger became disruptive in flight. This matter was addressed with the passenger by police on arrival. Ryanair crew only request such assistance when deemed absolutely necessary based on their assessment of the disruptive passenger behaviour and their reading of the situation.
This all comes a very short time after United made headlines when they removed a passenger for asking whether or not there would be a meal served on the flight.
What do you think? Did Ryanair do the right thing by contacting the police? Or could this situation have been worked out on the plane without incident?
Ryanair denies overreacting in sandwich incident [Irish Times]
Among the tens of thousands of classified documents released this week by Wikileaks is evidence the US military in Afghanistan is repeating a PR blunder that led to trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run "friendly stories"— in military parlance, "psychological operations."
Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as "our journalists" and directing them in how to do their jobs.Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering "12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming" to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them "$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October":
Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.
In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering "12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming" to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them "$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October":
More Shocked Cat.
Net Index is a free service that ranks and compares download and upload speeds, quality of broadband connections, and internet service providers across the globe using data obtained from the popular Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net online tests.
The Net Index takes a little work to wrap your head around when you first visit the site, but it's full of useful information if you take a little time and start drilling down into its offerings. For example, the front page starts with the Household Download Index, which rounds up the average download speed across the globe, highlights the average speed by country (at 9.87Mbps, the U.S. is above the global average of 7.59 but below the seriously high speed countries, like South Korea's mind-blowing 31.38).
From the front page, you can drill down into countries or states for more information about the cities and ISPs providing the fastest connection—much more interesting for consumers looking for the best ISP in their area. For example, here in California, I can see that if I want the consistently fastest downloading ISP, I'd probably want to go with Charter—followed by Comcast and Road Runner.
I can also see that each of the three fastest ISPs are rated around 3 out of 5 stars by customers. Cox, the fourth fastest, has 4 stars (rounded up)—something to keep in mind when I'm making my decision. Download speed isn't the only thing that matters, and the site performs the same analysis using upload speeds and a "quality index" based on results from Pingtest.net.
Give it a try, and let's hear how its measurements seem to match up with your ISP—and whether it looks like you might want to switch—in the comments.
Earlier today, I spoke with Jacob Appelbaum, a volunteer with the WikiLeaks project whose work in other projects related to tech and human rights have been blogged here on Boing Boing over the years. As reported on Boing Boing and widely elsewhere, Wikileaks have released a massive archive of secret US military documents related to the war in Afghanistan, unprecedented in scope. The archive spans a 6-year period from 2004 to 2010, encompassing more than 91,000 documents and 200,000 pages. The White House, Pentagon, and Department of State have condemned the leak, with various spokespersons describing it as a breach of federal law, a "criminal act," and describing Wikileaks as a threat to US national security. I spoke with Appelbaum, a longtime friend of mine, about why he and other Wikileaks volunteers disagree. —XJ
As reported on Boing Boing and widely elsewhere, Wikileaks have released a massive archive of secret US military documents related to the war in Afghanistan, unprecedented in scope. The archive spans a 6-year period from 2004 to 2010, encompassing more than 91,000 documents and 200,000 pages. The White House, Pentagon, and Department of State have condemned the leak, with various spokespersons describing it as a breach of federal law, a "criminal act," and describing Wikileaks as a threat to US national security. I spoke with Appelbaum, a longtime friend of mine, about why he and other Wikileaks volunteers disagree. —XJ
Boing Boing: We're told that there are more documents from this archive yet to be released by Wikileaks, some 15,000 of them as reported. Some have speculated that these could relate to Iraq. Can you comment more?
Jacob Appelbaum: The 15,000 documents are part of the set of Afghanistan documents. They are being redacted for harm-minimizing purposes as requested by our source, and will be made available as is applicable with respect to the relevant security concerns.
Boing Boing: What do you think of the White House reactions so far to the "Afghan War Diaries" leak?
Jacob Appelbaum: It's clear that the White House is attempting to shoot the messenger. These documents provide concrete evidence of events that have occurred during the last six years of the Afghan war.
Boing Boing: The Department of Defense has called Wikileaks a "national security threat."
Jacob Appelbaum: Wikileaks is not a national security threat; we are an international security promise.
Boing Boing: What do you mean by that?
Jacob Appelbaum: We promise our sources that we will get their information to the public. We have released information about what is actually happening in Afghanistan. We are telling you the facts as the US military saw fit to document them. We are telling you these facts because they document an important first-hand perception of everyday life in Afghanistan that our source felt important to show the world. It clearly meets with our submission criteria and based on the reaction, it's obvious that we've done our job as we've promised.
Boing Boing: What of the criticism from some commentators, and from the US defense spokesperson yesterday in the initial response, that these documents are "old news," because they only cover from 2004, when Bush was in office, through late 2009, before Obama announced a policy change for Afghanistan?
Jacob Appelbaum: The contents may be old news to the White House but it was very clearly not available to the American public and actually any public with an interest in the topic before our release.
To suggest that it only covers Bush is to misrepresent the very clear facts. The document archive goes all the way up to the end of 2009. The White House tried to spin this by saying it goes only until December when the Obama administration announced a policy change. However, there is an overlap - this is a document cache that spans both of their presidencies and it includes information after Obama enacted the policy change in early December 2009.
Boing Boing: What do you think will happen as a result of the leak? Will there be policy change?
Jacob Appelbaum: It's only been a single day and the entire world is talking about this information. The collaborative effort put into the initial analysis of these documents is unprecedented, and the foundation laid by New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel in respect to initial analysis of the material will certainly serve as a sound basis for further investigations by the media, historians and researchers, as well as general public scrutiny.
People in the United States of America have the ability to democratically change this situation if they are unhappy with the truth; they now have information that will assist them in having a clearer picture. Perhaps they will demand more transparency and more accountability. It is clear that they will find out how the war is actually going, and see what they're financing. This isn't unique to the United States: it impacts the people of every country with troops in Afghanistan. The world has wide-open eyes. Together, we can make better, more honest decisions.
Furthermore, the people of Afghanistan are not shocked by this information. Nobody needs to tell them what the conditions are like on the ground. They don't have reports with this level of specificity, rather they live with everyday terror and fear. In some cases, we can see more clearly now that the Taliban are doing terrible things, and they're far better equipped than the "camel jockeys" they're portrayed as in the American media. These are scary guys with scary capabilities. Why aren't we being told this truth regularly after nine years? Why would the US government hide this from the world? Why are the rest of the governments complicit in this silence?
Additionally, it sounds like our allies are the ones supplying them with some of those capabilities. Some wings of the US government were apparently aware of that. But I'd wager that most Americans were unaware. This strongly suggests a need for policy change. How can the people of the US fund another situation that is not unlike when America was using Afghanistan as proxy during the Cold War? Didn't we learn our lesson the first half dozen times we did something like this?
If not, let's learn it now.
(photo courtesy Jacob Appelbaum)
Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."... The children will study a poster of rocks instead... Well, there's the Graco Harmony High Chair. The commission warns parents to "stop using product immediately." Yikes! Scary! Is it ejecting kids? Spontaneously combusting? Not quite. Of the 1,200,000 units sold, the CPSC received "24 reports of injuries, including bumps and bruises to the head, a hairline fracture to the arm, and cuts, bumps, bruises and scratches to the body." In other words: For every 50,000 chairs sold, a single child has suffered a bruise, bump or--once--a hairline fracture. Now look: Nobody likes to see a sweetheart suffer. But the Harmony high chair does not exactly sound like baby's first Pinto.
Well, there's the Graco Harmony High Chair. The commission warns parents to "stop using product immediately." Yikes! Scary! Is it ejecting kids? Spontaneously combusting? Not quite. Of the 1,200,000 units sold, the CPSC received "24 reports of injuries, including bumps and bruises to the head, a hairline fracture to the arm, and cuts, bumps, bruises and scratches to the body." In other words: For every 50,000 chairs sold, a single child has suffered a bruise, bump or--once--a hairline fracture. Now look: Nobody likes to see a sweetheart suffer. But the Harmony high chair does not exactly sound like baby's first Pinto.
A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says that credit card reward programs have a sneaky hidden cost that the card holder doesn't have to bear. This occurs because the fee that a retailer pays to run a credit card varies with every card, and reward cards cost more to process--in other words, the card issuer passes the cost of the rewards program on to the retailer. The retailer adapts by raising prices across the board, which distributes the cost of the reward program among all shoppers.
This affects those who pay with cash the most, since they're essentially paying to help subsidize a program that they don't benefit from. And poor people tend to use more cash and fewer credit cards.
The New York Times quotes some actual figures from the report:
After accounting for rewards paid to households by banks, the researchers concluded that the lowest income household (those making less than $20,000 a year) pays $23 a year, while the highest income household (those making $150,000 or more annually) receives a subsidy of $756 every year. As a result, the researchers wrote, reducing the transfers could potentially increase consumer welfare, and the transfers may be something that public policy makers may want to address.
After accounting for rewards paid to households by banks, the researchers concluded that the lowest income household (those making less than $20,000 a year) pays $23 a year, while the highest income household (those making $150,000 or more annually) receives a subsidy of $756 every year.
As a result, the researchers wrote, reducing the transfers could potentially increase consumer welfare, and the transfers may be something that public policy makers may want to address.
"How Much Credit Card Rewards Cost the Poor" [New York Times via The Daily Beast] Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report (PDF) (Thanks to Howard!)
If you haven't yet had the pleasure of being trapped -- without water -- on a delayed Delta flight that's been waiting on the tarmac in 112-degree Arizona heat, one passenger has chronicled his ordeal in a series of quick videos from yesterday. The best -- or perhaps worst -- part comes at the end of the first clip when he squeegees about a gallon of sweat from his forehead.
Thanks to Chris for the tip!
Apple has added the Droid X to its list of phones that it claims also has the "death grip" antenna issue. Apple's website depicts a hand holding the phone in a fairly normal one-handed grip, with the signal bars depleted. Below the image, Apple says: " In weak signal areas, this grip may negatively affect signal strength." PCMag, however, takes issue with Apple's methodology...
From PCMag:
Most recently, Apple showed a death grip on the Motorola Droid X using one hand. We tried the very same experiment last week, and we disagree with Apple's methodology and conclusions in two important ways.
According to the article, those ways are:
1) "Rather than using bars, you need to look at the signal receive strength in -dBm or the phone's ability to connect calls. "
2) "As you can see in our video, we had to completely cover the body of the Droid X in an awkward, two-handed grip to get the phone's signal to drop."
Here's the aforementioned video. That poor doughnut! Do any readers have the Droid X? Can you death grip it with one hand?
Apple's Droid X 'Death Grip' Claim: Bogus [PCMag]
Above, a letter written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1956 predicting, quite accurately, aspects of the future of communications.
Link [via Letters of Note via dvice]
So this ruling is pretty interesting news, as it constitutes a circuit split with pretty much the rest of the nation's courts, which is often a precursor to a Supreme Court challenge. What's more, the defendants here are General Electric, not hackers in black t-shirts or sketchy offshore Xbox-modchip vendors (theoretically the law shouldn't care if the defendant is a hobo or a billionaire, but in practice, billionaires usually get better precedents, and not just because they can afford better lawyers).
It's up to the plaintiff, MGE, to appeal to the Supremes, but even if they don't, it's only a matter of time until there are new cases in the Fifth Circuit (or other circuits that follow its lead) that lead to highest court handing down some new law on this. Let's hope they see the sense of Judge Garza: "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision."
Court Backs Dismissal of Digital Copyright Claim (via /.)
These are major blows against the tradition in US law of protecting DRM, even when DRM wasn't upholding copyright. For example, Apple argued in its Copyright Office filing that it should be illegal under copyright law to install iPhone software unless Apple had approved and supplied it (akin to the principle that you should only be allowed company-approved bread in your toaster, or Folgers-approved milk in your instant coffee).
I'm not clear on whether these rulings now make it legal to traffick in circumvention tools that can accomplish this trick: if so, it would mean that you could sell DRM-ripping software in stores, or open a fix-it shop that jailbroke iPhones so that they could access unapproved software from third-party suppliers (including online stores that competed with Apple's App Store).
In any event, major kudos to EFF for an enormous win. I've always maintained that the biggest problem with DRM is the special status the law affords it: prior to 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a company that wanted to control how you used your purchases had to devote serious, ongoing effort to stopping the companies that sprang up to undo their locks; consequently, the market was able to drive DRM into the dust quickly, as companies abandoned strategies that squandered profits to lock down products. But after DRM got special treatment under the law, companies could merely slap on the thinnest veneer of DRM (the iPad's DRM was broken in less than a day!) and count on a public subsidy to defend it, through the courts and the law.
This was pure moral hazard, an invitation to the world's corporate bullies to invent "business models" based on stopping you from fully enjoying your property unless you paid to "unlock" every feature and morsel of value latent in it. Like a fridge that you have feed quarters into if you want to chill anything except dairy products, or a shower that charges you extra to rinse off the dog. Companies could create these ridiculous businesses and count on the government to police them, externalizing the cost of their extraordinary chutzpah to the very customers they were inflicting it upon!
Ironicially, just as the US government is starting to reconsider this wisdom of this approach, other governments are being arm-twisted by the US trade representative into adopting it -- for example, Canada's pending Bill C32, a copyright law that was practically ghost-written by the American entertainment lobby and delivered after the Prime Minister's office handed down the edict to "Make the Americans happy."
EFF Wins New Legal Protections for Video Artists, Cell Phone Jailbreakers, and Unlockers