 Tuesday, November 4, 2003
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Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, said on Monday the collapse of Kim Jong-il's communist regime was more likely than gradual reform in North Korea and urged South Korea to build financial reserves to cope with the cost of reunification.
John Chambers, managing director for sovereign ratings at S&P, told reporters in Seoul that state collapse in North Korea was just a matter of time and could cause a bigger shock to the South's economy than the 1997 Asian financial crisis. (Financial Times)
To paraphrase James Taranto: where would we be without managing directors of credit ratings companies?
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Via TPRS:
The Selective Service System wants to hear from men and women in the community who might be willing to serve as members of a local draft board.
Oh, great.
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On Friday the White House canceled a Congressional delegation's plans to visit North Korea:
The 10 lawmakers had hoped to leave last weekend on a rare official trip to North Korea. They expected to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and visit the nuclear compound at Yongbyon, the source of spent fuel rods that could be used to make nuclear bombs.
But the leader of the delegation, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., issued a statement Sunday saying that the White House withdrew its support for the trip.
The lawmakers' letter said they don't believe a president has ever prohibited congressional travel, except to an active war zone.
"It is extremely ironic that in this case you canceled military transport of a bipartisan delegation that is in total and complete support of your state foreign policy agenda in North Korea," they said.
It's not clear what if anything such a trip could have accomplished, although I tend to believe any contact North Koreans have with Americans helps to destabilize one of the few remaining Stalinist states. On the other hand, I can't imagine under what legal authority the executive branch thinks it can halt Congressional travel on official business.
(Curt Weldon, the Republican mentioned above, incidentally was one of the sponsors of the North Korean women's soccer team which competed in the US for the World Cup last month.)
Is there more to this than meets the eye?
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Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required):
Novell Inc. agreed to acquire Germany's SuSE Linux AG for $210 million and began talks with International Business Machines Corp. to extend commercial agreements between IBM and SuSE, a provider of Linux software and services..."All of a sudden, [investors] are viewing [Novell] as a Linux play," said Drake Johnstone, an analyst at Davenport & Co...In August Novell bought Ximian, which provides Linux at the desktop.
WordPerfect for Linux? Now there's a winner (NOT).
UPDATE: Reader agaffin reminds us all that Novell sold off WordPerfect to Corel a number of years ago. I forgot! So now Novell's the proud owner of another second rate operating system the first being Netware.
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Fascinating story in the New York Times about the battle over voting machine software.
Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company‚s internal communications about its electronic voting machines...
The files circulating online include thousands of e-mail messages and memorandums dating to March 2003 from January 1999 that include discussions of bugs in Diebold‚s software and warnings that its computer network are poorly protected against hackers. Diebold has sold more than 33,000 machines, many of which have been used in elections.
Obviously, it's a huge problem: if our voting machines are subject to hacking, then the foundations of our democracy are at risk. What's to be done?
Clive Thompson says the solution is to use open-source software:
So why not just develop voting software in open-source mode? If everyone can openly inspect the code, any bugs or hackable insecurities would instantly be noticed and removed. And given that many geeks are pretty psychotic libertarians, you'd best believe they'll triple-check every line of the voting-software code to make sure no-one can mess with US elections. It's perfect!
I don't think it's perfect at all. Open-source rests on several cornerstones including programmer anonymity and zero accountability. What if we were to find out that a key contributor to our voting machine software was a member of Al-Qaeda?
In fact, the last people I'd trust to verify the correctness and trustworthiness of something as critical as voting machine software would be a loose group of international programmers who could care less about the integrity of our republic.
No: it seems to me that the American people would demand accountability, as they are of these particular vendors. Laudably, the other vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, is apparently submitting its code to independent security review.
But shouldn't the government certify voting software? What could be more important to the security of the United States than the security of the system by which we the people decide the country's issues? More directly: shouldn't the Department of Homeland Security take this on?
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Oct Dec
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