 Thursday, December 4, 2003
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Hardly:
Hackers have forced the Gentoo Linux project to take a server offline.
The attack and subsequent compromise comes after several machines belonging to the Debian Linux project were breached by attackers last month. A forensic analysis of the Debian machines revealed that no software packages or source code offered for download were affected--a claim now being made by Gentoo.
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Amusing parody of today's business catchphrases and buzzwords here -- sample:
Danbom: How do you convince people you're a cliché expert?
Lingua: I walk the walk and talk the talk.
Danbom: Did incomprehensibility come naturally to you?
Lingua: I wasn't wired that way, but it became mission-critical as I strategically focused on my go-forward plan.
Read the whole thing (and grimace as recognize some things you've said!)
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Bruce Cumings is a scholar and historian whom I greatly respect; his magisterial two volume Origins of the Korean War served as a primary source for Land of the Morning Storm. However, his recent essay in the London Review of Books, entitled "Wrong Again," fails to live up to his reputation.
Cumings dismisses claims about North Korea's nuclear arms buildup while simultaneously justifying that country's development of such weapons as a deterrent to a belligerent US. He rails against US plans to build smaller, more targeted weapons that can reach deep underground bunkers -- where, he admits, North Korea does indeed stockpile chemical and biological weapons, and possibly (in our view, almost certainly) nuclear arms as well.
Cumings condemns US policy toward North Korea as hostile and condescending -- and then makes remarks like Maybe Bush's resentments have something to do with the widespread perception that both leaders owe their position to Daddy. This sort of thing is unbecoming a great scholar.
However, Cumings is right about one thing. We will be living with the consequences of the Iraqi war for a long time. A fact is a fact, and the fact appears now to be that US claims surrounding Iraq's WMD program were overhyped, if not outright manufactured. That the brutal dictator Saddam is gone is indisputably a good thing; that we took him down for the wrong reasons will damage US credibility for years to come.
We were wrong in Iraq, so how can we be right in Korea? This subtext runs throughout Cumings' essay, and while we should gird ourselves for this soon-to-be-frequent rejoinder, Cumings should know better. Certainly North Korea's behavior in the past: assassinating South Korean leaders, blowing up Korean Air jetliners, kidnapping South Korean (and Japanese) citizens, smuggling drugs, not to mention oppressing its own people in ways nearly too horrific to imagine, suggest that North Korea is anything but trustworthy, anything but lawful, anything but a legitimate citizen of the family of nations.
Cumings writes: Loud in prattling about American sovereignty when it comes to the UN, these officials see no other country whose sovereignty they feel bound to respect.
Given North Korea's attitudes, belligerence and history, however, I ask: Why should we respect its sovereignty? Should we have respected Nazi Germany's sovereignty and allowed the Holocaust to proceed?
Would not the region, the United States, the world, humanity itself be better were we to rid the planet of this evil regime?
Reference via the Marmot.
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Sun is taking orders for the Java Desktop System; click on the link to see some screenshots.
Let's just say it looks, ah, strikingly similar to the Windows XP desktop. OK, there are differences: in the lower left hand corner there's a Launch button instead of Start button. It's "Network Places" not "Network Neighborhood." It's "This Computer" not "My Computer." Now there's some innovation for you!
Good thing for Sun that Lotus lost that user interface suit against Borland a decade ago, I suppose.
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Nov Jan
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