| Wednesday,
October 7, 2009 A Warning (thanks to Tracy Walters:
IE, Chrome, Safari duped by bogus PayPal SSL cert
Fraudulent credential, real risk
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Posted in Enterprise Security, 5th October 2009
23:24 GMT
If you use the Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or
Apple Safari browsers to conduct PayPal transactions, now would be a good
time to switch over to the decidedly more secure Firefox alternative.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/05/fraudulent_paypay_certificate_published/
I haven't given up IE yet, but do note the risks here. I am astonished
that Microsoft hasn't fixed this yet.
===================
I became aware of this just as I was finishing the column.
Late News: Amazon Kindle goes international. The
implications are obvious. The future of publishing is changing rapidly, and
needs more attention than I can give it before deadline time. More later.
<http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/international-kindle/>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/technology/companies/07amazon.html>
===================
Five days since the last official sunspot.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
=============
Still catching up. Column is done and will be posted
tonight or tomorrow. The theme is security. I also address the FTC power
grab, and bunch of other interesting stuff.
I meant to mention What We Would Have Told Obama, by
three physicians, in Monday's Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB20001424052748704471504
574449513730221946.html
If the health care debate still interests you, this is worth
reading. Apparently it's now down to stunts, with bug White House photo-ops
complete with White House issued white coats for a couple of hundred
physicians selected because (among other reasons I am sure, but this was was
prime) they were Obama supporters and campaign donors. This is not to say
that such physicians are not worth listening to, but in fact they didn't say
anything other than 'Hurrah for Obama' as they appeared in the Rose Garden
in the white coats they didn't think to bring to a White House reception.
(Who would? The few times I have been invited to the White House I wore my
best dark suit and a not very daring tie).)
Palmisano, Plested, and Johnson (the three authors) point
out that the system we have works pretty well, and the proposed system would
not be kind to Medicare. Medicare already underpays physicians (compared to
what the treatments cost). Of course the article -- Palmisano is a former
president of the AMA -- isn't very deep, and mostly repeats what has been
said, but the point is that it doesn't take a very deep or profound analysis
to say that the middle of a Depression is hardly the proper time to make
drastic changes in our economic system, and restructure nearly 20% of the
economy -- and also to make official a great number of expensive
entitlements. Perhaps we need to say explicitly that everyone is entitled to
some minimum level of health care, and that the rest of us are obliged to
pay for it; but having said that, the devil is still in the details, and we
are still in a Depression; and it is not at all clear that this is the right
time to put that principle into public law.
The system we have may be expensive, and certainly isn't
perfect. The principal flaw, in my judgment, is the present inability to
change employers without losing health insurance. Fixing that won't be
simple, but it would be a lot easier than revamping the whole system.
Meanwhile, none of the proposals I have seen address the problems of supply
of health care workers. That isn't even being debated, and yet it should be.
We don't want to break what we have by trying to fix it. My physician
professor friends tell me that good teaching resources are harder to find
than you think, and staffing new medical schools and teaching hospitals with
good people will be far more difficult than most of us outsiders even
suspect. I have no way to know if this be true, but it surely needs to be
part of any debate on health care reform, since the "reforms" are going to
raise demand enormously, and if the demand rises there will have to be some
kind of increase in supply.
All this is obvious; but it doesn't seem to be obvious to
the White House or the Congress.
==============
I have to get to work, but in another forum there is a
discussion of whether or not Israel has the capability (leave out the will
for the moment) to take out Iran's ability to build nuclear weapons. My
preliminary analysis, not based on anything but very open sources, is that
they do not -- and even if they do, the task is so difficult the Israeli
authorities could not have much confidence in their ability. I suspect that
taking out the Iranian nuclear capability would take the entire USAF
resources and at least ten days. It might even require nuclear weapons.
Understand, my experience in hardening targets is forty years old, and
largely centered on silo hardening at that, but I was the originator of the
"dirty thirty" basing concept known as "Citadel", an armed very hard Command
Authority base (think Cheyenne Mountain on steroids; see Footfall for a
loose description) and I did study the subject -- forty years ago.
In any event, I think it would be an enormous mistake to
equate Iran with Iraq. The Iranians are Persians, known for millennia as the
most subtle of people, and not to be compared with Saddam Hussein. They
haven't all their eggs in one or even a few baskets, and those baskets are
likely to be hardened. There are thriller novels about Israeli special ops
teams contaminating the Iranian nuclear facilities with biological (I think
one used nuclear) agents, but I think those are science fiction: to the best
of my knowledge contaminating agents work very well against very cautious
people, but those who are more daring and less caring for their
decontamination workers have other options.
My conclusion from these musings is that we had better learn
how to life in a world with a nuclear Iran. The current Administration is
not going to join Israel in a preemptive attack, thus beginning yet another
war in the Middle East and inviting retaliation against the Great and the
Lesser Satans. If we have any actual plans for facing this contingency I
don't know of them.
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