Sunday, July 03, 2005

Training for Improved Stamina


Picture credit: Scandinavian Boxing Rankings
Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueThe man many observers believe is the finest pound-for-pound boxer in the world -- Floyd Mayweather, Junior -- was on HBO last night. The broadcast was a repeat of last Saturday's pay-per-view event from Atlantic City, in which Mayweather opposed veteran Arturo Gatti.

I hesitate to call it a fight, though. A demolition, perhaps. Utter domination, certainly. The still-undefeated Mayweather exercised a hand- and foot-speed advantage seldom seen at this level of competition. After three rounds, Mayweather looked like he was hardly breaking a sweat, while Gatti was sucking down water, struggling to stay in the bout. After six rounds, Gatti's corner threw in the towel.

The punch-stat totals were as one-sided as you can imagine. Mayweather connected on 57% of his punches, compared to a measly 17% for Gatti: 168 to 41. The numbers were even more skewed for power shots: 115 to 10. It is hard to imagine a more thorough annihilation of a proven, experienced boxer by a younger man.

Why was Mayweather so fast and in such obviously superior condition?

Announcer Don Merchant let slip an interesting anecdote. During training, Mayweather eschewed the traditional three-minute rounds followed by one minute breaks. He frequently sparred in ten-minute rounds, with a new, fresh sparring partner for each.

In some cases, Mayweather took ten or fifteen seconds off between rounds, rather than sixty seconds. Combination work came in ten-minute segments and each continuous heavy-bag training session is fifteen minutes long, with no breaks.

The formula is really quite simple. Training sessions that require such enormous energy expenditures make the actual bout itself a walk in the park.

The lessons of Roy Jones, Junior

Another interesting training tidbit relates to former pound-for-pound great, Roy Jones, Jr. Jones was trained by his father, who reportedly pushed his son into greatness through a training regimen that would have felled most human beings. Among his unique training approaches: one-handed sparring.

Supposedly, a series of sparring partners would be brought in to face Roy, Jr. One at a time, they would box a round with the son, who was permitted to use only one hand during each round. The hand he was permitted to use varied from right to left based upon round: even round numbers got the left, odd rounds got the right. Not only that, but the sparring partners were, say, sixteen years-old while Roy, Jr. was twelve or thirteen. Talk about a rough indoctrination.

Hard Training

While great genetics is a primary determinant in the development of world-class athletes, another lesson is equally clear. The best athletes have generally trained harder, smarter and faster than their opposition. Michael Jordan's brutal pickup games and Mia Hamm's outrageous regimen helped build the foundation for improved confidence and mental intensity. And, if you want to be a world-class athlete, it probably doesn't hurt to have a father willing to push you to the limit.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Carnival of Trackbacks


Picture credit: http://www.parl.ns.ca
Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueI'm in, baby... with a vengeance! Wizbang's carnival of trackbacks is in full swing. In celebration, here are some of my personal favorite trackbacks:

  • Regarding Iraqi Ties To September 11th 2001 from SoCalPundit

  • The Modern Slave Trade as mentioned by the Cassandra Page

  • Ending Identity Theft from Stuart Berman

  • What really happened in Deadwood? from Holy Shmoly

  • Offbeat technical interview questions as linked by XTremeBlog


  • And a bonus double-reverse trackback:

    Froggy Ruminations: Crying Wolf

    Friday, July 01, 2005

    Eviscerating the New York Times... again


    Picture credit: http://www.time.com
    WarThe blogger voted (by me) as the most likely to get a syndicated column is New Sisyphus. Actually, it's unclear whether the blog is written by a group or a single person. Either way, it's not to be missed. In a recent entry, NS brutalizes a New York Times' op-ed piece. The editorial's unnamed, gasbag authors are left holding a shredded canard - but not any semblance of an argument.

    The combination of this piece and a panoply of excellent commentary on Powerline make for powerful, maddening reading. That the leadership of the Democratic party can so willfully ignore their own votes, which clearly stated the rationale for war in Iraq ("Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States... are known to be in Iraq... Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens...") -- and that they can do so without any fear that the mainstream media will sound the alarm claxons for egregious duplicity -- are among the more obvious reasons for the blogosphere's ascendancy in audience, importance and quality of analysis.

    We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal - beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion.

    -- Excerpt, New York Times, Lead Editorial, today


    Liberals, as the whole world knows, are masters of nuance and of complex thinking. It is Conservatives who deal in simplistic ideals... responding to detailed challenges by issuing jingoistic clichés. Bush... is roundly ridiculed in the MSM and the Leftish corners of the Internet for his lack of nuance, his lack of comprehension...

    ...So why is it that liberals persist in claiming to not understand the President’s central argument regarding the War on Terror, the Iraq War’s place in that larger conflict and the role of 9.11 in shaping his strategic worldview that made Iraq a necessary battlefield?

    ...The President’s argument is easy to grasp... The attacks of 9.11 were not simply terrorist attacks — as the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the U.S.S Cole were perceived and treated — but a declaration of war. This declaration of war was readily identifiable as such by the vast majority of the American people, yet carried with it a new and perplexing wrinkle.

    The enemy was not a nation-state or even the agents of a nation-state, but, instead, the vanguard of a wide-spread ideological movement... ...This new enemy shares a common cause not bounded by nationality or a specific grievance, but by an essentially fascist view that only the [ideologues]... are truly human, that [only they] have a holy duty to decide who lives and who dies, that only [their beliefs] are acceptable, and that the unbelievers must be converted by force or be killed so that a return to some romanticized volkish past... in all of [its] historical homelands (this includes you, Spain), can be achieved.

    Thus, after 9.11 the nation found itself at war with an organized ideological enemy. While most of this enemy were non-state actors, some received sanctuary and support from some states, notably the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran...

    However, at its core, the enemy was not a state or even a collection of states, but an ideology... The central lesson of 9.11 taken away by the President was that if these... “root causes” of terror were not addressed... it would be only a matter of time before the United States was attacked again. And the next attack may well be many times worse, given the state of modern weapons technology and our free and open society.

    Here the President made a judgment as the chief exective, commander-in-chief and the man actually responsible not only for our safety but the safety of future Americans as well. In his judgment, the [enemy's] ideology... rose to prominence... for the same reason the same affliction rose among a good proportion of the world’s Germans a half-century ago: a sick and afflicted political culture has nurtured a violent popular ideology of grievance-fixation, anti-Semitism and murder. Nothing short of breaking the back of the conditions that gave rise to the ideology of fascism would deprive it of strength and recruits, thereby preventing future attacks on the U.S. from a foe that is neither deterrable nor destructible in the classic sense.

    That being the case, once the immediate and relatively easy to identify goal of removing an obvious state sponsor of... Fascism was accomplished in Afghanistan, the President needed to put his strategic vision into action.

    A number of reasons made... Baathist Iraq the obvious choice: it was a once-prosperous, multi-ethnic community in the heart of the Islamic world that had been brutalized by an insanely aggressive regime that not only had invaded neighboring countries twice but had used long-banned chemical weapons in doing so. It also had an on-going program to further develop WMD for its use. It had used WMD against its own population to strengthen its rule by fear. It was still technically at war with the United States, violating a cease-fire almost daily by firing upon American pilots. It had attempted to assassinate an ex-President of the United States. It was supporting suicide bombing in Israel by providing financial benefit to such fanatic’s families. It had given refuge to terrorist groups and terrorist leaders. In short, Iraq was the poster child for the type of dysfunctional political culture that had given rise to the grievance-based ideology...

    Thus, Iraq presented the President with a convergence of strategic sense and tactical opportunity. Strategic, in that a conversion of Iraq to a more democratic and prosperous country would provide a counter-model to that proposed by the [ideologues]; tactical in that its WMD program, aggressive behavior and... links to terrorist groups represented a threat to the United States.

    ...Together, both prongs, along with the aggressive use of law enforcement domestically and abroad, diplomacy, and special operations in remote theatres, make up the wider War on Terror...

    ...it is in 9.11 that the President forged his central judgment: that a phenomenon previously thought to be a regrettable but constant in life—Islamic terrorism—has now shown itself ready, willing and able to represent an existential threat to the United States and that, therefore, it must be fought aggressively, while on the offensive, in a wide-ranging campaign to deny it sanctuary, succor and room for growth.

    Thus, for the NY Times and liberals at large to say that Iraq had “nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks,” is to miss the larger point the President is making... Iraq is central to the President’s war aims in that he seeks to inject a radical new order in the heart of the Middle East, one that will present an alternative and democratic space [to] deflate the appeal of the fascism that gave rise to 9.11 and similar attacks.

    For liberals to pretend not to understand all this — for them to lose their vaunted sense of nuance and understanding — reveals a profound and distasteful dishonesty on their part... Beyond indicting Bin Laden in District Court for the Southern District of New York, liberals have been without a strategic plan on how to win the War on Terror. In fact, they would deny such a war even exists.

    Such is their right. But their standard-bearer, Senator Kerry, took that argument to the American people a mere 7 months ago and they soundly rejected it in favor of the strategic vision advanced by President Bush and his team...

    Clearly, it’s Bush who has a problem with complex arguments and nuance and not, say, the editorial board of the New York Times.


    New Sisyphus: Eviscerating the New York Times... again

    Thursday, June 30, 2005

    Disintegration of the old-line newspaper business


    Picture credit: http://www.newsday.com
    Newspaper businessThe indispensible PoliPundit points us to one of many stories of circulation fraud plaguing the old-line newspaper business.

    Put simply, the traditional newspaper business is disintegrating faster than a six dollar suit. Newsday, among others, reportedly engaged in a massive fabrication of sales numbers. The bogus circulation game is simple: pump up distribution to keep ad revenues flowing.

    Furthermore, the questionable practices extend to a bevy of major dailies. And, even without questioning their circulation numbers, it looks like the big boys have been heavily subsidizing sales by offering discounts. The accompanying chart, also courtesy of Newsday, tells the discounting story.

    Surprise, surprise - the list of the ten most discounted newspapers reads like a Who's Who of MSM/DNC shills. Here are the chart's top ten most heavily discounted papers... along with some of their noteworthy personalities:

  • Washington Post - Richard Cohen (or, as I like to call him, "The Goalpost Shifter")

  • Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Tom Teepen ("Dense and intellectually bankrupt is no way to go through life, son")

  • Boston Globe - Thomas Oliphant ("Nickname: The human 'factuum' - a consistent lack of any factual basis to his arguments")

  • San Francisco Chronicle - the city that only syndicates!

  • Houston Chronicle - Cragg Hines ("Puts the 'Cragg' in 'Craggpot!")

  • Los Angeles Times - Ron Brownstein ("The least-read columnist in the largest city in America!")

  • Philadelphia Inquirer - Trudy Rubin ("If there's a Pulitzer Prize for extruding DNC talking points like a Pez dispenser, she's a lock!")

  • New York Times - Maureen Dowd ("Chimpy McBushitler is responsible for all of America's troubles... and my whiney voice!")

  • Newark Star-Ledger - Deborah Jerome-Cohen ("We're evil, empire-building occupiers... with hearts of gold!")

  • Minneapolis Star Tribune - Nick Coleman ("Trying to control envy... trying... trying... failing... YOU POWERLINERS STINK LIKE... SICK... uhm... WEASELS!")


  • Keep up the great work, MSM/DNC op-ed columnists! From all appearances, you're accelerating the destruction of print media, almost singlehandedly. In this case, intellectual bankruptcy is beginning to translate to financial bankruptcy.

    Let's see. If I'm a publisher of one of these papers, what lessons can I learn from this? DNC shills... poor circulation. Hmmm. What can I learn? Constant recitation of DNC talking points equals crappy circulation. What... could... I... change if I'm publishing the paper? Hmmm. I'm not coming up with anything. Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

    Wednesday, June 29, 2005

    Book Review: Lee Child's One Shot 


    Amazon - One Shot by Lee ChildLee Child's enigmatic drifter, Jack Reacher, is back and this time, he's really ticked off.

    A former Gulf War sniper is accused of a random killing spree in a small Indiana city. Hiding in a parking garage, someone killed six civilians during rush hour by picking them off, one at a time, in the city plaza. And a bevy of evidence supports the contention that the former sniper, James Barr, is the guilty party.

    Rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, Barr has only two things to say: "I'm innocent" and "Get Reacher". Having seen the crime and arrest reported on CNN, though, Reacher is already on the way. Using the classic Child formula of investigative and procedural detail, unbridled criminal brutality, and the thinking man's cold-hearted hero, One Shot is a trip on the express lane straight into the darkest corner of the heartlands.

    I'll be frank, this isn't Child's best novel. Not even close. Try Persuader, Running Blind or Without Fail for the penultimate Reacher stories. But Child's lesser efforts are so far above the typical "thriller" that the term seems woefully misplaced. Simply put, Child is the best action-adventure author in the business today. On my scorecard he's nine for nine. Read any of the Reacher novels, in any order, for a surefire adrenaline rush.
     

    I have seen the future of the newspaper...


    Picture credit: http://davidszondy.com
    Newspaper of the futureI have seen the future of the newspaper, and its name is NowPublic (hat tip: Scobleizer).

    Think Wikipedia as applied to the online newspaper business. Anyone can post a news story, picture, audio or video clip. Registered users edit and vote on stories. More votes will translate to increased visibility: major stories move higher on the page ("above the fold") based upon the votes they've received.

    Anyone can be a reporter, contributor, editor, or just a reader.

    Newspapers of all sizes better get on this concept, lickety-split, if they want to control the future of local news reporting.

    Now that I think about, someone could offer a software platform that would enable local entities to embrace this concept. Say, an open-source, PHP-based application that could provide all of the infrastructure necessary to run this type of operation. Wait a minute... wait... just... a minute... I've got a name:

    "OpenNewsDesk"

    That's gold, Jerry, gold!

    In fact, if Rob Curley gets there first, I wouldn't be surprised if LJworld.com implements it and starts offering it as a product.

    NowPublic

    The wonders of nature


    Picture credit: http://www.vegasretro.com
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueFrom the miscellaneous items department comes this headline from the Houston Chronicle:

    "Report can't pinpoint why tiger attacked Horn"

    Uhmmm, because it's a tiger?

    Houston Chronicle: Report can't pinpoint why tiger attacked Horn
     

    Tuesday, June 28, 2005

    Oh, those  dangers of outsourcing, part VI


    Picture credit: http://www.touchsupport.com/
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueIt's one of the first TCO (total cost of ownership) studies of outsourced help-desk support that I've seen. And if follows closely on the heels of various corporate moves to bring help-desk support back to the States:

    Management consultancy Compass conducted a global desktop study over four years to the end of 2004, and found that outsourcing can result in hidden costs through the increasing amount of self-support end users are forced to undertake...

    ...The study revealed self-support costs increase as more desktop support is outsourced, from £214 per user if 10 per cent of the desktop service is outsourced to £672 per user if 40 per cent of the service is outsourced...


    Silicon.com: Outsourcing can triple desktop support costs
     

    Ballmer: .NET is stalled


    Picture credit: http://www.techriots.com
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueI'm not sure exactly to what Microsoft's President is referring when he posits that .NET has been "stalled" for the last year. In corporate America, .NET seems to be making positive headway against J2EE-based solutions. It does seem, however, that in the SME and Internet hosting world, open-source and mixed-source solutions (e.g., Zend's PHP-based offerings) are dominating. And there's no reason that Microsoft, like Oracle and IBM before it, can't coexist with the increasingly popular LAMP stack.

    Think .NET web services with multi-platform front-ends, for instance. Some advantages come to mind: non-homogenous infrastructure, which has certain cost and security advantages; ability to leverage pieces of the LAMP stack; less vendor tie-in; reduced licensing costs; and so forth.

    Asked about the future of its .NET strategy, Ballmer admitted the platform "had stalled in the last 12 months". But there would be a renewed .NET push, he said, and this was "an assigned priority" for the government sector.

    "Government has really been pushing for stronger interoperability. We can't support open source but we can support interoperability," he said.


    News.com: Ballmer: We'll kick-start "stalled" .NET
     

    Monday, June 27, 2005

    Underhanded Code


    Picture credit: http://www.irasov.com
    Underhanded C ContestThe invaluable Bruce Schneier points us to an Underhanded C contest. The challenge: to create source code that looks innocent, yet provides a malicious capability. Some of the samples I've seen employ obfuscated buffer overflow attacks to launch their malevolent behaviors.

    Two thoughts ran through my head after reading this:

    1) What, if any, are the implications for the open-source community? Some closed-source advocates might point to this example as evidence of open-source insecurity ("...see, even with full transparency, it's possible to infect a distro..."). I personally don't buy that argument. After all, we're forced to trust that closed-source vendors thoroughly vet code and developers.

    Furthermore, last year's well-publicized anti-open-source polemic (EE Times: "Linux: unfit for national security") hasn't exactly swung opinion, at least from what I can tell.

    2) A previous missive on self-replicating code referenced Ken Thompson's classic ACM article: "Reflections on Trusting Trust." In it, he describes why compilers -- written in the language they compile -- can't be trusted. Why? Simply because someone could surreptitiously modify the compiler source to infect every piece of code it builds with a malicious payload. Imagine an underhanded modification to gcc  , for instance.

    The Underhanded C contest is a good idea. It forces us to carefully consider code contributions in this, the golden age of Marvel Comics open-source software development.
     

    Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda


    Picture credit: http://www.husseinandterror.com
    http://www.husseinandterror.comThanks to the National Review Online's Deroy Murdoch, here's a compendium of various ties between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda. Andrew McCarthy also described these ties in a separate article. And, of course, no presentation is complete without mentioning Murdock's multimedia presentation entitled, "Hussein and Terror" (not for the faint of heart).

    In any event, these make for interesting reading when transformed into an easily readable list of activities:

    o After running an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, [Zarqawi] found his way to Baathist Baghdad, where he reportedly checked into Olympic Hospital, an elite facility run by the late Uday Hussein, son of the captured tyrant. Zarqawi is believed to have received medical treatment for a leg injury sustained while dodging American GIs who toppled the Taliban. He convalesced in Baghdad for some two months. Once he was back on his foot, Zarqawi then opened an Ansar al-Islam terrorist training camp in northern Iraq...

    o According to the Clinton Justice Department's spring 1998 indictment of bin Laden, "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."

    o In what the CIA nicknamed "Operation Dogmeat," two Iraqi students who lived in the Philippines tried to demolish U.S. Information Service headquarters in Manila. Iraqi diplomat Muwufak al Ani met with the bombers five times before the attack. His car even took them near their target on January 19, 1991. Their bomb exploded prematurely, killing Ahmed J. Ahmed, but his accomplice, Abdul Kadham Saad, survived and was whisked to a Manila hospital. Saad, carrying documents bearing two distinct identities, asked staffers to alert the Iraqi embassy, then recited its phone number.

    o Around this time, according to former high-level CIA counterterrorist Stanley Bedlington, Hussein paired Iraqi intelligence operatives with members of the Arab Liberation Front to execute attacks. "The Iraqis had given them all passports," he said, "but they were all in numerical sequence." These tell-tale passport numbers helped friendly governments nab these terror teams.

    o President George Herbert Walker Bush ignored information that Hussein "was offering state payment to terrorists," then-Senator Al Gore (D., Tennessee) declared on October 15, 1992. Gore also listed more than a dozen examples of Iraq-sponsored terrorism and said "an estimated 1,400 terrorists were operating openly out of Iraq."

    o "In 1992, elements of al Qaeda came to Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein," Abu Aman Amaleeki, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence, said on ABC's Nightline on September 26, 2002. Speaking from a Kurdish prison, he added: "And among them was Ayman al Zawahiri," bin Laden's chief deputy. "I was present when Ayman al Zawahiri visited Baghdad."

    o Former Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) Deputy Director Faruq Hijazi, reports a reliable foreign spy agency, supplied blank Yemeni passports to al Qaeda in 1992.

    o Mohammed Salameh, a 1993 World Trade Center attacker, called Baghdad 46 times in the two months before bomb maker Abdul Rahman Yasin flew from Baghdad to New Jersey to join the plot. Salameh's June 1992 phone bill totaled $1,401, which prompted his disconnection for non-payment. After the blast — which killed six individuals and injured 1,042 — Yasin fled to Baghdad, where records and multiple press accounts show he received safe haven and Baathist cash.

    o Based on a 20-page IIS document discovered in Baghdad, the Defense Intelligence Agency reports that "Alleged conspirators employed by IIS are wanted in connection with the [June 25, 1996] Khobar Towers bombing and the assassination attempt in 1993 of former President Bush."

    o In an October 27, 2003 memo, Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith explained Hussein's bonus pay for terrorists: "Iraq increased support to Palestinian groups after major terrorist attacks and...the change in Iraqi relations with al Qaeda after the [1998 east African] embassy bombings followed this pattern." A top Philippine terrorist also said Iraq's payments to the al Qaeda-tied Abu Sayyaf grew after successful assaults.

    o ABC News reported on January 14, 1999, that it "has learned that in December [1998] an Iraqi intelligence chief, named Faruq Hijazi, now Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden."

    o On January 5, 2000, Malaysian intelligence photographed September 11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar being escorted through Kuala Lumpur's airport by VIP facilitator Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi recommended to Malaysian Airlines by Baghdad's embassy there. The pair soon were photographed again at al Qaeda's three-day planning summit for the October 2000 U.S.S. Cole and 9/11 attacks. Three separate documents recently unearthed in Iraq identify an Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as a lieutenant colonel in Uday Hussein's elite Saddam Fedayeen.

    o Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani is the former Iraqi diplomat suspected of meeting September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta in Prague on April 8, 2001, and possibly June 2, 2000, the day before Atta flew from Prague to Newark, New Jersey. Top secret Pentagon records cite a Czech intelligence report that al Ani "ordered the IIS finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office." During the summer of 2000, $99,455 was wired from financial institutions in the United Arab Emirates to Atta's Sun Trust bank account in Florida.


    Murdock: Hussein and Terror

    Update: SoCalPundit has an excellent set of resources that clarify the links between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda.

    Sunday, June 26, 2005

    Iraq, WMDs, and al-Zarqawi: the Jordan Trial


    Picture credit: CNN
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueI haven't seen much coverage of a trial that's taking place in Jordan. Thirteen men affiliated with al Qaeda are accused of planning to detonate chemical weapons on instructions from Musab al-Zarqawi.

    "They sought to disperse poisonous gases which would have caused death, illnesses and blindness," Col. Najeh al-Azam testified. al-Azam is a chemical expert in Jordan's Security Services, which investigated the group and foiled the plot in April of 2004.

    Jordanian officials believe that if the attack been carried out, thousands of people would have perished.

    The Guardian elaborates:

    ...Islamic militants planned to detonate an explosion that would have sent a cloud of toxic chemicals across Jordan, causing death, blindness and sickness, a chemical expert testified in a military court Wednesday.

    ...The accused include al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, and three other fugitives who are being tried in absentia...


    CNN discusses the links between the suspects and al-Zarqawi in more depth:

    Photo
    Azmi Jayyousi (CNN)

    Jordanian intelligence suspects Jayyousi returned from Iraq in January after a meeting with al-Zarqawi in which they allegedly plotted to hit the three targets in Amman.

    In a series of raids, the Jordanians said, they seized 20 tons of chemicals and numerous explosives. Also seized were three trucks equipped with specially modified plows, apparently designed to crash through security barricades.

    The first alleged target was the Jordanian intelligence headquarters. The alleged blast was intended to be a big one.

    "According to my experience as an explosives expert, the whole of the Intelligence Department will be destroyed, and nothing of it will remain, nor anything surrounding it," Jayyousi said.


    John at Powerline notes:

    ...after the fall of Afghanistan at the end of 2001, Zarqawi and other al Qaeda veterans made their way to Iraq, where, secure under the wing of Saddam Hussein, they plotted chemical weapons attacks on countries friendly to the U.S., as well as the murder (successfully carried out) of an American diplomat. And yet, to this day it remains an article of faith on the left that Saddam's Iraq was a kite-flyer's paradise with no connection to international terrorism, no relations with al Qaeda, and, of course, no chemical weapons. Maybe the current trial will reveal where the chemicals assembled for the attack on Jordan came from; maybe it won't. But we don't need any new information to understand that Saddam's regime protected and supported the deadliest of al Qaeda's terrorists.


    And how do we know Zarqawi ended up in Iraq after the fall of Afghanistan? From numerous reports, including those published by the traditional neocon press outlets including the New York Times and al Jazeera:

    According to Jordanian court documents, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi left for Iraq via Iran, eventually settling in the corner of northern Iraq controlled by Ansar al-Islam.[79]

    The next known sighting of Zarqawi came from Jordanian officials, who claim that they spotted Zarqawi on Sept. 9, 2002, when he illegally entered Jordan from Syria.[80]

    A month later, senior American diplomat, Laurence Foley, was murdered outside his home in Amman. Jordanian agents arrested three men involved in the killing who claimed that they had been recruited, armed, and paid by Zarqawi. He was sentenced to death in absentia. Court documents claim that Zarqawi planned and financed the operation during his stay in Iraq.[81]


    So, just to recap, a major terrorist leader affiliated with Al Qaeda used Iraq as a base of operations prior to the U.S. invasion. Not only did he orchestrate the murder of a senior American diplomat, but he was knee-deep in a WMD-attack designed to kill thousands.

    No, there's no story here. Just go about your business.

    PowerLine: Pay No Attention to the Terrorists Behind the Curtain
     

    Parliament of Obstructionists


    Picture credit: http://www.willisms.com
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueIn other words: the Democratic party circa 2005. Michelle Malkin points us to WILLisms' all-too-revealing summary of senior Democratic officials' rhetoric. I laughed. I cried. It moved me to post this entry. Here's a taste, but read the whole thing:

    When [Nancy "Majority Insurance" Pelosi was] queried on her plan for saving Social Security, [she] offered this eye-opening comment:

    "...why should we put a plan in? We will go — our plan is to stop him from — stop him. He must be stopped."


    Yes, the Democratic party... ensuring its minority status for years to come.

    WILLisms: Rabid Donkeys On The Loose
     

    Saturday, June 25, 2005

    The Hub of Digital Media Convergence: Lawrence, Kansas


    Picture credit: http://www.robcurley.com
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueIt's true, Virginia. Lawrence, Kansas is the hub of digital media convergence. Why? Because it's home to Rob Curley, the Lawrence-Journal World's director of New Media. Arguably the most visionary convergence journalist in the world, Curley has orchestrated the construction of:

    The Lawrence-Journal World - the newspaper's online presence, winner of the 2004 Edgie award for best overall news site (under 75,000 population), another award for most innovative visitor participation, and an EPpy Award for the Best Internet News Service.

    Lawrence.com - a gen-Y entertainment site, which has won both an Edgie award for best entertainment site and an Eppy award for best overall design.

    KUsports.com - the Kansas University sports site, which has won Edgie awards for best sports site and most innovative use of digital media.

    Curley's tenet is to ignore national news, because he doesn't want to compete with CNN. Instead he provides an unbelievable level of local detail - at one point even covering age 9 to 12 sports like T-ball as if it were the major leagues. Boxscores, interviews, pictures of the fields.... one little kid even had a classic quote during an online interview: "I'm really seeing the ball well now... I'm in a groove".

    To give you a sense of Curley (and his team's) creativity, consider the following KUsports features:

    Weather - a game-time weather mapper that modifies the conventional local weather maps to add local landmarks ("...the wind's blowing straight past Joe's Pizza into the stadium...")

    Simulations - Curley's team simulated the entire Kansas football schedule using an X-Box, created broadcasts of the simulated games, and even generated a complete database of online stats (Curley: "...and just like in real life, our virtual kicker sucks...").

    Statistics - the team hired an intern to enter the boxscore of every Kansas game since the 19th century into a complete, searchable database.

    Want to hear from the visionary himself? Take the time to listen to this highly entertaining interview with Curley. Then visit his blog from time to time. Creativity and a laser-like focus on the business are rare traits in a single person.
     

    Friday, June 24, 2005

    The Google AdSense Mystery: Revisited


    Picture credit: http://www.google.fr
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueI have some questions regarding my AdSense reports. Whoa, let me back up a bit. I use Google AdSense, primarily to familiarize myself with context-sensitive ad networks. I place AdSense text ads on my blog, a discussion board, and a newsletter that gets sent out from time to time. Check this report out of advertising performance over the last few months:

    Date rangePage ViewsClicksRevenue
    Dec 1 - Dec 22, 2004282,50483$23.73
    Jan 1 - Jan 22, 2005328,126131$32.48
    Feb 1 - Feb 22, 2005318,90880$12.95
    Mar 1 - Mar 22, 2005379,831474$63.81
    Apr 1 - Apr 22, 2005280,116544$60.10
    May 1 - May 22, 2005281,606454$55.48
    June 1 - June 22, 2005228,743307$36.94


    Okay, so here are my questions:

    1) What in the name of Rowdy Roddy Piper caused the "click-through explosion" between 2/05 and 3/05?
    2) What in the heck happened to my traffic in June?
    3) And what ever happened to Marie Osmond?

    In all seriousness, I really wonder about #1. Were my astounding improvements in click-through typical for most Google AdSense outlets? If so, it's no wonder Google had breakout earnings last quarter.

    And is my drop-off in click-through percentage typical for the Google network? And, if so, what are the implications for Google's results this quarter?
     

    Scotus: Property Rights


    Picture credit: http://www.getusout.org
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueThe Supreme Court decision known as Kelo, which is concerned with the seizure of private property for the public good, has raised the veritable firestorm of controversy. Argue with Signs has an extensive collection of reactions from the blogosphere:

    The Supreme Court has ruled that cities can seize homes through eminent domain for lame purposes such as “economic development.” ...

    Bryan Costin: So now, apparently, the only justification the government needs to take away your house and land is that the government wants more money. Have you ever met a government that didn’t want more money? Me neither.

    Dan Melson: This is about fat wallets, yes, but it isn’t intrinsically and unavoidably linked solely to fat wallets. Below that, more importantly, is the ability to move things politically. Once the public taking of property depends upon who has the loudest political voice, no one is safe. Down this path lies madness. Stark raving insanity.


    Putting the decision in context, John at Powerline notes:

    ...a Minneapolis suburb condemned a stretch along the metropolitan area's major beltway to serve as the new headquarters for Best Buy Company. This was prime real estate, which was already occupied by other profitable businesses--a major car dealer, restaurants, etc. They resisted the taking, but it was upheld.

    My point is not that these decisions were correct--I have considerable sympathy for the other side--but rather that the Kelo decision shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has been following this area of the law...


    Argue with Signs: Scotus: Property Rights
     

    Kennedy vs. Rumsfeld


    Picture credit: http://one38.org
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueThere's just something fundamentally disturbing about this transcript of SecDef Rumsfeld's appearance before the Senate. It's not just the corrosive tongue-lashing from Senator Kennedy. And it's not the 55-gallon drum of vitriol or the pandemic talking points (soon to appear in an Al-Jazeera  op-ed piece). It also appears to me as a blatant hip-check of Durbin stage left. Radioblogger sums up the transcript in concise fashion:

    What is truly amazing about Kennedy's rant is what the alternative, [Kennedy]-controlled universe would be today.

    Saddam Hussein would still be in power, he would still be bribing his way out of the U.S. sanctions, and he would be continuing to reconstitute his WMD program, with the full intent on being a regional, if not global, threat. He would still be writing checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. His sons would still be literally raping and pillaging the landscape. Graves would still be filled, people would still be persecuted. Libya would not have turned over weapons information, and Syria would still run Lebanon. But I guess to Ted Kennedy, the world would be a much better place.


    RadioBlogger: Kennedy vs. Rumsfeld
     

    Thursday, June 23, 2005

    Book Review: MoneyBall



    MoneyBallI just posted the following review on Amazon:

    You need not be a baseball fan to appreciate Michael Lewis' MoneyBall. Lewis tracks Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, who built a series of powerhouse ballclubs with a major handicap. Despite having a payroll that was petty cash to teams like the Yankees, Beane's clubs excelled. A series of excellent finishes, culminating with a playoff series that took the Yankees to the limit, solidified Beane's reputation. But how did he do it?

    Beane's unconventional methods were the key. Using Bill James (of Baseball Abstract fame) as an inspiration, the A's GM hired the best and brightest statisticians and dispensed with the conventional wisdom of opinionated scouts. So what if a college catcher had a "bad baseball body"? Beane didn't care. He was concerned with metrics like on-base-percentage, which turns out to be a much better predictor of major league success than any scout.

    Dealing with players as business units, each with measurable ROI (return on investment), Beane bought low and sold high. If a closer cranked out a bunch of saves, Beane figured he could trade him for higher value than he was really worth. Saves were a misleading statistic: strikeouts, walks, and home-runs-allowed were the only true ways to measure a pitcher's performance. A "superstar" was simply a stat-generating machine and if the same amount of money could be leveraged on someone else that could yield similar stats, why not make a trade?

    In retrospect -- and like all great ideas -- Beane's tenets are remarkably simple. It's just interesting that it took baseball over a century to figure out that stats such as ERA and RBI are pretty much meaningless. What matter are stats that historically prove to be predictors of baseball victories: on-base-average and slugging average for batters, for instance. A quick, fascinating read, MoneyBall is an elegant look at a smart GM and his godfather: Bill James.
     

    Oh, those  dangers of outsourcing, part V


    Picture credit: Online Sun
    Online SunHave a seat. Please. Ready for yet another identity theft debacle? Here's another assault vector: outsourcing, which we also discussed in May.

    Following closely on the heels of the Indian call center fraud scandal, the Pakistan telecomm strike, the Bangalore bomb scares at Wipro and Infosys, and various terrorist threats, the offshored backoffice is a dangerous place. And I don't mean just for the workers, but for citizens abroad whose data is handled by firms with questionable vetting practices.

    The Sun reports:

    Crooked call centre workers in India are flogging details of Britons’ bank accounts, a Sun probe has found. Our undercover reporter was sold the top secret information on a thousand accounts, and numbers of passports and credit cards.

    An undercover reporter was able to buy the details thousands of UK banking accounts, password particulars and credit cards numbers from crooked call centre workers in India...


    The article isn't online yet, but The Register picks up the story:

    The paper says one of its journalists bought details of 1,000 UK banking customers from an IT worker in Delhi for £4.25 each. He was also able to buy the numbers of credit cards and account passwords. An unnamed security expert hired by the paper verified that the details were genuine. The information sold could be readily exploited by ID thieves to apply for credit cards or loans under assumed identities or to simply loot compromised accounts. The call centre worker bragged that he could sell up to 200,000 account details each month.

    The Sun handed over a dossier on its investigation to the City of London Police. In a statement, the City of London Police said: "Unfortunately we have no jurisdiction to prosecute this in the UK. However we have passed information through Interpol to the Indian authorities and will be working with them to secure the prosecution of this individual.".

    Amicus, the union, said the case highlighted possible data protection risks about moving financial services overseas. "Companies that have offshore jobs need to reflect on their decision and the assumption that cost savings benefiting them and their shareholders outweigh consumer confidentiality and confidence," Dave Fleming, senior finance officer, told the BBC.


    For those firms utilizing offshore resources to handle consumer identity data, an alarm claxon just went off. Again.

    Update: The eminent Bruce Schneier takes exception with this general viewpoint in his latest post. In a nutshell, his take is that the problem is with people, not offshore/onshore. But a commenter notes differences between the legal framework between countries that can make pursuing remedies noticably different.

    And here's another difference. In the U.S., there are accepted standards for employment. A typical call-center worker will be vetted through a standardized background-check process, a drug-screen, and so forth.

    Can a firm that offshores consumer data describe the vetting processes of their offshore firm? And the reliability of those doing the vetting?

    IMO, it is far riskier to pipe sensitive and valuable data offshore than it is to keep it onshore, all other factors being equal.
     

    Security as competitive advantage


    Picture credit: http://www.cumberlandgroup.com
    Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueInteresting snippet from a roundup of the recent spate of identity theft debacles (i.e., CardSystems, Bank of America, Lexis-Nexis, Harvard, ChoicePoint, Cal-Berkeley... *yawn*... *hrnggh*... sorry, dozed off there):

    ...A May 2005 survey of 8,200 consumers conducted by Lightspeed Research showed that over 80 percent of respondents felt threatened by online identity theft and online fraud.

    The survey also indicated that 80 percent of respondents would have more trust in their account provider -- and greater confidence in transacting online -- if their provider offered a hardware-based strong authentication solution.

    In addition, 44.5 percent of those surveyed said they would be more likely to switch account providers if a competitor offered hardware-based two-factor authenticators...


    I'll take the latter two assertions with a grain of salt. I'd be shocked if 40% of respondents could even define "strong authentication" or "two-factor". But I believe the first contention: people feel increasingly threatened by the tide of cyber-crime washing over the Internet.

    So what happens next? Yep, you guessed it! Prepare yourself for a spanking new marketing blitz by companies hoping to pitch identity tracking solutions for consumers. Coffee mugs... tee shirts... USB key fobs... towels (oops, just ignore that Holiday Inn towel I'm drying off with)...

    ...Take the new product launched by credit information management company Intersections. Called Privacy Protect, the service will keep tabs on credit information as well as public information like DMV, criminal, and mortgage and real estate records. In addition to tracking a person's credit information, such as who makes queries against it, it tracks how other unique information, which can be used for fraudulent activities, is accessed...


    Opportunistic, eh? The offering appears to be, in essence, a credit data aggregator with timely alerts.

    ...For a subscription fee, the service will aggregate and track not only a person's credit information but other unique forms of information that can be used for fraudulent activities... If new applications are made in the customer's name, or address changes at banks, the service alerts go out, for example. In essense, the service monitors publicly-available information that many companies use today to run background checks on prospective employees or customers. After all, if businesses can access your data, then why can't you track how they track it? ...


    Seems like a reasonable idea. Especially if the following Gartner estimate has any validity at all:

    ...According to Gartner (Quote, Chart), 9.4 million online U.S. adults were victimized by identity theft between April 2003 and April 2004. The losses amounted to $11.7 billion...


    Wow. ID theft is as common as halitosis at a garlic growers' convention.

    So, where's the business opportunity? It's a quality and differentiation issue, in my opinion.

    Companies that can demonstrate compliance to standards will likely have a competitive advantage. If your firm handles credit-cards and meets PCI, why not emblazon that fact on your marketing material?

    Slap the PCI-certified logo on your web site and stationary. Actually, I really don't know if there is a "PCI-certified" logo. But if there isn't there should be. While PCI is certainly no panacea (as Bruce Schneier has already pointed out), I'll bet CardSystems wishes they'd implemented it 100%.

    ...The standard, called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI, consists of 12 requirements (PDF), such as installing a firewall and anti-virus software and regularly updating virus definitions. It also requires companies to encrypt data, to restrict data access to people who need it and to assign a unique identifying number to people with access rights in order to monitor who views and downloads data...


    PCI is a good start if only because firms can use it to their competitive advantage. You can bet the major merchants and the credit-card companies will be asking the PCI question of their processors.

    The next step? Any firm that handles or accepts sensitive consumer data should voluntarily adopt the principles of PCI on its own. And, hopefully, new and more comprehensive standards will be in place as part of a regulatory framework designed to force companies to better protect identity data.

    InternetNews: Fronting a Fix on Data Breaches