A recent update to Symantec’s antivirus software rendered some Windows-based PCs inoperable, the security software maker disclosed Friday.
An update earlier this week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a “blue screen of death,” the company revealed on its Web site …
The company said it learned of the issue Wednesday night from customers, who said they were forced to manually remove the software from disabled machines, a process they described as time consuming … “This whole episode is a joke, had the issue been a conflict with a random device driver then I could maybe slightly more sympathetic,” the customer said. “But for it to conflict with its own Symantec related drivers and cause this issue is a total farce …”
Anti-virus software can’t be dispensed with by most. On the other hand, I was able to rid myself of it a few years ago through the combination of running things in a sandbox and knowing how to manually pick unrecognized malware off a machine.
I realized the only malware that was getting into my stuff was undetected by signature scanning and, subsequently, always removed before a signature update and automated purge was available. Indeed, the signature update would occur because I eventually submitted a sample and was curious about response times which were generally very good.
However, there was little practical value in continuing the use of it.
But I don’t recommend this for most. Regulars of DD blog, exempted, of course.
“In my opinion, it’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” said general Keith Alexander, he of the National Security Agency, on cyberattacks launched at our great country. Not quite, and no one has to rely on opinion. The greatest transfer of wealth in history is the economic collapse of 2008, a disaster that shaved 40 percent off the worth of most Americans and which still has the nation in a deep slump.
“That’s our future disappearing in front of us,” Alexander added on the consequences of cyberattack.
It’s a claim that’s been made more than once, mostly because it gets your attention.
However, Monday was the latest example, in a talk on cybersecurity and American power given at the American Enterprise Institute.
Cybersecurity is a serious national issue. But the implication that it is the issue or that your future is disappearing in front you due to the lack of it should put a bug up your ass.
The preeminent national security challenge faced by this country is devolution into the equivalent of a banana republic with the largest military in world history and all the implications of that for stability and, ahem, the preservation of economic well-being. The future disappeared for millions, right in front of their eyes, between 2007 and 2008. What’s left is still dribbling away.
Moving on, in the introductory part of the talk Alexander reflected on the advances made in computing power, musing about what it would mean for gene sequencing — “think what we can do for gene research” (leave the predictions on molecular biology to the experts, is all I’ll say), invoking the number of apps for Crapple devices — 500,000, and that in a couple years there will be more mobile computers in circulation than people.
Which tells you that the world’s haves are accumulating multiple gadgets at a furious rate, not that conditions are wonderfully transformative.
The statistics are necessary to give an audience reference points to hang onto.
Americans love statistics and if furnished with enough they will often not notice when one is straying into quantifying the unquantifiable. Which is where you are when hearing about the greatest transfer of wealth, ever.
But all of this was just a preamble to the center of Alexander’s talk on cybersecurity, the meat of which started with the problem posed by companies that did not know they had been hacked. They outnumber those that do, 100 to 1, he said. This is very bad and requires an evolution to information sharing at “network speed.”
This, according to the discussion, hinges on applying a “thin layer” of security on top of the “cloud,” with the patches, updates and anti-malware signatures pumped out automatically. In addition, information sharing equals the rapid dispensation of data on threats occurring in real time.
Alexander assured the crowd this was all to be done with care for civil liberties. It’s not the e-mail they’re interested in so much as what’s coming with it, and the signatures of attackers.
Information sharing between government and industry has been an issue for almost twenty years. No one who has argued for more of it has ever believed there is enough. It’s always been that way, along with the promises that no one will be reading the mail. That’s the standard line. Nothing new here.
Paradoxically, the people making the arguments for more information sharing now know that the conditions they want are virtually impossible. It’s always unfinished business with many private sector institutions not interested in that level of two way flow on computer attacks. However they cannot bring themselves to say it. Thinking in the United States has always been crippled by a beamish adherence to a “can do” ethic. A realistic admission that some things just can’t be done is heresy.
One suspects the battle is also lost to get the “American people” to trust anyone from the government on the issue. This is not any fault of Keith Alexander but a national condition that can’t be remedied by good words, or even law.
Many already believe their mail is being read, anyway. It’s a perception that’s fatalistic and entrenched. Does it matter? The way things have gone, it would seem not. Public debate has made very little difference on what the national security side of the US government wants to do, or does, in the last decade. No heads have rolled because the security men have gone too far.
In Tim Weiner’s “Enemies,” a history of the FBI, the author asserts the FBI was reading national e-mail for most of the war on terror, anyway, part of this under the name of what has been called Stellar Wind. But then it stopped.
By the record of who the FBI was arresting in this country and the charges brought, particularly through the middle years of the last decade, there appears to be a great deal of truth to such assertions.
However, the new requests for information sharing are for different reasons than digging up terrorists in the country’s backyard. Now it’s for the timely and rapid application of technical solutions.
Alexander also spoke to the audience about not wanting to wait for something bad to happen and then jumping to “where we don’t want to be” in the world of monitoring and collection.
Well, that would seem to have already happened and cyberattack was not the precipitating cause — it was that Osama bin Laden fellow.
Alexander told his audience he would be where he didn’t want to be the day after “there went the electrical grid, there went the financial sector.” Testifying before Congress about how it all could have been avoided, as with 9/11.
That’s what everyone says and Alexander is sincere. He does sound like he means it. But you’re always gonna have those kinds of days, one or two of them, in a lifetime. That’s the vagary of history and no one can get around it.
On the other hand, if you conduct a meaningful public poll on how much average Americans really care about “the financial sector” being protected against cyberattacks, you might get an earful on how they’d like to be protected from the financial sector. Bank of America and Wall Street aren’t going to be popular again for a good long time. This is called ignoring the big picture, or historical context, and it has always had meaning for issues in national security. You cannot defend something or win the war when the little people, the locals, have little or no interest or incentive in rallying to your side.
Alexander took questions for about fifteen minutes. To his credit he dismissed one reporter’s query on whether or not al Qaeda had a serious cyberattack capability. No, he answered but if someone with the right training were able to take advantage of knowledge and tools available on the Internet …
I’d have answered, “Look, buddy, al Qaeda’s virtually operationally dead. They have a hard time making underwear bombs, finding people to run them and even getting out .pdf files of their company organ. What makes you think they’re great cyber-warriors?”
It’s sort of like asking if one thinks the Cleveland Browns might win the Super Bowl in 2013. Y’know, the name was good once. A real long time ago. And, theoretically, they could get better.
But government men have to be cautious about what they’ll admit.
For the sake of a discussion that emphasizes the gravity of dealing with cybersecurity it’s just easier to quote someone higher up, like Leon Panetta: “Technologically, the capability to paralyze this country is there now.”
It works in a talks even though the people who’ve been around since the beginning quietly hoot and roll their eyes.
Extreme heat, power blackouts and wildfires are no reason to mull over the consequences of global warming. Keep your eyes on the ball, folks! Instead they illustrate how frail US civilization is. And they let us have just a little taste of what life might be like after electromagnetic pulse doom.
If you thought embarrassing failure in the Republican presidential primary was any reason to keep Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy chief Newt Gingrich off the pages of the Washington Post, you were mistaken.
Without power, the comforts of home become worthless. You sit in the sweltering heat, realizing you are living in a box that, without electricity, is a trap. You pray for the “juice??? to return before your groceries go bad. You either make do in the heat or find refuge with friends who have electricity …
I write this now because of my concern for national security and our power grid, which are susceptible to doomsday-level damage if hit by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike …
In 2009, my friend — and sometimes co-author — William R. Forstchen published a truly frightening book, “One Second After.??? (I wrote the foreword.) The story is fiction but based on hard facts. It is a cautionary tale about the threat of EMP strikes and major solar storms, known as coronal mass ejections.
William turned to bipartisan congressional studies published in 2004 and 2008 and interviewed many experts. His book made the New York Times bestseller list and helped to trigger what some call the “prepper??? movement …
It’s a play on the old pejorative “Vietnamization,” the word for the failed strategy of propping up the old Army of the Republic of Vietnam with US air power while transferring the job of fighting the war to it.
Without US air, the Afghan toady army, like the ARVN, gets beat up.
US bombing always suppresses or removes the enemy, like removing a boulder blocking a road to nowhere.
“Asked how Afghan soldiers or police officers might manage a similar tactical problem in the same canyon, Commander Burks gave a knowing frown,” reads the Times. “I don’t know, but they’re not going to do this.???
And the Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog has recently posted a Congressional Research Report on Afghan Army casualties. It is here.
There are two important figures.
And the numbers, if reliable, on Afghan National military casualties.
One can only tell the national toady army and police force don’t bear the brunt of any fighting. When they do fight, they are more likely to die than US forces.
This may also indicate other problems.
The Afghan National army may, like the ARVN, be casualty and risk averse, reluctant to fight. And that when it fights, it loses.
It may also often be ambushed, in its barracks, at home or in the field. And that the handling of those blown up or shot is much less effective than US retrieval of combat casualties, meaning you are more likely to not survive if hit in the war.
Over ten years in Afghanistan and the US military cannot make a decent fighting force out of the locals dragooned to finish the war for an unpopular central government.
Recall all the guff Democrats take for being snobs, for not embracing stock car racking with enough fervor, for being prissy and fussy, like the hated French or all those fags in England. It’s a class thing, showing a lack of authenticity. They, we, are not salt of the earth.
And Mitt Romney’s family ‘sport’ is something the average Tea Party voter could easily watch on the giant flatscreen while crushing an emptied Budweiser can in his right hand.
GLADSTONE, N.J. — Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, who plan to attend the opening of the Olympic Games in London this summer, now have a personal rooting interest in the event.
Jan Ebeling, Mrs. Romney’s longtime riding tutor, and his horse Rafalca, co-owned by Mrs. Romney, earned a berth on the United States Olympic dressage team on Saturday.
Mr. Ebeling, 53, who has spent a decade knocking on the door of top international competition, made his first Olympic team with a third-place finish here at the United States Equestrian Team Foundation headquarters, a century-old stable built by the financier James Cox Brady to adjoin his 64-room mansion.
While Mr. Romney was barnstorming on a bus tour of swing states, Mrs. Romney watched from a V.I.P. tent as Mr. Ebeling executed a smooth “test??? of flying changes, in which Rafalca seemed to skip down the arena, and piaffes, an in-place trot …
As millions tune in to the Olympics in prime time this summer, just before Mr. Romney will be reintroducing himself to the nation at the Republican convention, viewers are likely to see “up close and personal??? segments on NBC about the Romneys and dressage, a sport of six-figure horses and $1,000 saddles. The Romneys declared a loss of $77,000 on their 2010 tax returns for the share in the care and feeding of Rafalca, which Mrs. Romney owns with Mr. Ebeling’s wife, Amy, and a family friend, Beth Meyers.
Remember, ithe horse does not share the nature of its owners. A horse does not choose for whom he trots. I like horses.
Yes, yes, you’re right. A lot of this is about class warfare and hating on the wealthy. Gotta problem with it? What’re you, some kinda commie-loving Euro-homo? I bet you don’t like pig’s feet or blind robbins.
Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences …
[Mitt Romney] doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.
We got outraised last month, and not by a little bit.
Part Two of getting outraised is getting outspent. That translates into a potentially devastating sweep of negative, misleading messaging that’s going to flood the airwaves in swing states — over and over and over — until November 6th. It’s already started, and it’s only July.
Will you make a donation of $4 or more to help close this gap?
How this election plays out will define our democracy: Can super PACs and hundreds of millions of dollars from Republicans and the Romney campaign — through the brute force of negative advertising alone — drown out millions of voices?
Or can the politics of inclusivity [sic] — asking supporters to chip in $5, $10, $25 at a time — keep the margin close enough to win?
Please donate $4 or more today to close the gap:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised
Thanks,
Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager
Obama for America
Julianna Skinner Smoot and Lon Barton Johnson were married Saturday in Northport, Mich. The Rev. Thomas H. John Sr. performed the ceremony at the Northport Indian Mission United Methodist Church, where he is pastor.
The bride, 44, is keeping her name. She works in Chicago as a deputy manager for President Obama’s re-election campaign. Until March, she was the White House social secretary. She graduated from Smith. She is a daughter of Edward B. Smoot and Julia L. Smoot of Willow Springs, N.C.
The bridegroom, 40, is a partner in TVV Capital, a private fund in Nashville that invests in small and midsize manufacturers and other companies, chiefly in the Southeast …
The canvas e-mails from the swells shown in the pages of the New York Times’ wedding section is so not cool.
The husband of the fund-raiser is a partner in a junior league Bain.
Could the machine choose people who aren’t just more shoeshiners for the 0.1 percent and the forces of national entropy?
From images of corporate raiding, to luxury speedboats, to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, to mega-mansions in the Hamptons, this week’s stories suggest that the candidacy of Mitt Romney – poster-boy for the symbiotic relationship between big money and the modern Republican party – is in serious trouble …
Last weekend’s photos of the Romney clan on a luxury speedboat cruising around a lake in New Hampshire, where their multimillion-dollar compound sits, were startling in their tone-deafness.
What is so very puzzling about the whole episode is the sheer in-your-face-ness of it.
Yet, perhaps that is the point. As a very perceptive article in the New York Magazine, Lisa Miller describes how new psychological research indicates that wealth erodes empathy with others. In the “Money-Empathy Gap”, Miller cites one researcher who says that:
“The rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
I changed the thumbnail photo on Mean Future, canceling out the “I Love Capitalism” Tea Party man. It’s too disturbed, like watching someone you’re sure has slipped from their prescription drug straight jacket.
I was on Lake Winnipesaukee once, as a child. I accidentally threw a neighbor’s fishing rod overboard with a bungled cast. It was never recovered.
Hank Williams, Jr. has put his new album of mostly Tea Party-themed I-Hate-the-President music, Old School New Rules, on YouTube. You may not be able to get through it. But I listened for you.
Readers may or may not remember Hank lost one of his big money gigs last year, getting tossed as the opening theme to Monday Night Football, for comparing the President to Hitler. Country music did not rally to his cause.
And it won’t this time. Because while the genre and fans won’t tolerate the Dixie Chicks, and even went out of their way to ruin them, they also won’t publicly indulge anything like him.
Darryl Worley found it out with Keep the Change, an anti-Obama single he peddled to the Tea Party, hoping grass roots interest would force country music radio and television to play it. (If Worley made a penny of business value for every play on the fan-made video for it, he’s grossed about 2300 dollars. Boosted to a dime per play it’s still a sub-poverty wage for one office worker with a family. So while the numbers superficially looked like support from the standpoint of a major label artist who had previously had a hit single, they meant nothing.)
The best Darryl Worley could manage was an appearance on Huckabee. His record, promised after the release of the “Keep the Change” single never materialized. Instead, his company went out of business.
Like with Worley, Hank’s dilemma is that country music is emotionally embalmed. (He has also stupidly put his old anti-Obama tune with the exact same title, “Keep the Change,” on the new LP. It smells strongly of desperation.)
It’s classic rock refugee music for white people desperate to hold onto the delusion that if they’re just good enough, family-loving, God worshiping, hard workers, everything will turn out right in the end.
And what strikes fear in them is the wisp of any idea that this isn’t the way things are, that the country they think they live in hasn’t been the way they thought for a long time. Reality, looming over everyone like an unstoppable slow motion avalanche, threatens everything they believe in.
The music must therefore remain cheesy comfort.
Hank Williams Jr. is cheesy but not a comfort. And if there are songs that blame the President for everything, tunes that vow vengeance at the voting booth — well, the audience might find it agreeable privately but they won’t buy it and country music radio won’t play it. All the buxom young cut-off wearing girls on the summer tour circuit will find the mood harshed by Hank’s clumsy song to the small businessman, “Who’s Lookin’ Out for Number One.”
Counry music fans just don’t, don’t, don’t want trouble.
And Hank’s music is angry and a bit psychologically troubling but also not that great, expertly played by ringers and sung in two ways, either as a smooth ham or a mild boor tilting at the government.
In other words, if you want to have a genuine shit fit maybe you should really have one, instead of a big Nashville-session-man-and-buddies-middle-of-the-road imitation of it.
“I want to dedicate this song to every working man and woman in this country and everyone trying to run a business constantly punished, taxed and regulated by the federal government,” declares Hank Jr on the previously mentioned small businessman’s anthem.
“Our glorious leader just got back from China and Japan where he gave away our jobs, put us down and sold out our plans,” he sings. “We don’t need to be givin’ all that money away to other folks.”
It just doesn’t work as catchy music.
The first tune, “Takin’ Back the Country,” features his dead dad, autotuned. One presumes a few people in the studio thought this a bad idea but declined to say anything on the matter.
Hank Williams, Jr would desperately love Cow Turd Blues, from his new album, to be a Tea Party anthem.
This week, we learned that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party outraised us for the second month in a row. This time, it was by more than $35 million.
Now, we don’t need to win the fundraising race to beat Mitt Romney. But the gap is growing at an alarming rate, and if we don’t start closing that gap right now, it will be too late.
It’s up to you.
President Obama and Democrats across the country are counting on our grassroots operation. Please donate $3 or more today.
In 2008, we showed that elections can be waged, and won, based on the idea that many voices could overpower those of a few.
And it worked.
This year, we need to prove it in the face of unprecedented spending from super PACs and outside groups. We need to show that ordinary people can still control the outcome of an election.
I hope you’re ready to fight — one supporter, one dollar at a time.
Let’s show what we’re made of. Pitch in whatever you can to help close the fundraising gap today:
Hildy Kuryk, the daughter of Judith Frisch Kuryk and David Kuryk, both of New York, is to be married this evening to Jarrod Neal Bernstein, a son of Roberta and Edward Bernstein of Merrick, N.Y. Rabbi Joseph Menashe is to officiate at Sky Studios, a loft in New York.
The bride, 29, is a political fund-raiser in New York. She is the senior New York finance consultant for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She graduated from Vanderbilt.
Her father is the director of editorial services at Barnes & Noble in New York, where he writes documents for the corporate communications department. Her mother retired as a creative director at Grey Advertising in New York.
Every other day, the Daily Dun depreciates a little more, the salami sliced a little thinner. From $5, now to $3.
On Tuesday, the US Olympic Committee officially unveiled the threads Team USA will be wearing during the Opening and Closing Ceremony Parade at the London Olympics this summer. As usual, the uniforms have drawn mixed reviews. Similar to the way people felt at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, some are saying they reek of military propaganda while others appreciate the nostalgic feel of the navy blazers, white pants and berets. Those are simply opinions, but the fact of the matter is the uniforms are made in China.
While they were designed in America by the famous Ralph Lauren himself, the US athletes will be covered in head to toe with garments and accessories that are labeled “Made in China.??? Like many others, US fashion designer Nanette Lepore said she is shocked that the uniform manufacturing was outsourced.
“These days, Romney rails against China for swiping American jobs and proclaims, ‘For me, it’s all about good jobs for the American people,'” it reads.
China didn’t swipe the jobs. We sold the jobs.
But who would believe what Mitt Romney says, anyway? In fact, if he said something, you would be safer in believing the opposite, on any subject.
