Security Shmecurity. Got to have our tunes.

I saw this on Oliver Willis' blog and followed the link to its source at MSNBC.com. Holy pile of scary crap!

Employees of Tiversa, a Cranberry Township, Pa.-based security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology, reportedly found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.

It seems an employee of a defense contractor in Bethesda had some  file sharing program on his computer.  You know - peer-to-peer. Probably for music. And then poof! The blueprint for Marine One winds up in Iran. 

This is kind of hard to wrap one's mind around this one. A defense contractor employee who had access to sensitive information had a file sharing program installed on his computer. Was allowed to have one. Or else employees workstations are not monitored to see what kind of software they're downloading/installing. I mean, we have the Patriot Act to make sure we don't talk to terrorists - or anyone, apparently - without the government knowing about it. We have warrantless wiretapping and all kinds of eavesdropping to make sure that if a terrorist or other antagonistic entities call you it's going to be picked up, right along with that really awful break-up call you got from your now ex. We have lost civil liberties in the name of national security left and right in the years since 911, but we just send these sensitive files to Tehran along with Coldplay's latest? WTF?

Marine One, Tehran, Iran, file sharing

Red State Sinners

First we learned that red states have more divorces than blue states.  And it seems they tend to to have more  teen pregnancies. And now it turns out they download more porn per broadband connection. Seeing a pattern here? Yeah, me, too. And these are the people who are worried about our morality? Maybe they should try out ours for a while. See how it works.

I'm not entirely surprised.  I'm not all that conversant with the red state culture, it's true. I've lived all my life either in New York City or some fifty miles away from it.  We haven't gotten around much due to time,  money and the fact that when we can go somewhere we tend to head to Western Massachusetts because couldn't possibly be a lot of better places to be in the world. 

The closest we normally get to deep red is when we visit my mother-in-law in the Ocala area of purple Florida. The roadside billboards make fascinating reading for the uninitiated such as ourselves. Besides the ones touting tourist attractions the most ubiquitous by turns were huge ads for all manner of ultra-conservative Christian churches and Adult XXX diversions of one sort or another. That kind of says it all.

I think that you have to consider that one reason that red state social conservatives are the way they are is that they like it fine that way. The constant tension between sin and slavation can make every life a piece of epic poetry in a tortured sort of way. Can it be a coincidence that so much of the best American literature comes from the South? It could be all of a piece. 

Tags: Red States, Sex, Sin, Porn, Conservatism

House Approves Increase for Legal Services

Don't ever tell me there's not a "dime's worth of difference". That's never been true, even in the worst of times. The Obama adminstration introduced, and the House has approved increased funding for Legal Service Corporation, which represents low income people in non-criminal legal cases.

The 11 percent increase would bring funding for the Corporation to a total of $390 million,the third consecutive year (emphasis mine) that the House has supported additional funding to provide civil legal assistance to low-income individuals and families. Most of the funding, $365.8 million, would be awarded as competitive grants to 137 nonprofit legal aid programs across the nation.

Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees LSC, said the Corporation "is an important, significant program that provides legal assistance to people who are unable to afford it. We know that the poor are hit hard during economic downturns, and this funding will help more low-income Americans faced with unlawful evictions, domestic violence and other serious legal problems"

Legal Services Corporation programs are often - usually - the only legal representation available to low income people in non-criminal cases.  Other than that, it's just them against whatever system they're up against. Just figuring out how to navigate the courts or a hearing situation can be an impossible task without help, let alone actually going to court, if it should come to that. Demand almost always exceeds resources,  so most agencies have to limit their services to cases related to basic sustenance - food, shelter, income and safety - and even then they can't always help everyone who might be eligible for services.  Republican administrations have been at war with Legal Services since Reagan's time.  After all,  Legal Services represents poor people and poor people are not popular with the GOP. Democrats fund Legal Services. Note that this is the third consecutive year that the House has voted an increase in funding. What else is happening in the House  for the third consecutive year? Yes, that's right. Democratic majorities.  Let me tell you, by 2006 things were really bad for some Legal Service agencies and lack of funding was really hampering them in their ability to represent clients. This current economic climate has been a huge worry, too, because some of the funding for LSC comes from interest on escrow accounts that private lawyers hold for clients. Naturally enough,  these days there's considerably less being held in escrow.  Budget cuts from the states have also cut funding for legal help for the poor. This news is very welcome and is yet another reason to have warm, fuzzy feelings for the Dems.

Tags:  Legal Service, Poverty, Economy, Budget

Die Welt liebt Obama

Or The World Loves Obama (according to Google Translate). Sounds about right, though. I have a lot of faith in the man, but judging by this float which appeard in the Rose Monday parade in Duesseldorf, Germany, expectations around the world might just be a little high.

Tags: Obama, Rose Monday, Parade. Float, Duesseldorf, Germany

Apologies about comments

People are telling me that comments haven't been working well on this blog. I don't know what's up with that, but I'm very sorry. If people are nice enough to leave a comment I'd like them to be able to do so without any problems. I haven't done anything to modify the Blogger commenting system, so there's not too much I can do to fix it, but I have disabled the word verification, just in case that was the root of the problem. To avoid extreme spam I enabled comment moderation on posts more that a couple of weeks old.  I didn't even realize that was an option and might be a better solution.  If you find that there are continued problems please drop me a line at patsalzer AT gmail.com. Thanks so much.

Watching the President

It's so good to have a president we can stand to watch on TV, let alone look forward to it.

Michelle looks lovely. Justice Ginsberg is there, very much alive. Hillary Clinton is not afraid of color, but hot pink looks good on her. Rahm Emanuel is concealing whatever blunt instrument he's carrying very well.

Lot of pundits are telling us what President Obama has to accomplish tonight. I can predict that if he gave the Gettysburg Address up there, there'd still be plenty of "constructive" criticism from the same people who kept assuming that John McCain won all the debates that the public thought Obama won.

Well, here we go.

UPDATE: Really, really good speech. Even better than I'd hope for. Jindal's response was pretty lame and designed to appeal to no one but other Republican politicians. If he's planning to go up Obama in an election he's going to have to improve his speechifying.

Technorati Tags: President Obama, Politics

The World Almost Ended Today

Image via CrunchBase

Gmail was down this morning. For a two and a half hours, for God's sake. In some parts of the world that was during the work day. It was a disaster! Apparently. Boy have we got it good these days, emailwise. When I was a girl we had to walk through five feet of snow, uphill both ways, to check our email and it was always down. OK, maybe not a girl exactly. When I was a girl the only computer we knew about was Univac. But when I was in my forties, email was a chore. And even as recently as five or six years ago or so.

I recall something like a decade ago, getting home from work to check my Yahoo mail. It was a big improvement over the first web based email account I'd had which was Hotmail, which was an improvement over my ISP's email. For some reason my account would decide to be inaccessable for an hour or so starting at 6pm more nights than not. But hey, we had 6MB of space. That was incredible. I tried just about every free email account that came along and even paid for an account for a couple of years. There was almost no such thing as a stable email system. Office email was down a lot, too. Nowadays we expect to get our email and get it instantly as the Good Lord intended. And mostly we do. But it helps you to remain calm during these rare outages if you're old enough to remember how it used to be.

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Technorati Tags: Gmail, Email, Internet, Technology, Google