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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 216 July 29 - August 4, 2002

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Monday  July 29, 2002

Writing on  Burning Tower shortly. I have some essays to write here, but fiction comes first.

Unfortunately there is a ghost in the house. A very friendly one, of course, but we keep turning expecting to see him. I expect that passes.

More tonight after I work. But I find I make very silly mistakes.


William McGovern says it all about airport security:

From http://www.opinionjournal.com/
editorial/feature.html?id=110002053
 

The Gates of Hell indeed. But now that we have made all those horrible people civil servants, and they have a union, you can be sure that they will be given things to do consistent with their intelligence, which means they will continue to harass the people, be arrogantly stupid, and rigidly enforce rules. They even searched Al Gore twice; Gore said he was "happy to comply", and Buckley commented that if that were true then Gore is unfit to hold public office. No one ought to be pleased with the arrogant incompetence of these people.

Well, we didn't need an airline industry anyway.

Meanwhile, our own industry thrashes, with Ziff in trouble

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/business/media
/29ZIFF.html?ex=1028520000&en=
73c9a4f95c212ba8&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA
 

and COMDEX in trouble

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4676 

and so forth. 

We will come out of it, but the winners will be government and those who ride the permit raj; those who seek civil service jobs. Neil Schulman in his novel Alongside Night once had the government collapse with the incoming government give the agencies to their employers: those who can find someone to pay them for their services are welcome to do so, but we don't have any tax money left and we certainly won't force people to hire you. Of course that won't happen. And I expect I am just in a foul mood.

More mail up later. I am going to dinner.

 

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002

It appears that the Hammer won't fall this time. We have a little longer to Do Something.

NASA's Near Earth Object Program office has ruled out any impact possibility

from asteroid 2002 NT7 on February 1, 2019.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ 

 

A series of X projects to bring down the cost to orbit would still be a very good idea, as well as insurance against being wrong -- or of there being another we haven't seen yet. The Earth remains a rather small and fragile basket for the human race to keep it's eggs in.

There is also HOTFACE: a facility for hazardous testing, located on the Moon, where quarantine can be complete. We came up with that one in a study back in about 1978, but nothing seems to have come of it. With lower cost access to orbit we could build and maintain that facility for biohazardous research. 

And there will always be another Hammer -- and one of them really will have our address.


Roland warns of another major vulnerability:

http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/
3D46633B.80403@algroup.co.uk
 


And is THIS something to worry about?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,764617,00.html 

Britons left in jail amid fears that Saudi Arabia could fall to al-Qaeda

Martin Bright, Nick Pelham and Paul Harris Sunday July 28, 2002 The Observer

Saudi Arabia is teetering on the brink of collapse, fuelling Foreign Office fears of an extremist takeover of one of the West's key allies in the war on terror. Anti-government demonstrations have swept the desert kingdom in the past months in protest at the pro-American stance of the de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah.

At the same time, Whitehall officials are concerned that Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

Saudi sources said the Pentagon had recently sponsored a secret conference to look at options if the royal family fell.

Demonstrations across the kingdom broke out in March, triggered by a fire in a girls' school in which 14 pupils died after the religious police stopped them escaping.

Unrest in the east of the country rapidly escalated into nationwide protests against the royal family that were brutally suppressed by the police. The Observer has obtained secret video footage of the protests smuggled out of the country last week that shows hundreds of Saudis, including women, demonstrating in support of the Palestinians and opposition to the regime.

The Foreign Office believes that the failure of Abdullah's recent Middle East peace plan could have terminally undermined his position.

The Crown Prince's main rival, Prince Sultan, the Defence Minister, has been vocal in his opposition to Abdullah's pro-Western policy. His brother Prince Naif, head of the Interior Ministry, has led a crackdown on the Saudi media in the wake of the demonstrations to stop any word of them leaking out.

Abdullah has even sent his own representative to Washington to counter the influence of the ambassador, Prince Bandar, a son of Prince Sultan.

<snip>

 

And we can add:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/dh20020729.shtml  TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: David Horowitz

David Horowitz (archive) (printer-friendly version)

July 29, 2002

The Destructive Romance of the Intellectuals

The British novelist Martin Amis has written a new book, Koba, The Dread about Soviet Communism and the utopian delusion. It is about the romance of western intellectuals with a fantasy whose real world incarnation has already killed at least 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union and probably 100 million all over the world. The crime committed by these victims of the progressive dream was their refusal to go along with the claims of "social justice" and the requirements of instituting a socialist state.

This is Martin Amis on the adventure of creating the Soviet Union: "The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republics was a lie. Comrade was a lie. The revolution was a lie."

Question: How many intellectuals believed and spread this lie and thereby colluded in the enslavement, death, and generalized social misery of hundreds of millions of socialist citizens?

This is Martin Amis's answer: "The overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere."

To make the statement perfectly clear: Every magazine that today calls itself "progressive," including The Progressive, the Nation, Social Text, Oktober, Zmagazine, and the Village Voice, tens of thousands of professors in American universities alone, the intellectual avatars, models and instructors in virtually every Women's Studies, Black Studies, Chicano Studies and Cultural Studies program in America, the heads of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Modern Language Association - all were either apostles of this lie in its own time, or are apostles of the same utopian idea that gave it birth, along with the same anti-capitalist, anti-American social analyses and the same anti-Western, anti-American historical narratives that produced the lies and their attendant atrocities in the first place.

Amis's book also asks the following question: Why are even those leftwing intellectuals who managed to understand all along that these were lies - or who have come to realize that they are lies - still comfortable in thinking of those who supported them as "progressives" and worse, political "comrades." In his book, Amis addresses this question to his close friend Christopher Hitchens:

"Comrade Hitchens! There is probably not much in these pages that you don't already know. You already know, in that case, that Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it.So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more distance between yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your un-regretted discipleship of Trotsky. These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use."

<snip>

 

 

 

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Wednesday, July 31, 2002

You can get the Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 at

http://download.microsoft.com/download/
win2000platform/SP/SP3/NT5/EN-US/w2ksp3.exe
 

I used the satellite to download it: the file is 130 megabytes. Once I had it, I transferred it to a number of win2k machines and installed it first on Fergie, which is a machine I take to the beach and which Niven uses when he is here: since he isn't here and I am, this one was a good testbed for the installation. It installed without any glitches, and the machine ran just fine, so I decided to put it on Regina, which is the system that does my real communications here. Regina, a Compaq SP750 Professional Work Station dual processor Pentium III 750, will be retired shortly for Principessa, an extremely fast Pentium 4 I built from an Intel motherboard, but for the moment Regina is still the main system in the house. I did the backups, and then cleaned a huge pile of cruft out: any communications system gets all kinds of spyware and other unwanted junk. More on that in the column.

The bottom line is that I'm using Regina with W2K Sp3 to write this and for my email, and everything is fine. The system is a bit crisper than yesterday but that's probably more due to my repeated applications of cruft cleaning than SP3.

But see the WARNING regarding Promise Technology controller boards.

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Hollywood Bowl last night. Excellent program. They opened with Strauss's Don Juan which was a bit marred by the brass not being together for part of the crescendo, but overall good. Then the best part, featuring Sir James Galway, the only person I know of to get a knighthood for playing the flute. The program included a Flute Concerto by William Bolcom, who was Roberta's classmate in Seattle. This lyric concerto was written for Galway. They also did some "confections" as "encores" although since they were clearly rehearsed the encores were more like treats not in the program.  The second half was Dvorak's 7th which isn't played enough, and the Philharmonic does Dvorak well. A nice evening. That's Sir James with the golden flute.

 

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And today I have work but I have to wait for the gardener, who was supposed to be here earlier but isn't, and until he gets here I have to work in the main office. And the office blinds have disintegrated so I have to buy new ones, and installing those will require climbing a 15 foot ladder, something I don't much like to do. I am sure there are plenty of people who wish they had my problems. I will have to remember to turn off the ceiling fan before I climb up there....

And as usual I can't transmit these pictures or connect to the Internet just now. It will all fix itself shortly but I HATE these unpredictable things. In the middle of transmitting the pictures it just died, and now I can't reconnect.

So it's go to the cable room, shut down the satellite workstation, restart it, note that the problem is "upstream connection," wait ...  eventually it works again. I sure wish I had DSL.  But at least the satellite lets me send large files. And if I wait it eventually comes back. Crows? Ghosts in the local cemetery? Quien sabe?


Boeing is investigating anti-gravity.

Found it -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2157975.stm 

David Bruner

I do not know what to make of this. When I was at Boeing we looked into the Dean Drive, but nothing came of it.

 

 

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Thursday, August 1, 2002

From Roland

Subject: 31Jul02 portable OpenSSH source tarballs trojaned

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?
fetch=394609+0+current/freebsd-security
 

Is nothing sacred?

It is important enough that I sent a mailing to subscribers. See mail for the rest.

 Note also:

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

The version of OpenSSH to which they are referring is the portable version, which runs on most Unix (including Linux) systems.

This is much worse than just BSD systems.

The confusion comes because OpenSSH is part of the FreeBSD group and the produce OpenSSH for both BSD and non-BSD systems.

I repeat, this is the portable version, which runs on most Unix (including Linux) systems.

Regards,

Gordon Runkle

 

Jerry,

Just a quick update: this affects *any* system running the OpenSSH 3.4 server where the admin for that machine downloaded the source code and built it himself. I.e. the trojan is part of the OpenSSH BUILD process, not the binary itself.

This could affect any system that can build OpenSSH natively, including, but not limited to:

- Linux (all distro) - FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD - Solaris - AIX - Digital Unix - and probably VMS as well

Linux users who upgraded their OpenSSH recently using their normal distribution upgrade mechanisms are *probably* ok, as they receive the binary and do not normally build the source code themselves.

We'll probably see an advisory from CERT before too long.

Pete Flugstad

===

 


 

 

While we are at it, here's another asteroid: you can see this one.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/30jul_ny40.htm 

And regarding Windows 2k Service Pack 3, Eric f0und this:

There is a reported BSOD situation if you install SP3 on a system running a Promise ATA133 board. This would include the boards that Maxtor was bundling, IIRC.

That is the warning given here , http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4743  , but the Promise offers no announcement.

We can find nothing about this on the Promise web site. We have built systems using the Maxtor/Promise Raid bundle, and we're looking into it.

If you are using Promise Technology boards you might think twice about installing SP3 until this clears up.

There is more about SP3 and updates in MAIL.

And I have to go do some fiction.

 

 

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Friday, August 2, 2002

I am missing ComicsCon in San Diego, and will miss the SF World Convention in San Jose, to get Burning Tower out the door and start catching up on fiction; there is also the High Tech Wars book I need to get finished.

And the column has to be done this weekend.

There's a good bit of mail on various matters, and it's time for me to get to work. I do have a squib about freedom over there.

But Roland reports that HP has stood down:

HP backs down 

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-947740.html  --

There is a good FPRI paper on the Middle East

And a plea for help: some time ago (not really very long) I was told how to exempt large blocks of files from being published by FrontPage Publish without having to do it one file at a time.  I tried it. It worked. And I promptly forgot where I put the correspondence and I don't remember HOW TO DO IT, or who I was discussing it with. 

Never Mind. I find I remembered how to do it, although not the name of the kind soul who told me how to do it.

I grow old. I may roll up my trouser legs, eat a peach, and give up. 


HELP WANTED

I need the energy budget of the United States. The last one I have was in an annual review of maybe 20 years ago.

What I need is the amount of energy consumed in the US, and what consumes it: space heating, industry, transportation, electrical power broken down into commercial, residential, lighting, industrial, etc.

I am sure this exists somewhere but I don't know where. Any help appreciated. Please, I don't want speculations, I am looking for source data I can quote. (And I guess I have them. Thanks!)

===

Well, I have links to a number of sites, but ye gods!  I wish the web had never been invented. What I wanted was a chart, such as used to appear in paper books, a nice two dimensional chart with percentage numbers and the like. We used to get those in Annual Review among other places. What I see now is more data than anyone needs, presented in complicated ways. I'll see if I can make sense out of it, but apparently I have become too stupid to understand these things in the dozen years since I looked into this.

Anyway, thanks to all who responded. Now I have to try to consolidate this over abundance of information into the rather simple minded table I had in mind...

 

 

 

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Saturday, August 3, 2002

I spent the day cleaning up and doing some writing.

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, August 4, 2002

I did a lot of cleaning up yesterday, and wrote a couple of thousand words, some of them on my disappointment with Warcraft III. I don't like games that force me to role play bad guys.

The column is due shortly, and I still have to get the logistics together for the lead in to the final scenes of BURNING TOWER.

And there is a mixed bag of mail.

Finally:

Jerry: You may want to read this:  http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26517.html 

which is yet another story about the EULA in the new Microsoft upgrades. It may all be true, but my guess is that it's simply lawyer talk. 

Mr. Holsinger sent a massive bibliography with links on smallpox. I have put it up on a separate page.

 

 

 

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