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| Thursday, July 17th, 2008 | | 7:37 pm |
The latest crap from Peter Phillips The headline:
U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq
The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago.
( ... O RLY? ... ) Current Mood:  grumpyCurrent Music: U2 - Two Hearts Beat As One | | Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 | | 6:58 pm |
"Before I kill you, Mr. Bond..." I just found this and had to share it: a James Bond villain makes a serious error. There are some other good cartoons on that site, too. Current Mood:  amusedCurrent Music: Moby - Made of Stars | | Thursday, July 10th, 2008 | | 12:47 pm |
| | Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | | 8:27 pm |
Linkage Current Mood:  blahCurrent Music: The Offspring - Walla Walla | | 3:58 pm |
Browsers leak history through :visited and DOM LWN notes that hostile websites can use CSS and Javascript to see if you have visited another site. They can't get your whole browsing history, but a website can tell if you have visited another specific site by seeing if a given link has the :visited style or not. This is a clever and simple hack that is difficult to fix. The common practice of turning visited links a different colour is an attractive feature that has been around since before CSS and the DOM, CSS is supposed to be able to change things like this, and the DOM is supposed to be able to access things like this. This is a minor vulnerability, but two uses that I see right away are data mining and as a test before launching a cross-site request forgery attack. Current Mood: blahCurrent Music: The Offspring - Have You Ever | | Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 | | 11:00 pm |
| | 10:40 pm |
IE7 CSS bug with multiple stylesheets A Drupal installation had a problem with the Events calendar. The calendar is an HTML table with decently sized cells where the number of the day links to an event description if there is an event that day. The problem is that the number is not decently sized. It's hard to click on, particularly for days under 10 where the clickable area is halved (another UI problem), and making the number bigger would make the calendar unattractively large. There is an easy fix: make the 'a' tag a block and widen it to the size of the cell. Unfortunately, it came out ugly in IE7.
( Screenshot and further description below the cut... ) Current Mood: blahCurrent Music: Dave Matthews Band - Don't Drink the Water | | 5:40 pm |
| | Saturday, July 5th, 2008 | | 12:51 pm |
| | Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 | | 10:02 pm |
Chad stomps Islamic extremists The government of Chad put down an Taliban-style Islamist insurgency led by a heretofore unknown preacher named Ahmat Ismael Bichara, who was captured in the fighting. Australia's ABC News has the backstory as described by Chadian officials:
"Since June 3, he has been calling on all Muslims to prepare to engage in a holy war against Christians and atheists, saying that the war would be launched from Chad to as far as Denmark," Security Minister Ahmat Mahamat Bachir said.
More information comes from News.com.au which describes the group as follows:
The interior minister said 700 supporters of the 28-year-old preacher had sacked Kouno, burning 158 homes, four churches, a clinic and a police station.
And here's how Al-Jazeera puts it:
Chad's government says Bichara had threatened to fight against the corruption of the Islamic faith in Chad, which is a secular state but counts just over half of its population as Muslims.
That seems to be leaving out quite a lot. Current Mood: blahCurrent Music: Portishead - Sour Times | | 3:15 pm |
Etc I rarely disagree with E.J. Dionne's columns and twice in a row
is unprecedented, but this nearly made me laugh out loud:
But the more important question is whether conservative judges will see fit to do exctly what conservative courts did for much of the New Deal era by using a narrow, 19th-century definition of property rights to void progressive economic, environmental and labor regulation.
Yeah, he is upset that those 1930s judges respected the precedent
of the time. Dionne writes as if being "progressive" should have made the
constitutionality of New Deal legislation unassailable when there were
serious questions at the time of whether Congress had the lawful power
to pass these types of laws. FDR got around it by lasting long enough
to appoint judges that he knew from the start would support his programs.
That does not make these judges any more correct in interpreting the
Constitution than their predecessors, and there are valid arguments
that they might not have been.
There remains a valid cause for concern that conservative judges
would throw out some federal laws as unconstitutional. The commercial
groups that would rather not be regulated have spent a lot of money
promoting interpretations that would be in their favour.
( More stories, more commentary, more linkage... ) Current Mood: blahCurrent Music: The Offspring - Pay the Man | | Sunday, June 29th, 2008 | | 10:45 pm |
| | Friday, June 20th, 2008 | | 8:39 am |
Sitemaps The web grew a new feature while I wasn't looking. Sitemaps are an XML directory of the files on a website that search engine crawlers can use to find information on the site. Since sitemaps are a Google technology and other search engines have hopped on the bandwagon, anyone interested in search engine optimization will want them.
I seem to recall that way back in the old days, there was a standard which did much the same as sitemaps. It did not require any special new keywords or data structures. It worked in plain HTML and you could integrate it as part of your site. The way it worked is that you would make a hyperlinked HTML index of the information in your site, or at least the public information that you would want visitors (and crawlers) to see. You would then save this index in a file called index.html.
Sitemaps contain a way for you to specify when a web resource was last modified and how frequently it changes. The web server is supposed to handle that with the HTTP Last-Modified: and Expires: headers. Not that any web server makes it easy to say when the pages on your site expire, but standards are already in place. Sitemaps also let you associate metadata with your page such as "priority" numbers to rank the importance of different pages on the site. That sort of thing could be handled in an HTML Meta tag.
All in all, it seems to me that sitemaps shouldn't be necessary. The main problem they solve is that people don't know how to set the HTTP Expires header in their web server and so most people didn't do anything to tell crawlers how often to access their site. On the upside, sitemaps provide a portable standard for any future web server to easily load this information and present it correctly in HTTP. Current Mood:  contemplativeCurrent Music: Goo Goo Dolls - Iris | | Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 9:33 am |
OSX local root exploit on slashdot From Slashdot: How to gain root privileges on an OSX box:
osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"';
ARDAgent is Apple's Remote Desktop server. Apparently, it runs as root and has authority to launch any process you tell it to, which runs under its security credentials. Oops. The slashdot comments say you can "fix" it by taring up the ARDAgent directory, effectively disabling the program.
"tell app" is some kind of interprocess communication like RPC, though it is not clear what the underlying method is. This page says the method might be "Apple Events".
It is interesting how much the AppleScript language resembles plain English. Personally, I prefer my programming languages to be more clearly structured than English is. Current Mood: amusedCurrent Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Scar Tissue | | Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | | 6:03 pm |
Bad news for American media McClatchy is cutting 1/10 of its workforce. Many important stories of the past few years have had McClatchy bylines. What remains of the organization will likely be crippled, unable to do its job as well.
In a world of nothing but utter crap on television news, where the radio is more likely to lie to you than keep you informed, where it is left to fashion and society magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker to go further in depth on topics of national import than any newsweekly or paper of record, there was one news organization that maintained a reputation of quality reporting on timely and important subjects. That news organization was Knight-Ridder. They went out of business. McClatchy bought them and tried to keep up the good work, but it seems they just couldn't compete in the marketplace.
If this means any death of serious reporting, the serious reporters are going out with a bang. McClatchy stories of the past few days include documents showing that the US hid tortured prisoners from the Red Cross and
an in-depth series on Guantanamo Bay including allegations that the prison has become a terrorist training camp. That's how news is done. Current Mood: grumpyCurrent Music: The Cure - Disintegration | | Sunday, June 15th, 2008 | | 11:20 am |
Reading the Senate report on "homegrown terrorism" Last month, the Senate Committee on Pantswetting Nationalism and Other Stuff
released a report on "homegrown" right-wing Islamist terrorism
in the United States
[PDF].
The lead authors are Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut
and Susan Collins of Maine, or their uncredited staffs.
Lieberman is a pro-war nutter who essentially switched parties
over Iraq but isn't quite as crazy as Zell Miller. Imagine Zell Miller
on Prozac. On the other hand, Collins is one of the last of the type
of moderate Republicans who used to be what we called conservatives
in the '70s (it's down to her and Olympia Snowe since Lincoln Chafee
retired). The report says Collins initiated it, but Lieberman gets
lead billing.
( Read more... ) Current Mood:  curiousCurrent Music: Guns and Roses - You Could Be Mine | | Friday, June 13th, 2008 | | 8:40 pm |
The Five Iraq Wars NBC journalist Richard Engel divides the Iraq conflict into five distinct phases, with a sixth phase (withdrawal) about to begin. He also says the US record is "maybe 1-4" in fighting them.
It's worth thinking about. Here is my take on the five phases:
- The invasion. This would be the drive into Baghdad. The US clearly won this one.
- The nation-building phase. The fact that the nation-building phase failed is the main reason for the later phases existing, including the withdrawal. This would be the part that Rumsfeld's Pentagon had no plans for, to the point of expelling from meetings the State bureaucrats who had tried to plan for it. One group that did successfully plan ahead and was able to implement their plans was the libertarian capitalist wing of the Republican Party, who planned to showcase the benefits of capitalism to the world by replacing Iraq's state-controlled economy with a free market. The result was economic collapse and 60% unemployment, with a lot of those unemployed people angry enough and having time enough to reach for their guns. Engel says this phase had mixed results, but I consider it an epic failure.
- The insurgency. This would be the fight against the Mahdi Army and the various local Sunni militias. The Mahdis called for a cease-fire in 2004, allowing the US to concentrate on the Sunnis. Only fighting a third of the country, the US only managed a stalemate.
- The civil war. Although there were earlier attacks between internal Iraqi groups, one could consider this phase to begin with the bombing of the Golden Mosque in 2006. This is where the bulk of the violence became Iraqi-on-Iraqi and the US stayed out of it. It certainly wasn't a victory for the US.
- The Surge. This phase begun when Daddy Bush knocked enough sense into Junior to get him to dump Rumsfeld and bring in Robert Gates. Gates brought in General Petraeus, said to be the Pentagon's top expert in counter-insurgency. The story here is a clear shift in US tactics. Basically, they started doing what I've been saying they should do: use more ground forces, actually attack the enemy with them, establish diplomatic contacts with populations on the local level, and generally start treating this as a political war instead of a series of engagements. The result was a sharp drop in violence down to about what the level was during the insurgency phase. So was this a US victory? Not quite, but it was an improvement.
The sixth and upcoming phase is the withdrawal. The goal here is to lose the war while making everyone believe we didn't. The target audience for that impression is that part of the Muslim population most likely to support terrorists, those most likely see the withdrawal as a victory for Islam. The process of phase six will involve beating down the worst of the terrorists, making peace with everyone who doesn't fit that description, making an agreement with the Iraqi government that constitutes the old phrase from Vietnam, "peace with honor", and shoving the Iraqi government lots of money under the table so they don't collapse into anarchy. Some words from President Obama repudiating the original invasion might also help.
The US could use another 50,000 to 100,000 troops in Iraq right now to make the future withdrawal phase easier. Unfortunately, Afghanistan could use them too and we don't have them to send to either place. Current Mood:  tiredCurrent Music: Lacuna Coil - To Myself I Turned | | 6:02 pm |
| | Thursday, June 12th, 2008 | | 6:28 pm |
The Boumediene Decision In the news today is a reminder of how this year's Presidential race is about
much, much more than Obama versus McCain. This reminder is called Boumediene
vs. Bush. This is a Supreme Court case wherein the Court determined that the
right of habeas corpus, which the Constitution states is not to be suspended
except in cases of rebellion or invasion, is not to be suspended except in cases
of rebellion or invasion. This might sound like an easy decision, but it came
through on a 5-4 vote with the usual suspects on either side.
Opposing the decision were Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas,
and Chief Justice John Roberts, all Republicans appointed by Republican presidents.
Supporting the decision were Steven Breyer, Ruth Ginsberg, David Souter, John Paul
Stevens, and Anthony Kennedy, only three of whom are Republicans appointed by
Republican presidents. The majority decision was written by Kennedy, who is
what passes for a swing vote these days. The media calls him a centrist, but
I am old enough to remember when he was part of the court's conservative wing.
He has not changed, the Court has.
The Boumediene decision opens with a summary of everything that is wrong with
the state of constitutional law in the US today. Republican judges routinely
reject the most explicit text of the US Constitution, and when saner heads prevail
and the Constitution is upheld, the Republican-controlled Congress orders the
judiciary to ignore it. In the Republican Party's vision of America you have
no rights. To address the old cliche, yes that can possibly stand up
in court.
The best thing to do is show you the most relevant parts of the decision. Emphasis and notes added. I am not going to lj-cut this. It is too important.
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U. S. 507, 518, 588–589, five
Justices recognized that detaining individuals captured while fighting
against the United States in Afghanistan for the duration of that conflict
was a fundamental and accepted
incident to war. [Note: The question of whether the captives were fighting
is central to the problems at Guantanamo] Thereafter, the Defense
Department established Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs)to determine
whether individuals detained at the U. S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, were "enemy combatants." [Note: this is a new designation by the
Bush administration]
... each petitioner sought a writ of habeas corpus in the District
Court, which ordered the cases dismissed for lack of jurisdiction because
Guantanamo is outside sovereign U. S. territory. The D. C. Circuit
affirmed, but this Court reversed, holding that 28 U. S. C. §2241
extended statutory habeas jurisdiction to Guantanamo. See Rasul v. Bush,
542 U. S. 466, 473. Petitioners’ cases were then consolidated into two
proceedings. In the first, the district judge granted the Government’s
motion to dismiss, holding that the detainees had no rights that
could be vindicated in a habeas action. In the second, the judge
held that the detainees had due process rights.
While appeals were pending, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment
Act of 2005 (DTA), §1005(e) of which amended 28 U. S. C. §2241 to provide that "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to ... consider ... an application for ... habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained ... at
Guantanamo," and gave the D. C. Court of Appeals "exclusive" jurisdiction
to review CSRT decisions. [Note: This was the Graham-Levin Amendment which passed the Senate 49-42 with 80% of Republicans supporting it and 84% of Democrats
opposing it]. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U. S. 557, 576–577, the Court
held this provision inapplicable to cases (like petitioners’) pending when the DTA was enacted. Congress responded with the Military Commissions
Act of 2006 (MCA)
[Note: which 96% of
Republicans voted for and 74% of Democrats voted against in the Senate, with
similar numbers
in the House], §7(a) of which amended §2241(e)(1) to
deny jurisdiction with respect to habeas actions by detained
aliens determined to be enemy combatants, while §2241(e)(2) denies
jurisdiction as to “any other action against the United States ...
relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial,
or conditions of confinement” of a detained alien determined to be
an enemy combatant. MCA §7(b) provides that the 2241(e)
amendments “shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after
[that] date [Note: the prisoners' habeas petitions have been delayed since 2002.] ... which relate to any aspect of the detention,
transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained ... since
September 11, 2001.”
By the slimmest of margins, the court finds the obvious:
Petitioners have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus.
They are not barred from seeking the writ or invoking the Suspension Clause’s
protections because they have been designated as enemy combatants or because
of their presence at Guantanamo.
... Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted
control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the
Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United
States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s
basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress
and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the
power to decide when and where its terms apply.
Kennedy also has some words for the notion of military tribunals:
At the CSRT
stage the detainee has limited means to find or present evidence to challenge
the Government’s case, does not have the assistance of counsel, and may not
be aware of the most critical allegations that the Government relied upon to
order his detention. His opportunity to confront witnesses is likely to be more
theoretical than real, given that there are no limits on the admission of hearsay.
The Court therefore agrees with petitioners that there is considerable risk
of error in the tribunal’s findings of fact.
Among the constitutional infirmities from which the
DTA potentially suffers are
the absence of provisions allowing petitioners to challenge the President’s
authority under the AUMF
to detain them indefinitely, to contest the CSRT’s findings of fact, to supplement
the record on review with exculpatory evidence discovered after the CSRT proceedings,
and to request release. The statute cannot be read to contain each of these
constitutionally required procedures. MCA §7 thus effects an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.
In addition to this opinion, Souter issued a separate concurring opinion, joined
by Ginsberg and Breyer, which was less a concurrence than a counterargument
to the dissents of the other justices.
Chief Justice Roberts's dissent begins with this nonsense:
Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous
set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country
as enemy combatants.
Given that the notion of enemy combatants was invented during
Roberts's term as Chief Justice, this may technically be true.
However, the US used to have clear and generous procedures for the
people that are now called enemy combatants. There were the Geneva
and Hague Conventions, and the people who did not fall under Geneva
or Hague would be tried under civil law.
What makes Roberts's opinion worse is how he approaches the root of
the case. The petitioners are asking for the ability to question their
designation as enemy combatants. Roberts refuses because he considers
them to be enemy combatants. He convicts them before the trial begins,
before they have even had habeas corpus.
The second sentence of Roberts's opinion is not much better.
The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an
ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough
debate.
This is nonsense. The Republican Party has rushed to pass laws approving of the powers that Bush has claimed by virtue of the fact that he has an army and you don't. There was nothing careful about it. The only debate was the few Democrats speaking up against it and the Republicans calling them traitors. The fact that the law was crafted
during a military conflict should make the court more aggressive in
questioning its constitutionality, not less.
I'm not going to read any more of Roberts's dissent. He gets his first
sentence completely wrong and his second sentence completely wrong. That
does not bode well for the rest of it, and this is the man who will
probably be America's chief justice for the next thirty years. Let's see
what Scalia has to say.
Scalia's dissent is worse. It begins with panic about the threat of
terrorism, which has no relevance to the concerns of law. Scalia opposes
habeas corpus because "it will almost certainly cause more Americans to
be killed", which has no relevance to the concerns of law. Scalia denies
that habeas corpus is a "time-honored legal principle", declaring instead
that the only time-honored legal principle decided in this case is the
opinion of Bush's lawyers, Patrick Filbin and John Yoo, that it is acceptable to deny detainees of their habeas corpus rights. Scalia declares this to be constitutional because the President ordered it and the military did it. Scalia then has the gall to condemn the Court's majority for a decision that will "reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect."
All four dissenting judges joined both Roberts's and Scalia's dissents.
Now back to why this is a partisan issue. The Republican Party has gone
insane over the past 20 years and their insanity is being written into law
and embedded in the court system where appointed judges cannot be voted
out (and shouldn't be). This was a 5-4 decision on a clear constitutional
issue. The Constitution barely won. Two of the 4 were appointed by
George W. Bush in his second term. If either John Kerry or Al Gore had
won another few states, it would not have been close.
There is a strong possibility that John Paul Stevens, part of today's majority, will retire within the next four years. The next President will replace him.
Barack Obama is a constitutional scholar.
Vote with the Supreme Court in mind, and vote Democrats for Congress also. Remember, you too could be an "enemy combatant". All it takes is for someone in the government to call you one. Current Mood: contemplativeCurrent Music: Genesis - Driving the Last Spike | | Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 | | 10:06 pm |
US bombing kills Pakistani soldiers Bad news of the day: US bombing kills 11 Pakistani soldiers at the Afghan-Pakistan border (more) (more). Pakistan has been freakish about every US offense to their border going back to 1998 when Clinton struck an al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan and some of the cruise missiles fell short. This time there is a body count. We saw how the US's closest allies reacted when Canadians and British forces were accidentally bombed. This is going to heavily damage public opinion for the US in Pakistan.
We may be at a strategic turning point in the Afghan theatre. The Taliban has seized chunks of Pakistan over the past few years, and from there it trains and sends troops across the border to fight the Afghan government and the US. Pakistan cannot stop them and they will not let the US in to try. As a result, the Taliban has established a safe haven like North Vietnam was during the Vietnam War. History suggests it is very difficult to defeat a well-supplied enemy living in a safe haven who will not stop fighting. On the political front, Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, who has been a steady US ally or else, has been losing his power to the pro-democracy movement which has taken a more friendly stance to the Taliban. The US bombing of Pakistani forces strengthens their hand and weakens his.
A few days ago, Denmark's embassy in Pakistan was bombed. Everyone blames al-Qaeda for the embassy bombing, but the culprit could have been anyone because al-Qaeda's ideology is so widespread. The Pakistani ambassador to Denmark told Denmark they deserved it for allowing a private newspaper to publish those Mohammed cartoons. That's what is considered a moderate's opinion. The political side of the war is not going so well. Current Mood: blahCurrent Music: Collective Soul - December |
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