Dana Blankenhorn

What the Sourceforge Attack Means to You

Open source has grown up.

A few years ago, when I was getting my feet wet on the open source beat, open source could claim “security through obscurity.”  Desktop Linux was a joke, many open source projects had only a few hundred or few thousand users, everyone knew the big illegal opportunities lay in compromising Microsoft software and systems.

That's not true any longer. Consider the recent directed attack against Sourceforge a wake-up call.

Now, don't get me wrong. Microsoft remains a target. “Patch Tuesday” is an important date on every sysadmin's calendar. It comes as regular as happy hour. (Call it unhappy hour.) But open source is also a rich target environment for evil-doers. For good reasons.

• There's more open source out there than ever before. Linux' market share is ginormous.
• Who needs “desktop Linux” when you have Android? Holy market share.
• Many open source sysadmins just aren't careful.

This last may be most important.

Black Duck has long been concerned with open source security. It's why they bought Spikesource  last year. The sad fact is many companies which use open source don't update their software as they should. If you're running old code, it's far more likely to be insecure, to have unpatched vulnerabilities bad guys can exploit.

And there are lots of bad guys out there.

The Solar Halo

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 2 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Nothing is as hot right now as renewable energy, especially solar.

The technology is ripe. You can write a 15-year lease on rooftop solar panels and, with current government aid programs, come up with enough to make it seem a good deal all around. It's great for the lessor, not so good for the lessee, but that's the way it goes.

A signable lease is just the first of many crossover points solar is going to go through, as manufacturing ramps up and technology keeps improving. Next comes an industry big enough, and tied in closely enough with banks, to do mortgages. As prices decline cash deals will become commonplace. Millions of new jobs are on tap.

Current panels are about 15% efficient. Thin films are usually just 8% efficient, but their flexibility makes them even more popular. Both those efficiency numbers will climb, and there are a variety of other technologies coming out of labs that will take advantage of ultraviolet light, heat, and do a better job of accounting for the changing angle of the Sun.

Storage technology is also improving. That's a game changer for electrical utilities. You can't turn the Sun on-and-off as you can an oil-fired power plant, and the same is true with the wind. But if you can store that power, either with a better battery, or underground in the form of compressed gas, you make it more reliable. Utilities are also interested in "molten salt" systems that heat a chemical mix while the Sun shines and use that energy to produce electricity after it sets.

Good times.

2011 Will Be Better

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every year I use my last Clue to peer into the future and see what the next year may hold in store.

From here it holds almost nothing but good news. (Explore The World of Escher, from which this crystal ball was borrowed. Still under-estimated among the great 20th century artists.)

The economy has bottomed up, and it has been growing (albeit slowly) for six quarters. Employers have been squeezing employees for productivity, getting P/E ratios down toward a rational level, and looking around the corner for the next boom. When they see it they will start hiring again.

Recessions have causes. Since field computing ended the problem of "inventory recessions" in the early 1980s, recessions have been financial events. The leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s, the Internet stocks of the 1990s, and the housing bubble of the 2000s all created irrational exuberance that had to be unwound for growth to resume.

This last has been a harder fall than the others, and unless regulators around the world are watchful the next fall will be harder still, because financial interests control many governments including (it turned out) our own.

But that fall is now behind us. The markets have been recapitalized. What people are looking for is the Next Big Thing.

Why India and China are Winning the Solar Race

One of the most misunderstood crisis periods in American history came at the turn of the last century.

What later historians called the Progressive Era was driven by a desire for normalized input prices -- human rights and rising wages were just a byproduct.

It was clear as early as the 1880s that giving monopolists the power to set "free market" prices for crucial inputs like rail service would not allow for the creation of giant factories needed to make America globally competitive. Thus Wall Street, and Washington, put together giant holding companies, concentrating power in safe hands.

Without stable prices for inputs like transport and electricity, entrepreneurs like Henry Ford could not have built things like the River Rouge plant. Stability is why Ford gave his workers the "unheard of" wage of $5/day for factory work.

Countries like China and India, which watched America dominate the last century while their great old civilizations stagnated, have taken this lesson to heart. Thus India can set a goal of 20 gigawatts of grid-connected solar power by 2022, and stick to it. China is doing the same thing, but promising that if costs come down it will do even more.

I find it amusing when capitalist ideologues in this country call such plans "socialist." Was J.P. Morgan (above) a socialist? Grover Cleveland? Was John D. Rockefeller when he calmly putted out upon hearing his Standard Oil monopoly would be broken up and said "buy Standard?"

Nixon is back and he's a Democrat

The President's speech on Afghanistan was called adult by some commentators.

Only I'm afraid it wasn't. 

That's because, like President Nixon's Silent Majority speech on Vietnam 40 years earlier, it told only half the truth. 

The President's strategy of a quick build-up, and then a quick draw-down, in Afghanistan only makes sense as part of a larger Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

Just as Nixon didn't tell America about his secret war in Laos or his plans for Cambodia, so President Obama did not discuss the dirty war the CIA is waging now, and will continue to wage, in Pakistan.

Protection Racket

My PC is very slow.

(This is actually a drum mat, sold in the UK.)

I checked it out with my malware and anti-viral. The malware detector didn't find anything serious. The anti-viral found almost 2,000 copies of a file called sgregister.

I looked it up. Sounded dangerous. I checked message boards for advice. They suggested a "free" product. Click a link, download it, load it, let it run -- waste a few hours. Then my fear is confirmed -- you have 743 serious errors.

But my "Free" software won't fix any more than a half-dozen of those errors. If I want them fixed, I have to register and buy it. I have to pay.

How America Must Lead

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Last week I talked about why America will win the future.

Now I want to talk about how to do that, and our responsibility for making that happen. 

America will continue to lead because of the hard work we have all done in the last generation, not so much in Washington but in our lives and communities. 

All the many movements of the last generation -- the womens' movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, the fight for rights for the disabled and ethnic minorities, the environmental movement -- all of what I have called the AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis, or the outright rejection of that thesis -- all have had an impact. 

All of them have taken us further down the road of progress than most other societies have even contemplated going, and what came to me most clearly during my recent trip was that elites elsewhere recognize that progress, and envy it.

What they have given our society is flexibility, mobility, an ability to adapt to change unparalleled in human history. The ruins of failed societies all around the world attest to this. Change is the hardest work a society can undertake. No society has succeeded at it like ours, and none has done more to unite people worldwide around the idea that change is both good and necessary.

The clearest proof is living in the White House right now. But we can't rest on that laurel. Here is what we must do:

1. Set high goals 
2. Learn what real leadership means 
3. Embrace the change process

  Let me take these one at a time:

Behind Obama Fail in the War Against Oil

While the President's first 100 days deserve strong praise there is one area of conspicuous failure.

The War Against Oil.

There are good and bad reasons for this:

1. Good - Lower energy prices reduce the priority for alternatives, and the savings from conservation.
2.  Bad - Energy has been lost among all the other priorities of the first 100 days.  

You can't fight the market unless you either make it your top priority or have an ongoing market failure driving public opinion. We have ongoing market failures in the financial and health markets. But in energy, in the near term, the market is our friend. The recession has pushed oil prices into the $50/barrel range, and gasoline prices are half what they were at their peak. 

Oil Fights Back

Those engaged in the War Against Oil must not underestimate the potential of oil to muddy the waters.

Their chief weapon is to question the premise of that war, namely global warming.

Doubt is their ally, because doubt prevents  action. To that end any scientist who questions global warming is being trotted out. These range from industry shills to thoughtful men like Freeman Dyson, who realize science offers nothing like an "airtight" case. 

All this is driven by right-wing "think tanks" like the Cato Institute and Heartland Institute, whose thoughts always lean to the golden rule -- he who has the gold makes the rules. But what many liberal bloggers don't understand is that, while orders come from the top and people follow with a devotion that would make Mao proud, their belief in this ideology is real.

Look carefully at the conservative comments under this New York Times blog post on Michele Bachmann, a "hatie" from Minnesota whose attitude towards Obama is identical with that of Jerry Rubin's 1969 attitude toward Nixon:

• What reasonable people take issue with is that the cause for climate change is somehow related to human activity.
  
• Conservatives are not invested in denying climate change - they are invested in denying man-made climate change which is a myth ginned up by liberal kooks pusing their agenda.
• The right doesn’t want to have more of our money confiscated, just to further motivate scientists and researchers and businessmen to invent a competitive solution (that currently doesn’t exist), to a problem that might not even be real.
• I believe that the earth may be warming slightly, but I am not convinced that anything that man does will alter this shift one way of the other.
  

This "belief" makes it possible to claim that public commitment to a War Against Oil is fleeting, that green energy is an economic sinkhole, and that rolling back fossil fuel use is a money-loser.

New War for Europe

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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A quiet economic war is now being fought and the future of Europe hangs in the balance.

As with much of the Cold War this struggle is mostly happening in secret. Unlike the Cold War (until, as my son would note, the end) this war is economic, not military.

At the center of the struggle is AIG. Reporters here are desperate to find out "who are the AIG counter parties?" That is, who holds the other end of the trade on the phony insurance AIG gave to Big Shitpile, without collateral -- the black sinkhole into which the world economy is rapidly falling.

In his testimony to the Senate this week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refused to answer the question. Some facts are leaking out, but these are mainly the names of American banks that are already getting government aid.

Here is what Geithner can't say. Europe. Banks in both Eastern and Western Europe were heavy buyers of Big Shitpile, lured into thinking they were getting AAA paper rather than junk by the AIG insurance.

Why was this done? My guess is that the Bush Administration was covering up the real costs of Iraq by creating a housing bubble, and that the bonds were also meant to create a "co-dependence" in Europe tieing those governments to U.S. policies. Pushing these bonds overseas helped increase the supply of free capital here for housing, and the AIG "insurance" made these deals look safe.

In fact, AIG was running a Ponzi scheme that made Bernie Madoff look like a two-bit grifter. Instead of putting up capital against its "insurance" AIG just pocketed the proceeds. Rather than price this insurance against the real risk of default AIG ignored its own underwriting rules. Was it done out of greed or under political pressure? I don't know. My guess is a little of both, along with "honest" patriotism -- your government asks and you act.

Why can't Geithner admit to this? Because, as we saw with Citicorp, which crashed as the government pumped its books with capital, the market will act on knowledge by running away from the counter-parties. So we keep Estonia, Hungary and the rest afloat on the sly, and we're forced by circumstances to bail everyone else out as well.

The danger is that this is a hole that can't be filled. Estimates of the value of mortgages at risk on this crap range from $2.5-7 trillion. At its height Credit Default Swaps were a $70 trillion business.

That's the real reason the President is going to Europe. All this springtime in Paris talk is a cover.

But wait. It gets worse.