There’s an AP story on the increasing trend toward crackers (really script kiddies) turning to home computers as targets. The article sort of misses the main reason why home computers have become targets — script kiddies often simply scan banks of IP addresses and hack whatever returns the result they’re looking for. Whether the computer is a home or business computer is irrelevant in those cases, any old victim will do. Ultimately, what’s going to have to change is the software industry. We need operating systems and applications that are secure out of the box, most people can’t or won’t take responsibility for securing their own computers. I think that what’s going to happen is that businesses are going to pressure Microsoft (and others) into better securing their products (even home products) out of weariness with banks of home computers being used as launch pads for attacks on business computers.

Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos (Here’s the WSJ article on the contents of the al-Qaeda computers that they purchased, syndicated via MSNBC. Thanks for the link, Dan.)

Here’s one for people who keep track of the consequences of poor information security (sent along by a reader). The Department of the Interior was ordered to turn off the Internet connections for all of the computers with access to data about some money held in trust for Indian tribes because of poor security. Unfortunately, the Department of the Interior comprises the National Parks Service, Bureau of Land Management, and all sorts of other agencies of interest to regular people. Thanks to the judge’s ruling (and the Department’s poor information security), they’re all offline.

How evil can a company be? Check out this Washington Post piece on a decades-long coverup by Monsanto of the dangers of PCBs and their own irresponsibility in releasing them into the environment. Monsanto really ought to be put out of business altogether.

Guardian Unlimited: Hypocrisy at the heart of the Taliban. This really shouldn’t surprise anybody.

This LA Times op-ed piece says Pervez Musharraf is as good as gone in Pakistan.

Anne Applebaum explains in Slate why the United States is in a tough spot in the conflict between Pakistan and India. India has the same case against Pakistan that we had against the Taliban, and they have a better case than Israel does against the Palestinians. We can’t offer India our unqualified support, though, because we really need Pakistan’s help right now if we want to finish off the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Of couse, it’s also in India’s best interest for the US to erase Al Qaeda because they were big supporters of the insurgency in Kashmir, too. I honestly think we’re doing the best we can in this situation, geopolitics are hard.

We’re having a weather anomoly here today.

I took a look at the Mozilla Development Roadmap today and noticed two things. The first is that they’ve really been hitting their dates over the last few releases. That means we might really see Mozilla 1.0 in April. The quality of the current milestones is already higher than that of several released versions of Netscape Navigator. The second thing I noticed is that four of the seven project managers of Mozilla don’t look like they’re on AOL’s payroll. That has to be a good sign.

The controversy over the Secret Service agent kicked off the airplane won’t go away. American Airlines says that they didn’t racially profile the guy, they became suspicious of him because his bag had Arabic looking books in it. Well, OK then.