Shaun Waterman has written a piece for UPI covering the Laurie Garrett affair at length. One interesting bit about this whole thing is that Garrett’s tone in the email, which seems so flip to her, is very much in a weblogesque style. Her piece reads like a huge entry on her weblog, and it’s no surprise that it was such a big hit in the weblog world for that reason. Publishing observations and impressions is an anathema to the news reporter, but it’s the weblogger’s stock and trade. So she seemed like one of us, except with more writing skills and better access.

One thing I’m glad to see is that the fact that we’re screwing the Kurds is getting a ton of press. It sort of kicks the chair of morality right out from under the feet of our war effort, doesn’t it?

Yet another buffer overflow in Sendmail has been found, and can be used to obtain root. Interestingly, the worm Robert Morris unleashed in 1988 took advantage of a security flaw in Sendmail. Good to know that 15 years down the road, we’re still running into problems with the same buggy piece of software. There’ll be no patching for me, I run postfix.

The North Koreans keep pushing us. I assume we’re supposed to ignore it.

Project Blogger is a marketing scheme that gives free stuff to bloggers in exchange for their talking it up. Of course, the obvious question is whether the blogger maintains an independent voice. If they send you some crappy soft drink to try and you write that it tastes like goat urine, will they send you that hot new Nokia phone next month? It would seem that the price to stay on the gravy train would be to keep writing uncritical reviews of the free schwag.

One condition of the project is that you put a bit of code on your page that enables them to see what kind of traffic you’re getting. It seems obvious that any number of blog tracking sites could keep a list of people who are participating in the program, and we can evaluate their comments through that lens.

By the way, Project Blogger didn’t give me anything at all to talk about them, and even though I’m not signing up for the project, I could use a free cell phone.

Tim Bray posts today about progress in the spam wars. His basic sense is that the filters are winning. At this point, I’m inclined to agree. He uses Mozilla’s built in spam filter; my weapon of choice is SpamAssassin. My experience with it has been good since I first started using it for about 10 months, and since I installed version 2.50, it’s gotten a lot better. I’ve never had real problems with false positives, and these days it’s letting very, very little spam get through. I’m still saving up a big pile of email messages to train the Bayesian filter, but I haven’t bothered yet, and at this point I don’t know whether I will. The built in filters are already outstanding.

One perverse thought I had the other day is that ISPs running spam filters are kind of screwing those of us who run our own spam filters. The reason is that if spam filtering is opt-in (either setting up your own or turning on the ISP spam filter), then spammers have little incentive to write their messages to get around the existing filters. They might do so anyway because my gut assumption is that spammers are generally total morons, but any spammer with a modicum of brain cells should know that if I’m willing to go to the trouble to set up a spam filter, I will never, ever accept an offer that comes in via spam. On the other hand, if AOL and Yahoo set up spam filters by default for all their users, then there’s a powerful incentive for spammers to attempt to circumvent them. Overall, such filters may still be to the good on the larger scale, but they sure don’t work to my benefit.

Given the major attention given The Threatening Storm author Kenneth M Pollack in this space, it would be poor form for me not to give equal billing to Jim Henley’s response to Pollack’s arguments. Can Saddam Hussein be deterred? In my opinion the answer is, at least in some cases, yes.

In today’s column, I read the beginning of Thomas Friedman’s column and thought I’d found something I really agree with:

Watching this Iraq story unfold, all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids and my own planet, I’d pop some popcorn, pull up a chair and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan.

Unfortunately, Friedman is talking about the Bush administration’s plan to tump over the Arab world and see if democracy and civil rights fall out, and the thing I’m morbidly interested in seeing is just how much credibility the Bush administration can piss away by the time this Iraq thing is over. Between giving Turkey carte blanche to destroy Kurdish democracy so that we can bring democracy to Iraq, spying on half of the UN Security Council (and getting caught), and pretending that we care about anything other than kicking out Saddam Hussein to try to get people to buy into our war, just how far are we going to descend?

The real question that I’m looking for the answer to is what’s going on in Tony Blair’s mind right now. Support for the war here in the greatest country in the world is fading, and in the UK it seems to be all but gone. Tony Blair has been talking up disarmament, and morality, and all that stuff, and the Bush administration has, in the past few days, treated Blair’s self-justification like a hurricane treats a sand bar. I wonder if he’s beginning to have abandonment issues.

Here are two data points (one via the No War Blog and the other via Electrolite) that you may find instructive when thinking about the nature of the current administration. First, from a press briefing given by Ari Fleischer, whose job seems to be lying without shame:

No, it’s exactly as I indicated, that we have, on this issue, a matter of diplomacy and a matter of the merits. We ask each nation on the Security Council to weigh the merits and make a decision about war and peace.

The issue of course is the resolution to let the US invade Iraq. It was shortly after this that Fleischer was literally laughed out of the room when he pretended to be outraged at the idea that leaders of other countries could be induced to support us with cash or concessions.

Anyway, apparently the merits aren’t quite enough to get us the votes we need, because The Observer (UK, British media disclaimer applies) reports that the NSA has set up a little spying operation to monitor the swing countries on the Security Council. Here’s the beef:

The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is ‘mounting a surge’ aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also ‘policies’, ‘negotiating positions’, ‘alliances’ and ‘dependencies’ – the ‘whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises’.

The current big picture indicates that the second resolution is really a farce anyway because disarmament was never the President’s goal, but this still sheds some light on exactly how this administration works.

I would have never expected an op-ed like this to be written by a former US Attorney General.