After a drunken design session, the OpenBSD group has come out with some countermeasures that should prevent buffer overflows. All of the stuff they’re doing could be implemented in any OS, and does look like it should work. Given that most of the major Internet attacks since the Morris worm have been based on buffer overflows, needless to say this is huge.

I have only one thing to say about re-code.com: this idea is hardly new.

In the midst of the death and destruction brought about by the war in Iraq, for some reason it’s the pillaging of Iraq’s museums that really leaves me depressed, mainly for the senselessness of it all. It seems odd to be as upset about things, especially things that don’t really have any practical value, as one might be about people, but I can’t help but feel so very sad that some Iraqis have chosen to destroy or steal the cultural artifacts that document the history of their civilization. Maybe it’s because all of the death and destruction that we confront every day all sort of melds together. If the violent deaths of innocents sent me into a deep depression, then I could never leave the house. On the other hand, the destruction of a national museum is something more unusual. Obviously, given the attention being paid to the musem story, many other people feel similarly.

Declan McCullagh has written a background piece on Mike Hawash, the Intel engineer who’s languishing in a federal prison on a material witness warrant. By the way, did you hear about all of the prisons we’ve found in Iraq where people were being held without charges?

Man, these days I really wish I were implementing something interesting. The main reason there hasn’t been much technical discussion on this site is that I’m just not doing much interesting technical stuff these days. I’m reading an EJB book, and surprisingly, EJB seems pretty understandable to me so far, but other than that, I’m just maintaining some old applications that are really completely boring. The other problem is that I have so much going on right now just in terms of real life maintenance stuff that I don’t have a whole lot of time to really concentrate on something technical. In the meantime, I’m envying Sam Ruby, Don Box, and Russell Beattie, who are always posting about code that they’re writing. I can say that I painted all of the bathrooms in my house this weekend, which was somewhat rewarding but is nothing to write about.

The effect of SARS on the economy is starting to get me really worried. There’s talk of Cathay Pacific Airlines grounding its fleet next month if things don’t get better. Considering that China was responsible for 77% of global GDP growth in 2002, the idea of its economy taking a huge blow due to SARS is pretty chilling.

The New York Times ran yet another Google love letter today, talking about Google’s amazing success amidst the wreckage of so many other failed companies. The article is a typical business fawn piece (deserved in this case), I’m just linking to it because it made me realize something important. Google’s advertising system is so good that these days when I search for something involving a business transiaction, I often look at the ads that come up before looking at the search results. For someone who does everything they can to filter spam, block popups, and generally ignore advertising, that’s saying something.

Tom Friedman’s column today basically says what he’s been saying for weeks, which is that rebuilding Iraq and showing that Americans don’t have it in for Arabs is more important than conquering the country, and that we need to do something to help resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He unfortunately cites Colin Powell’s statement about Americans never asking for anything more than a place to bury its dead when invading other countries. It’s a beautiful sentiment, but is it true? Where did all of those military bases that we have around the world come from, anyway? It seems to me that the bases in Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Cuba, and other places as well were all direct offshoots of American invasions. How large would America be if we hadn’t taken nearly every acre of it away from Native Americans? I do not think of America as a country that’s interested in conquest, but to say that we’ve never asked for anything in terms of land from countries we’ve invaded is just inaccurate, and I hate seeing it repeated over and over, just because it reinforces the way we think of ourselves.

Molly Ivins wrote a nice column this week on Iraq’s new leadership. It’s amazing to me that at every opportunity, the Bush adminstration displays its tin ear.

Jake Tapper has a long story today at Salon about how we’re failing in Afghanistan. The comparisons are pretty obvious, we “liberated” Afghanistan at the end of 2002, promising big piles of foreign aid and a new, better life for Afghans. None of that has come to pass, though. It’s basically the same shooting gallery it was under the Taliban and before the Taliban. Iraq obviously has a number of advantages over Afghanistan — it sits on a bunch of oil, it’s in a strategic location, and it has a much more educated citizenry. Even so, getting it back on its feet is going to take a lot of work, and I wonder whether anyone has the tenacity to see it through.

I don’t think this is a problem exclusive to the US. While in the aftermath of World War II, the victorious powers made sure that Japan and Germany were rebuilt, since then the record for turning countries around is really pretty spotty. I don’t think the US is worse than anyone else at babysitting ravaged countries until they can stand on their own two feet. I just don’t think anyone is really good at it. We have a lot of domestic problems in this country, and we have an administration that is clearly more interested in destabilizing the world rather than stabilizing it. So I don’t think that rebuilding Afghanistan or Iraq is really their agenda, and I don’t think it will hold the attention of most of our citizens. In the meantime, there are powerful people in this country who’d like to see regime change in bunches of other countries as well. Personally, I’d like to see us actually fix a country, any old country, first.