URLs du Jour

2007-10-05

  • "Naomi Klein Smackdown" is the title of the Free Exchange link collection of negative reactions to Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. There's a link to the Tyler Cowan review we mentioned a couple days back and many more. John Cusack will not be reading any of them. (Via Pejman.)

  • The American Spectator's "Prowler" dishes plenty of right-wing rumor, but this one has a New Hampshire angle:
    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signed off on a legislative plan that he thinks will both lead to his party winning an additional seat in the Senate, and new tax revenue for his party to spend in the coming years.
    The "additional seat" is (at least for now) that of our very own Senator Sununu's, and the plan in question is to defeat Sununu's proposal to permanently extend the moratorium on Internet taxation. Quoting unnamed—they're always unnamed—Senate leadership aides:
    "Reid thinks there is enough friction on this issue that there will be no consensus on the moratorium, it will expire, and Sununu can take the fall for no extension. He wants Sununu down and out going into 2008," says a Democrat leadership aide. "We're looking at building a filibuster proof majority of 60 for 2008. That's the goal and Sununu has to go."
    I don't think anyone with a pulse is likely to believe that a Sununu-free Senate is less likely to stick us with tax hikes, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

  • The kiddos at Slashdot link to this article at New Zealand's version of Computerworld, where eBay's chief information and security officer, Dave Cullinane, spoke to a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University (which is in the US).
    Cullinane's experience with phishing goes back to his previous employer, Washington Mutual, which has been one of the top phishing targets in the US.

    While there, he noticed an unusual trend when taking down phishing sites.

    "The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," he said.

    Rootkit software covers the tracks of the attackers and can be extremely difficult to detect. According to Cullinane, none of the Linux operators whose machines had been compromised were even aware they'd been infected.

    Well, um, that's kind of sobering to your blogger, whose major day job is administering Linux boxes. And would prefer not to see even this unsubstantiated slur.

    Free advice to Linux admins: when someone needs to tell you your box has been compromised, you'll feel like an idiot. And you may be right about that. You might want to check out the Rootkit Hunter project, download their software, configure and run it. You don't want to see any bad news, of course, but a rootkit you know about is better than a rootkit you don't know about.


Last Modified 2007-10-05 5:34 PM EDT