Friday, November 07, 2003
In the New York Times there's a commentary on a new movie/documentary called Hidden in Plain Sight. It is about the well known (for us, at least) School of the Americas:
The school, founded during the cold war to train Latin American soldiers in the techniques of withstanding Marxist aggression (and, not incidentally, protecting United States interests) (...)
The Army says they are learning leadership skills; others say the school produces torturers and dictators, pointing to past graduates like Manuel Noriega of Panama and Gen. Leopoldo F. Galtieri of Argentina.
The bloody history of Latin America, and the notorious role of the United States (let's remember Nicaragua and Chile) are things that can't be easily erased from our memories. In the United States, however, the foreign policy is something that everyone prefers to neglect, and words like "imperialism" are kind of taboo. The article mentions that
Noam Chomsky, the busy linguistics professor, (...) condemns the school as a blatant tool of United States imperialism.
The documentary is serious enough to be reviewed in the New York Times in spite of the topic; nevertheless I notice the usual reticence of the American media: to call Chomsky "the busy linguistics professor" is to reduce him to just someone who teaches in the school, and knows nothing about politics. Is to highlight the academic Chomsky, just to put the activist Chomsky in the shadows; is to unauthorize his decades of lucid political critic saying he's just a professor, after all. In 1933, Borges wrote in an essay called "Arte de Injuriar":
The "mister" title, omitted carelessly or irregularly through the verbal commerce among men, is denigrative when stamped on someone. "Doctor" is another obliteration. To mention the sonnets perpetrated by doctor Lugones, equals to wrongly measure them for ever, to refute each of his metaphors. Once "doctor" is first applied, the demigod dies and we only have left a vain Argentinean gentleman who uses fake paper collars and gets shaved every two days; someone who can die by an interruption in the respiratory system. We only have left the central and incurable futility of every human being.
The school, founded during the cold war to train Latin American soldiers in the techniques of withstanding Marxist aggression (and, not incidentally, protecting United States interests) (...)
The Army says they are learning leadership skills; others say the school produces torturers and dictators, pointing to past graduates like Manuel Noriega of Panama and Gen. Leopoldo F. Galtieri of Argentina.
The bloody history of Latin America, and the notorious role of the United States (let's remember Nicaragua and Chile) are things that can't be easily erased from our memories. In the United States, however, the foreign policy is something that everyone prefers to neglect, and words like "imperialism" are kind of taboo. The article mentions that
Noam Chomsky, the busy linguistics professor, (...) condemns the school as a blatant tool of United States imperialism.
The documentary is serious enough to be reviewed in the New York Times in spite of the topic; nevertheless I notice the usual reticence of the American media: to call Chomsky "the busy linguistics professor" is to reduce him to just someone who teaches in the school, and knows nothing about politics. Is to highlight the academic Chomsky, just to put the activist Chomsky in the shadows; is to unauthorize his decades of lucid political critic saying he's just a professor, after all. In 1933, Borges wrote in an essay called "Arte de Injuriar":
The "mister" title, omitted carelessly or irregularly through the verbal commerce among men, is denigrative when stamped on someone. "Doctor" is another obliteration. To mention the sonnets perpetrated by doctor Lugones, equals to wrongly measure them for ever, to refute each of his metaphors. Once "doctor" is first applied, the demigod dies and we only have left a vain Argentinean gentleman who uses fake paper collars and gets shaved every two days; someone who can die by an interruption in the respiratory system. We only have left the central and incurable futility of every human being.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
More on spam: the Pew report shows some interesting results about women:
More women than men expressed concern about every bothersome trait of spam we probed in our survey, but a few stood out. Significantly more women than men are bothered by offensive or obscene content of spam (83% v. 68%); by the deceptions and dishonesties in spam (82% v. 77%); by the sense that spam could mean their privacy has been compromised (79% v. 73%); and that spam could damage their computers (81% v. 76%).
Although men and women receive about the same volume of email, the same proportions of spam in those emails, and spend about the same amount of time processing the spam, more women than men say the spam gets in their way; women are considerably more likely to report that they get so much spam, it often makes it hard to get their real mail, both for work email (41% v. 28%) and for personal email (60% v. 51%).
When asked to identify the kind of spam that bothers them most, men and women alike name pornographic spam above all others, together nearly four times the runner-up. And significantly, more women cite porn than men do (63% v. 42%).
Men are also more aggressive in acting on spam they receive, both positively and negatively. While women are more likely than men to delete their spam immediately (88% v. 83%), significantly more men than women have clicked on a link inside spam to get more information (37% v. 29%), and have ordered a product or service (9% v 5%). More men than women have requested to be removed from mailing lists (71% v 63%).
I think that a brief glance on the titles of the spam may explain the last figures ("enlarge your penis", "get your viagra", "naked schoolgirls", etc.)
More women than men expressed concern about every bothersome trait of spam we probed in our survey, but a few stood out. Significantly more women than men are bothered by offensive or obscene content of spam (83% v. 68%); by the deceptions and dishonesties in spam (82% v. 77%); by the sense that spam could mean their privacy has been compromised (79% v. 73%); and that spam could damage their computers (81% v. 76%).
Although men and women receive about the same volume of email, the same proportions of spam in those emails, and spend about the same amount of time processing the spam, more women than men say the spam gets in their way; women are considerably more likely to report that they get so much spam, it often makes it hard to get their real mail, both for work email (41% v. 28%) and for personal email (60% v. 51%).
When asked to identify the kind of spam that bothers them most, men and women alike name pornographic spam above all others, together nearly four times the runner-up. And significantly, more women cite porn than men do (63% v. 42%).
Men are also more aggressive in acting on spam they receive, both positively and negatively. While women are more likely than men to delete their spam immediately (88% v. 83%), significantly more men than women have clicked on a link inside spam to get more information (37% v. 29%), and have ordered a product or service (9% v 5%). More men than women have requested to be removed from mailing lists (71% v 63%).
I think that a brief glance on the titles of the spam may explain the last figures ("enlarge your penis", "get your viagra", "naked schoolgirls", etc.)
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Evo Morales, in the Forum to Defend Human Kind, Mexico, last week:
What has just happened these days in Bolivia is a big turmoil, after being scorned through more than 500 years. What has happened from September to October this year was that people's arguments have won and they began to defeat the empire's cannon. We lived so many years the confrontation of two cultures! The culture of life, represented by the aboriginal peoples, and the culture of death, represented by the West.
The whole speech goes on in this vein:
Because we have no other choice: if we want to defend human kind we have to defeat the system, we have to defeat the American imperialism.
Sometimes I think that Latin America withdrew to the sixties...
What has just happened these days in Bolivia is a big turmoil, after being scorned through more than 500 years. What has happened from September to October this year was that people's arguments have won and they began to defeat the empire's cannon. We lived so many years the confrontation of two cultures! The culture of life, represented by the aboriginal peoples, and the culture of death, represented by the West.
The whole speech goes on in this vein:
Because we have no other choice: if we want to defend human kind we have to defeat the system, we have to defeat the American imperialism.
Sometimes I think that Latin America withdrew to the sixties...
Monday, November 03, 2003
If I just copy this from some newspaper, you would think it's just another portrait of Argentina:
...the new members of the club, who only months ago considered themselves middle class, before jobs and their retirement funds evaporated.
But if I tell you this is something that's happening at the United States, you would laugh at me. My reaction wasn't too different, after reading a Guardian article about the hidden numbers of Bush's America. I just copy one or two more lines:
(...) the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries.
About 31 million Americans were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger.
The Americans in the food lines often do not show up in the statistics and usually do not turn up for elections.
If it wasn't the Guardian, I would have not trusted such data. But as it is in fact The Guardian, I am astonished.
...the new members of the club, who only months ago considered themselves middle class, before jobs and their retirement funds evaporated.
But if I tell you this is something that's happening at the United States, you would laugh at me. My reaction wasn't too different, after reading a Guardian article about the hidden numbers of Bush's America. I just copy one or two more lines:
(...) the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries.
About 31 million Americans were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger.
The Americans in the food lines often do not show up in the statistics and usually do not turn up for elections.
If it wasn't the Guardian, I would have not trusted such data. But as it is in fact The Guardian, I am astonished.
I read in Adrian's weblog his logical concerns about the new anti-spam laws in UK. What is clear to me is that no domestic law will stop spam; if spam becomes illegal in UK, they will send it from the Bahamas. If laws are actually implemented on most first world countries, soon we'll have "spam paradises" in third world countries.
I've been wondering lately how much of the global bandwidth of the internet is wasted these days by spam and viruses. Virus infected mails are typically 140-300k in size, and when one of them is the last trend, it floods virtually every mail system. If you check the statistics of viruses of the last, say, five years, you'll see that every important virus exploits weaknesses in Microsoft Outlook. However, most people continue using such mail client, and most companies keep going with Microsoft Exchange, the symmetrically insecure mail server. Spam could easily be avoided following a few common sense rules (instead of doing the Kafka-esque procedure suggested by the Death to Spam webpage), and still people receive spam daily and think of it as the flyers in the real life mailbox: there's nothing they can do about it, as a mailbox is something public that everyone sees while passing by. So I asked myself the first question again, how much of the global internet resources are wasted because of people's ignorance, indolence or stubbornness? Perhaps it's useful to repeat the anti-spam rules, the ones that worked for me:
1) Keep two e-mail accounts, one for spam and one for personal use. The one for spam will be typically a Hotmail account, in order to return to Microsoft something of their kindness. Try to avoid a free mail account for the personal one: it has been proved that many free mail providers sell address lists to spammers.
2) Each time you're prompted to give an e-mail address in a webpage in order to register for something, use the spam account.
3) Use the personal address only for your friends. Ask them not to make it public when sending group jokes, instruct them to use the BCC field.
4) If you receive spam, never reply. Instruct your mail client to filter it from now on (I use Mozilla's statistic spam detection).
5) Avoid forwarding chain mails (missing people, virus warnings, etc.). Instruct your friends to do the same: such chains are meant to collect mail addresses for spam.
6) If you really need to publish your email address somewhere (a guestbook, your own webpage, etc.) use some kind of trick to avoid robots that collect email addresses. In my webpage I use a picture with my email address instead of real text. You can write things like "myname at myserver.com" or "myname@nospam.myserver.com" and instruct people to remove "nospam" from it when using it.
I've been wondering lately how much of the global bandwidth of the internet is wasted these days by spam and viruses. Virus infected mails are typically 140-300k in size, and when one of them is the last trend, it floods virtually every mail system. If you check the statistics of viruses of the last, say, five years, you'll see that every important virus exploits weaknesses in Microsoft Outlook. However, most people continue using such mail client, and most companies keep going with Microsoft Exchange, the symmetrically insecure mail server. Spam could easily be avoided following a few common sense rules (instead of doing the Kafka-esque procedure suggested by the Death to Spam webpage), and still people receive spam daily and think of it as the flyers in the real life mailbox: there's nothing they can do about it, as a mailbox is something public that everyone sees while passing by. So I asked myself the first question again, how much of the global internet resources are wasted because of people's ignorance, indolence or stubbornness? Perhaps it's useful to repeat the anti-spam rules, the ones that worked for me:
1) Keep two e-mail accounts, one for spam and one for personal use. The one for spam will be typically a Hotmail account, in order to return to Microsoft something of their kindness. Try to avoid a free mail account for the personal one: it has been proved that many free mail providers sell address lists to spammers.
2) Each time you're prompted to give an e-mail address in a webpage in order to register for something, use the spam account.
3) Use the personal address only for your friends. Ask them not to make it public when sending group jokes, instruct them to use the BCC field.
4) If you receive spam, never reply. Instruct your mail client to filter it from now on (I use Mozilla's statistic spam detection).
5) Avoid forwarding chain mails (missing people, virus warnings, etc.). Instruct your friends to do the same: such chains are meant to collect mail addresses for spam.
6) If you really need to publish your email address somewhere (a guestbook, your own webpage, etc.) use some kind of trick to avoid robots that collect email addresses. In my webpage I use a picture with my email address instead of real text. You can write things like "myname at myserver.com" or "myname@nospam.myserver.com" and instruct people to remove "nospam" from it when using it.
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