Serving up security

Cyrillic spam
The Fight Against V1@gra (and Other Spam)

Tom Zeller Jr. in the Times: "For the end user, spam isn't that much of a problem anymore," said Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs' senior antispam technologist. "But for the network, and for people like us, it definitely is." ...

But spam continues to account for roughly 70 percent of all e-mail messages on the Internet, despite tough antispam laws across the globe (including the Can-Spam Act in the United States), despite vigorous lawsuits against individual junk-mail senders and despite the famous prediction, by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in 2004, that spam would be eradicated by 2006. ...

Mr. Sergeant said that just two men — [Leo] Kuvayev and Alex Blood, a Ukrainian who is rated the No. 1 junk mailer by Spamhaus — hammer the world's e-mail systems with five million messages an hour. "You're talking about being responsible for something like 10 percent of all e-mail on the Internet," Mr. Sergeant said, "from just two guys."

Wow, 10% of all email--that's astonishing. What is it about those Russians--from Spamhaus' list they make up half of the world's 10 worst spammers-- they always seem to be at the center of all trouble on the Internet....

The article's really interesting, details all the creative ways spammers try to get past filters.

Baby makes four
My Broker, My Therapist

Teri Karush Rogers in the Times: Brokers, like therapists, have to understand what buyers really want in order to help them get it. While that might seem easy, it is not, because buyers often don't know themselves what they would like — hence an old real estate maxim, "Buyers are liars."

In the course of probing for information, brokers sometimes encounter far more than they really want to know or need to know. Details that might make a therapist wince, or at least write faster.

"More so than any other profession, I think you get to see the window of people's inner souls in a kind of hyper-reality superquick time," said Rob Gross, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. ...

Sometimes, brokers hear about an important event in the couple's lives at the same time as one of the spouses.

[Brian K.] Lewis was showing a junior-four condo to a young couple when he happened to mention that a two-bedroom was available in the same building. The wife pressed to see it over her husband's objections. "He was saying: 'Why are you so adamant? We've already talked about a two-bedroom,' " Mr. Lewis recalled. "She just kept saying, 'We need it.' "

Finally, she laid her hand on her belly, and the men slowly caught on.

Then, "we all screamed and yelled," Mr. Lewis said. For him, that was just the start of the good news. Aglow with the impending change in their lives, the parents-to-be bought the two-bedroom.

I think some people don't spend enough time with their spouse--what a way to find out! It's funny how the article emphasizes 'the men' slowly caught on.

Guy lit
I Confess: One Theme, 30 Writers, a Trend

Charles McGrath in the Times: Chick lit. True crime. Diet books. Recovery memoirs. Books about Britney. The publishing industry is a staunch believer in the principle that too much is never enough. The latest genre to flood the shelves in possibly excessive numbers, you may have noticed, is the anthology, but not the sort we used to lug to class.

This new kind of anthology assembles first-person confessional essays, rather than, say, discussions of sanitation and personal hygiene in the Middle Ages, and is readily distinguished by an annoyingly cute title and a numeral specifying the number of writers who bare their souls on a range of intimate topics: "Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives"; "Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick: 28 Women Writers on Life, Sex and Survival"; "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves." ...

Men have occasionally been known to write this kind of confessional lit. In response to "The Bitch in the House," for example, there was "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom." And men may even read these first-person anthologies, though not in great numbers, apparently, and seldom on the subway or in other public places. "Most of the ones aimed at men pretty much fail miserably," said Sally Wofford-Girand, an agent who has handled a number of the books. ...

The essays in this book present a fairly consistent narrative: the writer, a self-proclaimed idiot (the term of choice is actually a more anatomical one), after floundering around for years (though enjoying, as he modestly admits, a healthy amount of hot action on the futon), suddenly finds himself blown away by a "stone babe" who is "willowy" or else "gleamy eyed" and "leggy" and instantly commits, without a moment's thought or regret.

As David Owen writes, explaining his decision to marry quite young: "If you don't know what you're doing, simply gathering more facts is unlikely to improve the outcome."

What a great quote. Hopefully his wife knew what she was doing.

Need me to spot you?
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

Frank Rich in the Times: When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores." ...

You forget sometimes how ironic truth can be.

Somewhere there has to exist footage from random security cameras that show NSA employees wiping down exercise equipment after a terrorist's used it... helping a hijacker reach a can of beans high up on a shelf... maybe spotting him while he lifts.

It's strange, I really should like Frank Rich as a political columnist more than I do. I liked him when he wrote for the Arts section--he's funny, writes well, always interesting. But for some reason reading his political pieces feels like eating your spinach.

Maybe because he's so predictable; strikes just the right note of aggrieved outrage, is so deft with his logic and language. His style reminds me a bit of Lewis Lapham's essays for Harpers--but Lapham always seemed to loop around in an original direction, connecting what looked like disparate observations.

Maybe Rich is like the typical artist or entertainment figure who's mastered their craft and then--used to the adulation and respect of his/her sphere--spouts off assuredly on the real world, little realizing how amateurish they sound.

Politics is unique in that it's a theater that everyone can and should participate in; lack of knowledge or understanding isn't a barrier to entry. And as I said, I do read Rich and find him pretty good. But for whatever reason, he still feels a little like a dabbler to me, someone who's striving to write important columns that the movers and shakers quote to each other.

In exactly the way that R.W. Apple Jr., who for decades covered politics for the Times, does not when he writes, nowadays about travel and food, (always mentioning his wife Betsey).

See, for example, Apple's article on eating in Shanghai. Maybe it would profit the famously-arrogant Rich to spend some time hoofing it around the globe with R.W. and his wife, taking time to talk to people and try their food.

Photo of Nan Xiang in Shanghai by Nelson Ching in the Times