Throwing Money at Internet Freedom

Jackson Diehl is concerned that, although money has been earmarked for use to subsidize sites that allow the residents of foreign nations to avoid state censorship, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have been slow to spend it. I can think of three reasons why that would be the case:

1. Just because I claim to have a good system for helping people avoid state censorship doesn't mean I'm necessarily a good target for $millions in taxpayer dollars. A company offered those $millions is likely to take the money, sure, but it may not use the money wisely - or its backers may pocket the money and run.

2. Just because a system is up and running doesn't mean that it's actually secure. Funding the wrong program could helptyrannical regimes identify dissidents.

3. The U.S. Government is concerned that it would be subsidizing tools used by criminals and terrorists to operate in ways that avoid detection and impede tracing by U.S. authorities.

Palin's Email Hacker

If this turns out to be accurate... How embarrassing for dad.

Lieberman's False Accusations Against Lamont

You know this by now - the FBI has concluded that the Lamont campaign was not responsible for attacks on Lieberman's website. If you followed the issue at the time, you probably expected that outcome. As I stated back then,

It gives me no confidence in the Lieberman campaign staff, or their accusations of sabotage, that they seem to think that their website is served from a magic box which can only fail in the event of the malicious acts of others.

The FBI's determination as to the cause? Lieberman's magic box server was misconfigured.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

Has Lieberman apologized yet? He should.

Website Security

You have to keep your eyes open. Odds are your website security budget is not as high as Al Gore's, but look what has happened to him.

Sometimes the most damaging hacks - the ones which knock you out of your position in the search engines - are the ones you can't see. The obvious stuff gets corrected, usually before it has much impact.