ARTS & FARCES internet

I desperately wish my hometown had a world-class newspaper, but as long as Knight Ridder owns the franchise, smart money says it’s not going to happen. Accordingly, I stopped reading the daily years ago. Here’s a perfect example why. I would quote the money graf, but I find it too despicable.

I had a whole rant worked out, but Charles Laszewski, one of the three Pioneer Press writers worth reading, did it far better in an open letter on Romenesko’s non-blog blog:

“With your column, you have spat on the copy of the brave men and women who are doing their best in terrible conditions. More than 20 reporters have died in Iraq from around the world. You have insulted them and demeaned them, and to a much lesser degree, demeaned the reporters everywhere who have been threatened with bodily harm, who have been screamed at, or denied public records, just because they wanted to present the closest approximation to the truth they could.

“I am embarrassed to call you my colleague.”

Last summer, Texas transplant surgeons made a diagnostic mistake and transplanted a kidney from a brain-dead donor they believed died from a crack cocaine overdose into a relatively healthy end-stage-renal disease (permanent kidney failure) patient. Turns out the organ donor had rabies and the transplant recipient—along with the three other organ recipients from that donor—subsequently died of rabies. The doctors looked no further than the donor’s crack habit and never suspected rabies or anything else. “He’d recently smoked crack cocaine. He’d hemorrhaged around the brain. He’d died. That was all we needed to know,” said Dr. Goran Klintmalm, chairman and chief of the Baylor Regional Transplant Institute at Baylor University Medical Center in Gretchen Reynolds’ piece in today’s New York Times magazine.

Fully ninety percent of surveyed internet users have adjusted their behavior because of “software intrusions.” So says a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report, “Spyware: The threat of unwanted software programs is changing the way people use the internet.” So what about the other ten percent? Do they just happily ignore malware, or do they think it’s actually part of the operating system?

According to the Pew report, “68% of home internet users, or about 93 million American adults, have experienced at least one computer problem in the past year that are consistent with problems caused by spyware or viruses.”

I suspect that’s actually down from previous years because until this year default Microsoft installations were immediately vulnerable to various attacks.

Around the first of the year I bought an IBM ThinkPad and a few weeks ago the left trackpad button was getting a little “mushy.” Last week it started dropping mouseclicks intermittently. After following the amazing adventure Jeff Jarvis had with Dell, I was somewhat apprehensive about dancing with IBM, especially post Lenovo purchase.

Last Tuesday evening I filed a service request on IBM’s website. This not being a crucial breakdown, so I assigned the trouble ticket the lowest priority. Within the hour I received a call back saying the technician would call in the morning for the on-site repair.

On Wednesday morning, right on schedule an IBM technician called to say that the part was temporarily unavailable but had been ordered and should be in tomorrow.

On Thursday, the technician called to say that he had gotten buried in higher priority tickets and that he would call my ticket in for reassignment.

On Friday morning another technician called and we set up the appointment. He arrived on time but the warehouse had sent the wrong part.

This morning the technician called to set up another appointment and he was at my downtown Minneapolis office within the hour. The repair took less than an hour start to finish. No question or hassle about the problem, just a quick replacement and he was gone like the Lone Ranger.

I’m going to have to replace my server this fall. I won’t be looking any further than IBM.

That the Bush administration is one of the most secretive in history is not news. But the breadth and depth of that secrecy is news. According to Scott Shane’s report in this morning’s New York Times, “a record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office.”

Bush’s federal minions are classifying documents to the tune of an astounding 7,500 per hour.

The Times presents this information visually in a series of graphic images.

The price we pay for Bush’s secrecy is considerable. “The increasing secrecy—and it’s rising cost to taxpayers, estimated by the office at $7.2 billion last year—is drawing protests from a growing array of politicians and activists, including Republican members of Congress, leaders of the independent commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks and even the top federal official who oversees classification,” according to the Times account.

All of this secrecy flies in the face of the common-sense notion articulated by former Republican governor of New Jersey and chair of the Sept. 11 commission, Thomas H. Kean: “We’re better off with openness. The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public.” Things have clearly gotten out of control when scientific papers, portions of a Supreme Court decision, and the CIA’s budgets from the 1950s and 1960s are being suppressed. Perhaps no one knows more about the overclassification issue than J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office. “I’ve seen information that was classified that I’ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks,” Leonard told Times reporter Shane.