As the web and web browsers have matured, people have started expecting different things out of them. When we first released Firefox, few people were browsing with tabs or add-ons. I’ve written before about how web usage patterns have changed, so too have our strategies on how to effectively make use of system resources such as memory.

Firefox 3 Memory Usage

There are obvious dangers in trying to draw any common lessons from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. First, they are very different countries and very different wars. Second, the fighting still has years in which to evolve, and each side is constantly learning from the other and adapting every aspect of their strategy and tactics. Third, these are extraordinarily complex wars are fought in different ways in different parts of each country, and where nation building is as important as armed struggle. The US and its allies must not only win in military terms, the host government must win in terms of national political accommodation, creating effective security forces and a rule of law, establishing effective governance, and creating enough development to remove the incentive to fight to live.

It is also a reality that every observer of such complex wars tends to see them the way the blind men saw the elephant: to confuse what they can sense on the basis of limited observation with the overall reality of the struggle. This is further complicated by the fact that no one can spend half a century observing such conflicts without realizing that they follow the same maxim as politics: all counterinsurgency is ultimately local. It is not enough to have the right national solution. The “edge” goes to the side that has the right regional and local solutions over time, and what works in one area may well not work in another.

That said, the attached brief does provide a survey of both wars that does imply they have common lessons. Moreover, many of the most important lessons reinforce both what the US military has learned (relearned?) about stability operations, nation building, and counter insurgency and put in Field Manuals like the one on Operations (FM-3-0), and much of the work of various study groups.

The Ongoing Lessons of the Afghan and Iraq Wars

The IRS uses the Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS ) to administer and configure routers and switches. Users of the TACACS must be authorized by managers. The IRS had authorized 374 accounts for employees and contractors that could be used to access routers and switches to perform system administration duties. Of these, 141 (38 percent) did not have proper authorization to access the TACACS . Authorizations for 86 of the 141 employee and contractor accounts had been provided on some prior date, but the authorizations had expired at the time of our review. However, we could not find that the other 55 employee and contractor accounts had ever been authorized to access the System. We are particularly concerned that 27 of the 55 employees and contractors had accessed the routers and switches to change security configurations.

To authenticate users, the TACACS uses a security application that requires users to enter an account name and password. System administrators had circumvented this control by setting up 34 unauthorized accounts that appear to be shared-user accounts. Any person who knew the passwords to these accounts could change configurations without accountability and with little chance of detection. For this reason, the IRS requires that shared accounts be used only on a limited basis and that they be subjected to special authorization controls. However, during Fiscal Year 2007, 4.4 million (more than 84 percent) of the 5.2 million accesses to the TACACS were made by the 34 user accounts. None of the accounts were properly authorized.

Inadequate Security Controls Over Routers and Switches Jeopardize Sensitive Taxpayer Information

A large and growing burden on the nation’s economy, traffic congestion arises for various reasons, and more than one mechanism is needed to combat it. It is most unlikely, however, that serious inroads to address the problem will be made without fundamental reform in the way consumers are charged for their use of congested highways. Congestion prices are tolls that reflect the economic costs of congestion, including productivity losses from traffic delays, increased accidents, higher emissions, and more. Such prices would help reduce these economic costs, and guide transportation investment resources to their highest and best use—which would include a better balance between highway and transit investment. In addition, such prices would generate revenues to help finance new investment and compensate low-income people and others for whom toll payments are especially burdensome. Requiring federal, state, and local engagement, such reform is a necessary step in the development of an effective, efficient, and sustainable highway system for the twenty-first century.

America’s Traffic Congestion Problem: Toward a Framework for Nationwide Reform

So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors’ urine. And if there are illicit trainers on campuses, shady tutors with wraparound sunglasses and ties to basement labs in Italy, no one has exposed them.

Yet an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?

The following audio is a recording of last nights conversation at the ICA between Clay Shirky and Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.

Everywhere we look, it seems, companies and organisations are trying to harness the alleged wisdom of crowds – the power of groups of people to come together through the internet and share with one another, work together, or take some kind of collective public action. One of the world’s leading experts on social and technological networking, Clay Shirky, Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, comes to the ICA to talk about how the idea of networks, and particularly online social networks, is changing everything around us.

The Power of Networks

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible.

I was sure we'd covered this, but I couldn't find it.

William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview

It's hard to imagine another member of the United Nations Security Council, for instance, feeling threatened by Bjork. But when the big-voiced Icelandic pixie shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" from the concert stage in Shanghai - nearly two weeks before any hint of the violence that would roil Lhasa - the official Xinhua news agency reported that the Ministry of Culture would "investigate" her performance, which had "not only broken Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feeling of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist."

China is one of the very small number of places on the planet where the political impulses of rock musicians are taken seriously by politicians.

Why China is the only world government scared of Bjork

It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?

Why the Surge Doesn’t Matter

So, when you want to build some ambient visualizations that are integrated with the structure of a data-driven site, remember: you can go a long way with accessible, standards-based markup and some simple CSS.

Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards