As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

According to some flickr forum discussions (where others are reporting similar occurrences) Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so. And they’ve failed to implement sufficient countermeasures, technical or otherwise.

Phishing typically targets banking and PayPal information, obviously for financial gain. In my case, someone left a comment on a photo, with a link. And clicking on that link led me to this sad situation. Why did Yahoo let someone post a link that was harmful?

Sure, the forums are also filled with smug posts (not from the flickr staff; they have been instructed to use a soothing tone, while not providing any resolution) from people who insist that the victims of these scams are to blame for not knowing better. I would have thought I did know better, actually.

This miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.

Stories, lost forever

At your request, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has analyzed whether a difference exists between the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) funding for science and technology (S&T) activities supporting unclassified space programs and its funding for S&T activities supporting other (nonspace) programs. The enclosed report indicates that funding for S&T activities supporting unclassified space programs has been less than S&T funding for other defense programs and that DoD’s plans for the future maintain that difference in funding. (Because of a lack of information, CBO’s analysis does not address the extent to which classified research might be supporting unclassified space programs.)

Comparison of science and technology funding for DOD’s space and non-space programs

A system-wide banking crisis increases population heart disease mortality rates by 6.4% (95% CI: 2.5% to 10.2%, p<0.01) in high income countries, after controlling for economic change, macroeconomic instability, and population age and social distribution. The estimated effect is nearly four times as large in low income countries. Conclusions Banking crises are a significant determinant of short-term increases in heart disease mortality rates, and may have more severe consequences for developing countries.

Can a bank crisis break your heart?

Given its relatively low savings rate, the U.S. economy depends heavily on foreign capital inflows from countries with high savings rates (such as China) to help promote growth and to fund the federal budget deficit. China has intervened heavily in currency markets to limit the yuan’s appreciation. As a result, China has become the world’s largest and fastest growing holder of foreign exchange reserves (FER), which totaled $1.4 trillion as of September 2007. China has invested a large share of its FER in U.S. securities, which, as of June 2006, totaled $699 billion, making China the 2nd largest foreign holder of U.S. securities (after Japan). These securities include Treasury debt, U.S. agency debt, U.S. corporate debt, and U.S. equities.

U.S. Treasury securities are issued to finance the federal budget deficit. Of the public debt that is privately held, about half is held by foreigners. As of October 2007, China’s Treasury securities holdings were $388 billion, accounting for 16.8% of total foreign ownership of U.S. Treasury securities and making China the second largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries after Japan. From March to October 2007, China’s Treasury holdings declined by about 8%.

Some U.S. policymakers have expressed concern that China might try to use its large holdings of U.S. securities, including U.S. public debt, as leverage against U.S. policies it opposes. For example, various Chinese government officials are reported to have suggested that China could dump (or threaten to dump) a large share of its holdings to prevent the United States from implementing trade sanctions against China’s currency policy. Other Chinese officials have reportedly stated that China should diversify its investments of its foreign exchange reserves away from dollar- denominated assets to those that offer higher rates of returns.

A gradual decline in China’s holdings of U.S. assets would not be expected to have a negative impact on the U.S. economy (since it be matched by increased U.S. exports and a lower trade deficit). However, some economists contend that attempts by China to unload a large share of its holdings U.S. securities holdings could have a significant negative impact on the U.S. economy (at least in the short run), especially if such a move sparked a sharp depreciation of the dollar in international markets and induced other foreign investors to sell off their U.S. holdings as well. In order to keep or attract that investment back, U.S. interest rates would rise, which would dampen U.S. economic growth, all else equal. Other economists counter that it would not be in China’s economic interest to suddenly sell off its U.S. investment holdings. Doing so could lead to financial losses for the Chinese government, and any shocks to the U.S. economy caused by this action could ultimately hurt China’s economy as well.

The issue of China’s large holdings of U.S. securities is part of a larger debate among economists over how long the high U.S. reliance on foreign investment can be sustained, to what extent that reliance poses risks to the economy, and how to evaluate the costs associated with borrowing versus the benefits that would accrue to the economy from that practice. This report will be updated as events warrant.

China’s Holdings of U.S. Securities: Implications for the U.S. Economy

Lawrence Wright discusses the United States’ intelligence strategy with Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence. In a rare interview, McConnell, who has been charged with bringing unity to a set of agencies that, for years, have been “brutally competitive, undermining one another and hoarding vital information,” speaks candidly with Wright about cyber-security, torture, intelligence leaks, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Cyber-security is one of McConnell’s top priorities; as he said in one Oval Office meeting, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focussed on a single U.S. bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy.” “My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens,” McConnell tells Wright. He is drafting a Cyber-Security Policy that seeks to protect not just government but also American industry and individuals from attack, but may be seen by some as violating privacy. Ed Giorgio, a former N.S.A. official working with McConnell on it, explains that the policy would give government “the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search.” Giorgio tells Wright, “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” and warns him, “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” Wright emphasizes this tension between security and privacy, saying, “Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically, the government has not proved worthy of that trust.”

Wright questions McConnell on the U.S.’s use of torture in intelligence investigations. McConnell denies that the U.S. tortures detainees, but says of the C.I.A.’s “special methods” of interrogation, “Have we gotten meaningful information? You betcha. Tons! Does it save lives? Tons! We’ve gotten incredible information.” When Wright asks him to define torture, McConnell answers, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.” On the subject of waterboarding, he says, for him, “Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”

Wright also discusses “the continuing failure of the intelligence community to capture or kill bin Laden and dismantle his organization.” David Shedd, McConnell’s deputy director for policy, tells Wright, “The trail is cold. It’s as hard a target as we’ve ever faced.” Wright notes that the C.I.A. shuttered its unit in charge of tracking bin Laden in 2005, and a former agency official tells Wright that “there’s a sense that there’s not a quarterback” in the fight against Al Qaeda. Regarding rumors that bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, McConnell st... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Spymaster

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

The whole Armor of God Pajama set will help your children to depend on God to protect them from their fears, doubts, and uncertainties at night so their sleep can be restful and peaceful.

Armor of God PJ's

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.

I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.

It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.

Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

It turns our passive, private, spontaneous appreciation of popular culture into something active, public and market-driven. It leads us to confuse self-expression (which is, of course, all about us) with art (which more generously “speaks to us even though it doesn’t know we’re there”). It has created what Mr. Siegel calls the first true mass culture, though he cites critics who in 1957 worried about how culture could be degraded by the masses. Culture for the masses, he says, was a worry of the past. Culture by the masses is what is being born in the present and will shape the future.

Peppering his argument with potshots at writers (among them Mark Dery and Malcolm Gladwell) who view any of these developments enthusiastically, Mr. Siegel both defines and decries an array of current misconceptions. We are being persuaded that information and knowledge are interchangeable, he claims, when they are not; we would have citizen heart surgeons if information were all that mattered. And mainstream news outlets, which Mr. Siegel is otherwise delighted to assail (his love-hate relationship with The New York Times is particularly intense), suddenly look worthwhile to him by virtue of their real, earned authority. Better the old press than the new tyranny of bloggers. Their self-interest, he says, makes them more mainstream than any standard news source could possibly be.

The vindictiveness and disproportionate influence of the blogosphere is a particularly sore subject. Who is it that “rewrote history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted associates out of documents and photographs”? Mr. Siegel’s immediate answer is Stalin. But he alleges that the new power players of the blogosphere have appropriated similar powers.

Spinning Out Into the Pileup on the Information Superhighway