Airlines’ motto: Squeeze now, apologize later

Who’s getting squeezed? Of course we all are. with additional costs for everything, including seat assignments, baggage, and (Heaven help you) change fees, airlines are making money again, on our backs. One might think there would be an easier way to do this, like simply increasing fees, but for whatever reasons, it’s not the case. Southwest has always been on the forefront of charging for this or for that. It’s latest adventure into charging people who seem too large seems to have gone awry, thanks to the light shown on this policy by Hollywood director Kevin Smith. A spokesman told CNN, “We want to assure everyone that has expressed concern over the situation that we will use this experience in our customer service program when training our employees on the correct way to apply the policy.”

This discussion isn’t about the size of individuals, or even Southwest’s policy on large people. It’s about the fact that they were able to impose a policy, which until this point hasn’t really given them much grief. And why not? Many people agree with the policy in principle: you take up more than one seat and you should pay for it. The problem is, of course, in how the policy was implemented, and this is often the case. Often the result of poor training, contracting of services, or just underpaid staff, passengers are subjected to policy fabrications. A classic case that we have suffered is whether our FAA-certified car seat can go on board a passenger plane. What often happens is that it is allowed in one direction, and then we have to argue for it to be allowed in the return direction. Worse was when we were in Newark Airport and were told by a staff member that we would not be allowed to rebook our flight when a security incident occurred, even though Continental Airlines had stated on its web site that we could.

And so what do the airlines do after such events? They apologize. They ask for our forgiveness. I would gladly give them that forgiveness, were it not for the fact that forgiving often doesn’t go both ways. If I need to make a change to my flight will they forgive me? If my daughter is ill and we need to reschedule our trip, will they forgive me? Of course not.

The underlying problem is that individual consumers have very little buying power. Even large corporations get very little say in how airlines treat them. With market entry costs in the tens of billions of dollars for an airline, consumer protection laws are needed to keep airlines honest. Kevin Smith should be compensated for the poor service he received. So should people who are less visible, who are not Hollywood directors. America really needs the same sort of protections that the European Commission implemented in 2005.

Airlines may argue that such regulation hampers their ability to offer tailored services, or that it is simply too costly. It’s difficult to quantify the impact of such legislation as well, because airlines airline statistics in Europe are not easily available. Still there is a moral need to address the problem. Agree? Disagree?

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Get mad? Get Even? Or get up and running again?

When a system is broken into, the management often has a choice to make: should they take some time to try to figure out who was behind the break-in, should they bring in the police, or should they just clean up the mess that they find and move on. This is the choice that the City of Norfolk faced when a time bomb clobbered 784 systems, according to this blog. Debugging and understanding how a break-in occurred is a bit of a black art unto itself, requiring a substantial amount of expertise that focuses on the innards of Windows, and it requires time for the experts to track back what they think the source of the problem is, and even then the ability to do a trace may not be possible. For one, it depends on what sort of forensic evidence can be found within logs, whether those logs themselves have been tampered with, and what sort of backups were taken of the systems involved.

Here’s the problem with not trying to trace back: the miscreant who screwed you the first time can do the same thing again, using the precise same attack vector. At the very least it helps to have relationships with your security vendor to be able to report the problem, but as defenses get more complex, our continuing game of Cat and Mouse demands that so do the attacks. An initial attack vector might itself lead to the use of secondary means to attack. For instance, probing attacks work very poorly against a walled off Intranet, and in fact can be a means to alert The Guys In White Hats that the probing system has been broken into. However, the likelihood of that happening from within the Intranet is smaller. What’s more, as white collar criminal investigators know, one cannot rule out the possibility that someone on the inside will in fact have gotten things going.

This supports the whole notion of what Cisco calls Borderless Networking. That’s a marketing mouthful for a concept that Steve Bellovin articulated many many years ago, which says that bottleneck firewalls are going to need to give way to more sophisticated forms of defense on devices themselves.

A combination of good backups and logging to secure systems might have helped. Logs give some notion as to who did what when, assuming that you are logging the right things. Backups provide you a means to preserve state. This works in three dimensions: you can, perhaps even incrementally, look back into the history of a system for forensic purposes, you can preserve a crime scene through a very low level backup, and you can get back to a known good state.

Saddle Up, Boys: Iran is Next

It seems to me that back in the 1940s when the U.N. Security Council was formed, its purpose was for governments to work out differences before one decided to take unilateral action. This seems to have never worked well, our latest example being the disingenuous Chinese who feign interest in diplomacy with Iran, when it has become perfectly obvious to even the most casual observer that Iran will not give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But is it the Security Council that is failing, or is it just the way we deal with it? When the same block of characters (and we can expect Russia to join in the obstructionism) constantly put commercial interests in front of greater protection of societies, perhaps the best way to deal with them is to ignore them and proceed blockades, sanctions, and limited military actions, as may be appropriate. The lawless government of Iran must be checked with first the real threat of such actions, and then actual, well, actions that support principles long mouthed by all, and practiced by few. Is this cowboy diplomacy? You bet your sixshooter, but it’s not like any other options are being presented by our so-called partners in peace.

It’s time to take on not only Iran, but clear misbehavior on the part of those who sit in the Security Council.

Healthcare Debacle

President Obama bet the farm on health care reform, then did nearly nothing to help its passage, and got what he deserved. Of course, we deserve better. We deserved a decent health care bill in the Senate that wasn’t held hostage by Senator Nelson. We deserved something that improved the circumstances of a good chunk of 45 million Americans, just as many are put at risk because of lack of health care, thanks to 10% unemployment. Here’s a little math: 10% of 320 million people that live in the U.S. = 32 million people right there.

Shame on Democrats for not getting a bill through. Great shame on them.

Now we have nothing. If the situation remains as is, if we get nothing by the election, then no party is going to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole for our lifetimes. How good that must be for insurance companies! If we get nothing, our elected officials deserve less. I say THROW THE BUMS OUT, ALL OF THEM, Republicans AND Democrats.

Including President Obama.

AND Yet Again! This time in Munich

The Washington Post reports that German police evacuated a Munich terminal because a guy’s PC set off a bomb detector. At least in this case, there was at least some indication of a threat, but as we’ve seen no bomb actually went off. While some people might believe it is better to be safe than sorry, again the risk is whether we should be sorry or sorrier.