Secure SmartPhone? No Such thing

iPhone Today’s CNN reports that President Barack Obama will supposedly get a secure smartphone that would be similar to his Blackberry. The Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, has already received a seal of approval from the National Security Agency. There is only one problem: either it’s not that smart or it’s not that secure. You can have either one, but you can’t have both. Smartphones are those phones that can provide some form of general purpose computing function. It is that function that is subject to abuse. While it is possible to develop and provide a general purpose computing function that is perhaps even provably secure, it will also be provably useless.

Another problem with the Sectera Edge is that it lacks the ecosystem that Mr. Obama may be used to with the Blackberry, or others might be used to with the iPhone. I imagine that very few applications have actually been written outside of GD. Looking at the iPhone, only a fraction of the apps for the iPhone are developed by Apple.

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead!

Ding Dong

What’s the cure for Steve Jobs’ Illness?

Apple A lawsuit? That is what some shareholders are rumoured to be considering, because they feel as though they were kept in the dark about the struggling CEO’s health. While Jobs is known to be an aggressive man in many respects, his health is something he may have very little control over, as we probably know lots less than we don’t about the human body.

One thing we do know is that stress isn’t good. And would could be more stressful than having to worry, not only about one’s continued survival, but also about having answer depositions about that subject? What if such a lawsuit prevails? Would it mean that it is now tortous to become ill or to simply to be optimistic about one’s own chances?

Many AAPL shareholders have done remarkably well, thanks to Jobs. The least we can do is let the man deal with his illness in peace.

The Next Terrorist Threat: Canada Geese

Evil Geese But for some fancy flying by Captain Chester “Sully” Sullenberger and his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles, a menacing flock of geese would have managed to pull of the same feat that Osama Bin Laden’s gang of thugs took pains to plan and execute. La Guardia Airport is as close to Manhattan as an airport can get. It wouldn’t have taken much for that plane to kill many people. The geese almost got their way.

Now it has been shown that geese can wreak havoc on our infrastructure, especially those Canada geese that crap all over the east coast. Probably the Canadians planned it that way. Blame Canada, too. Next we should probably invest in goose protection technologies. I’m sure DARPA is already on it. Harboring geese? Better beware. I’m sure you’re being watched already. How do you think Bin Laden managed to get them positioned? Did he pay them off? Did he seed their trail right through Queens? Let us flock to investigate and excoriate the guilty.

In the meantime, as we evict the 43rd president from the White House, a man who defined his administration by the war on terror, who led from a place of fear, and who capitalized on the fears of others, let us shut the door on this sorry chapter of our history by endeavoring to remember the miseries we have to go through at airports, the violations of our privacy that were made in our names, the destruction of our international reputation through the reckless disregard for human rights and international law, and now goose poop, which perhaps is best cleaned up with the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, as they have no better use.

Apparently, we have legalized torture

Scales of Justice This past week Eric Holder went before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee so that he might be confirmed as the next Attorney General. In that hearing, he was asked whether waterboarding was torture, and he gave a pretty unequivocal answer of “yes”, much along the lines that his soon-to-be boss President-elect Obama has said.

According to an article in the New York Times, and a separate one in the Wall Street Journal, the statement itself, obvious as it may seem, will have consequences for those who committed the acts, and for the United States government itself, who is party to a treaty that requires prompt investigation of all credibly alleged acts of torture.

The Times article mentions, however, that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (where they probably mean the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, PL 109-148 §1004) protects officials from prosecution if they acted in good faith based on the opinion of the Attorney General and the President.

Let’s put this another way: if the President and AG say it’s okay to torture, then according to that law, ain’t thing one a future president can do about it. Furthermore, simply changing the law would not remove the protection for officials, as any prosecution would be considered ex post facto, which is prohibited by our Constitution.

Of course nobody ever said that the President or AG said torture was okay. They just defined it in such a way that waterboarding wasn’t included. Well, why not do that with electrical shock, or caning? It’s a hole of infinite size through which any numbskull could step through.

What, then, does it mean when we say that the United States doesn’t torture people?