How the invasion of Iraq was supposed to go

A Freedom of Information Act request has yielded a 2002 plan from U.S. Central Command about the invasion of Iraq.

A planning group convened by Gen. Tommy Franks under the coded compartment POLO STEP (a coded compartment created under Clinton for counter-terrorism plans including the targeting of Osama bin Laden) produced this PowerPoint of briefing slides.

The slides show that "key planning assumptions" included that "a broad-based, credible provisional government" would be in place "prior to D-Day," that "Iraqi regime has WMD capability," that "co-opted Iraqi units will occupy garrisons and not fight either U.S. forces or other Iraqi units," and that "Operations in Afghanistan transition to phase III (minimal air support over Afghanistan."

According to the plan, there would only be 5,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq as of December 2006.

(Hat tip to Jacob Sullum at the Reason Blog.)

Bush attempting to mislead on Iran

The Bush administration is trying to use innuendo and statements carefully crafted to imply falsehoods (or at least, things not known to be true) in order to justify war against Iran. Where the Department of Defense presented evidence that explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) used in Iraq were manufactured in Iran, Bush has made statements designed to imply, without explicitly stating, that the Iranian government is behind them. Reporters are also being told that the U.S. government has some solid evidence, but that it cannot be shared.

For specific details and criticisms, see:

Talking Points Memo (February 14, 2007)
TPM Muckraker (February 14, 2007)
Outside the Beltway (February 12, 2007)

The Pentagon's briefing PowerPoint on the EFPs can be found here. Interesting that the labels on the weapons shown in photographs include English wording, but that's not a sign that they weren't made in Iran, but only a consequence of the fact that English is the lingua franca of the arms trade.

UPDATE (February 27, 2007): A factory producing EFPs has been captured in Southern Iraq--and the parts that have identifiable origins did not come from Iran.

Jeff Han multitouch demo

Jeff Han (who gave a very interesting demo at the TED conference last year) has formed a company called Perceptive Pixel which makes even larger touch screens. This video is a demo of some of the interesting user interfaces that multitouch provides.

Three lottery stories

Sex offender wins $14 million in lottery (Jensen Beach, Florida).
Man with year to live wins $50,000 a year (Rochester, New York).
Bill would refuse lottery wins for sex offenders (Jefferson City, Missouri).

And Jamie Zawinski suggests a fourth:
Bill would refuse lottery wins for cancer victims.

The economics of information security

Ross Anderson and Tyler Moore have published a nice paper that gives an overview of recent research in the economics of information security and some open questions (PDF). The paper begins with an overview of the relevance of economic factors to information security and a discussion of "foundational concepts." The concept of misaligned incentives is described with the now-standard example of how UK and U.S. regulations took opposite positions on liability for ATM fraud is given--the UK held customers liable for loss, while the U.S. held banks liable for loss. This led to U.S. banks having incentives to make their systems secure, while UK banks had no such incentives (and the UK has now reversed its position after this led to "an epidemic of fraud"). other examples are given involving anti-virus deployment (where individuals may not have incentives to purchase software if the major benefit is preventing denial of service attacks on corporations), LoJack systems (where auto theft plummets after a threshold number of auto owners in a locality install the system), and the use of peer-to-peer networks for censorship resistance.

The authors examine the economics of vulnerabilities, of privacy, of the deployment of security mechanisms including digital rights management, how regulation and certification can affect system security (and sometimes have counterintuitive adverse effects, such as Ben Edelman's finding that TRUSTe certified sites are more likely to contain malicious content than websites as a whole).

They end the paper with some open issues--attempts to develop network protocols that are "strategy-proof" to prevent cheating/free-riding/bad behavior, how network topologies have different abilities to withstand different types of attacks (and differing vulnerabilities), and how the software development process has a very high failure rate for large projects, especially in public-sector organizations (e.g., as many as 30% are death-march projects).

There are lots of interesting tidbits in this paper--insurance for vulnerabilities, vulnerability markets, the efficacy of spam on stock touting, the negligible effect of music downloads on music sales, and how DRM has moved power from record labels to platform owners (with Apple being the most notable beneficiary), to name a few.

(Hat tip to Bruce Schneier's blog, where you can find links to a slide presentation that covers the highlights of this paper.)

I've won a Thinking Blogger award!

I've been awarded a Thinking Blogger award, courtesy of Larry Moran at Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist. Thanks, Larry!

As per the rules of this award-meme, I must tag five other blogs that make me think:

1. Glen Whitman and Tom W. Bell at Agoraphilia
2. The Technology Liberation Front
3. Martin Geddes at Telepocalypse
4. Ed Felten at Freedom-to-Tinker
5. Kevin Carson at the Mutualist blog

Arizona minimum wage increase leads to job cuts and reduced hours

In November, Arizonans voted to increase the state minimum wage from $5.15/hour to $6.75/hour, and there is now some anecdotal evidence of job loss for teen workers in South and Central Phoenix.

Pepi's Pizza in South Phoenix is laying off three of its 25 workers and Mary Coyle's Ice Cream Parlor has cut back on hours and not replaced two workers who quit (despite the fact that its owner, Tom Kelly, voted for the increase). Kelly notes that he also increased the wages of those who were already making above minimum wage, with the net effect being an additional $2,000/month in expenses.

The Arizona Republic article notes that the majority of the state's 124,067 workers aged 16-19 already made well above minimum wage before the change, 30.1% of workers making minimum wage fall in that age range, and 30.4% of minimum wage workers live with a parent or parents.

Teens can legally have sex, but if they take pictures, they're child pornographers

The Florida state appeals court ruled that a 16-year-old girl and 17-year-old boy in Tallahassee who took digital photos of themselves having sex were guilty of violating child pornography laws. The appeals court panel rules 2-3 that the Florida Constitution's right to privacy did not protect them. Judge James Wolf, in the majority opinion, wrote that they could sell the photos to child pornographers, and "if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives." Apparently he's not concerned about the damage he's doing to them by causing them to become convicted child pornographers for taking pictures of themselves. Judge Philip Padovano, in his dissent, wrote that the law was intended to prevent children from being abused by others, not to punish them for their own mistakes.

More details in Declan McCullagh's story at News.com.

What's happened to The Simple Dollar?

The Simple Dollar blog is offline, and its author is looking for a way to get back online.

I've been reading Trent's The Simple Dollar blog since mid-December. It's a very well-written, professional-looking blog that gets a lot of traffic, but I was surprised to learn that he only started it about a month before I started reading it.

Today, I noticed a lot of Google searches for "The Simple Dollar" were hitting my blog, all coming to my post about Robert Kiyosaki that linked to Trent's blog. I clicked on the link to re-read his post, only to get a "Forbidden" message from his webserver. I contacted Trent to see if the problem was a legal issue, perhaps a threat from Kiyosaki, but it turns out his entire blog has been taken offline by Dreamhost, his webhosting provider.

It seems that today The Simple Dollar--already in the top 2800 at Technorati--got prominent links from both digg.com and reddit.com. This generated so much traffic to the shared server hosting the blog that Dreamhost disabled the account and denied access to the blog. Not only have they denied web access, they've denied Trent FTP access. He does have a backup from a few days ago, but is currently looking for a way to get back online with a dedicated server.

You can read his own account of his predicament at Metafilter.

I've offered a few suggestions for possible webhosting providers, but he doesn't think he can afford a dedicated server right now. That's in part because, despite his huge traffic, his blog has grown in popularity so fast that he hadn't yet acquired any major advertisers. He's been the victim of his own too-rapid success.

Are there any advertisers out there who would be willing to help finance the blog's return on a dedicated server with sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic?

UPDATE (February 10, 2007): The Simple Dollar (or at least most of its content) is back!

Bill Maher makes fun of creationist museum

And Ken Ham is not amused:

Christian publisher Ken Ham said Maher showed up unannounced this week to videotape an interview with him at Ham's Creation Museum, which is just south of Cincinnati. The $25 million facility, due to open in the spring, tells visitors that the earth is just a few thousand years old and that Adam and Eve lived among the dinosaurs.

Ham said a camera crew arranged a Monday visit to the museum, but he was not told that it was connected with Maher, host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."

"They sneaked Bill Maher into the building while I was waiting for an interview," Ham wrote in a blog he maintains on the Web site of his publishing company, Answers in Genesis.

Maher visited the museum for a documentary he's been filming on religion, his publicist, Sarah Fuller, said Friday. She said he's traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe for the project.

"He's been all over the place," she said. Fuller said she wasn't familiar with how the interview with Ham was conducted.

Ham called Maher's visit an "elaborate deception." He said the film crew asked for a one-on-one interview with Ham after a tour of the museum. After the tour, crew members asked for permission to bring some camera equipment in through the back of the building. Ham wrote that the crew drove to the rear, then distracted an employee as Maher ducked into the building.

Ham said he was shocked, but agreed to the interview.

"Bill Maher did interview me; though respectful in one sense, most of his questions were just mocking attacks on God's word," Ham wrote in the blog on Wednesday.

Ham declined on Friday to comment further on Maher's visit.

But AiG's Mark Looy says "Ken is not upset."