Emerging Republican Minority, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, Turning Left, NY Times: Remember how the 2004 election was supposed to have demonstrated, once and for all, that conservatism was the future of American politics? I do: early in 2005, some colleagues in the news media urged me, in effect, to give up. “The election settled some things,” I was told.

But at this point 2004 looks like an aberration, an election won with fear-and-smear tactics that have passed their sell-by date. Republicans no longer have a perceived edge over Democrats on national security — and without that edge, they stand revealed as ideologues out of step with an increasingly liberal American public.

Right now the talk of the political chattering classes is a report from the Pew Research Center showing a precipitous decline in Republican support. In 2002 equal numbers of Americans identified themselves as Republicans and Democrats, but since then the Democrats have opened up a 15-point advantage.

Part of the Republican collapse surely reflects public disgust with the Bush administration. ... But polling data ... suggest that the G.O.P.’s problems lie as much with its ideology as with one man’s disastrous reign.

For the conservatives who run today’s Republican Party are devoted, above all, to the proposition that government is always the problem, never the solution. For a while the American people seemed to agree; but lately they’ve concluded that sometimes government is the solution, after all, and they’d like to see more of it.

Consider, for example ... in 1994, the year the Republicans began their 12-year control of Congress, those who favored smaller government had the edge, by 36 to 27. By 2004, however, those in favor of bigger government had a 43-to-20 lead.

And public opinion seems to have taken a particularly strong turn in favor of universal health care. Gallup reports that 69 percent of the public believes that “it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage,” up from 59 percent in 2000.

The main force driving this shift to the left is probably rising income inequality. ... Interestingly, the big increase in disgruntlement over rising inequality has come among the relatively well off — those making more than $75,000 a year.

Indeed, ... the big income gains have been going to a tiny, super-rich minority. It’s not surprising, under those circumstances, that most people favor a stronger safety net — which they might need — even at the expense of higher taxes, much of which could be paid by the ever-richer elite. ...

So what does this say about the political outlook? It’s difficult to make predictions... But at this point it looks as if we’re seeing an emerging Republican minority.

After all, Democratic priorities — in particular, on health care, ... seem to be more or less in line with what the public wants.

Republicans, on the other hand, are still wallowing in nostalgia — nostalgia for the days when people thought they were heroic terrorism-fighters, nostalgia for the days when lots of Americans hated Big Government.

Many Republicans still imagine that what their party needs is a return to the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan. It will probably take quite a while in the political wilderness before they take on board the message of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback in California — which is that what they really need is a return to the moderate legacy of Dwight Eisenhower.

Trojan horse targets Skype users

A variant of the Warezov Trojan horse has again been programmed to spread through the instant-messaging feature in Skype.

By Joris Evers
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: March 23, 2007, 10:31 AM PDT

Miscreants have again adapted the Warezov Trojan horse to target Skype users, Websense Security Labs warned on Thursday.

The attack is similar to threats that target instant-messaging applications. A targeted Skype user will receive a chat message with the text "Check up this" and a link to a malicious executable called "file_01.exe" on a Web site, Websense said in an alert. If the user runs the file, several other files are downloaded and run, it said.

Once infected, a computer will be at the beck and call of the attacker and the Trojan horse will start sending messages to the victim's Skype contacts to propagate, Websense said. The attack is similar to one reported in February, but it has been adapted with files hosted at different locations and a new version of the malicious code, the security company said.

Skype has acknowledged in the past that its instant-messaging feature could be used for nefarious purposes just like any other IM service. The company has said that it is looking at partnerships with security firms to offer a capability for the Skype client that filters out malicious links.

"Harmful viruses and Trojan horses may damage a user's computer and collect private data, regardless of whether a person is using Skype, e-mail or IM clients," Kurt Sauer, Skype chief security officer, said Friday. Skype warned users against opening the malicious file and said they should take caution in general when opening attachments. The company also recommends using antivirus software to check incoming files, Sauer said.

Warezov, also known as Stration, has been around since at least September. Several variants of the malicious code have appeared. Miscreants have spread it via spam e-mail, as well as Skype.

Quindlen: Political Pundits Must Rise Up

The people who pontificate for pay need to rise to the level of their audience. That will turn out to be a stretch for many of them.

By Anna Quindlen

Newsweek

March 19, 2007 issue - This is not a column about Ann Coulter. Otherwise it would be irrelevant. When the conservative lounge act used an anti-gay slur to refer to John Edwards while speaking to a Republican gathering, she catapulted herself momentarily back into the public eye. That, of course, is what she was after. As Warren Beatty once said of Madonna, she doesn't want to live off-camera, much less talk. If it takes a bit of desperate bigotry to make the cameras whir—well, desperate times demand desperate measures.

"Desperate" is the key word here. The national snarkfest is on its way out, and good riddance. Like doo-wop when the Beatles showed up, an era is grinding to a close. The landscape of American discourse has grown lousy with agents provocateurs whose careers are built around delivering verbal depth charges, not information. The form is now officially past its sell-by date.

The public has outgrown it.

This is an election that really matters. NBC News recently reported that 73 percent of Americans say they are following it closely, an astounding figure in a country in which it's a big deal if more than half the electorate votes. Everywhere there's talk that this may be the most momentous race in our lifetime, that it's clear that the country is teetering on the cusp of something, good, bad or cataclysmic.

The war that is a fruitless quagmire. The government that can't even provide adequate services to returning soldiers. The stock market that seems to be on a vertiginous ride. The housing bubble ready to blow away middle-class families.

An educational system that often seems not to educate. A criminal-justice system that is a swamp for the victim and the accused. A health-care system that leaves sick people running up chemo on their high-interest credit cards. And a future built on a monstrous deficit that could sink Social Security and any other meaningful entitlement program for coming generations.

This is an election that belies all the old cynical constructs with which journalists found themselves so comfortable for so long. The one about how no one good runs anymore? Gone. On the Democratic side of the aisle, it sometimes seems that everyone good is running. If half the candidates in the field pulled out now—any half of them—there would still be plenty of possibilities with smarts, experience and credibility. The number of serious Republican contenders is far smaller, but at least the party is no longer completely paralyzed by the usual litmus tests: abortion, gay rights, gun control. Why, Mitt Romney alone has been on both sides of almost every one of those issues!

See, I'm falling into the trap myself. Political reporting and commentary has become a burlesque show, with sober analysis losing the field to the snappy comeback. Stephen Colbert has made a brilliant TV career out of simply pretending to be a true believer, which has become an idea so laughable that he gets lots of laughs. But what happens when the real true believers surface again, Americans who suspect their families are on the edge of a volcano and who hope, despite everything, that maybe someone can run the country well enough to pull everyone back from the edge? They need more than ripostes. Sure, there's still room for satire in dissecting the body politic. But when satire morphs into mockery, and mockery morphs into savagery and suddenly it's all savagery, all the time—well, does any of that really advance the debate?

If, as many suspect, this is either a moment for the United States to prevail or to implode, a radio program, a column or a TV talk show really matters. It's a valuable piece of public real estate that should be earned every day, by engaging rather than interrupting, by reasoning rather than rabble-rousing. Maybe even by doing the really unthinkable in the civic auditorium and trying to move the conversation in fruitful directions. In the constant search for the new and the counterintuitive, one answer might be to get ahead of the curve with solutions instead of bringing up the rear with opprobrium, to be the ringmaster rather than the guy with the broom and the pan following the elephants.

Someone once told me that the media are always fighting the last war. Personal attacks and cynical put-downs are so last-time-around. Maybe idealism is the new black. Were there commentators during World War II content to mock the way Hitler styled his mustache, or the idea of Franklin Roosevelt's running (ha, ha—get it? Running?) for a fourth term? If so, they've been forgotten.

These times are, in some fashion, as significant and serious as those, and the way in which voters are attending to this election and the issues makes that clear. This election is not a joke; this moment deserves more than playground-bully punditry. The people who pontificate for pay need to rise to the level of their audience. That will certainly be a stretch for many of them. But it's better than being remembered decades from now as a person who wasted time doing the tired old nah-nah as the republic crashed and burned.

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Think Again: Now You Tell Us ...

By Eric Alterman

March 15, 2007

As the story of the Bush administration’s firing of eight federal prosecutors snowballs into scandal—complete with calls for a special prosecutor, the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and a possible under-oath subpoena for one-time presidential mastermind Karl Rove—we should pause for a moment and examine how the story finally came to its critical mass. It began all too typically with newspaper reports picked up by blogs, and a blind eye from cable and network TV—apparently in the hopes it would go away and leave them alone to cover Anna Nicole Smith and “American Idol,” but, um, wouldn’t go away thanks to diligent newspaper reporting and that pesky liberal blogosphere.

Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney, offers a mainstream media mea culpa that is both welcome and instructive:

“When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were ‘concerned,’ but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the mainstream media along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire.” This admission once again blames the Bush administration for “poorly executed acts” rather than its standard operating procedure, which is deliberate deception in the service of ideological obsession. And it comes literally months after Josh Marshall and his team at TPM Muckracker began digging into this story following the dismissal of seven federal prosecutors in mid-January—the majority of whom received positive performance reviews from the Justice Department even though they were supposedly ousted for “performance issues.” The first and perhaps highest-profile dismissal was San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, who led the investigation that sent corrupt Representative Duke Cunningham (R-CA) to jail. This led to immediate attention in local papers and more national press attention in the next few days as more prosecutors were targeted.

Further questions arose when their replacements seemed to be politically appointees, including one, Tim Griffin, with close ties to Karl Rove. McClatchy Newspapers picked up that story and nailed the first big scoop with an article in late February on the political nature of the firing. A follow-up article went on to reveal that Senator Pete Dominici (R-NM) and Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) had encouraged U.S. Attorney Daniel Iglesias to speed up indictments in a corruption case against several state Democrats just before the 2006 elections. He refused; Domenici complained to the White House, and months later Iglesias was out of a job. Other U.S. attorneys reported similar occurrences to the press and in testimony to House and Senate committees that began investigating the incident. One fired attorney, John McKay, who was the target of accusations that he failed to pursue voter fraud, would later tell reporters “there was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.” This all comes on the heels of an ongoing study that reveals partisan profiling in political investigations by Bush administration justice officials. The widening media and congressional attention led first to Justice Department officials who planned and executed the firings, and then to complicit White House officials—including former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Investigators also discovered a provision slipped into the Patriot Act reauthorization in 2005 that would allow the White House to replace U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. The final straw was Tuesday’s release of documents demanded by House leadership, including—as reported in yet another McClatchy article—the following revelation about the political motivation behind the Bush administration’s decision: “In an email dated May 11, 2006, [recently resigned Department of Justice Chief of Staff Kyle] Sampson urged the White House counsel’s office to call him regarding ‘the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam,’ who was then the U.S. attorney for southern California. Earlier that morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam’s corruption investigation of former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham, R-CA, had expanded to include another California Republican, Rep. Jerry Lewis.” Given the seriousness of these allegations, you’d think they would have demanded a considerable chunk of the evening news, to say nothing of the cable shout-fests. Alas, you’d be wrong.

According to the Tyndall report, a Web site that monitors the three major nightly news broadcasts, no network news broadcast had covered the story by Monday with the exception of a CBS story on March 7. In other news, ABC found time for a human interest piece on members of Congress who live together—promoted as if they had discovered a cure for cancer by the smart boyz on “The Note”—while NBC broke the startling news story that a new season of maple syrup was right around the corner in Vermont, to pick two tempting targets of many.

On cable, the story was naturally overshadowed by whatever the tabloid scandal-of-the-day happened to be. But when the story finally did get reported on CNN, Ed Henry—as Media Matters has pointed out—stated as “fact” that President Bush and Rove told Gonzales they had heard “complaints” that several U.S. attorneys were “allegedly not performing well.” According to a March 13 Washington Post article, however, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that Bush and Rove complained to Gonzales in October 2006 about some prosecutors’ lack of zeal on a specific topic—voter fraud. (Meanwhile, the Project on Excellence in Journalism reported on Friday that the story did not even breach the top 10 for the week on cable, trailing even Ann Coulter's use of the word "faggot" to refer to John Edwards.)

The story is too big to ignore anymore, thanks to the surprising incompetence of the attorney general who refused to come clean at the outset and then, amazingly, channeled Ronald Reagan during the Iran Contra scandal by admitting that “mistakes were made” —as if using the passive tense would somehow prevent reporters from asking “who” actually made these mistakes and whether deliberate dishonesty and attempts to subvert the law genuinely constitute “mistakes” or something else entirely.

Whatever its final outcome, I suppose the Bushites should congratulate themselves for getting away with it this long, and the rest of us who care about the continued functioning of our democracy should be grateful that we still have newspapers and we now have blogs. Because if all we had were television stations, well—as the playwright Tom Stoppard has written, “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press, everything is correctable. Without it, everything is concealable.”

But a free press only works if the press itself works. And altogether too often, broadcast and cable prefer to look the other way.

Income Inequality is Still Rising

Emmanuel Saez Writes in About American Income Inequality Rising Rapidly in 2005: He says:

The IRS has released yesterday the preliminary stats for year 2005 which I have used to extend my [and Thomas Piketty's] series [on the top income share by tax return unit] to 2005, posted at: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2005prel.xls

2005 shows a very large increase in income concentration: the top 1% gains 14% in real terms from 2004 while the bottom 99% gains less than 1% (when including capital gains). The [previous] record peak of 2000 is surpassed even though 2005 is less of a high capital gains, high stock option year than 2000. By 2005, it looks like top incomes are showing strongly along all components: wages, business income, dividends, and capital gains.

The striking thing about 2003-2005 is the huge increase at the top with quasi-stagnation below the top 1%. In the late Clinton years, the top gained enormously but at least the bottom was also making progress (something you can see on Fig A2)...

Market income excluding capital gains

Overblown Personnel Matters,

by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:

Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help ... in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation ... took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that’s true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds...

And the thuggishness seems to have gone beyond firing prosecutors who didn’t deliver the goods for the G.O.P. One of the fired prosecutors was — as he saw it — threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had “mishandled” the 2004 governor’s race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

As I said, none of this is surprising. The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn’t working. ...

Still, a lot of loose ends have yet to be pulled. We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases — in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. ... And she was investigating Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

Was Ms. Lam dumped to protect corrupt Republicans? The administration says no, a denial that, in light of past experience, is worth precisely nothing. ...

What we really need — and it will take a lot of legwork — is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?

In other words, the truth about that “overblown personnel matter” has only begun to be told. The good news is that for the first time in six years, it’s possible to hope that all the facts about a Bush administration scandal will come out in Congressional hearings — or, if necessary, in the impeachment trial of Alberto Gonzales.

Computer Time Issue
Note: With the recent change in the onset date for daylight savings time, several computer functions that require correct date/time settings, or automated time sync programs are out of whack with actual time.

The simplest solution is to just change the time zone for the computer...for example: from Eastern to Atlantic for the next few weeks until the regularly scheduled shift would have occurred.

Wikipedia to seek proof of credentials
Associated Press
March 08, 2007

Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his cloak of anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified.

"We always prefer to give a positive incentive rather than absolute prohibition, so that people can contribute without a lot of hassle," Wales wrote.

Wales suggested such a plan two years ago, but the idea suddenly gained currency after the recent discovery that a prolific Wikipedia contributor who wrote under the pen name "Essjay" and claimed to be a professor of theology turned out to be a 24-year-old college dropout, Ryan Jordan.

Faux News has a special take on the Scooter Libby verdict.

Note: He WAS found guilty on four counts of perjury and obstructing justice...but Hume suggests that's not the important finding.

It must be that 'fair and balanced thing' eh?

The highest ranking White House official charged thusly since...ah...that other Republican yahoo: Oliver North. And there the similarities end...or do they?

Linux vs Win$os: Another consideration
via BoingBoing.net Website - Mar. 8th, 2007

A research report says that Linux boxes get used for twice as long as Windows boxes (just think of all those PCs that'll be thrown out in favor of something fast enough to run Vista's crippleware!). That means that GNU/Linux machines save landfill sites!

"A typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows is 3-4 years. A major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years." A significant difference...a doubling even, of the lifetime of a computer.

Thus, a world using Linux would be a world with half the computer waste (and, admittedly, halved sales for Dell and the rest.)

A widespread switch to Linux could prevent millions of tons of waste from going into landfills. Every computer not needed would prevent the use of 240 kg of fossil fuels. Spread that out over the 17.5 million computers that wouldn't be going obsolete every year and Linux could deliver the world a much more sustainable future.

What's Bugging eBay?
March 6, 2007

eWeek By Lisa Vaas

The eBay villagers are whispering that he can creep through eBay's internal databases and suck the lifeblood of customer accounts—log-ins and passwords—right out of their pulsing, 222 million-plus customer heart. He's putting up bogus listings as fast as eBay can take them down, and that proves he's walked through a security hole as big as a barn door. No, eBay insists, this hacker, this Romanian wiseguy who goes by the handle Vladuz, is "nothing new." He's just another phisher, says eBay spokeswoman Catherine England, one of hundreds the huge auction site has to deal with constantly.

He may be getting loads of publicity from posting onto eBay forums as a service rep and taunting eBay—"Durzy is full OF sh*t," he wrote about eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy in a February posting after Durzy said that Vladuz had not accessed internal systems. But that just means he got lucky once and hit upon an internal e-mail that had a screenshot containing customer service reps' e-mail account information, eBay maintains.

Some eBay watchers attribute eBay's recent crackdown on cross-border sales to the recent spike in hijacked accounts. The spike in traffic might not be wholly attributable to Vladuz's work, but he or she is being credited for most of it. The multitalented hacker is leaving a calling card behind with his or her name, spelled backwards, attached to malicious code injected in live auctions. He's taunting eBay by posting to its forums as a customer service rep. His name is associated with a company name that is in turn associated with eBay hacking tools being found for sale online.

Hijacked accounts occur after phishers weasel log-in names and passwords out of legitimate eBay account holders and then use them to run auctions that look like they're taking place in a country with a reputation for legitimate sales, such as the United States or Canada.

This is nothing new, but eBay watchers say the number of hijacked accounts and their changed behavior makes it begin to look as if somebody had set up tools to automatically skim customer accounts from eBay's internal accounts—and such are Vladuz's reputation and braggadocio, at this point, that experts believe he or she could be responsible.

eBay watchers say the trigger for the spike was eBay's recent crackdown on counterfeit goods being sold from countries notorious for it, such as China. Like rats leaving a sinking ship, the thinking goes, crooks such as Vladuz are turning to hijacked accounts because the counterfeit e-business has gone belly-up.

"In the last few months, eBay has really taken a look at the trust and safety of our marketplace and our Web site," England told eWEEK. "We've been incorporating a lot of new measures. My understanding is it's been a little frustrating for this fellow. He's spent some quality time poking around our site and trying to find a way in. He did find access to a small amount of customer service rep e-mail accounts. He used those to go on discussion forums, as a pink—when an employee posts, it's highlighted in pink. He did that in an attempt basically to say, 'Ha ha, look what I did.'"

Lies, lies, lies, says online auction activist Rosalinda Baldwin, who runs an auction watchdog group called The Auction Guild (TAG).

"There's always been phishing [attempts to get account information and second-chance offers made to bidders who didn't win] and other fraud going on," she said. "It became huge mid-December [when eBay began to prevent Chinese sellers from selling to eBay U.S., eBay Canada, etc.]. It seems to have been the trigger: [The collection of phishing attempts and hijacked accounts] went from one without pattern to one" that definitely showed a pattern, she said.

"I know eBay pretty well," Baldwin said. "They can use all the excuses and lies they want, but they have yet to explain how what is happening on this site could be happening if what I'm saying is not true: that somebody has access to the back end."

Quantifying the hijacking of accounts is another eBay watcher, Genie Livingstone. Livingstone is a PHP programmer and runs the Internet host and domain name registration site Dotyou.Com.

Here's an example (check out the five links at the bottom) of the Web monitors, based on RSS eBay tools, that Dotyou.com is using to track eBay scam auctions in real time. Livingstone is also tracking eBay listing totals on MedVed.net.

What she's found for the past few weeks is that the daily count of eBay listings has been "a series of sharp spikes of 1 [million] to 3 million items, instead of the usual gradual curve that reflects items being listed and sold," she said.

The seesawing appears, she said, "as if someone is flooding the site with hacked listings that eBay is pulling down, only to have them immediately relisted, only to have them pulled down, etc., etc."

eBay adds 10 terabytes of new storage every week. Click here to find out how it manages all that storage.

This is MedVed's graph for eBay listings in February 2007, compared with February 2006. Notice the seesawing that begins on Feb. 22, 2007, with sharp increases and decreases that are of equal value, as if the same number of listings are being posted, delisted and posted again, in multiple daily cycles.

eBay's England said that she looked into site activity over the past six months and found "absolutely no significant movement in number of account takeovers." However, she has not yet looked into the flux of listings numbers, she said.

Still, she insists, there's nothing new to see here, even if Livingstone credits eBay with having perfected automated tools to remove the bogus listings, which recently have been coming down after only 30 seconds.

"We've had a variety of automated tools in place for a long time," said England, in San Jose, Calif. "This is nothing new. I wish I could say it's some big, exciting thing. It's your standard, typical phishing scam that's been happening a long, long time. I think this person, because [he or she] went on discussion boards and posed as an employee, it got more attention. The reality is these scams have been around years and years. As [we] shut these guys down, they adapt. They're obviously intelligent people. But as they evolve, so do we."

Vladuz first came to Dotyou.com's attention a few weeks ago—Valentine's Day, as a matter of fact.

Dotyou had written some RSS tools to track scam auctions. First, they manually identified the improper English typically used by non-native English-speaking scam artists. The listings with bad English had another consistent feature: They tried to lure buyers into contacting them outside of eBay, through an e-mail address at Yahoo or Hotmail, for example, and then asked that the buyers pay them through Western Union.

Using the bad-English phrases in one RSS stream and cross-referencing the non-eBay e-mail addresses in another RSS feed keeps the list of bogus sites current, Livingstone said. Using this list, they kept track of hijacked seller accounts and were tracking some 30 to 70 accounts per day. Each account, however, would typically post from 70 to 200 expensive items, to make as much use of the hijacked account as possible before eBay would shut it down.

But in 2007, Dotyou noticed that the hijacked accounts were only running one auction per hijacked seller; the frugality had disappeared. "It appeared as though something [had] changed," Livingstone said in an e-mail exchange. "As if there is [a] larger and larger pool of available phished eBay IDs so the scammers do not need to be frugal with them any longer."

The trend culminated with Vladuz temporarily unveiling his auctions to the public, she said. Instead of putting up fake auctions, he began to inject legitimate auctions created by real sellers, updating the auction with big "EMAIL ME" statements. The typical hijacked auction on Feb. 14 looked like this listing, with a "Buy It Now" message luring buyers to a Gmail address.

What's alarming about the new trend, Livingstone said, was that it went beyond fake listings—a "regular Romanian modus operandi"—that were the result of successfully phished legitimate accounts and, through a security hole or a tool, entered a new level of sophistication, picking up on real auctions and modifying them.

As of Feb. 5, Dotyou.com was in the process of updating an archive of what Livingstone said are live Vladuz auctions, identifiable by his signature toward the bottom: his handle spelled backward, as zudalv.

TAG's Baldwin said that Vladuz first came to her attention through his sale of eBay hacking tools. She saw that somebody on a chat board posted a tale of having been offered the chance to buy a tool called Second Chance Offer. The modus operandi of the tool was to contact an auction bidder who came in second and therefore hadn't won whatever he had bid on. Second Chance offers to sell the bidder a similar item, but in this case, Vladuz appeared to have created a tool that allowed the user to look as though the e-mail was coming from eBay's e-mail system. Actually, the tool creates fake offers, a way to coax a buyer into making a payment and receiving nothing in return.

Baldwin searched for any reference of the Second Chance Offer tool and came up with a company called SGI Enterprises—a name to which the handle vladuz was connected. She started tracking postings of vladuz back to 2002, finding postings on Chinese hacker sites.

Then Vladuz e-mailed her, offering a look at his or her new tool. It was posted as a Firefox plug-in, Baldwin said, that would automatically decipher and type in the text encoded in a garbled image file.

eBay denies that Vladuz has anything but old screenshots of the back ends of tools eBay created and used. "He didn't have access—he pulled screenshots," England said.

At this point, Vladuz is shrouded in an aura of invincibility. eBay watchers, almost superstitiously, point to his ability to "cherrypick accounts" according to a certain pattern—usually those with a medium amount of feedback that are fairly inactive. News accounts have referenced his ability to offer up hijacked accounts in sequential order as proof that he has access to eBay's internal databases.

That's taking it a bit far, said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti Phishing Working Group.

"There are of course automated phishing kits, and they are becoming both more sophisticated and widely available," he said. "However, they typically mine eBay auctions and find user names, and then send e-mails or Second Chance rebid opportunities to those people. That's the only way I can see that automated harvesting would work."

The sequential order of hijacked accounts is typical, he said, when phishers batch-process information and offer it for sale.

Still, given the range of brazen hacks to which the name is attached, Vladuz is scary, and eBay is hot on the Romanian spammer/phisher/hacker's trail.

England said that eBay has spent the past few months tracking the crook, working with Romanian law enforcement. But although Vladuz is known as a "career criminal" in Romania, she said, there's no guarantee he or she will be found and prosecuted soon. That's due to differences in laws surrounding IP tracking, for example, but also due to a lack of resources in a country such as Romania.

In an impoverished country such as Romania, money talks, Livingstone said. On that point, England agrees. Back in 2002 when eBay was dealing with a separate hacker issue in Romania, the police knew where the criminal was, she said. Unfortunately, he was some 30 to 40 miles away from the station, and they couldn't afford the gas to go get him.

eBay was more than happy to lend a helping hand.

Editor's Note: This story was updated to include more information on Vladuz's reported activities.

Copyright (c) 2007 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

American Progress Action Report
March 6th, 2007

THE PRIVATIZATION: On Friday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) released an internal memo from Sept. 2006 describing how the Army's decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed was causing an exodus of "highly skilled and experienced personnel," placing the entire hospital and its patient care services "at risk of mission failure." In Jan. 2006, against the wishes of numerous progressive members of Congress, Walter Reed finalized a five-year, $120-million "cost-plus" contract to IAP Worldwide Services for hospital support services, including facilities management. IAP is led by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official who testified in 2004 "in defense of Halliburton's exorbitant charges for fuel delivery and troop support in Iraq," and former Vice President Dan Quayle serves on the board. IAP has "grown exponentially in recent years in part because of contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq"; in 2005, it received a contract to deliver desperately-needed ice to victims of Hurricane Katrina, but "millions of pounds of ice were sent to storage, some as far away as Maine." As Waxman writes, "It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers."

Lessons Learned? By Alex Rossmiller

Forget the debate over apologizing for past support of the Iraq war. What have Democratic candidates , {and we, the general public}, actually learned from the disaster?

From "The Best Care Anywhere" by Philip Longman
Washington Monthly - Jan. 2005

"...But when it comes to health care, it's a government bureaucracy that's setting the standard for maintaining best practices while reducing costs, and it's the private sector that's lagging in quality. That unexpected reality needs examining if we're to have any hope of understanding what's wrong with America's health-care system and how to fix it. It turns out that precisely because the VHA is a big, government-run system that has nearly a lifetime relationship with its patients, it has incentives for investing in quality and keeping its patients well--incentives that are lacking in for-profit medicine."

Privatization from the Army Times:
March 2007

"The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who was fired as head of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after Army officials refused to allow him to testify before the committee Monday.

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and subcommittee Chairman John Tierney asked Weightman to testify about an internal memo that showed privatization of services at Walter Reed could put “patient care services at risk of mission failure.”

The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

The letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty – a process that began in 2000.

The Military - Industrial Complex and the Obsession with Privatization
from the book "Sharing the Pie" by Steve Brouwer

From Matthew Yglesias's Website - March 5th, 2007
Privatizing Walter Reed

Ron Brynaert at Raw Story makes the convincing case about GOP passion for privatization of government services and the problems at Walter Reed. Jim Henley reminds me that I posted on the general problem here last month -- it's not as if there are dozens of United States Armies all competing against one another to run the best hospitals and choosing among a variety of suppliers of hospital services in a dynamic marketplace where the Army that runs a bad hospital goes out of business.

You've got private profits, private corporations, privatization, and all sorts of other private stuff, but you don't have a market you have a patronage mill and you have suffering soldiers. The correct way to privatize government services if you don't think they should be provided by the government is to just have the government not perform the service. If it's something you think the government should provide -- medical care for injured soldiers would be, I think, an uncontroversial case -- then the government needs to provide it.
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3/5/07 9:57AM del.icio.us this incoming links
Comments
I'm a government contractor and I agree with you. There is simply no benefit to having contractors run government facilities. In theory, since we can be fired on the spot and bureaucrats generally can't, there's an extra incentive to perform. But in practice, as you say, there's a lot of patronage involved and those incentives are marginal.

Special projects, limited in duration, requiring special skills - these are excellent candidates for "privatization." Running hospitals isn't a special project. There's no reason to expect privatization to make any difference.
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Posted by: Slippery Pete on March 5, 2007 10:19 AM
I tend to view it this way: I can't think of any free markets in which customers can be guaranteed to find a product or service that meets their needs. And yet this is exactly what's needed in treating injured soldiers. There's some overlap here with arguments for universal health care, in which it's impractical to expect all hospitals and such to be run by the government, but veterans' care strikes me as a special case: their need for treatment is a result of policies and decisions made by the government.
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Posted by: RSA on March 5, 2007 10:32 AM
There's some overlap here with arguments for universal health care, in which it's impractical to expect all hospitals and such to be run by the government...

I'm not sure why the norm in most of the western world is "impractical", especially as universal health care seems to consistently provide better treatment at a lower cost.

Granted, the "single-payer" part of the equation is probably the most important, but still.
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Posted by: Kevin Brennan on March 5, 2007 11:15 AM
I'm not sure why the norm in most of the western world is "impractical",

Sorry, I wasn't writing (or perhaps thinking) clearly. When I wrote about the government running hospitals, what I was thinking of as being impractical was the idea that most doctors would be military or civil servants, the way I assume it's the case at places like Walter Reed. I shouldn't have even brought up such a strawman idea.
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Posted by: RSA on March 5, 2007 11:45 AM
Are you saying you are against every instance of government contracting out? Should the government manufacture its own paper clips and build its own buildings?

Privatization is no panacea, but doing everything in-house doesn't make sense either. The problem here is in detailed institutional design.
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Posted by: Pithlord on March 5, 2007 12:20 PM
Pithlord, it goes without syaing that if government is buying a product or service identical to one widely available in the private market, with many competing buyers and sellers, that's fine. Also RSA's point: contracting out requires a certain tolerance for bad outcomes, which is fine in the case of paper clips but not so fine in the case of medical treatment for wounded soldiers.
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Posted by: lemuel pitkin on March 5, 2007 12:33 PM
Pithlord: in the case of paper clips and building construction, the government is just one of many buyers for the service, and they buy much less than half the product. When there are many buyers and many sellers, markets work well.

However, when there is a good or service that there is only one buyer for, like providing logistics for the army in Iraq, we aren't talking about a market, we're talking about a recipe for patronage and corruption. You don't save money by replacing supply sergeants and military construction units with Halliburton, just the reverse.
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Posted by: Joe Buck on March 5, 2007 12:36 PM
Another vastly overlooked failure in military privatization is in the arena of instruction. In all of the reporting on interrogators and intelligence over the past few years, how often did you see a mention of how those soldiers were trained? It was done by contractors--too many of which were and still are not qualified--and a minimum of "green suiters", they have other places to be. -- There's a story to be had here.
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Posted by: anon on March 5, 2007 01:27 PM
Don't enlist. Just don't join the U.S. Armed Forces. Caveat Emptor. If I was searching for a job I wouldn't apply at a corporation getting written up daily in the papers detailing their mistreatment of their workers. Why is the military any different? Do people sign up not for job and education opportunities but because of patriotism and a family history of military service? Yes they do. Is this country currently an institution that merits laying your life on the line? No, it isn't. Whoa you say, it's still a great country, it's just the current leadership that has led it astray. Well, roughly half the voting electorate put that leadership in office TWICE. At a minimum half the populace is undeserving of protection provided by the armed forces. It really is too bad veterans are treated as they are. However, most of them knew going in the mendacious nature of their commander in chief. THEY ASKED FOR IT! If you'd have stayed in the goddamn factory or mine or Walmart you'd still have your legs. Screw the military. Bunch of goddamn murdering xenophobes.
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Posted by: steve duncan on March 5, 2007 01:45 PM
steve,
You can't be so sure they new the "mendacious nature of the C-I-C." All the news networks were gung ho for the Iraq war. I saw one thing on C-SPAN that tried to show some reason. Even Obermann was subdued. I have sympathy for them.
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Posted by: Russ on March 5, 2007 02:05 PM
Russ, during both prez elections Bush "won" there were ample reportings of his deliberate avoidance of service during Nam. Even a charitable inspection of his military records would fail to deliver anything but a verdict of AWOL. How does a prospective soldier decide to serve an army headed by a deserter? Would you work in a daycare center supervised by a pedophile? A women's health center chaired by a wife beater? And you knew BEFORE applying for either job your superiors had these backgrounds? I hope your answer would be no.
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Posted by: steve duncan on March 5, 2007 02:23 PM
My rule for privatization of existing services is pretty simple,and as a union organizer I've won with this is a simple question to publicly ask. The contractor will want 10% profit, the government agency will want to save 10% for a total of 20% minimum. So unless there is demonstrably 20% waste in an agency, there should not be any privatization given the risks (3 in 4 new business fail in three years)and social disruptions, loss of jobs, lost health plans etc.
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Posted by: Bob D. on March 5, 2007 02:44 PM
I have been doing management consulting for the VA for years now, as a practicing Anthropologist. My take for some time is that the Bush Administration and other conservatives are nearly desperate that the VA and Walter Reed fail. They cannot square the great success that the VA has acheived in the past decade with their privatization schemes. They continually attempt to cut VA funding and make everyone dance through outrageous hoops to get their great work done. Their latest attempt to sabotage the VA includes appointing people like Jim Nicholson, who is simply not experienced enough to carry forward the renaissance of the VA that his predecessors accomplished in the mid-1990s (before my time with the VA).

Posted by: Chris Darrouzet on March 5, 2007 07:18 PM

Valor and Squalor, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time ... the whitewash didn’t stick. ...

For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America...

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. ... The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. ... More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions.... [V]eterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition...,” will be turned away.

So when you hear stories of veterans who spend months or years fighting to get the care they deserve, trying to prove that their injuries are service-related, remember...: all this red tape was created not by the inherent inefficiency of government..., but by the Bush administration’s penny-pinching.

But money is only part of the problem.

We know ... that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to ... privatize disaster management, which demoralized ... and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman ... appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo..., that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.

What comes next? Francis J. Harvey, who as far as I can tell was the first defense contractor appointed secretary of the Army, has been forced out. But the parallels between what happened at Walter Reed and what happened to New Orleans — not to mention parallels with the mother of all scandals, the failed reconstruction of Iraq — tell us that the roots of the scandal run far deeper than the actions of a few bad men.

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Data for March 5 Column, "Valor and Squalor", Paul Krugman, Money Talks: A few follow-up pieces of information on veterans and health care. ... The White House has a “fact sheet” claiming that spending on veterans’ care is up by 83 percent. But if you look at the historical budget data, Table 16-1, you find only a 45 percent increase in spending on veterans’ medical care from 2001 to 2007. What’s going on?

Well, first of all, the number in the fact sheet includes “collections.” This means that if veterans are charged high fees and co-pays, which they increasingly are, the White House counts the money collected as part of its spending on health care, then boasts about how much it’s doing for the troops. As my parents would say, this administration is a real piece of work.

Also, the White House bases its claim on its projected spending in 2008. Now, if you look ... you’ll see something funny about veterans health care spending: the administration projects a big increase from 2007 to 2008, followed by a decline in the following two years. I guess all those wounded vets will somehow heal spontaneously.

In the column, I compared what the administration has actually spent with overall national health care spending. You can get spending in 2001 here and a quasi-official estimate for 2007 here. Overall health spending rose 53 percent from 2001 to 2007.

It’s important to understand these numbers, in order to react to the inevitable right-wing attempt to spin the Walter Reed scandal: predictably, they’re claiming that the problems at Walter Reed show the evils of “socialized medicine.” Um, no: they show what happens when a government that doesn’t care starves veterans’ health care of resources even as its war places huge new demands on the system, and then makes things even worse through cronyism and privatization.

Fortune and Men's Eyes:

The woman's husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she had stayed by his bedside every single day. One day, when he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer.

As she sat by him, he whispered, eyes full of tears, "My dearest, you have been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired from the auction house, you were there to support me. When my antique business failed, you were there. When I got shot by that burglar, you were by my side. When we lost the house in a bad deal, you stayed right here. When my health started failing, you were still by my side... You know what?"

"What dear?" she gently asked, smiling as her heart began to fill with warmth.

"I think you're really bad luck."

The Bible Salesman

A local sales company had particular trouble selling bibles. One day, a man came in with a job application and says, "l-l-l-l'd l-l-l-l-l-like t-t-t-t-t-to b-b-b-b-b-be a b-b-b-bible salesman, s-s-s-sir." lnitially, the manager didn't want to give the job to this man, but decided to try him out.

After three weeks, the manager is looking at the charts and realizes that the newest guy is selling the most copies.

Amazed, he calls him in to his office. "You've only worked here for three weeks and you've already sold more copies than anyone else here! How do you do it?"

"W-w-w-w-w-well, l g-g-g-go up t-t-t-t-to th-the d-d-d-door and-d-d l-l--l s-s-s-say, w-w-w-w-would y-y-y-y-y-y-you l-l-l-l-l-like t-t-to b-b-b-b-buy a c-c-copy o-o-of th-th-th-the b-b-b-bible, or w-w-w-w-w-would y-y-y-y-you l-l-l-l-like m-m-me t-t-t-to r-r-r-r-read it t-t-t-t-t-to y-y-y-you?"

CompUSA to Close 126 U.S. Stores
DATE: 28-FEB-2007
By Reuters

NEW YORK—CompUSA, the computer and gadget retailer owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said Tuesday it would close more than half of its U.S. retail locations over the next two to three months to focus on top performing locations.

CompUSA said in a statement it would close 126 of its stores and would receive a $440 million cash capital infusion, but it was not specific as to the source of the cash. The company also said it would cut costs and restructure. The company operates 225 stores, which its Web site says are located in the United States and Puerto Rico.

"Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation," Roman Ross, chief executive officer of CompUSA, said in the statement.