Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Guardian Angels

Though they can be faulted on a number of fronts, I am always pleased by the quality of reporting which comes out of the Manchester Guardian, specifically when they report on something I find interesting but have not heard of yet.

Today 3 stories blow open some interesting stuff:

1. The Windows Storm virus: "Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict."

2. Deregulation hypocrites: "The Economist notes, Northern Rock "pushed an aggressive business model to the limit, crossing its fingers and hoping that liquidity would always be there". It was allowed to do so because it was insufficiently regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. When his libertarian business model failed, Ridley had to go begging to the detested state. If the government and its parasitic bureaucrats had not been able to use taxpayers' money to clear up his mess, thousands of people would have lost their savings. Northern Rock would have collapsed, and the resulting panic might have brought down the rest of the banking system."

3. Abortion: "The result of his own internal conflict is a documentary that is, in the conclusion of Cineaste magazine, "a maddeningly elusive film". Shot in arty black and white, it has sequences that will dismay pro-choice feminists and pro-life fundamentalists in equal measure.

The most shocking section of the 152-minute film is footage shot by Kaye himself of the abortion of a 20-week foetus. It shows the foetus's head and eye staring straight at the camera, its hand in a metal collecting tray and its foot placed on a ruler and measuring just over 3cm."

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