Free Republic

Inadequate Security Poses National Security Threat Dan O'Dowd, CEO, Green Hills Software Inc.Design NewsJuly 19, 2004 Linux is being designed into future U.S. defense systems, including the Army's Future Combat System (FCS), the Land Warrior, and the Global Information Grid, which will connect future military systems into one network. This spread of Linux into defense systems is cause for serious concern. Linux security is inadequate for defense use. The operating system used in defense is the foundation of its overall integrity. The operating system controls all of a system's functions, communications, and security; if it is compromised, an enemy can...

Reuel Marc Gerecht's phenomenal article on the sorry state of US intelligence in the Weekly Standard has one major theme: that the CIA lacks the operational methods to penetrate its targets. He describes the heart of the problem as a reliance on recruited foreign agents of indifferent quality as the metric for promotion within the organization. A kind of bizarre sales target without a point or even a purpose. Under this system, thousands of agents were recruited abroad neither for their intelligence-reporting potential nor their operational utility. They were put on the books--case officers often referred to the sport as...

Open source has expanded into the political world, with open software powering the online operations of the Democratic National Committee and Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign. The DNC has embraced open source to run its online operation, including outreach and fund raising, and has been working on this front since 2001 with New York-based consultant Plus Three LP. This week, the DNC will launch, at www.democrats.org, the third version of its Web site, which is designed to mobilize voters on a national and grass-roots level, grow the party's online database, and raise funds, said David Brunton, Plus Three's vice president...

Halloween XI: Get The FUD I've just seen a dispatch from the front lines of the FUD wars, Huw Lynes's report from one of Microsoft's Get The FactsHalloween VII and more recent leaks out of Microsoft. The outlines of the next stage in Microsoft's anti-open-source propaganda campaign are becoming clear. It's a good time to take stock of where we are, what our favorite evil empire is doing, and how best to respond. roadshow in Great Britain. It's a fascinating read, especially when considered in context with (Writing code that doesn't suck always has to be our base-level and most...

Mozilla 1.7 Web-browser built for 2004, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application. Navigator Tabbed browsing gives you a better way to surf the net. You no longer have to open one page at a time. With tabbed browsing, open several pages at once with one click. And now your homepage can be multiple tabbed pages.Popup blockerlets you surf the web without intrusion. Advanced popup blocker notifies you when popups are blocked. You can also block pop-ups on a site per site basis.Image Manager lets you...

CAEN, France (AP) - Charles Hostler has a small white scar on his forehead where a Nazi-sympathizing French grocer hit him with a meat ax 60 years ago. It was the morning after the Allies' D-Day landings in Normandy, and Hostler's dangerous, top-secret mission was under way. The grocer and others like him along the French coast were telegraphing military details to the Germans. Hostler, who was working for the American Office of Strategic Services - the forerunner of the CIA, and his American and British colleagues forced 43 of those agents to turn coat and send their spymasters false...

A Really Open Election By CLIVE THOMPSON Published: May 30, 2004 This fall, as many as 20 percent of American voters will be able to cast their ballots on A.T.M.-style electronic voting machines. But to put it mildly, these machines -- where you simply touch a screen and a computer registers your vote -- have not inspired much confidence lately. North Carolina officials recently learned that a software glitch destroyed 436 e-ballots in early voting for the 2002 general election. In a Florida state election this past January, 134 votes apparently weren't recorded -- and this was in a...

John Kerry, apparent Democrat nominee for President, is the more important person with the less important problem. Jamie Gorelick, member of the 9/11 Commission, is the reverse. So in explaining why each is unfit for the position he seeks and the one she holds, we begin with Kerry. We’ll use a version of a game we all played at an early age, “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” to deal with Kerry and Gorelick. This week ABC came up with a videotape of Senator Kerry saying the opposite then of what he’s saying now about his “medals thrown over the...

Posted on Sat, Apr. 17, 2004 Leader of a secret squad in World War II makes sure his men finally get their due BY ALLAN JOHNSON Chicago Tribune (KRT) - It was the summer of 1944. Chicago's John Giannaris and his detail of 22 men were staging sneak attacks and other covert operations against the Nazis in a rugged area of Greece. Meanwhile, German troops were burning out villages in the area, and "there was a lot of barbarism," Giannaris said. "I saw mass graves. It was terrible." When Giannaris got word the Nazis were again on the move against...

In the vernacular of espionage, he was a "spook," a World War II shadow soldier whose field of operations knew neither front lines nor rear. Art Jibilian was attending Navy radio operators school in 1943, when he was first approached by a recruiter for the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. The man told Jibilian of his likely assignments, "Sometimes we will drop you by parachute. Sometimes you will go by submarine. You will have a 50-50 chance of making it back." "He didn't pull any punches," Jibilian recalls today. "He told me the OSS needed radio operators...

Has the US intelligence community become too reliant on satellites versus human intelligence—spies? It seems as if a majority of America’s bigfoot political commentators have decided that the WMD intelligence failure in Iraq is due to a lack of human intelligence caused by an over-reliance on technology. This “spies good/satellites bad” way of thinking is just as misguided as the “spies bad/satellites good” conclusions of the mid-1970s (repeated to a lesser extent in the 1990s.) Gathering and interpreting technological intelligence and human intelligence are entirely different disciplines, and trying to compare them is like trying to compare the study of...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... . U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. . . Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family...

2003 in Review: One Step Backward, Two Steps ForwardDate: December 31, 2003, 19:58:35 ESTTopic: Free Software This year was a year that wasn't exactly how we might have hoped, but overall, the state of GNU/Linux was overall better at this side of 2003 than it was at the other. In our annual tradition, what follows is a look at the ups - and downs - of GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software in 2003. The year started hopeful - in our last year-end article, I said, "all indications seem to suggest that 2003 might just be even better [than 2002]." However,...

Companies mobilize to patch Sendmail By Robert Lemos CNET News.com March 3, 2003, 12:28 PM PT A critical vulnerability in Sendmail, the Internet's most popular mail-server application, has security experts and software companies moving quickly on Monday to convince customers to apply a patch. The flaw allows an attacker to send a specially formatted e-mail that could take control of a mail server running Sendmail and execute a malicious program. At present, no attack tool that could exploit the vulnerability is known to exist, said Greg Olson, chairman and co-founder of Sendmail, the company that has created a commercial version...

This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. You can view this paper at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html (HTML format). Palm PDA users can view it in Plucker format(you will also need Plucker to read it). Old archived copies are also available. 1. Introduction...

Gentlemen, Col. Peter J Ortriz I was speaking with my father (who is now in his 80th year) when he told me that he had been asked to give a short talk to a group of young schoolchildren about his experiences in the 1939-1945 war. Whenever he talks about the war the name of Peter Ortiz is always mentioned with some awe and respect. In order to find out a little more about him we searched the web and came across your excellent sites. My father was one of the four Royal Airforce Officers mentioned in the sites that Peter...

Carl F. Eifler, who commanded the first OSS covert operations unit during World War II and was dubbed "the deadliest colonel" for his daring exploits and planning of operations behind enemy lines, has died. He was 95. Eifler died April 8 of natural causes in a medical rehabilitation center in Salinas, Calif. Central Casting couldn't have supplied a more imposing figure than the 6-foot, 2-inch, 240-pound, tough-as-nails Army colonel. Eifler, according to his biographer, devised top-secret plans (that were later canceled) to assassinate Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and to kidnap Adolf Hitler's top atomic scientist. He was, in a word,...

Recommended reading for those interested in spies and stuff.