News and Views

This is pretty good. You can waste a lot of time with it.

Suddenly this morning I started receiving “Undeliverable” messages from email servers all around the world, many of them complaining that I’m sending spam, or sending to expired email addresses. The messages were coming in at several per minute, flooding my inbox. In a half hour I had a few hundred.

One’s first thought when this happens might be that perhaps your own computer has been compromised with a trojan, and is sending out spam at a huge rate. But that’s almost never the case. Spammers do compromise innocent computers with trojans, and they do force them to send out spam, but they never use the correct return address.

When email was invented it was primarily for University and Defense Department inter-office communication. It was naively assumed that someone was who they really said they were, and so there were no safeguards against “spoofing”. The spammers and con-artists have taken advantage of this, and send out their messages with bogus return addresses. The return addresses are harvested from various sources; it’s very hard to keep your email address off these lists.

Typically they will use one return address for a day or so on one or a few computers, and then as the spam filters adjust they will move on to another. So I know that if I just sit tight this flood should be over by tomorrow.

But fortunately the compromised email address is one of my “throw-away” addresses that I don’t really need. I create these and use them in cases where the address is likely to be made public.

I disabled that address and like magic the emails stopped.

The computer/internet world is a jungle, with parasites and predators lurking everywhere. Compromised computers can be made to send out millions of spam messages at little or no cost, and if one in a million recipients fall for the scam it is worth it.

I got another phone yesterday, the new BlackBerry Flip.

It’s a full-featured BlackBerry phone in a flip (clamshell) format — the first flip BlackBerry on the market.

I used to have a Kyocera 7135 flip Palm phone. It seemed small when I bought it, but this one is much smaller, and very light.

I think the iPhone is probably a better all-around toy and gadget, but this one flips, and is much lighter and smaller than the iPhone, all features that are important to me.

I think I’m going to like this, and probably keep it, but I’ve got 14 days to be sure.

Gisele’s sister Angela fell last week and broke her arm. Gisele flew up to San Francisco today to spend a week with her, helping out until she is feeling better. So I’m a bachelor/single father/dog sitter this week.

I think Gisele is glad to have an excuse to visit her sister anyway!

Tom Bradley ran for governor of California in 1982. Bradley, a black man, was leading in the polls by over 10%. However, he lost the election.

The so-called Bradley Effect was named after this event. In several other elections in the US the actual votes received by African Americans was significantly less than polls predicted.

There are some theories on why this happens, with the most popular being that voters might be embarrassed to sound racist and so lie to pollsters. When they get in the voting booth, inner bias takes over.

Polls show that Obama has a 3% - 7% advantage (depending on the poll). If the Bradley effect affects this race, that may not be enough.

Nature magazine recently published an article that analyzed the position on and approach towards science of the two major party presidential candidates.

As one excerpt, it’s interesting to compare Obama’s Science and Technology team of advisers with McCain’s:

Obama’s:
Dan Kammen, University of California, Berkeley
Don Lamb, University of Chicago
Gil Omenn, University of Michigan
Henry Kelly, President, Federation of American Scientists
Sharon Long, Stanford University
Jason Grumet, Bipartisan Policy Center
Harold Varmus, (Nobel) Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

McCain’s:
James Schlesinger, Former secretary of defense
James Woolsey, Former Central Intelligence Agency director
Robert McFarlane, Former national security adviser
Carly Fiorina, Former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard
Meg Whitman, Former chief executive of eBay

On the one hand we have real scientists. On the other hand, former CIA agents and former CEOs.

Benjamin Bates is the son of my old and good friend Don Bates (since our days together at Flowing Wells High School), who are both also my colleagues in the creation of the aznb.com websites.

Benjamin has a degree in (I think) Theater Arts, and has dabbled in making a couple of short films. He recently submitted his first full-length movie script “Walrus Eating Baloney” to the IFP (Independent Film Producers?) contest in New York City.

A few weeks ago he was told that he was one of 5 finalists for the grand prize, so last week he flew back to New York for the Filmmaker Awards Ceremony. Amazingly enough, he won the $10,000 Grand Prize — first place!

He made the Variety Magazine website.

An industry insider’s blog said:

What was interesting is that the one guy who had never made a film at all (Benjamin Bates, “Walrus Eating Baloney”) brought the most arresting visual presentation - a sort of portfolio of pics, sketchings, writings and perhaps more that had a strong visceral appeal and displayed some real creative ambition.
and
And, guess what? Benjamin Bates, the filmmaker who’d never made a film, but impressed us with his visual homework, won the Screenwriting Award for “Walrus Eating Baloney”.

Among the shoulder-rubbers and award presenters were actress Ally Sheedy (”Wargames”, “The Breakfast Club”, “Short Circuit”…), actor Kevin Corrigan (”Pineapple Express”, “Definitely, Maybe”, “Superbad”…) and other actors, directors and producers.

Major congratulations to Benjamin! He hopes to start filming sometime next spring, but with all the new contacts and the overload of info from New York he is going to take some time to sort things out and decide the best way to take the next step.

By the way, the script is about an old man with Alzheimer’s and two deaf-mutes who life throws together on a trip to Miami.

Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked why they won’t let Sarah Palin talk with the press? What could a Vice Presidential candidate possibly say that could hurt them?

Then he cut to Joe Biden telling about how Franklin Roosevelt got on television after the stock market crash to calm the nation.

Ouch! Two mistakes in one statement. Roosevelt wasn’t in office when the stock market crashed, and there was really no television until well after he was gone.

But I bet Sarah could match that if they would give her a chance.

In an editorial published today, arch-conservative George Will said:

“It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?”

The article is focused specifically on McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis, but calls it a “harbinger” of a McCain presidency: “For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.”

To be fair, Will as recently as August 24 talked about “Obama’s Economic Fairytale“, so he hasn’t developed a “crush on Obama”. He’s clearly still in the conservative camp, but it’s refreshing to hear anybody on either side criticizing their own candidate.

Who knows, maybe next we’ll hear Jon Stewart or Maureen Dowd belittling Obama! (Don’t wait up for it!)

This is a bi-partisan plea. Both Obama’s and McCain’s campaign’s continue to release ads with lies and half-truths.

McCain keeps insisting that Obama plans to raise taxes on the middle class, which is untrue.

Obama says that McCain wants to cut Social Security benefits in half, which is not true.

McCain runs an ad stating that Obama was being disrespectful of Palin, calling her a “pig”, dismissing her as “good looking”, and just “doing what she was told”. All false and based on statements totally out of context.

Obama keeps referring to McCain’s joke that making $5 million was the definition of “rich”, as if it were a policy statement.

McCain claims that Obama wants to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners, when the bill actually focused on teaching them how to avoid sex predators.

An Obama ad running in Michigan says that McCain refused to support loan guarantees for the auto industry, which had been true, but McCain changed his position long before this ad came out.

Come on, guys! I don’t expect you to always say nice things about each other, but let’s try to keep a little closer to the truth! It makes you both look bad.