Bizzy’s Noontime Biz-Econ-Life Links (081406)

Free Links:

• I must have missed the part of the Catechism where it says doing this is OK:
  

  DUSSELDORF - A Catholic chaplain to a German prison was accused during a court hearing Thursday of smuggling letters and doing internet searches on behalf of a detained al-Qaeda suspect.

• Remember the name Vanessa Arrington (of the Associated Press), and question everything she writes from here on out — This article on Cuba (”Some Cubans enjoy comforts of communism”) is disgraceful statist propaganda disguised as analysis. There’s no point trying to excerpt it, just go there.

• A non-comforting assessment (link no longer works at Eureka, but this one does at a different site; HT Porkopolis):
  

  Two researchers working within Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science, Professor Antonia J Jones and Joseph R Rabaiotti, together with a third independent researcher Stuart P Goring, have today released details of a problem with HSBC’s online banking system. The bank was informed of the issue prior to publication.

  The researchers demonstrated (without in any way hacking, or even entering, the system) that the problem they observed, together with the illegal use of a keylogger (a device which records keystrokes and can later play them back), would in principle allow an attacker to gather all the necessary information required to enter any customer account.

  HSBC and Cardiff University are now working together to address a number of issues raised by this research.

  No illegal access took place during this research. It is generally assumed that to be in a position to prove that a gatekeeper system has a weakness one must have broken the law. However, the researchers were able to demonstrate that this is not the case. In this case they showed that by perfectly proper use of the system (a legal log-in which fails due to a typing error) and by intelligent observation one can logically prove a weakness without even passing the gatekeeper or entering the system. While they were able to do this because of a rather trivial problem, an interesting point of principle has been established and a significant loophole identified.

  Professor Jones said: “What is truly amazing about this particular problem is that it apparently has not been illegally exploited for at least two years, during which time all user accounts were in principle open to the access procedure we describe.

  “This fact alone raises some serious questions about the wisdom of having any sensitive system online and about online banking in general.”

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• The Business & Media Institute exposes a howler of a piece in The New York Times by Melanie Warner:
  

  Would You Like a Gas Guzzler With That?

  ….. This week ….. (McDonald’s) started putting toy Hummers in children’s Happy Meal boxes, calling it the “Hummer of a Summer” promotion. Television and radio ads, which started running this week, feature a family riding in a Hummer on the way to a McDonald’s.
  ….. Not surprisingly, environmental groups are appalled.

  ….. Charlie Miller, a spokesman for Environmental Defense, said he thought that McDonald’s might be trying to help an ailing General Motors win some future customers.

  ….. “Anything that sends a message to kids that these are the cool vehicles to buy is the wrong message,” Mr. Miller said.

  ….. With toy Hummers, McDonald’s is “sending a message to children that utter waste of this precious resource that is causing us such national security problems is O.K.,” she said.

  McDonald’s decision to include Hummers in its Happy Meals is surprising given that the fast-food chain has strived in recent years to bolster its image as an environmentally aware company.

  Where to begin? Oh, forget it — They’re TOYS, people.