Forms of decay, more or less subtle…

I’ve been sent a common or garden Word document that won’t open. Not on my Mac, not on Windows XP, not with threats or blandishments or assaults with a chisel.

I admit we weren’t puzzled for long. Suspicion of Microsoft (TM) hangs in the air. It turned out to be an Office 2007 document, which can be opened if a Windows user downloads an add-on to Word 2003 which translates the file. But users of the new Office can’t guarantee their dox will open elsewhere, unless they save them as rtf files. This is a drag.

However, it turns out that this is a harbinger of a much larger problem. Both Science and Nature are exceeding wroth.

As noted by a peripatetic Danny Yee, who I hope is enjoying himself.

In other news, NASA head Michael Griffin

“may have inadvertently revealed one reason why the space agency has been cutting back on satellite missions to study global warming.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Mr Griffin acknowledged that global warming is happening but then, remarkably, suggested that it might not be a problem – or at least one that had to be fixed. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate,” he said, adding that he wasn’t sure there was any “need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”

How did he get the job without reading science fiction as a kid? He doesn’t even have the imagination to realise just how narrow the comfort zone of our “optimal climate” for the species is. Maybe he has never had the curiosity to go to a full-blown desert, or take his boots off in the snow..

Speaking of comfort zones, the spread of computers has made that very narrow indeed.

Do you realise your computer could have been used to make cyber war on Estonia? It seems some naughty peoples have retaliated against the removal of a bronze war memorial glorifying Russian soldiers by launching a vast bot attack on Estonian computers wich lasted from April 17th to around May 10th.

Estonia is very internet dependent, using it “routinely to vote, file their taxes, and, with their cellphones, to shop or pay for parking”, as the NYT says.

“What followed was what some here describe as the first war in cyberspace, a monthlong campaign that has forced Estonian authorities to defend their pint-size Baltic nation from a data flood that they say was set off by orders from Russia or ethnic Russian sources in retaliation for the removal of the statue.

The Estonians assert that an Internet address involved in the attacks belonged to an official who works in the administration of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The Russian government has denied any involvement in the attacks, which came close to shutting down the country’s digital infrastructure, clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers.

“It turned out to be a national security situation,” Estonia’s defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, said in an interview. “It can effectively be compared to when your ports are shut to the sea.”

Computer security experts from NATO, the European Union, the United States and Israel have since converged on Tallinn to offer help and to learn what they can about cyberwar in the digital age.”

However, the blogwired gang takes to the hysteria with a fire extinguisher:

“..because one of the (presumably zombified) PCs used in the packet floods belonged to a Russian government official, we in the press get to trot out our full arsenal of infowar hyperbole to describe Estonia’s Slashdotting.”

Can’t have been fun, though. Officials outside the country were left without email for several days. Reports that the Estonian ambassador to Australia’s nose fell off at a Senate Enquiry into the Pasteurisation of Raw Herring Imports have been officially denied.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 pm and is filed under netizens, world politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.