bush’s message to whistle blowers — you are fired

the cia fired a senior analyst for telling the press that the cia and the current administration is acting against current laws.

C.I.A. Fires Senior Officer Over Leaks

“The Central Intelligence Agency has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The Washington Post about the agency’s secret overseas prisons for terror suspects, intelligence officials said Friday.”

so while bush stands proudly next to those whistle blowers that uncovered the enron and other business scandals of the late ’90s for publicity and to show he is tough on crime, his true idea of whistle blowing has come out: if it impacts the way he runs the organization, then, sorry, no whistle blowing allowed.

it doesn’t matter that the person seems to be quite qualified and seems to understand the law way better than any of there superiors. the problem with this administration is that as the most secretive administration in history the only way that the public finds out about the crooked ways the administration operates is through whistle blowers. and i guess they have realized this and are trying to discourage any future whistle blowing.

so act one was uncover cia agents of people who speak out against you, act two is just fire the ones that speak out against you.

telcos getting more power over the net; telcos in bed with nsa … coincidence?

the news stories this week:
thursday
Republicans defeat Net neutrality proposal

friday
Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room
“AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center”

i guess the one question one has to ask is, is this is a coincidence? suddenly it makes sense that the government hands over much more control of the internet to at&t.

i guess it is naive to think that politicians act in the best interest of their voters, or that they at least should act in the best interest of their voters, and not their corporate donors.

does at&t forward all internet traffic to the nsa?

slashdot has a story about AT&T possibly forwarding all internet traffic to the NSA.

while in this day and age, and with this administration and the current spineless congress nothing really surprises me anymore, this story if true still surprises me. that in a country that is based on freedom of speech, due process of the law something like this can happen is just amazing, this is 1984, the dreams of Stalin and the like becoming reality.

windows on a mac, what is all the fuzz about?

the story was everywhere, the front of nyt.com, the front of reuters.com, any news site you went to today had that story. a lot was written about what this means to apple, to microsoft, to users. techdirt said that Apple Supporting Windows, All That’s Left Are The Shiny Boxes. in the article techdirt sums up the news:

“Either way, it reinforces the idea that Apple is a design company, not a technology company. Like the rest of the economy, they outsource the guts and production of their products, while profiting from their expertise in style, usability, and branding.”

i couldn’t disagree more. apple is and will be more than a design company, they will be a tech company, they will be a computer company, they will be a software company, they will be an os company — for a long time to come.

why did apple offer the ability to load windows on a mac? well they figured people would find a way anyway, so why allow this to only some hardcore coders? there are probably some mac users out there for whom this is really useful, those who interact with windows environments a lot but don’t really want to make the full switch — well they don’t have to make the full switch to windows anymore, they can keep their mac and just run windows in parallel.

will windows users start buying macs just to put windows on it? no, not enough to justify the move to apple. this is about making life easier for mac users, who use mac os x. those that would have bought virtual pc. and that is also the only area where it will hurt microsoft, just a few less virtual pc packages sold. the ones that will feel the impact will be dell and the like. there are just much less reasons now for mac users to switch to dell or windows you can just keep the mac.

why don’t i believe in the story apple will turn into a design, or a software only, or a hardware only company? well, because the ipod has shown to apple that having an integrated offering kicks butt. one of the reasons the ipod is so successful is that it is not only the ipod, but itunes, and the itunes music store offering combined that make the whole experience so great. and by moving out of the hardware business, or out of the software/os business apple would give up way too much power to design a complete product platform. to say that the ipod is a success only because of its styling and branding is just not correct, and the usability is partly true to the great integration of the whole ipod/itunes experience.

so, apple will still make os, software, hardware … they will integrate even more, making sure that whatever they offer to users (something video related very likely coming next) works seamlessly on whatever platform apple offers it. and when it comes to the computers they sell apple will make sure that users who have to use them in windows environments that they will work, and work well.

german vip lounge design

coolhunter has this story about the new vip lounges in the allianz arena (munich’s new football stadium). while the stadium design is already amazing, the interior showcases great modern design. i just love those white lines on green. though i don’t know how well it will go over with the bavarian crowd.

goes well with the new (well not really new anymore) vw ads here in the US

redesigned nyt.com is all about the looks, not functionality

after a change of the web design of salon earlier in the year is was the new york timesthat changed its design. here are the issues i have with the new site:

the times went with the wider, full screen space usage, which i already disliked when CNet started to use it earlier this year. while yes, many users have the screen real-estate but they might not want it all being taken up by the web browser; sometimes it is nice to have some space for another window.

the front page is just too cluttered. while most sites moved to three columns (navigation on the left, content in the middle, links and other stuff on the right). the new nyt site has if I count correctly five columns, but that is actually only true at the top, if you scroll down it ends up being four columns for a bit, then six columns for a bit, and then back to five. just very confusing, and on top of that lots of different font sizes and pictures and ads thrown in. salon (especially during the first week of their redesign) went the other way, kind of the google way, with less is more which i though was an interesting choice.

but what i think is the biggest mistake has nothing to do with the design, but the functionality. while there is a “most blogged articles” list available, and links to blogs at the end of articles, but there is no del.icio.us or technorati, or yahoo’s myweb2.0 integration. there is just no easy way to link and make nyt articles part of social bookmarking sites.

for me the The International Herald Tribune is still the best designed and functional news site. the times could have learned a lot, from the use of the three column view that doesn’t require a page reload when moving to the next page, and direct del.icio.us integration.