a convenient truth

LMAO.  Seriously.

I saw this on MeFi, and some of the links are fascinating. Ross Perot is selling a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta. It is one of 17 copies, and the only one not in institutional ownership in the Commonwealth.

The Magna Carta certainly has some great words in it (this is taken from the article referred to later):

The provisions of the Magna Carta reveal among other things the famous chapter 39 from which habeas corpus, prohibition of torture, trial by jury, and the rule of law are derived:

Chapter 39: No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or any way victimized, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Chapter 40: To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.

We also see that “one of the first great stages in the emancipation of women is to be traced” to the Magna Carta.⁵ The most valuable individual provisions in the eyes of the only contemporary chronicler (a minstrel attached to Robert of Béthune) are those treating the disparagement of women:

Chapter 7: A widow shall have her marriage portion and inheritance forthwith and without difficulty after the death of her husband . . . Chapter 8: No widow shall be forced to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband . . .

It put a stop to the robberies of petty tyrants: Chapter 28: No constable or other bailiff of ours shall take anyone’s corn or other chattels unless he pays on the spot in cash for them . . .

I had previously thought that, for all it’s emotive language, the Magna Carta was basically PR. There’s a fantastic article in the Boston Review of all places that covers the history of the Magna Carta in more detail, and there is a whole lot more to it than a tiff between a skint King and some irritating Barons.

This has to be the best Mefi derail ever. And it’s a LOTR reference too.  I think I need a new category.

We’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online, which is really rather ace. We made it to Rivendell last night, and look who we found:

He means free as in hairy naked hippies frolicking across the meadow, not free as in stealing a Faberge egg from a museum by executing an implausibly complex plan involving a variety of non-existent high-tech gadgets.

– Anonymous Coward, Slashdot

We have a massive problem with the Internet.  The massive penetration of malware has reached epidemic proportions, and it’s hard to see how to fix it.  This PDF has some great slides that show how the malware industry works.
Everyone you ask will have a different target to blame: Microsoft, application vendors, insecure protocols and standards, the police, clueless users .  The real problem is a network effect - it really takes a combination of failures to make this problem as gigantic as it now is.  There is a real risk of the end of the Internet as we know it.

A good example of this is the Storm Worm.  When this hits, we could see the largest piece of military or economic infowar ever undertaken, presumably depending on who they auction their network to.  Seriously, this is going to be huge.

Unless the security community take their responsibilities seriously and combat this directly, it’s hard to know how the Internet can cope with such widespread infection.  However the state-sponsored police organisations are woefully clueless, and the guys who know what to do are paralysed by fear of prosecution, fear of making a mistake, and fear of execution by Russian hit-men.  Seriously.  If this was a movie, you wouldn’t believe it.

There is something horrific about this. The Israeli Defence Force, which is probably the most competent army in the world (recent cock ups notwithstanding) have philosophers in their ranks.  And the stuff they are reading and applying is weird.  You would not like to be anywhere near these guys when they execute their theories in hardware:

We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational architects”.’4 In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari. War machines, according to the philosophers, are polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis, made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another, depending on contingency and circumstances. (Deleuze and Guattari were aware that the state can willingly transform itself into a war machine. Similarly, in their discussion of ‘smooth space’ it is implied that this conception may lead to domination.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such bizarre theoretical justification for murder.