Sunday, May 22, 2011

Goldman Sachs' Role in the Financial Crisis

This is an interesting 6 page piece from Rolling Stone, based on the (650 pg) report from the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations regarding the causes of the financial crisis. It focuses primarily on Goldman Sachs’ role. (If you decide to read it, the web page is actually the first page of the article, although it’s broken up by a lot of links to other things)

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Kissinger on China

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published this piece by Henry Kissinger about China. It's adapted from his new book "On China" and promises to be a good read.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

What goes around, hopefully, doesn't come around.

Here is a fascinating NY Times account of Stuxnet, the computer worm that seems to have attacked and damaged some of Iran's nuclear enrichment equipment. It's got me pondering broader implications.

I knew, for example, that many US commercial, government, and military computers have been broken into by various foreign & domestic hackers. And that the US electric grid is considered vulnerable. But I hadn't really thought about how many other control facilities, say manufacturing or phone communications or air traffic control are also based on computers. And that attacks can be designed to cause lasting damage to the equipment they control - fabricators, generators, transformers, planes, etc. I hadn't really worried about cyberwar before. Now it seems a little more real.