Microsoft's Passport Technology

For some reading on Microsoft product stability and security issues and  Passport check this ComputerWorld article by Nicholas Petreley and the article "Microsoft Passport to Trouble" by Marc Slemko.

America's War on Terrorism :  Some Quotes.

Here are a few interesting comments from Fortune's Volume 144, No. 10 issue of 26-November:

Interviewing Kishore Mahbubani   (Singapore's ambassador to the U.N.)

"Qn :Your new book is called Can Asians Think? How do Asians look at the U.S. right now?

Answer :  If you asked the average educated Asian--the hundreds of millions who have access to TV and communications--the vast majority would say they like the U.S. Many have bought into the American dream and want to be prosperous too. But each society in Asia has a sense that the U.S. isn't sensitive to its problems. For instance, every day that China remains stable, it's doing the world an enormous favor--its 1.2 billion people are making the world a more secure and prosperous place instead of being a big source of problems. It's the toughest country to run in the world, by far. And instead of saying "Thank you, China," the United States says, "Why aren't you doing better in these areas?" Western nations took a long time to establish their rights. How long did it take to get universal suffrage? To abolish the Jim Crow laws? It would be good if people in the United States stopped looking at the rest of the world as a dark and threatening place. Most of the people out there share the same values and desires as Americans."

From the article "the American way" by Janet Guyon .... the first paragraph and a half read :

" After listening to 30 minutes of America-bashing from the television audience on the BBC talk show Question Time, Philip Lader, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain under President Clinton, was practically in tears. Less than 48 hours had elapsed since terrorists attacked New York's World Trade Center, and people were shouting that it was America's fault. "The cause of all this is because the American almighty dollar keeps wanting to spread the American way to every single country," yelled one blond man in a red sweater.

Though Lader says he received more than 1,000 e-mails from Brits horrified at the lashing he took, the guy in the red sweater was right about America's influence. In the business world, at least, globalization has meant Americanization."

From the article "11 takes on terror" ...

Bill Joy  (Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems) :

"In an article in Wired in early 2000, I wrote about how I feared accidents involving emerging technology, crazy people, and weapons of mass destruction. Now I'm writing a book about it. I was getting ready to work on it in New York on the evening of Sept. 10, unpacking books with titles like Anthrax, Plague Wars, Nuclear Madness, and The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons. The country has gotten a big education in all these subjects over the past month or so.

Now networks are being attacked: the transportation and postal networks, networks that are vulnerable. If you send something that leaks through a network, the network gets contaminated, just as a [computer virus] worm replicates through the Internet and contaminates it. Anthrax is using the network to behave as if it's contagious.

Still, I'm not more scared than before. This problem existed. If we had done nothing, then the chance of catastrophe would have become larger and larger. But now we've become aware of it in a way that allows us to take action. I would call this a medium-scale disaster. Smallpox or nuclear would have been large-scale.

I felt after I wrote my article that there was no political will to address these problems. That's changed. We're closer to the discussion we need to have. We're not quite there yet.

We're uncomfortable because we're perceiving things we didn't see before. But they were there all along. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. People feel sad because they now know the way the world always was. That's sad but healthy."

Madeline Albright   (Former US Secretary of State)

"I'm supportive of what President Bush is doing. I think his team has learned that a unilateralist policy doesn't work. What concerns me now is that they are going unidimensional--that they see all foreign policy through the lens of how to fight terrorism. They need to also be thinking about democratization and human rights and poverty and health and various economic issues."

Marc Andreessen   (Chairman, Loudcloud ;  Founder, Netscape)

"We spend most of our time now doing what we did before--building the business, trying to close the quarter, all the other things you do. We've got 420 employees counting on us to do that.

A lot of companies in Silicon Valley had troubles already. But recall what happened in 1998 when the Asian crisis hit--all of a sudden, when anybody missed earnings, it was because of the Asian crisis, even if they had no business in Asia. There's a bit of that going on. If asteroids started to hit Antarctica, that would become the new reason people are missing earnings.

Sept. 11 has changed the mood here. Two years ago anybody in the Valley could go anyplace and get any job at any rank at any salary anytime. That had already been shifting, and people felt pretty bad about it. But this has helped them put things in perspective. People are a lot less self-absorbed.

I think the world remains a good place for doing business, even if there's a continuing problem with terrorism. London lives with this every day, Israel lives with this every day, and they do just fine from an economic standpoint. It becomes a part of the environment, and applies equally to everybody."