Gag Order Imposed on Wounded Veterans, reports Military Times Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media. (OnPoint)

The current administration is responsible for some pretty sleazy decisions, but if this is even close to being true, and I do not doubt its veracity, then the investigation into what is and is not happening at Walter Reed, a facility due to be closed under the Base Realignment Committee recommendations, needs to be conducted by the Inspector General and heads need to roll. This is unacceptable.

What is your pan flu plan?

Flu pandemic could choke Internet, requiring usage restrictions Expected surge in online traffic puts telework plans at risk Patrick Thibodeau February 12, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly fall apart as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.

There are a number of agencies and organizations that have, as their backup plan, the use of the Internet and its technologies for more than just pandemic flu. Like most telecom companies, the Internet is not sized to handle a full load. With the amount of traffic that is currently being consumed by spam, pop-ups, and other superfluous noise, expecting the Internet to be able to take the load when people are at home and expected to use it to do actual work is not something any network engineer would bank on. Of course, with an expected illness rate of 40%, there will be a lot of people at home, but I don't know that they will have the time or energy to go online.

2GB of RAM, for a PC?!

Buying a new PC? 'Windows Vista Capable' barely hits the mark IBM'er says Vista's RAM sweet spot is 4GB by Patrick Thibodeau February 20, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Configuring a PC around the minimum hardware requirements of an application or operating system is lot like agreeing to live in a basement apartment. Sure, it will work as a place to live -- if you don't mind damp and dim living conditions.

WHAT! TWO GIGABYTES OF RAM!? Has someone finally lost what little mind they had? A PC, with that much RAM for surfing the web or sending email? Come on. If Vista really requires that for normal operations, then the deployment of Vista as a standalone operating system should be questioned by every CIO that is forced to adopt it. Only recently did I add RAM to my three year old laptop, taking it from 512Mb to a little more than a Gigabyte, but that was because I got tired of waiting for Eudora to open my email while I was working in three other large applications at the same time. This is not just booting the machine level operations. Vista is not a server OS. It should not require what a server does in terms of RAM and CPU just to play games. Have we reached the point where Moore's law has hit the law of incredulity? Why should I have to put that much horsepower into a machine to send photos to Grandma?

Whose Responsibility? Yours!

A ban on MySpace and Facebook? Legislators propose banning access to social networking sites in schools, libraries by Heather Havenstein February 15, 2007 (Computerworld) -- An Illinois state senator has introduced legislation that would ban access to social networking sites at public libraries and in public schools. Sen. Matt Murphy, a Republican, last week introduced the Social Networking Website Protection Act, which would require all public libraries and public schools to prohibit access to social networking sites. The legislation, which doesn't define the social networking sites that would fall under the bill, would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2008. "This is really a conversation starter at this point," Murphy said in an interview today. "The intention is to start a dialogue between the interested parties to see if at some point we can do something to ... move the goal of making it easier for parents to keep kids safe on the Internet."

I am going to start throwing things. Probably starting with something heavy like a disk drive directed at the heads of the idiots that seem to think "keeping kids safe on the Internet" is the responsibility of the Government rather than the responsibility of the parents. "Oh, I am too busy," is the lament of lazy parents. There is no excuse. And if you are concerned, as you should be, you need to make sure you are aware of what is going on in your child's life. If that takes too much of your time then why did you have them in the first place?

Windows, Mac, and Open Source...the clear winner?

Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye Scot Finnie says "sayonara" to Windows, but his search for Mac software continues: If you give the Mac three months, as I did, you won't go back either. The hardest part is paying for it -- everything after that gets easier and easier. Perhaps fittingly, it took me the full three-month trial period to pay off my expensive MacBook Pro. But the darn thing is worth every penny (ComputerWorld)

I have no intention of inflaming the Mac/PC wars. Frankly they were fought and won for the most part in the late 1990s as the author is still discovering. My biggest complaint about the Macintosh is the sheer cost of the hardware. A pretty stripped down dual-core Mac will run you close to $2500. A similar Intel or AMD machine will cost you $1000 or less and, in fact, many of those machines will have more hardware in the box than a Mac.

If you don't want to move to Vista, a decision that is not a trivial one, nor is it one I would encourage anytime soon, there are plenty of open source operating systems that will give you the look and feel of the Mac, without the burden of Windows (but with the ability to virtualize Windows just like on a Mac for those one or two programs that just won't run on any other system and for which there is no good substitute) and with the same levels of hardware support. The Mac runs a derivative of BSD, a UNIX based operating system. Linux is also a UNIX based operating system. So if you are considering converting to the Mac, save yourself the money and go open source. In the long run, you will be much happier.

IPv6...umm..anyone got a manual?

NIST sends IPv6 profile out for comment By Jason Miller, GCN Staff The IP Version 6 standards for testing and profiling that exist in the Defense Department and in industry fall short of the needs of the civilian federal agencies, the National Institute of Standards and Technology found in a draft special publication sent to the CIO Council yesterday for comment. (GCN)

The Federal government's rush to force the upgrade to IPv6 may becoming back to haunt them in ways that even the most well intentioned geeks never foresaw. In case you have been busy with less esoteric issues, like working for a living, let me bring you up to speed. Back in 2006, someone at the GAO decreed that all federal agencies would upgrade their IP networks to IPv6 by the middle of 2007. Thanks, and tip your wait staff. IP version 6 is, from a lot of fronts, a much needed improvement on the current version (IPv4, IPv5 was a fork and died in the mid-90s). It improves the address space, making enough IP addresses available so that every person on the planet would have some astronomical number available to them (enough so that every book in the Library of Congress could have an address and still have enough left over for all the patrons coming through the door, I believe. You can look up the actual number, but it is a staggering one). It is, when properly deployed, supposed to improve security between connected devices and make a lot of the forced complexity that networks are dealing with now go away.

And herein lies parts of the problem. IPv6 was formalized as protocol in late 1990 and has literally been sitting on a shelf. IPv6 apparently has a solid hold in Asia, where the available number of IPv4 style addresses was already slim to begin with and some folks have put up demonstration networks, but in the United States it has gotten very little traction. IPv6 is not complicated so much as it is alien. The addresses are strange, 128-bit numbers that would bend the brain of any geek who has to work with them on anything less than a full time basis, and many of the tools that we use today functionally go away, which disturbs a number of people.

So along comes the government to jump start the process. Forget that most of the hardware in the federal sector is old and generally does not support the IPv6 stack, which includes but is not limited to the PCs, servers, routers, switches, printers and other IP-based systems lying in the basement. But, when the GAO puts out a mandate, everyone jumps. NIST, in this report is basically saying...umm...we have no clue how this is going to work and there is no model to point to.

What is sad is that this is not a surprise. There have been so many patches and band-aids put in place to get around the lack of IPv4 addresses that moving to IPv6 has not been even something that corporations are thinking about. Cisco has supported it almost since the beginning. Microsoft supports it in the stack, but not in most of its templates. Some of the key programs that the Internet relies on are ready to support it, but the core issues of address allocation and just how do we build it have yet to really be developed on a scale large enough to guarantee that it will not break. And part of the problem is the fact that they are taking a huge bite of the problem.

The Internet as we know it was slow baked for the better part of 10 years before they let any Tom, Dick or Henrietta on it. Ideas and systems were chucked on a daily basis. It grew organically from a small smattering of networks. To even contemplate trying to re-engineer it at this scale is almost absurd. But the Federal Government has always tried to accomplish the absurd and this is one case where I wish them luck, but suggest they carry a pencil and some paper. Some of the systems will not survive the conversion.

Papers Please

Yesterday, I asked, by way of a quote on the decline of society, if we are truly asking the right questions. I promised to follow up today and was rewarded with just the right set of stories.

First, from here in Virginia, yesterday: Va. House Approves Bill On Illegal Immigration Aim Is to Block Access To State, Local Funds By Tim Craig Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 31, 2007; Page A01 RICHMOND, Jan. 30 The Virginia House of Delegates approved a far-reaching proposal Tuesday to strip charities and other organizations of state and local funding if any of the money is used to provide services to immigrants in the country illegally. (Washington Post)

What scared me about this was I felt the cold winds of more civil liberties being stripped away from me. Bare with me and I will explain in a moment.

Secondly, from Government Computer News today: Davis to DHS: Fast-track Real ID By Alice Lipowicz, Contributing Writer As Maine and other states dig in their heels against the Real ID Act of 2005, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., called on the Homeland Security Department to move forward quickly to show how the program should be implemented. (Government Computer News)

Thirdly, from Glenn Greenwald's book, How Would A Patriot Act? It is not hyperbole to observe that we are moving away from the founding principles of our constitutional republic towards the theories of powers that the founders identified as the hallmarks of tyranny.

In the movie the Hunt for Red October, two of the characters are talking. One wants to settle in Montana and drive an RV around the country. He ask the Captain "They will let you do that? No papers?" And the Captain responds "No papers," and then qualifies it with "state to state."

The cold wind was replaced with a blast of arctic air that could have originated in Red Square in the mid-1970s at the high of Soviet Russia. Or further back in Nazi Germany. After reading about the Va. bill, I had to ask myself if Delegate Miller truly understands what it is he is attempting to do and I am still not convinced that he really does know what he is doing, but it is not what you might think.

There has been a push for a National ID card for several years in the United States. It is generally squashed for a variety of practical and patriotic reasons despite the fact that a national ID card is already available. The difference between the current one and the envisaged on is that the current national ID card is completely optional and generally only used by people who travel outside the country. It is called a passport. Now, with Real ID, comes the push for a National ID card that would be mandatory for all citizens and could conceivably be used to control access to goods and services provided by the federal, state or local government or service agencies.

What is truly scary about all this is that it does fly in the face of all the precepts set down by the founding fathers about what the United States was supposed to be about. Now, instead of a nice easy commute, you may be asked to show your papers to get gasoline or to meet and discuss the issues of the day in a civic place. The key here is that the push is coming from two directions under guises of sensible measures taken for security or to ensure the money is going where it is intended to. Under the current Virginia legislation, if passed, it would require that all persons asking for assistance, whether from the Salvation Army, or their local hospital to prove that they are in the country legally.

After all, if I was running one of these organizations, I would not want to take the risk of handing out services to Alex Brown, who happens to be an illegal alien from Australia. Of course, I sure would not like to have to face the law suit from Juan Gonzales, who does out reach in South America, who was born and has a house in Independent Hill, either.

And as I have said, numerous times before, most Americans do not have the documented proof that should satisfy the requirements to prove they are in the country legally. And in this case, I do mean the citizens.