Open Symposium

2003-04-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Beware of spyware

Wired reports that
some security experts warn that spyware, not viruses, is the biggest threat facing computer users. Whereas most businesses have set up filters to fend off known viruses contained within attachments -- and some users are learning not to click on attachments at all in order to avoid getting hit -- few casual users even know about spyware.

"Spyware is the next frontier of nastiness," said Marquis Grove, of security news site Security News Portal. "You may not know it, but you've probably got dozens of little nasty applets sitting on your system, reporting on your every move to some faceless, nameless corporate entity."

2003-04-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

The Love Affair With Liberalism

Julian was pontificating about why liberalism is so popular in the academy, he suggests :

I'd guess that it's for the same reason that literary scholars found postmodernism so appealing. If there is, at least roughly speaking, a "right" interpretation, or at least a most plausible and defensible set of interpretations, of a text, then sooner or later you get at least approximate convergence on that one or that set, and even if there's not total agreement, then most of what there is to be said about, say, King Lear, has already been said. If "all interpretation is misinterpretation" (a mystifying slogan, since without the idea of a correct interpretation to contrast with it, the concept of "misinterpretation" is meaningless—you cannot "misinterpret" a Rorschach blot) then your publication horizon is radically expanded. In politics, something similar is probably true. I don't mean here that advocacy of larger government is just disingenuous careerism, but rather that what intellectuals and pundits enjoy is the challenge of coming up with novel solutions to social problems. And the whole point of letting the market rip, so to speak, is that you don't think any centralized solution is going to do as well as the emergent solution produced by the decisions of lots of individuals. Once you look at social phenomena as problems to be solved, what Hayek called the "engineering mindset" is likely to take hold.

joane in the comments suggests

As for why liberalism (n.b. non-classical) is popular and makes people feel good -- this is all coming from a paper you would like, Tyler Cowen's Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane? -- it's a variation on the old "broken window." An individual accepts libertarianism at one fell swoop (or at least it seems that way to the non-libertarians.) But libertarianism' benefits are unseen. Education people can say they built schools, environment people can cite the benefits of the dams they built or all the endangered spieses they saved as examples of brilliant policy-making. And we all know the only reason countries go to war is to liberate poor civilians and rid the world of evil dictators, right? Everyone who voted for these things can pat himself on the back and feel he's done a good dead. But what can libertarians show the public?

I suggested that we can use the internet as a model to show how some thing can be totally decentralized yet still work well. Nobody owns the internet, nobody runs it, it's not even regulated (yet), but it works amazingly well.

2003-04-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

where is salam?

still seaching for salam pax. I keep on clicking on his site, hoping that he will update it and say he's o.k. I hope that the reason that he has not updated his blog in a while is because he doesn't have internet access and not because he is hurt.

(for those of you who don't know, salam pax (not his real name) is a blogger who lives in Bagdhad, and has not updated his blog since march 24)

2003-04-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

symposium n., 1. in ancient Greece, a drinking party at which there was intellectual discussion 2. any meeting or social gathering at which ideas are freely exchanged 3. a collection of opinions, esp. a published group of essays, on a given subject