Category Archives: Security

History, Poetry, Security

Encounter

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by Czeslaw Milosz (Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

His Nobel Lecture is worth reading (english | polish)

…by choosing solitude and giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth. (…wybieraj±c samotno¶æ i oddaj±c siê dziwacznemu zajêciu jakim jest pisanie wierszy po polsku, choæ mieszka siê we Francji czy w Ameryce, podtrzymywa³em pewien idealny obraz poety, który je¿eli chce byæ s³awny, to tylko w swojej wiosce czy w swoim mie¶cie.)

[…]

Simone Weil, to whose writings I am profoundly indebted, says: “Distance is the soul of beauty.” Yet sometimes keeping distance is nearly impossible. (Simone Weil, której pismom wiele zawdziêczam, powiada: “Dystans jest dusz± piêkna”. Bywa jednak, ¿e jego uzyskanie jest niemal niemo¿liwo¶ci±.)

His poem “So Little” takes an even darker turn from Encounter:

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Milosz passed away in August of 2004 in Krakow, Poland. His writing during postwar Europe is said to have influenced many generations by tackling difficult and inherent contradictions in life.

Security

H*Commerce Film

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McAfee has released a six-part video that gives a highly dramatic look at cyber crime. Apparently there are not enough names already, so they called it H*Commerce.

https://www.stophcommerce.com/

A woman falls prey to an email scam…a security expert tries to help. This takes six-parts? Really? Who does things in sixtal?

History, Security

Polish outrage over Spiegel Hitler story

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Spiegel Online apparently has opened a giant can of worms on itself with a recent cover story on who in Europe might have helped Hitler outside of Germany.

The feature describes how foreigners aided the Germans during World War II in the killing of 6 million Jews. Some of the accomplices — who represented a small minority in each of their countries — were forced into their roles, others denounced Jews in exchange for money. And some shared the Nazi’s anti-Semitic beliefs and joined in out of conviction.

Polish reactions to the story are titled “A Wave of Outrage”

“The article confirms the worst fears about the transformation taking shape in German thinking about World War II,” writes the conservative journalist Piotr Semka. For years, many Poles have seen a gradual change in the way Germany sees its history — a transformation, they say, to a victim mentality.

I agree with this but I would say German sentiment shifted to a victim mentality very quickly after the war, if not during the final stages. I suspect the Poles were less likely to have seen it before the wall came down so it seems gradual to them. I also disagree, however, with Spiegel’s assertion in the original story that “the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently”. History is rich in detail of the complicity of Ukranian camp guards under Nazi rule, for example, and the strife between Catholics and Jews in Poland that long pre-dated the German invasion.

Sailing, Security

Flying Under Water

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The flyingpenguin is excited to find Deep Flight Submersibles has achieved success in artificial underwater flight.

We have evolved the art of underwater flight for its own sake through three generations of pure fliers. The butterfly has finally fully emerged… Deep Flight Super Falcon, the first production underwater flier.

It seems the name falcon has something to do with Tom Perkins’ Maltese Falcon.

Now available for sale to private owners. The first full productionized submersible capable of sub-sea flight. HOT is currently building a Super Falcon for Tom Perkins, founder of Kleiner Perkins Venture Capital. Perkins owns the largest privately-owned sailing yacht, S/Y Maltese Falcon. Deep Flight Super Falcon replaces the experimental prototype Deep Flight Aviator which was sold to another organization as a decommissioned submersible and they are operating the Aviator without any support from Hawkes Ocean Technologies.

The aviator was named for the late, great Steve Fawcett who intended to use it to set a deep-sea diving record. New investor, new functionality, new name…

Imagine flying to shore in rough weather. This could be the best escape path for inclement or emergency sea-state conditions, as well as an awesome interactive experience in regular ship-to-shore travel.

I was already planning to fly above water, but I might just have to enroll in underwater flight school as well.

CNN tries to make a statement about human originality and the usual nonsense.

“It’s not just that they look like airplanes, they actually are,” Hawkes said. “The machines we build underwater should look like airplanes, not submarines. Airplanes don’t look like balloons.”

He won’t take credit for the idea, saying the idea of a submarine with fins and wings has been thought of before. The 1943 French comic book, “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” included a shark-like submarine with dorsal fins and a tail. Hawkes said that although the idea of wings may have been obvious, “The prize goes to he that does.”

Looks like an airplane? Shark-like is more like it because it actually is underwater, but let’s not forget that penguins do actually fly underwater. Let’s give some credit to the little feathered guys who did it first, eh?

Now there’s a graceful image of a flying machine. CNN also provides some stomach-turning marketing speak.

He said Deep Flight submersibles are designed to be more agile than any creature living in the ocean — with the exception of dolphins.

More agile than a penguin? I don’t believe it. Show me some numbers. Dolphins are certainly not the measure, but it makes for nice imagery. I mean I doubt they’d say it’s designed to be more agile than a killer whale, or a colossal squid. That might scare away potential buyers. After all, the Falcon runs at a max speed of just 6 knots, which is slower than many fish (Mahi mahi like to catch squid at 7 knots), and some squid are known to sprint at 20 knots. Like I said, show me some numbers.