Iraq, two years on

I've been looking for an excuse to post something here (life has gotten busy, and therefore a bit sterile/unpostworthy of late), so I went sifting through the archives... and ran across this bit about our presence in Iraq, and how much good it would actually do.

I think it's high time to do the grown-up thing and say... I was wrong. Mind you, the fact that the locals got tired of beating on each other is at least as big of a factor as our physical presence for getting to this point... but the Iraqi government has survived the challenges of the past two years, they have real, trained security forces that are picking up the slack, while we are disentangling ourselves and preparing to get out in an orderly manner.

Of course, there's still plenty of room for one party or another to royally screw things up... in particular, I hope we're well and truly gone before the central government really butts heads with the "semi-autonomous" Kurdish region over key cities and resources. On the whole, though, I'm actually hopeful for a reasonably stable country there going forward, which I didn't expect before short of a lopsided civil war with massive casualties for all involved. Live and learn, as the saying goes.

Comcast is at it again

Boy, if there's any company that gives me episodes of Tourette's, it's Comcast. Once upon a time, I had both cable TV and Internet access through them, and was reasonably well pleased. Over time, I became less well-pleased with them, as their cable TV bill crept ever upwards and they started playing games with the Internet connection (blocking applications, capping downloads and the like). On the TV side, the straw that broke the camel's back was when they reduced the functionality of their channel guide to insert more advertising... I've been using broadcast HDTV and my Roku box, mainly, for about a year, and haven't missed cable TV much.

But Comcast doesn't learn... they just launched a "Domain Helper" system, similar to ones tried (and failed) by other ISPs in the past (link). The basic idea is, you typo an address in your web browser and, if you typo'd the right part, you instead get sent off to a Comcast page with suggestions on where you might have been trying to get... along with who-knows-how-many-ads. The problem I have with this is that online advertisers are notoriously spotty about keeping their adverts "safe and clean"... it's often all too easy for a bad actor to slip an ad in that does something you don't want done, whether that's generating pop-up windows or infesting your computer with viruses, or something in-between.

So... given my druthers, I'd be hopping ship to an alternate broadband ISP carrier just about now. Unfortunately, I'm in an area served by Qwest, which means the really "good" stuff like fiber-to-the-home hasn't made it here yet, and I live about equi-distant from their offices, meaning DSL would be even crappier than usual. For now, I opted out of their "help", then, for good measure, switched my DNS to OpenDNS, which plays a similar trick to Comcast's, but has two distinct advantages in my book... first, you have to know what you're doing to hook up with them (which at least implies some sort of opt-in), and, since DNS is all they do, you can expect them to stay on top of their advertisers... nothing quite like the threat of your userbase deciding en masse to leave your service if you screw up security sufficiently to keep you on your toes.

New ways to screw up a good thing

Here's something that could be very, very bad, depending on how it's applied. It seems that Amazon has applied for a patent relating to serving up ads in their Kindle ebooks (link). Up to this moment, the only downside I saw to ebook readers was their cost... but throwing ads between pages of a book you would otherwise "get in to", that's just wrong.