America’s Agreement With Russia: Reax

Eli Lake calls it “very ambitious”:

The first step of the U.S.-Russian framework agreement requires President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to submit to the United Nations “a comprehensive listing, including names, types, and quantities of its chemical weapons agents, types of munitions, and location and form of storage, production, and research and development facilities.” Press reports say Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed in private talks in Geneva last week that Syria possessed about 1,000 metric tons of chemical agents, including nerve gas and blistering agents. But the devil is in the details. After the first submission from Syria, the U.S.-Russia plan says an initial round of inspections is supposed to be complete by the end of November, and Syria’s chemical stocks should be destroyed by the middle of 2014.

Jay Newton-Small sizes up the deal:

The framework did not address Assad’s demand in a Russian television interview on Friday that in exchange for his cooperation the U.S. stop arming the Syrian rebels. And Assad could drag the process out for years, as former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein did, if at any point he stops cooperating. Syria experts worry that the deal could empower Assad and undermine the opposition. “If [Assad] becomes our interlocutor how do we square that with our statement that he’s no longer legitimate? How do we square that with our statements that he has no future role in Syria?” says Steve Heydemann, a Syria expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace. “In effect this reinforces his future role in Syria.”

Shadi Hamid is furious about the agreement:

For his part, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is effectively being rewarded for the use of chemical weapons, rather than “punished” as originally planned.

He has managed to remove the threat of U.S. military action while giving very little up in return. Obscured in the debate of the past few weeks is that chemical weapons were never central to the Syrian regime’s military strategy. It doesn’tneed to use chemical weapons. In other words, even if the regime does comply with inspections (which could drag on for months if not years), it will have little import for the broader civil war, which Assad remains intent on winning.

Marc Champion has a different perspective:

[T]he odds of limited U.S. missile strikes ending the slaughter in Syria or toppling Assad are slim-to-zero. In 1999, 78 days of bombing Serbia didn’t remove Slobodan Milosevic, another monster. It took that long to persuade him to pull troops out of Kosovo. … The anger that Hamid and others feel over the U.S.-Russian deal is a displaced fury over the failure of the international community to do zip to end this conflict. That failure is set to continue, with or without airstrikes.

Cassidy weighs in:

For the next few months, at least, events are likely to proceed along three tracks—none of which involve direct U.S. military action. Inside Syria, Assad will continue his efforts to bludgeon the rebels and their supporters, using conventional high explosives and bullets rather than mustard gas and sarin. Meanwhile, and probably under the auspices of the United Nations, the process of identifying, verifying, and securing at least some of the Syrian C.W. stockpiles will begin. Having gone this far, Putin will certainly insure that Assad does enough to prevent an immediate collapse in the disarmament effort. Finally, and most significantly, diplomatic efforts to end the civil war will intensify.

Win-win-win-win. Unless you are the rebels and thought you could get the West to ensure your victory – something that would bring with it another host of questions the neocons haven’t bothered to think through, just as they never thought through the end-game in Iraq.

Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad, Ctd

Clearly-not-a-reader writes:

I work for Cision, a global pr/marketing software company. We are looking for sites who have “sponsored content” opportunities, much like advertorials. I was hoping you could tell me whether you and your site The Dish accept sponsored content written by or for brands. If you do, I would love to learn about how much you charge, get your contact information, and get a better understanding of the program so that I can pass that information on to the 10,000 clients of Cision. Thank you for your time.

Meanwhile, David Carr finds a web ad guru who is beginning to wonder whether “sponsored content” might be a mistake for journalism, paving the way for its destruction:

“I completely understand the value of native advertising,” Mr. McCambley said, “but there are a number of publishers who are allowing P.R. firms and advertising agencies direct access to their content management systems and allowing them to publish directly to the site. I think that is a huge mistake. “It is a very slippery slope and could kill journalism if publishers aren’t careful,” he said.

He’s right. Publishers might build a revenue ledge through innovation of the advertising format, but the confusion that makes it work often diminishes the host publication’s credibility.

Business models that treat journalism as a tool primarily for advertisers will kill journalism in the end. Because I mean by journalism not a platform for entertaining corporate-sponsored listicles, but an established fourth estate that readers trust as independent, transparent, and truth-seeking. If journalism is so enmeshed in selling things that ads and editorial are one hard-to-define mush, then its core value – independent editorial judgment – is inevitably debased.

Of course, this may not matter to those who, like the business geniuses behind Forbes, Buzzfeed, the Atlantic et al, are concerned above all with profits. Journalism, for many of them, is just a means to money. Which means, if they keep calling the shots, journalism is in danger of disappearing quietly, like a law repealing itself.

Update from a reader:

A point of clarification about that contact from Cision. That was most likely not a marketing message. Cision maintains a online database of information about media outlets, including online sites. Included in that database of information would be confirmation if that site accepts sponsored content. People like me use that information to determine if we can approach an outlet to place sponsored content. They were probably contacting you just to update their database.

Can Obama Pull A Reagan On Iran?

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Last night, I wrote that “Syria is the proof of principle for an agreement with Iran”. But that the second phase of dealing with regimes harboring WMDs in the Middle East will require real courage and boldness from the president – Reagan at Reykyavik boldness. Beinart sees the same comparison:

Since Syria is caught in the middle of an American-Iranian (and to a lesser degree, American-Russian) cold war, it’s worth remembering what ended the last Cold War. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the Soviet Union could no longer afford to prop up unpopular regimes in Eastern Europe. But to cut Eastern Europe free, Gorbachev had to answer hard-liners who had long argued that the USSR needed a ring of clients to protect it against another attack from the West. That’s why Ronald Reagan’s willingness to embrace Gorbachev and negotiate far-reaching arms-control deals—despite bitter criticism from conservative politicians and pundits—proved so important. As Reagan himself argued, “I might have helped him see that the Soviet Union had less to fear from the West than he thought, and that the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe wasn’t needed for the security of the Soviet Union.” By helping show Gorbachev that he could safely release Eastern Europe, Reagan helped end the Cold War. And when the Cold war ended, so did civil wars across the globe because the U.S. and USSR no longer felt that their own security required arming one side.

Today, President Obama’s real strategic and moral imperative is not killing a few Syrian grunts to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. It is ending the Middle Eastern cold war that fuels Syria’s savage civil war, just as the global Cold war once fueled savage civil wars in Angola, El Salvador, and Vietnam. It’s possible that strengthening Syria’s rebels and sanctioning Iran could further that goal, just as Reagan’s military buildup showed Moscow the cost of its Cold War with the United States, but only if such efforts are coupled with a diplomatic push that offers Iran’s leaders a completely different relationship with the United States, one that offers them security and status absent a nuclear weapon and no longer requires them to cling to Bashar Assad. By striking Syria, Barack Obama is making that harder. By doing so in alliance with groups that oppose any thawing of the U.S.-Iranian cold war absent total Iranian capitulation, he’s making it harder still.

This will not be easy, as Suzanne Maloney explains, but the potential for win-win-win is there:

Rouhani was elected to rescue Iran from its ruinous spat with the United States over its nuclear ambitions. He and those around him are sophisticated enough to appreciate that this objective will be much further out of their reach if all parties get tied up in a U.S.-Syrian military engagement. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for Tehran to insulate its assets and personnel in Syria from any military strike against the regime, and it would be even more challenging for Iran’s president to restrain the hard-liners in Iran’s security establishment from responding with force. So it comes as no surprise that, in hopes of advancing his mandate to rehabilitate Iran’s place in the world, Iran’s pragmatic president has thus been trying to modulate Iran’s public posture on Syria.

Russia’s diplomatic option may temporarily salvage Tehran’s investments in Assad and Syria. And perhaps that would disappoint those hoping to use intervention in Syria to set Tehran back on its heels. Still, the presumption that only a robust show of U.S. force in Syria can dissuade Iran from weapons of mass destruction is false. Using diplomacy to defang Assad would boost Iran’s readiness to work with the international community on the nuclear question.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar’s piece on the rise of Iranian pragmatism is on the same page:

In a recent interview with Iran’s state-controlled TV, Rowhani said he has been in touch with leaders of several countries and his foreign minister has spoken with his counterparts from 35 states to prevent a war. He emphasized that Iran would support “any initiative” to avoid a strike against Syria and pointed out that Tehran in principle agrees with the proposal for international control of Assad’s chemical arsenal. Moving to the nuclear issue, he said Iran’s approach for a “win-win solution” will begin during his upcoming trip to New York, where he will meet with foreign ministers of some of the P5+1 countries. He added that if the other side is serious, the “nuclear question will be resolved in a not very long period of time.”

Both the United States and Islamic Republic view the situation in Syria as a means to signal to the other side. The Obama administration claims that its serious handling of Syria will send a message to Iran and its nuclear program. The Rowhani administration, on the other hand, intends to show its diplomatic handling of Syria will pave the way for a diplomatic solution of the nuclear issue.

And why cannot both be right? Larison looks at the situation from Iran’s perspective:

 Imagine for a moment that the U.S. were in Iran’s position: a much more powerful government hostile to ours had waged two wars of regime change on our borders, it defined its policy towards our country solely in terms of grossly exaggerated fears of the threat that we ostensibly posed to them, most of the surrounding region was filled with governments aligned against ours, and one of our only remaining allies on the planet was threatened with attack from that same government. Wouldn’t we see this government as deeply hostile to us, perceive it as a major threat to our security, and do what we could to discourage an attack on our country? In such an environment, hard-liners would usually benefit and prevail in internal policy debates. If Iranian hard-liners benefit from an attack on Syria, the effect will be the opposite of the one that many Syria hawks predict, and it will make it that much more difficult to reach an agreement on the nuclear issue.

Which is why a Russian-backed UN process is so preferable to the other options. And why this is but a preliminary to the real event.

(Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rowhani attends a session of the Assembly of Experts in Tehran on September 3, 2013. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

Avoid The Unpaid Internship

In one list, Alex Mayyasi rounds up the ways unpaid internships are terrible:

Internships are a gender equity issue. Seventy seven percent of unpaid interns are women. The reason may be that unpaid internships are prevalent in women dominated fields like fashion, health care, and nonprofits, but it certainly contributes to the pay gap.

Internships are not a good way to land a job. One survey found that graduating seniors with unpaid internship experience did no better than seniors without internship experience at finding a job. Another concluded that a measly 17% of surveyed students received a job offer after their internship. The exception is paid internships, which did lead to job offers.

Internships are a free revenue source for colleges and universities, which pocket thousands of dollars for each student that interns for academic credit. Instead of paying professors to teach their students, they can receive the same tuition money for sanctioning unpaid work under the guise of an educational opportunity.

Previous Dish on internships and their discontents here, here and here. Dish Publishing LLC’s own approach to internships is detailed here and here (short version: paid with health insurance). Update from a reader:

One reason I felt comfortable subscribing to the Dish, content aside, was that you provide health insurance for your team, including the paid interns.  Had you not, there’s a reasonable chance I would have had to give up my Dish addiction; I feel that strongly about it.

I would be happy if insurance didn’t have to come through employers. I have very manageable yet annoying health issues like allergies that keep me tied to a job with health insurance.  I was lucky enough in college to get a paid internship with health insurance – I would not have been able to take an unpaid internship anywhere – and honestly, it costs large companies a comparative pittance even to give interns a really good wage.

I’ve seen lots of internship programs cut in this recession.  My engineering group was meeting at a local company that has a wall of photo proudly documenting their interns for the last 30 years, and they all looked ghastly as they explained how their longstanding program had been gutted for short term “cost savings”.   Internships are a big deal.  Unpaid internships are a crock.

I’m happy to support your efforts to pay real wages and real benefits.

If you share her feelings and have not subscribed yet, you can do so [tinypass_offer text=”here”] for just $1.99/month.

A Phone That Reads Your Fingerprint, Ctd

Stealing someone’s print is easier than you might think:

A reader writes:

The people who are arguing against fingerprint (or other biometric) authentication are forgetting that all the ways of defeating this scheme require physical access to the phone. And Apple’s Phil Schiller has pointed out that more than 50% of iPhone owners did not use the passcode feature. The appropriate comparison here is not an ideal security scheme to this new fingerprint scanner, but to no security at all.

Another reader:

With regard to “The Fifth Amendment Doesn’t Cover Your Fingertips” post, Marcia Hoffman’s worries seem baseless, as least as relates to Apple’s current implementation of the iPhone. She is concerned about a system that would allow a fingerprint alone to unlock a phone. Apple requires not only a fingerprint, but a backup numeric passcode, to unlock the phone. The numeric code is required any time the phone has been rebooted or hasn’t been unlocked for two days. By the time a court would be able to order you to provide your fingerprint, two days would certainly have elapsed, and the fingerprint alone wouldn’t work without the passcode, which is protected by the Fifth Amendment.

Another:

OK, I can’t just stay silent on this: “Passwords provide the strongest possible security guarantee.” No, they don’t. These days, a password you can remember equates to a password that can be cracked.

There are advanced methods that cut down the amount of processing time needed by pulling in vast databases of common patterns (known as rainbow tables), but even without that, your random 16-character password that is impossible to remember, by itself, still isn’t safe.

And that is where this new technology comes in. For today, right this minute, you should already be using two-factor authentication at minimum for all your email and bank accounts (go do it this instant, then come back and finish reading). Two-factor authentication, in short, combines something you know (password) with something you have (iPhone app, security token) so that a remote person has a much harder time getting into the account.

So with this new technology, once Apple opens up the API, your phone can become a more secure version of the security token. Right now if someone steals your token, they can easily get at the random number it generates. (Since they expire every 30 seconds or so, these apps themselves are not password protected, and the hardware tokens are accessed with a simple button press.) With this technology, someone would have to steal three things to access your accounts: something you know (password), something you have (phone) and something you ARE (fingerprint).

Can that be done? Sure. Will that level of protection be enough for the average person? Yes, at least unless/until someone finds out a way to install a virus on the phone remotely that can access the fingerprint validation (not necessarily the data) and your passwords. But once someone has that level of control of your device, they’ve got you dead to rights no matter the technology.

Another rare circumstance:

I would add one more problem to using fingerprints as a means of identification: not everyone has a fingerprint.  A prime example of this is my tech-savvy 84-year-old grandmother, who has owned just about every Mac/Apple device since the mid ’90s, including an iPhone 5. She also hasn’t had fingerprints for at least the last five years. They have simply worn away over the years. I haven’t talked to her about it yet, but I can’t imagine she’s excited about using a fingerprint as a password.

The Stray Dog Capital Of Europe

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Bucharest:

According to the city government, a staggering 64,000 feral dogs live on Bucharest’s streets, giving the metro area, population 2.3 million, more than twice as many street dogs per capita as Detroit, its closest US rival. Last week, a stray dog debate that had previously been more about public health, animal welfare and Bucharest’s image took a tragic, urgent turn, when a 4-year-old boy died after being mauled by a dog pack. Following an understandable public outcry, Bucharestians will vote on October 6 on whether or not to allow euthanasia for the city’s entire stray dog population.

The origin of the overflow:

The reasons for this glut are connected both to Romania’s former communist government and to the chaos caused by its removal. In the early 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu caused havoc in Bucharest when he bulldozed a large chunk of the city center in order to rebuild it along more monumental lines. As well as destroying some of the city’s most beautiful areas, this move forced 40,000 residents to be rehoused elsewhere. Many of these people moved to modern developments on the outskirts that did not allow pets, causing a flood of dogs onto the streets. With Ceaușescu’s grand plan slow to shape, the half-built shells of this wrecked area gave feral dogs a place to thrive.

The Mind Can’t Cure Cancer

James Coyne emphasizes findings by the American Cancer Society that “psychotherapy and support groups DO NOT improve prospects for survival of cancer”:

What a wonderful world it would be if, when confronted with a diagnosis of cancer, patients could mobilize their immune system and extend their survival time by merely eating the right foods, practicing yoga and relaxation exercises, and venting their emotions in support groups. The idea that patients can exert control over their cancer with such steps is deeply entrenched in psychosomatic medicine and the imagination of the lay public, and evidence to the contrary has been sometimes bitterly resisted.

Of course, cancer patients can use psychological techniques to relieve stress, or go to support groups for emotional relief and validation for their experiences and thereby improve the quality, if not the quantity of life. But the prospect of being able to improve the quality of life has always paled by comparison to the promise of being able actually to extend it.

The Rise Of The Tech Villain? Ctd

A reader writes:

Don’t you think Steve Jobs is to blame for some of this animosity? Jobs was deified by lefty middle- and upper-class white people for his aesthetic design and streamlined interface. But his actions as head of Apple were almost exactly antithetical to the professed social/economic concerns of those same people. He cancelled all of Apple’s philanthropic programs, farmed all of their labor out to Chinese hellholes, and accumulated enormous, static piles of cash exactly when enormous, static piles of cash were a serious problem for the economy.

Meanwhile, while Gates was derided for his products, he was actually doing the things that those same lefty middle- and upper-class white people claimed that they cared about. “But, but, but … brushed aluminum!”

It’s good that the public is starting to figure out that we need to hold these guys to the same standards to that we claim to hold other wealthy entrepreneurs/businessmen. But frankly, I think this is Jobs’ fault, and the Cult of Apple was the midwife to the birth of this new obscene vortex of conspicuous consumption about which we are all now so happy to complain.

Another points to Zuckerberg:

My biggest gripe about the tech sector is their unabashed ageist mentality.

Mark Zuckerberg comes right out and says “younger people are just smarter than older people”. Forget about the virtues of wisdom and experience. Forget about modern brain science that says that the brain can expand its capabilities well into adulthood. That’s not it. Zuckerberg wants employees with no lives, who are willing to put in 80-hour weeks in hope of lucrative stock options. Top-notch programmers who have families and will only work normal hours are in unemployment lines. As an employer in a brick-and-mortar business, I have to pay my guys time-and-a-half if they work more than an 8-hour day, and double time under certain circumstances. Zuckerberg and his ilk live in a happy place where the rules that apply to most industries are off the table.

Another zooms out:

I think one of the big problems for the worsening perception of the tech industry is a general lifting of a lot of the mystique of the computers/Internet that initially blinded everyone else from the fact that so much consumer technology was utter crap. There was so much low hanging fruit, so many quick new capabilities, immediate productivity gains, that despite the fact that your computer crashed five times a day and was probably infested with eighteen types of malware that it still felt like an upgrade to your life. It was all so new, most people had grown up never seeing anything like it, and it seemed almost magical.

Today, not so much. Adults have had well over a decade of computers/Internet to get comfortable with it. People graduating from college today can’t really remember a time before they had Internet. It’s not magic anymore; it’s just everyday life.

We’re not as easily impressed anymore. So the tech industry is going to increasingly be judged by the same basic standards as everyone else. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of smart and hardworking people who would love to make people’s lives better, but so does every other profession on the planet. And the market/society/government actually punishes those fields for releasing crap onto the world. If I designed a building that was as unreliable as Twitter has been, the only articles being written about my company would be to mention how we got sued into the ground.

The tech industry isn’t any smarter or harder working than everyone else; they just lucked into being the next big thing, which is why giant piles of money have fallen into their lap, even when what they’re producing isn’t always particularly well made. People outside of the industry might be realizing that more quickly than many people within the industry.

Should Domestic Abusers Have A Right To Bear Arms?

Katie McDonough addresses that question and others:

What does a person have to do in this country to get a gun taken away? Or lose the right to a concealed carry permit? And, more specifically, what does a man [George Zimmerman] with a noted history of both domestic violence complaints and a willingness to use deadly force, who is currently in the news for what may still turn out to be another such incident, have to do? Turns out: quite a terrifying lot. Because, put mildly, the laws in Florida and elsewhere regulating gun ownership among domestic abusers and men suspected of domestic violence are, shall we say, permissive.

According to recent data, more than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner.

The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by an astounding 500 percent. In general, guns are very, very bad for women’s health. But in spite of all of the evidence identifying a strong and deadly correlation between gun deaths and violence against women, our policies to protect women (victims of intimate partner-related gun violence are, overwhelmingly, female) are full of holes.

For an example of this, look no further than Florida. In Zimmerman’s home state, as a result of federal law, it is illegal for a person subjected to a protective order to own or purchase firearms, and it is a crime for that person to refuse to surrender them to law enforcement. This is a good law that, when effectively enforced, can save women’s lives. … But because the law does not explicitly compel courts to authorize police to take the firearms away, many people who are subjected to domestic violence-related restraining orders are still able to keep and carry their guns, undeterred.