Tehran Bans Paper Showing George Clooney Wearing "Je Suis Charlie" Button

The current Iranian regime has recently put on a diplomatic smiley face, presumably to make a nuke/sanctions deal with major Western nations. However, behind the smile remains a ruling, militant Islamic theocracy. Those fun loving beards in Tehran just revoked the license of a newspaper which had the (dare I say it) chutzpah to publish a photograph of George Clooney wearing a "Je Suis Charlie" button. According to a Reuters report reprinted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the offending three-week-old publication had supported a reform movement in the Islamic Republic. Now the Iranian newspaper will not be free to speak its mind, or anything, for that matter.

Report: Apple Blocks Java Due To "Security Issues"

In a story many mainstream publications didn't touch, Apple blocked Java applications from running on  Mac computers. The story, originally published by the Associated Press, appeared in the Mercury News.

The rationale for Apple's actions was that Java was notably vulnerable to "security issues." According to the AP file, the Department of Homeland Security issued a recommendation earlier this month for users to disable Java to "avoid potential hacking attacks." Oracle, which owns Java, has tried to provide fixes for the allegedly dangerous issues. It seems curious that Apple's decision was made now. Java has a relatively long history of use and is not an obscure programming langauge. It's hard to believe Java's security issues are just being discovered.

The timing of these episodes is curious. Today's New York Times put on a full-court press, including a top-of-the-paper story, about the hacking of its computer systems allegedly committed by agents of the government of the People's Republic of China. The Wall Street Journal also claimed it was the victim of Chinese hackers. Earlier this month, reports circulated about supposed Iranian hacking of Western banks and Saudi Arabian institutions.

The Trouble with "Argo"

My wife and I went to see Argo last night. The venue was a shopping mall multiplex where New Jersey's suburbs and its truly mainland portions merge. Its virtues are that its screens are big, the prints are in good shape, and the sound systems deliver appropriate oomph. Argo, which we'd been told was a fabulous movie, seemed to deserve a decent theatrical experience.

By the end of the picture, I wondered if I had watched the same movie Argo's fans had. The movie, except for John Goodman's and Alan Arkin's delicious comic depiction of two Hollywood insiders, made me squirmy. Affleck takes a flag-waving, feel-good story and presents a flag-waving, feel-good story. While he's at it, Affleck scores some political points, mostly at the expense of the US State Department and the Carter Administration. Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, comes across as something of a provincial dim bulb, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's name is not even mentioned. Why Vance is spared while his department is unflatteringly depicted is a curiosity.

However, that's small potatoes compared to the movie's "uplifting" ending, in which the nervy Yanks escape the clutches of the evil Republican Guard. Argo makes it clear that the Iranian Revolution was a dreadful event. Inferentially, how could Americans today allow those same anti-Western religious fanatics any chance at obtaining nukes? No way. To that end, I wonder if Affleck and the movie's producers found it useful to remind the public about perceived American "weakness" with the dangers Iran's ruling mullahs and military Praetorian Guard represent. While the Tehran embassy hostage crisis took place during "weak" President Carter, they were released shortly after the inauguration of a "firm" Ronald Reagan.

Former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor,
who hid the American embassy personnel in Tehran.
Read the Canadian TV interview with Taylor,
noting how Affleck's original ending (shown at the Toronto Film Festival!)
praised the CIA and implied the Canadians sat on their hands.

There was something eerie about watching Argo while Hamas (Iran's proxy along the Israeli border) and Israel (to some extent, America's regional proxy) begin their duel to the death in Gaza. This most recent conflict began on the American presidential election day, and reached the boiling point while President Obama was in Myanmar. It's hard to imagine 44 couldn't have been further from the world's media centers, or more inaccessible to the American audience that is separated by a dozen or more time zones from Southeast Asia. Of course, any military action against Iran proper would probably require Israeli neutralization of Hamas' military capability in Gaza. One wonders if Carter-Reagan was heading toward Obama-Romney, with Mitt on record as egging on Bibi Netanyahu's "bombs away" approach to Israel's neighbors.

The people in the movie audience who felt good about Argo's blend of daring escape and Rambo-style jingoism probably felt we delivered a blow against the bad guys -- a blow we should deliver again. We should be careful what we wish for. It's going to take more than Hollywood chutzpah to successfully manage any conflict with Iran and its allies.

PS. Ken Taylor's issues with Argo were amplified in a February, 2013 New York Times piece. Among them was Affleck's interesting decision to not invite Taylor to the film's premiere at, ironically enough, the Toronto Film Festival. Notable in the Times piece is Affleck's reasoning for "adjusting" history to fit narrative and entertainment "needs" (my quotes in both cases in this sentence).

Dutch Government Shutters Web Security Firm over Iran Hacking

Dutch prosecutors are investigating whether a US Internet security firm's Dutch affiliate was criminally negligent in a case involving Google and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Dutch-domiciled firm -- DigiNotar -- sells "certificates guaranteeing the security of websites," according to an AP story picked up by the San Jose Mercury News. In this case, the firm "had used weak passwords, failed to update software on its public servers and no antivirus protection on its internal servers." One consequence of this apparently sloppy oversight was that Iranian internal police could spy on its own citizens, using Google as a sort of Trojan Horse to enter into peoples' online communications and their computers.

The case came to light shortly after Google more or less outed DigiNotar and its troubling business claims.

DigiNotar is owned by Vasco, a Chicagoland-based Internet security enterprise. Major institutional investors in this NASDAQ-listed firm include Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street.

PS. The New York Times reported in its September 12, 2011 edition further details about this story, including information about a superhacker alleged to be the mastermind of the Iranian snooping.