Groups rally to bring Khadr back from Gitmo

TORONTO — Several Canadian social justice groups sent a clear message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday: Bring Omar Khadr back to Canada.

The press conference yesterday organized by the Canadian Peace Alliance is a lead-up to a march today from the U.S. consulate where hundreds are expected to protest the Toronto-born Khadr’s detainment at Guantanamo Bay.

“He’s the victim of a government who is now turning its back on its commitment to international convention of the protection of child soldiers,” Mohamed Boudjenane, executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation, told reporters yesterday.

Khadr was 15 when he was found badly wounded in the rubble of a bombed-out compound in Afghanistan.

Now 21, he is accused of throwing a grenade during a firefight that killed a U.S. army medic and will face trial before a military commission in October.

Researchers unleash DNS attack code

July 24, 2008 (Computerworld) Just days after details of a critical bug in the Domain Name System (DNS) software went public, researchers released attack code that can silently redirect users to unintended sites.

HD Moore, the creator of the Metasploit penetration testing framework, and a hacker who goes by the alias “I)ruid,” published the attack code in two parts yesterday and today to several security mailing lists and to the Computer Academic Underground Web site.

The two exploits do essentially the same thing, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc.; both poison a DNS server’s cache, and therefore can, at least temporarily, replace the legitimate addresses in that cache with bogus destinations.

Madame Bovary

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the focus of the short story is plot while the true subject of the novel is character. As for its plot, which is thoroughly realistic, Madame Bovary barrels straight downhill: Emma and Charles meet and marry, she has several affairs, then sinks the family into horrendous debt, with inescapable consequences. From its opening pages, the story exudes a powerful sense of inevitability.

The novel’s fame, however, depends, not on story but on character, and a style radically innovative for its time. Set in Normandy between 1827 and 1846 (and published in 1857), it gained instant notoriety, assisted by an obscenity charge and acquittal.

Under their multitudinous layers of clothing, Flaubert’s characters have the pulse of life. Charles Bovary is a dull carp of a husband, a cuckold for the ages. Homais, the apothecary in the rural village of Yonville, where the action takes place, is a puffed-up bourgeois whose bloated opinions on science and religion are made known to everyone within earshot. Rodolphe, Emma Bovary’s first lover, is a landowner and serial womanizer. Léon, lover No. 2, is a young clerk with lamentable romantic tendencies. There’s the devious merchant; the priest; the father of Emma and the mother of Charles; the many servants and minor characters. In every case, the reader can smell the mud on their boots, the perfume in their hair.