WS-Security
It looks like Sun is on-board with WS-Security now, which just went to Oasis. IBM has an implementation. Simon Fell comments on why WS-Security is better (but slower)than SSL. Security is great FUD material for the “rough” competitors, so it is great to see that Sun is willing to pass up the opportunity to frustrate Microsoft, and is acknowledging the merits of the specification. Now we just need to get implementations out there, until people expect WS-Security to “just be there” the same was they do SSL.
Changing topics, MSNBC is running a story todaytitled “HIV/AIDS: ‘ChinaÂ’s Titanic perilÂ’“. The actual “news” in this article is that the U.N. released a report on the AIDS trends in China. The U.N. report was deliberately alarmist. In the words of Kerstin Leitner, the U.N. resident representative in Beijing, “there was a clear message in the reference to the Titanic in the title of the report.” “If the people on the bridge of that ship had acted according to the information they had, then it could have been avoided.” The “journalists” at MSNBC, eager to please Miss Leitner, pick pieces of the report out of context and dutifully turn out a piece of propaganda that is considerably more alarmist than even the original U.N. report.
The facts are simple, though. If you take the number that the report was able to verify,0.003%(that is three one-thousandths of one percent) of the Chinese population have AIDS. Compare that with the United States, where 0.3% of the population are living with AIDS. In the enlightened United States, where we are qualified to give the rest of the world advice on AIDS, people are 100 times more likely to get AIDS than in China! Even if you accept the report’s upper bound estimate, China has 0.1% infection rate, still 300% better than the United States. The report goes on to say that the number could go “as high as” 10 million by 2010(which would be 0.8%) It is a very scientific-sounding number, but one wonders how they were able to arrive at an upper bound like that. What will happen in 2010 to make the number stop at 10 million? Why not 1.2 billion? Anyway, since this is their upper limit, that means that they assume it will be lower. And considering that China has been able to benefit from watching the successes (and failures) of other nations in the world battling AIDS, including the U.S. and even China’s neighbors Thailand and Burma, we can assume that they have learned a thing or two about how to control AIDS. And considering that China has some of the lowest drug abuse rates in the world, and a law enforcement system that makes it fairly easy to force whatever safe practices the government decides are appropriate, it is really hard to imagine AIDS in China ever being as prevalent as in the U.S.
Miss Leitner can be forgiven for trying”with good intentions”to release a provocative report to prompt change. That is, after all, the purpose of the U.N. report. But what excuse does MSNBC have? Since when has it been the job of journalists to skew facts and try to prompt social change, even if they have “good intentions”?