Is a War Coming Between the U.S. and Iran?

You can’t say the world wasn’t warned. In February, US National Security Adviser John Bolton — a leading proponent of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War — sent a video message to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 40 years after the creation of the Islamic Republic: “I don’t think you’ll have many more anniversaries to enjoy.”

Propelled in large part by Bolton, the Trump Administration withdrew in May 2018 from the 2015 nuclear agreement between the US and the 5+1 powers – the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China. In November, Washington imposed comprehensive sanctions on Tehran, including on the energy and financial sectors.

But Bolton was signalling unsubtly: we can inflict more damage if we wish. So how far will the Trump administration go? And is there an imminent threat of war between the US and Iran?

On May 13, after weeks of escalation, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, each took a rhetorical step back. In Moscow, alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Pompeo said the Trump administration “fundamentally” did not seek a conflict. Addressing the president and other senior officials in Tehran the same day, Khamenei asserted: “Neither we nor they, who know war will not be in their interest, are after war.”

Still, there were other combative words and steps on both sides. Khamenei jabbed: “In [its] policy of confrontation with the Islamic Republic, the US will definitely suffer defeat.” For his part, Pompeo said: “We have also made clear to the Iranians that if American interests are attacked, we will most certainly respond in an appropriate fashion.” Hours later, the administration ordered the partial evacuation of US embassy staff from Baghdad in Iran’s neighbour Iraq.

Psychology of the drumbeat

The threat of war is not just on the Twitter timeline of US President Donald Trump. It is also in Pompeo traipsing through Europe, cancelling a meeting with the Germans – seen as too conciliatory towards the Islamic Republic – to twist the arm of the British to take action. And it is in the loudly-signalled move to the Persian Gulf of a naval strike group with the USS Abraham Lincoln and bomber aircraft in early May, and the positioning of more bombers in Qatar.

It is US administration officials telling The New York Times of a updated military plan tabled at a meeting of national security officials to send up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East if Iran attacks US forces or accelerates work on nuclear weapons – a plan ordered by Bolton and other hardliners. Trump subsequently dismissed the report but said that if he did decide to become more aggressive with Iran, the US would: “send a hell of a lot more troops than that.”

But it is likely that all of this is for the illusion of war, rather than its launch. This is still jaw-jaw, but in the service of the US administration’s non-military schemes to topple Iran’s supreme leader.

The game – again far from subtle – is to break Iran’s economy. While the US ratcheted up sanctions during the Obama administration, the aim was to bring the Iranians into negotiations over their nuclear programme. This time, the ever-expanding blacklist has no vision of talks for a renewed agreement. Its aim is to constrict Iranian production, trade, and investment, driving up unemployment and driving down the currency. In support of this, the US could update past covert operations, such as the Stuxnet computer virus, to disrupt nuclear and other operations and – as an Iranian engineer claims – attempt to take down Iran’s power grid.

Read more:
Trump’s crackdown on Iran’s oil exports could backfire badly – with serious risks to global economy

War by default

But what if the overt sanctions and covert sabotage don’t bring about Khamenei’s departure? The vision of Bolton and his compatriots, egged on by certain Iranian diaspora groups, may be that Iranians will take to the streets in many hundreds of thousands, as they did in the Green Movement after the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election.

That vision is likely to be faulty. For almost a decade, the Iranian regime has decapitated dissent. The leaders of the Green Movement have been under house arrest since February 2011. Hundreds of activists, students, lawyers, labour leaders, and rights advocates are imprisoned or under perpetual threat of detention. Communications are still restricted, with further threat of punishment.

Many inside Iran are just trying to survive, and the mood is resignation. Assuming they did return to the streets, the motive for many was and is still likely to be reform of the system, not revolution – particularly if the US is pursuing regime change.

So what then? With Khamenei unyielding to any demand from the streets, will Bolton, Pompeo and co. conclude that the hammer has to fall? The gambit may be to make the Iranians make the first forceful move, and then act on the pretext of self-defence.

We could already be at that point. There is no sign yet of Iranian speedboats buzzing the US carrier and its bombers, or Iran closing the oil waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. But, on May 12 four commercial ships, including two Saudi tankers, were damaged off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in what the country called a “sabotage” attack. Two days later, Saudi Arabia said two drones caused a fire at oil pumping stations. Attacks by Iranian elements or their proxies? “False flags” to blame Tehran? Under either scenario, an escalation to more violent acts is possible.

There are many logical arguments why that escalation will not occur, however. The Islamic Republic’s factions, from Khamenei to the Revolutionary Guards, know that head-on confrontation with the US could be suicidal. American forces in a conflict that is far from straightforward is not a vote winner either for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. With the possible exceptions of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, almost every international actor – the UN, the European Union, China, Russia, the Organisation of Islamic Countries – will be opposed to war.

As Ilan Goldenberg of the Center for a New American Security summarised: “Nobody wants a war.” Probably. But some officials in Washington may not be averse to a war that happens to come along. The title of Bolton’s last major opinion article in the Wall Street Journal before joining the Trump administration in April 2018 was: “The legal case for striking North Korea first.”

Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Is a War Coming Between the U.S. and Iran?

Tinder Welcomes Class of 2019

And parents everywhere are rejoicing.

School’s out, summer’s in session, and 18-year-olds around the nation are finally taking their happiness into their own hands.

“Thank god for Tinder,” says Betty Sommerson, mother of graduating senior Chad Sommerson. “I was beginning to think the coddling would never end.”

We hear you, Mrs. Sommerson. And more importantly, we’re here for you. We know Chad’s got a lot going for him. You’ve raised him well. You’ve taught him some solid values. You’ve done an impeccable job and our hat’s off to you. But now, he’s ready for the next chapter of his life. So you can relax. We’ll take it from here.

Sure Chad, you might have hoped your graduation gift would be a new car, or a trip to Mykonos. But we’re here to give you and your classmates something infinitely more rewarding. We give you the gift of Tinder.

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Reach for the stars.

WINNER GETS $10K AND A SUMMER OF GOLD

Tweet at us, tag 3 friends, and tell us what your senior prank was. Best prank wins a summer of Gold for all of you. Don’t have 3 friends? Get on Tinder. Winner is officially named Tinderdictorian, Class of 2019 and gets $10k. Think of it as a Tinder scholarship–our contribution to your future.

Must be 18+ & resident of the U.S. Ends 5/17. See Official Rules here.

Make your own Tinder superlatives.

Most likely to break the internet with your good looks and charm? Let’s see what you got. Upload your photo here.

Congratulations, Class of 2019! It’s time to explore.

Must be 18 years old to use Tinder. Until then, enjoy your youth.

blog.gotinder.com/tinder-welcomes-class-of-2019/

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Your Internet Data is Rotting

Many MySpace users were dismayed to discover earlier this year that the social media platform lost 50 million files uploaded between 2003 and 2015.

The failure of MySpace to care for and preserve its users’ content should serve as a reminder that relying on free third-party services can be risky.

MySpace has probably preserved the users’ data; it just lost their content. The data was valuable to MySpace; the users’ content less so.

What happened to MySpace

MySpace is a social networking media site where performers could upload music or other content for access and distribution to its user community. It has always been a free site, with revenues coming from ads and programming that targets users for specific products.

Formed in 2003 in imitation of the social gaming site Friendster, MySpace grew rapidly and was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005. By 2008, MySpace was the leading social networking site, valued at one time at US$12 billion But it declined in popularity – thanks to an overprevalence of ads, concerns about exposure of minors to sexual content and other issues. In 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to Specific Media, who sold it again in 2016 to Time Inc., which was in turn bought by the Meredith Corporation in 2018.

So the company went through three changes in ownership over a 12-year period, and saw revenues and membership drop precipitously over that time. One sale might be fine, but three sales over short term suggests to me a troubled business that was not in a good position to watch over others’ intellectual property.

Anyone using MySpace as a storage service who did not have alternate backup is simply out of luck. You left your intellectual property sitting beside the information superhighway, and when you came back 10 years later it was gone.

MySpace is not alone in encountering problems. Amazon cloud services, for example, also experienced a a substantial outage in 2011 and another in 2017. Though temporary, and without actual loss of data, these outages left users without access to precious and important files for some time.

A much bigger problem

Preserving content or intellectual property on the internet presents a conundrum. If it’s accessible, then it isn’t safe; if it’s safe, then it isn’t accessible.

Accessible content is subject to tampering, theft or other sorts of bad actions. Only content that is inaccessible can be locked and protected from hacking.

The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of 70 terabytes per second. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever.

Massive and desperate efforts are underway to preserve whatever is worth preserving, but even sorting out what is and what is not is itself a formidable undertaking. What will be of value in 10 years – or 50 years? And how to preserve it?

Acid-free paper can last 500 years; stone inscriptions even longer. But magnetic media like hard drives have a much shorter life, lasting only three to five years. They also need to be copied and verified on a very short life cycle to avoid data degradation at observed failure rates between 3% and 8% annually.

Then there is also a problem of software preservation: How can people today or in the future interpret those WordPerfect or WordStar files from the 1980s, when the original software companies have stopped supporting them or gone out of business?

A nonprofit startup called The Internet Archive is preserving snapshots of the web on an ongoing basis, but mostly this is for top-level public HTML webpages such as The New York Times website and Facebook, not for underlying content files. As of last fall, its Wayback Machine held over 450 billion pages in 25 petabytes of data. This would represent .0003% of the total internet.

Universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data in a hodgepodge of archives, such as the U.K.‘s Digital Preservation Coalition, MetaArchive, or the now-disbanded collaborative Digital Preservation Network.
Preservation is hard and expensive in time, money and equipment. To be most useful, it not only has to be stored, but hosted in a form that is accessible and available for future reuse.

Actual storage costs less than $0.05 per gigabyte, but storage is only a small percentage of the costs of preservation. Acquisition, networking, maintenance and administration all require substantial and costly human labor.

Budgeting models suggest a 10-year preservation expense of around $2.50 per gigabyte, or $2,500 per terabyte, or $625,000 for the files MySpace failed to preserve.

Considering your own data

So yes, the internet is rotting, but archivists and digital librarians like myself knew it was rotten already, as did anyone who ever got a “404 File Not Found” error.

Where there is economic incentive to keep and use data – such as user information, profiles or browsing history – it may exist for quite a long time. It has been said by many that data is the new oil, and corporations are anxious to drill and exploit this resource.

However, where content is less valuable to whomever owns the servers, there is less incentive to invest in preserving it. A survey of 10 million hits from 25 random sites in 2004 suggests that 404 errors occur at close to 3% of targeted URLs. The internet is growing much faster than it is rotting, but both things are happening at once. No giant internet company has your interests closer to its heart than its own.

One preservation network is known under the acronym LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe – and that’s a good rule of thumb. Always have a backup, and always have multiple backups. Guard your privacy and guard your content, at least that content you may wish to have preserved, like photos, email, that screenplay or novel, or video and music files. Copyright rules do not prohibit storing content you may have purchased, as long as you don’t put it out for public sharing.

Free storage is a great offer, but sometimes you only get what you pay for. The internet is neither secure nor permanent. It never promised to be, and users should not assume that it will become so. Parts are rotting and corroding and collapsing as I type this. Just hope and plan to not be resting on that platform when it falls.

Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Your Internet Data is Rotting

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