Credit card stealing app in Apple's official store

The other day, I downloaded an update to an iPhone app that I own that streams Romanian radio stations called roRadio. They added a page of ads that are displayed each time you open the app, and they struck me as a very candid assessment of what tech-savvy Romanians are into. The first one (in no particular order – they're displayed randomly) is an ad for a DEX app. DEX is the official Romanian dictionary, and, for what's essentially a dictionary with some etymology notes, it comes up surprisingly often in everyday conversation with Romanians. The second is some utility with Romania-specific facts – not exactly sure what they are, but it seems pretty normal.

The third one, though, is the most fascinating: it's an app whose only apparent utility I can see is to credit card thieves! It's 99¢ and I didn't buy it, but according to screenshots, it tells you the card issuer and whether or not a given credit card number is valid – things that you'd only need to know if the card in question wasn't actually yours (who forgets whether their card is a Visa or Mastercard??). Romanians are prolific hackers, but given Apple's notoriously stringent App Store policies, I'm surprised this one made it through.

Ceaușescu's balls

Radio Free Europe has an interview with a reporter who met Nicolae Ceaușescu not long before he was ousted from power in 1989 and executed. It's a pretty typical profile of a tyrant and his decrepit country, except for this extremely bizarre part:

RFE/RL: During the interview, Ceausescu and Auchincloss were seated on a dais. From where you sat, you had a better view of the "Genius of the Carpathians," as he liked to be referred to in the Romanian media. What struck you most about his appearance?

Meyer: I just began taking notes, and one of the notes said "balls," and this was not editorial commentary, this was a literal observation. Ceausescu was sitting and I was looking at his testicles, resting on his seat, in his overlarge trousers, and they...they looked, like, as I wrote in my notebook, overripe tomatoes, sort of flattened, squatted there on his feet -- malignant -- them so big; him such a small dictator.

...whaaat? This doesn't even make anatomical sense...how could his falls be "resting on his seat [...] sort of flattened, squatted there on his feet"? Anyway, not very intellectually stimulating, but it was too good not to share.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not fooled, knew he was in Poland

It seems that a third Eastern European CIA black site has been found in Lithuania, this in addition to the ones in Romania and Poland. (Non-Russian Eastern Europeans love America, for Cold War reasons. The Albanians and Georgians named streets after George W. Bush.)

But anyway, the Lithuania thing isn't that shocking or interesting. What I liked about the article was this quote from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later told a team from the International Red Cross, who questioned him in late 2006, that he thought he had probably been held prisoner in Poland. "I think the country was Poland," he said, according to the Red Cross report. "I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had (an) e-mail address ending in '.pl'. The central-heating system was an old-style one that I would expect only to see in countries of the former communist system."

Eastern European inferiority complex

The NYT's website is currently featuring an interesting article about an ethnic German politician in Romania, and it touches on something that I've always found interesting about Eastern Europeans: they have a tremendous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. The article is about Klaus Johannis, mayor of the town of Sibiu (Hermannstadt auf Deutsch), who very well might become the country's prime minister.

Mr. Johannis also benefits from the positive stereotypes Romanians associate with the German population, known as Transylvanian Saxons, who have called the region home since the 12th century.

The Saxons, known in German as Siebenbürger Sachsen, are considered hard-working, precise and uncompromising, an attractive mixture in a country tired of mismanagement and corruption, and one of the hardest hit in Europe by the economic crisis. It also does not hurt that the country experienced some of its best moments under German kings more than a century ago, even though the monarchs were unrelated to the local German population.

“I think it’s a real advantage that he’s German,” said Bianca Florea, 18, a student, as she passed through the main town square in Sibiu on Friday. “Well, not exactly German, but Saxon.” Asked why, Ms. Florea responded, “We Romanians are a bit lazy, that’s my opinion.”

Romania's once large German minority mostly moved back to the Fatherland (sold by Ceaușescu to West Germany for a couple thousand bucks each), so Johannis is a bit of a novelty. Despite its power, the Eastern European inferiority complex apparently doesn't override Eastern European pessimism:

But like most of the dozen residents interviewed here, she was skeptical about Mr. Johannis’s prospective move to Bucharest, despite praising his work as mayor.

“He could go there and do a good job for a while or he could be a puppet for others,” Ms. Florea said. Mr. Johannis belongs to none of the major parties, but instead to the small German Democratic Forum, which represents the 60,000 ethnic Germans remaining in the country.

North Korean monuments around the world

So apparently North Korea has another cash cow along with drugs, counterfeit money and cigarettes, and nuclear extortion – scary authoritarian-ish monuments. The blog North Korea Economy Watch has the scoop, along with links to pictures of monuments that North Korean workers – apparently skilled in bronze work – have built around the world. (And by "world," I mean a few select hellholes in Africa and the Middle East.)

Astute North Korea watchers will realize that the Hermit Kingdom has been exporting its particularly nasty brand of authoritarianism long before the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, took over from the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung. Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania, the Eastern Bloc leader with the strongest cult of personality, is said to have learned everything he knew about being a creepy cultish dictator from a trip to China, North Korea, and Vietnam in 1971 (.pdf).

Funny foreign press about Obama's coronation

Not that I looked very hard, but here are two headlines on foreign newspapers' websites about the Obama victory.

Ségolène Royal : "J'ai inspiré Obama et ses équipes nous ont copiés from lemonde.fr; the headline on the (East Coast) evening of January 19.

Translation: "Ségolène Royal: I inspired Obama and his team copied us"

Ségolène Royal was the losing socialist candidate in the 2007 French presidential election, in case you forgot. Here's an excerpt from the first paragraph:

Il a envoyé une équipe à Paris étudier son site Désir d'avenir. "Chez nous ils ont enregistré les idées de 'gagnant-gagnant', de 'citoyen-expert'" Ensuite, M. Obama a adapté sa "démocratie participative" à la mode américaine, "fort différente de l'européenne". Aux Etats-Unis, tout n'est que "communautés" – ethniques, religieuses, culturelles, urbaines, même les quartiers d'habitations s'intitulent "communities". En Europe, on parlerait de collectivités, de mouvements, d'associations, de réseaux. Mais l'idée, dit-elle, lundi 19 janvier, à Washington, est la même : refonder la manière de faire de la politique, la relation entre les élites et le peuple.

My very liberal/bad translation: Barack Obama sent a team to Paris to study Ségolène Royal's campaign site Désir d'avenirs. "When he was here they picked up the ideas of "win-win" and "citizen expert" (???). Then, Obama adapted her "participative democracy" to suit American audiences, "very differently from the European model." In the United States, it's all about "communities" – ethnic, religious, cultural, urban – they even have neighborhoods with "community" in their names. In Europe, we would talk about collectives, movements, associations, and networks. But the idea, Ségolène says on the eve of inauguration in Washington, is the same: to remake politics, and to change the relations between the elites and the common people.

By the way, I think the "citoyen-expert" refers to a sort of Joe the Plumber ethic of deferring to the "peuple," which is a word that (I think?) connotes a sort of populism. This is a great example, though, of typical French bullshit.

Barack Obama a stat o oră în Bucureşti / Noul preşedinte al SUA, care s-a declarat marţi, după jurământ, prieten al tuturor naţiunilor, a stat în Bucureşti o oră, în 2005, când era doar senator de Illinois.

Translation: Barack Obama spent an hour in Bucharest / The new US president, who declared himself on Tuesday, according to his oath, to be a friend of all nations, spent an hour in Bucharest in 2005, when he was just a US senator from Illinois.

This was the most prominent headline at cotidianul.ro, a Romanian newspaper. I probably don't appreciate it enough, but the Romanian media has always struck me as really bad and unprofessional.

Another blow for Nabucco

The Nabucco gas pipeline suffered anther blow this week when Gazprom held talks with Romania, apparently offering to run its proposed South Stream project through Romania instead of Bulgaria. Romania was, up until now, the last member of the Western-backed Nabucco pipeline to not be in talks with or have already made agreements with Russia's state energy giant Gazprom with regards to its South Stream project, which is in direct competition with the planned Nabucco pipeline. Romanian officials have apparently concluded that, given Nabucco's dimming prospects after the South Ossetian war (Nabucco would receive gas from the upstream BTE pipeline, which runs through Georgia), it's time to consider hedging their bets with their ex-overlords. This is in stark contrast to the picture before the August war, when back in March the Jamestown Institute was predicting that Romania, though it didn't have veto power over the project, could use its position in the Black Sea to delay South Stream.

Meanwhile, Hungary – which seems to be Nabucco's biggest advocate these days – is flailing its arms, trying to the West to reconsider Iranian gas to fill the Nabucco pipeline. (Iran, the decreasingly-independent republics of the South Caucasus, and Russia are the only land routes into Europe from the gas-rich Capsian region.) But there's little chance of that happening, and Iran seems to have taken the West's rejection personally, and has publicly sworn off the involvement in Nabucco that it never actually had in the first place.

For full coverage of Nabucco's precipitously declining fortunes, check my Nabucco archives.

Pirates at the Economist

It looks like the mainstream media might finally be catching on to the benefits of piracy – the Economist has an article this week called "Piracy: Look for the silver lining" in which they document the ways that owners of intellectual "property" are embracing piracy rather than attempting to litigate it out of existence. Though they skimp on some of the more interesting forms of piracy – namely music and video piracy – they quote Bill Gates as saying that piracy helps Microsoft compete against open source software in the developing world. I remember when I was in Romania Gates came to speak to Microsoft's Romanian employees (apparently the biggest nationality in Redmond aside from Americans), and Romania's president said that "[we] built our country on pirated Windows." Gates apparently looked a little uncomfortable after the comment, so I doubt his comfort with piracy is quite as strong as the Economist would make it seem, but nevertheless, still interesting. It's just a shame that pirates have to rely on the good will of content creators to see the benefit in relinquishing their intellectual property rights.

Is piracy more like stealing, or ad-blocking?

Though major media industry groups would have you believe that stealing music or other digital content is like stealing a physical object, a more appropriate analogy would be that it's a little like blocking ads on the internet. Ad revenue funds the content – you're paying for the content with your time – while the distribution costs are very little compared to distributing the content through physical media. But, people (and courts) often view the two issues very differently. While sharing an episode of The Office on BitTorrent could land you in court, no such case would be imaginable against someone who removed the ads from the official ad-supported version of the show on NBC's website. While copyright laws are viewed by all but anarchists (both anarcho-communists and market anarchists, actually) as sacrosanct, the WaPo leaves readers with the idea that the problem of ad-blocking might just work itself out.

The idea behind it is pretty obvious: blocking ads takes time, and people only do it if ads are obtrusive enough. If content providers are losing money because of missed ad revenues, they can respond by either two ways: an arms race to block and get around blocks, or by making the ads not worth blocking. Whereas the internet used to be filled with annoying talking ads, I haven't seen a video ad that starts automatically with the sound on in a long time. Even on a Romanian news website that I used to read which always had annoying ads long after professional American sites did, I haven't seen one lately. (The site, like most others, has gone upscale in a lot of other ways, but because of the brand name recognition it has, it can't shed its ridiculous name – HotNews.ro.) And though I almost always use Safari's pop-up suppressor, anecdotal evidence from when I surf without it tells me that pop-ups aren't nearly as prevalent as they once were. And though privacy advocates bemoan ad algorithms that analyze your habits and deliver ads that would appeal to you, ads are often helpful, and they can be a lot more helpful and less annoying to the consumer if they're better targeted.

Even though the media, courts, and lawmakers don't realize it yet, piracy has already forced producers of media content to make their products even more appealing than the pirated product. For example, I used to illegally download episodes of The Office with BitTorrent, until NBC started offering episodes with ads online for free. Though the pirated version is better quality, more enjoyable to watch since it doesn't have ads, and doesn't take much time if I plan properly, the ad-supported version is more appealing because I don't have to plan in advance. In fact, it even beats out (for me) streaming video pirate video sites like alluc.org, because it's faster and more reliable. Everyone I know who watches The Office (people who are the most appealing cohort: young people) watches it on nbc.com, and that includes people who also use pirate streaming video sites to watch shows that aren't available legally online.

Dog bites man

Articles like this one make me fall out of my chair laughing hysterically. It was obviously not written by anyone with any knowledge about Romania, because they would know that there are likely more than twenty bribes given per day in just Bucharest alone for drivers permits and licenses. My own mother (or, rather, a şofer) once bribed someone to get get suspended license back. The AP must have just gotten a new Bucharest correspondent, probably from Switzerland or Sweden or some other extremely law-abiding country. I can't even imagine the next story to come out of him/her – maybe a story about a taxi driver running a red light, or one about a 16-year-old buying cigarettes without being carded?

And someday, maybe Burma will become like Rumania!

The NYT apparently every week has an "op-ed classic," where the paper "presents an essay from The Times's archive by a columnist or contributor that we hope sheds light on current news or provides a window on the past." This week's essay is in relation to the oppressive military regime in Burma, and the possibility of foreign intervention. It starts out:

While the U.S. invasion of Panama provoked a great deal of debate, there was no argument about possible French and Russian intervention in Rumania. And that raises an important question: Could big-power intervention – so often used in the past by Washington and Moscow to establish repressive regimes – now become a positive force wielded on behalf of democracy and human rights?

France offered to send troops if the Rumanian Army had difficulty overcoming the security forces loyal to the ousted and executed dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. And Secretary of State James Baker said America would support any move by the Soviet Union to intervene militarily.

Wow, talk about historical amnesia! (And not just for using an antiquated spelling of Romania.) While at the time the article might have made sense to its editors, in retrospect this is something that the Times should have been ashamed of publishing. First of all, they openly admit that what happened in Romania wasn't a revolution, but a coup d'état. Though the evil dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu might have been toppled, it's a mistake to assume that his enemies were America's friends, or even Romania's friends. After the fall of Ceaușescu's regime, Romania took over a decade and a half to become a stable, functioning democracy. For most of the period in between the events of 1989 and the first real liberal becoming president (Traian Băsescu in 2004), Ion Iliescu ran the country, and not very well. A simple search of the Times' archives (or twenty seconds with a real Romanian) would have sufficed to convince the Times that this was an absurd article, unless meant for its ironic value. Here's the Times, ten years later:

Ten years after a radio announcer exulted, ''The antichrist has been executed on Christmas Day,'' Romanians are still on a national quest to piece together what happened.

Who shot whom? Was it populist, or a coup by disgruntled Communists who months later legitimized it in elections held in a still traumatized country?

''The idea that the wicked witch and her husband the bad tyrant were taken down simply by the people rising up is a fairy tale,'' said Mark P. Almond, an Oxford history professor who studies Romania. [...]

But unlike the revolts in other Eastern European countries, where power passed to accepted heroes like Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, Romania was taken over by a committee, the National Salvation Front, which quickly splintered into parties now playing what amounts to a national bloodsport: bickering over ''who betrayed our revolution.''

So what was the purpose of the Times story? Unless it was meant to be ironic (and there is no indication that it was), it seems to be legitimizing military intervention by citing the case of Romania. Which in my mind is dishonest and misleading, considering the average Times reader isn't going to know that this particular "revolution" didn't turn out as rosy as it's portrayed.

Communist party PR: who can, who can't

China has reaffirmed its total ineptitude with handing PR on an international scale in claiming the Dalai Lama is orchestrating suicide attacks. It looks like China will be spared a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, but I doubt the Tibet crisis will be the last one before the end of the games in late August. I think China has grossly overplayed its hand in hosting the Olympics – at least in America, China is the villain du jour because of the latest anti-globalization backlash provoked by the longer-than-ever presidential election season. Europe has a similar antagonism, divided between intellectuals who look down on their human rights abuses and lack of freedom, and those who have been riled up by protectionist sentiment. The CCP has become so sure of its propaganda techniques at home that thinks that they'll work against world audiences. The truth is that they probably don't even work in China – the threat of the state coming down is strong enough to coax people into either apolitical or pro-party stances. I don't see this at all helping China anywhere where it matters (i.e., advanced democracies). In the rest of the world, the power and money is in the hands of people who aren't particularly concerned with China's big coming out party.

China ought to take a page from Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's totalitarian dictator. The Soviets had taught him well, and he turned on the Soviet Union (at least publicly) and managed to be the only communist dictator to secure Most Favored Nation trade privileges from the US. He knew that identifying a common enemy was key to obtaining favors from the West (at least till he went too far and squandered it all in the late '80s), and that allowed him to do some pretty terrible things. Essentially, Ceaușescu courted the West by railing against the Soviets, all in order to cover up behavior that was for more anti-liberal than anything in the USSR after Stalin.

Putin used the same model, and anti-terrorism was what he used to get Bush to look into his eyes and "get a sense of his soul" – and it was a good sense. Meanwhile, it's likely that Russia fabricated a lot of the attacks that were supposedly perpetrated by "Chechen terrorists." The apartment bombings that were the direct cause of the Second Chechen war were most likely black flag operations by the KGB FSB. Moscow theater crisis, too.

Of course, dictatorships have no monopoly on disingenuous PR. America has clearly provoked, if not intentionally, a lot of Islamic terrorism against itself, all in the name of rooting it out. Thankfully for Americans, it doesn't do nearly as well with PR than the dictatorships.

The Homogenization of Eastern Europe

Middle-age Eastern European history can become pretty sad when you think about the huge mixes of peoples in a lot of the areas. Jews, Germans, Armenians, Greeks, and Turks, and Gypsies were scattered throughout, comprising a large percentage of the urban populations. Germans had settled far into Russia, Greeks were the favored civil servants of the Ottomans, Armenians had been wandering since the 14th century but were particularly scattered after the Armenian genocide, and Turks came from the Ottoman Empire, ruler of the Balkans till World War I. Gypsies had been wandering throughout Eurasia since 1000, and Jews have been wandering since biblical times.

Unfortunately, nationalism got the best of cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The story of the Jews is obvious, and the Germans were naturally expelled after World War II, and the ones who were allowed to stay took advantage of West Germany's offer of citizenship to all ethnic Germans and returned. In Romania, first under Gheorghiu-Dej and later under Ceauşescu, the Jews and Germans were actually sold to West Germany and Israel, respectively. Ceauşescu was even reported to have said that "oil, Germans, and Jews" were Romania's best export commodities. In any case, he destroyed most of the oldest parts of Romania's capital, erasing a lot of the evidence that they ever existed. With the coming of nationalism, minorities like the Armenians and Greeks were almost entirely assimilated into whatever the native culture, retaining only strange last names. The Gypsies that were not killed in the Holocaust assimilated somewhat, but their culture has been in some perverse way somewhat preserved due to poverty and racism. However, the use of the language has significantly decreased, and it remains to be seen to what extent Gypsy culture will have survived by the time they achieve socioeconomic parity with the dominant populations. Eastern Europe has become as homogenized as Western Europe.