I was therefore surprised to read almost the same story in Thursday’s issue of the Gulf Daily News, a major English newspaper here in Bahrain. I was not surprised that GDN is publishing news that mentions Bahrain, but that they took an Associated Press story and published it using their own byline. I’m not completely sure about the rules of journalistic plagiarism but I think that changing word order and occasional word choice is not sufficient differentiation to publish without citing the source.

Original AP story

GDN story

Example:

AP: But within a month of his arrival in Bahrain in 2005 to join the handlers and their dogs in seeking out hidden explosives, Rocha said he found an abusive atmosphere in which he was hazed repeatedly, even though he never spoke of his sexual orientation.

“What made my rite of passage different is that I refused to have sex with prostitutes,” Rocha said. “In doing so, I gave them reason enough for them to think I was gay and they took it upon themselves to punish me for it for two years.”

GDN: However, within a month of his arrival in Bahrain in 2005, he claimed that he found an abusive atmosphere in which he was repeatedly bullied, even though he had never actually spoken of his sexual orientation.

“What made my rite of passage different is that I refused to have sex with prostitutes,” said Mr Rocha. “In doing so, I gave them enough reason to think I was gay and they took it upon themselves to punish me for it for two years.”

Upon careful inspection, I did find the following “unique research.”:

GDN: A Naval Support Activity Bahrain spokesman yesterday told the GDN that officials were aware of the situation and the case was under review.

“All we’d like to add is that these incidents do not reflect who we are as a navy,” he said.

Everything else was sourced from the AP article. At a minimum, I believe the article should have a line like “AP contributed to this report” as in this Jerusalem Post article. Now that the article has been published, GDN needs to re-look at how it handles bylines and sourcing to prevent these types of incidents in the future.

1. Create a standard desktop image with Internet Explorer 8. Deploy to computers gradually depending on response. Since the network administrators refuse to deploy Mozilla Firefox because of security issues, it doesn’t make sense to use Internet Explorer 6 when versions 7 and 8 are more secure. For instance, the newer versions have built-in malware, phishing, and cross-site scripting protection which will never appear in Internet Explorer 6.

2. Create a list of all official websites that don’t work properly with IE7 or IE8. Apply pressure to get these websites modernized. Supposedly, we continue to use an eight-year-old web browser because certain internal websites were created poorly and no one wants to fix them. Well, we need to know which websites these are so that we can track whether the issues are being fixed and whether it affects very many users.

3. Research a plan to give us more space in our inboxes. After posting this week, I talked to a friend of mine who pointed out that it is more challenging than simply buying a 1.5TB hard drive off the shelf as a RAID5 setup (duplication across multiple hard drives in case one fails) and backups are used. I still believe that the costs are minimal compared to the time wasted in trying to decide which attachments are important enough to keep and the knowledge loss (in a place where turnover is excessively high) when important documents are basically forced to be deleted.

4. Increase RAM to 1GB  or 1.5GB at least. The cost is negligble. If there were 1000 computers, the hardware cost shouldn’t be more than $15 x 1000 or $15,000. That’s like a month or two’s salary for the expensive contractors.

5. Figure out why network access is so much slower now that it was a year or so ago. It’s probably because the network is being used more with bigger documents but the network slowdowns need to be reduced. Too often, Windows Explorer or Microsoft Word will become unresponsive because the network has frozen. I presume there’s some way to distribute servers so that the network is more reliable.

6. Deploy a true web-based user-friendly helpdesk system. Statistics from banks indicate that the most expensive transactions are, in order, in-person, phone, email, web. I tried submitting a help desk request this week via the email option (which is not as useful as it sounds since everyone on the alias gets the email) and was told I needed to call the helpdesk. The only approved way to get any thing fixed is to call up the helpdesk (who, by the way, are not allowed to give you their personal phone number if you need to follow-up.) Here‘s one example of how expensive this system can be.

7. Long-term: Begin work on a Linux standard desktop image. If one of the network guys ever does read this blog post, he’ll probably think I’ve gone over the deep end by now, but there are some interesting benefits to Linux. There is no reason to pay the manufacturer to upgrade or to install your desktop image on additional computers. There are basically no viruses for Linux. OpenOffice.org is free and can do what a lot of individuals need out of their word processing suite. It is even possible to install Microsoft Office 2007 in Linux with Wine.  If Linux is configured to mount home directories as noexec, meaning it is impossible for users to run any programs they try to download off the Internet (because seriously, I can’t believe that so many network administrators are not aware how easy it is to download Firefox and install it to My Documents folder without admin privileges. This isn’t an issue in Linux since Firefox is installed by default and unapproved applications can be easily blocked.) Finally, with Linux, you can get better performance on minimal hardware…Ubuntu for instance uses less CPU & RAM than Vista.

My work computer runs Windows XP with Microsoft Office 2003.  That setup’s not necessarily a bad idea but it gets worse. (I just hope that when they do upgrade, they’re smart enough to skip Vista as Windows 7 has all the advantages of Vista with a couple years of bug fixes, fine tuning and feature enhancements.)

The only approved web browser is Internet Explorer 6. It would be one thing if they had a plan in place for when to upgrade, but there is none. No other web browser other than Internet Explorer will ever be considered unless a dramatic policy from STRATCOM would come down. The fact that either Internet Explorer 7 or 8 are more secure and would improve productivity are ignored.  I guess it was a good thing after all that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer & Windows Media Player inseparably into their operating system or we would have been left with no way to access websites or play audio.

The computers only have 512 MB of RAM (with part of that reserved for integrated graphics). Too bad that’s barely enough RAM to run a normal office workload of Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. Just hope you don’t also have a PDF you need to open. Skimping the $10-20 for more memory means increased computer crashes.

Speaking of mail, our inbox size is limited to 100MB. If people would stick to plain text, that would be plenty, but I get far more massive PowerPoint presentations and PDFs than I do at home. I got to thinking how much money it would cost to upgrade our email storage. If I bought a 1TB hard drive from the store on base for less than $150, I could significantly increase the storage space.  100MB = 1/10 GB = 1/10,000 TB.  1/10,000 of $150.00 is a penny and a half. They spend more on toilet paper in a month than it would cost to permanently double my inbox size.  Obviously there are some bandwidth and load issues to consider but those bandwidth problems are coming anyway. They could outsource some of this pain & suffering to Google for $50/person fully supported and we’d all get 25GB (250 times the size of the 100MB inbox) inboxes and the ability to check our mail and edit documents from anywhere, increasing productivity and possibly reducing costs but no decision maker in the US Government is seriously considering that idea. The 99.9% uptime guarantee is about 8 hours of downtime in a year which is less than what we currently have. (And people could continue to use the Microsoft Outlook interface we’ve paid for if they like.) My thinking is especially foolish since they won’t even allow us to access Gmail from any official military computer ever. We have unique security issues they say.

All in all our setup is pretty modern compared to 2001 when Windows XP was first released, but it’s not that great as we enter 2010. The real problem is that there is no one in Bahrain I can discuss these concerns with as the decisions are made by a nameless agent back in the United States. Not that they would care.