Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2008 (20. évfolyam, 3-51. szám)

2008-09-05 / 36. szám

San Francisco Celebrates August 20.

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The San Francisco Bay Area’s Hungarian American community launched a series of St. Steven's Day celebrations with a Hungarian musical program played by the San Francisco ’s Golden Park Orchestra, and the Tempo Giusto String Quartet, organized by András Rekay, president, Hungarian Freedom Fighters Federation.

The program included Ambassador Balazs Bokor, Consul General of Hungary in Los Angeles , Father Maurusz Nemeth, from the Woodside Priory, Diana Pray and Eszterlanc Dance Group. Honorary Consul General in San Francisco Eva Voisin awarded a Certificate of Recognition to Elizabeth Tarczy-Kovacs for ter many 30 years of service to the Hungarian community.

The Hungarian flag was raised at San Francisco City Hall on August 19 by the Honorary Consul General if Hungary, Eva Voisin, accompanied by a small representative group from the Hungarian community.

Hungarian and American friends enjoyed St. Steven’s Day Picnic on August 23 at the Woodside Priory. The Hungarian Catholic Mission served hundreds of traditional delicacies, pastries, “langos” and wines. The day concluded with a Hungarian poetry retrospective and recital by Mr. Ivan Szucs, a visiting artist from Hungary.

The Gulf Coast Braces For Hurricane Gustav

NEW ORLEANS - With a historic evacuation of 1.9 million people from the Louisiana coast, gun-toting police and National Guardsmen stood watch as rain started to fall on this city’s empty streets Sunday night — and even presidential politics took a back seat as the nation waited to see if Hurricane Gustav would be another Katrina. The storm was set to crash ashore midday Monday with frightful force, testing the three years of planning and rebuilding that followed Katrina’s devastating blow to the Gulf Coast.

Painfully aware of the failings that led to that horrific suffering and more than 1,600 deaths, this time officials moved beyond merely insisting tourists and residents leave south Louisiana. They threatened arrest, loaded thousands onto buses and warned that anyone who remained behind would not be rescued. “Looters will go directly to jail. You will not get a pass this time,” Mayor Ray Nagin said. He urged residents to evacuate: “If you remain, you are on your own. There will be no services and no rescue operations.”

Col. Mike Edmondson, state police commander, said he believed that 90 percent of the population had fled the Louisiana coast. The exodus of 1.9 million people is the largest evacuation in state history, and thousands more had left from Mississippi, Alabama and flood-prone southeast Texas.

Late Sunday, Gov. Bobby Jindal issued one last plea to the roughly 100,000 people still left on the coast: “If you’ve not evacuated, please do so. There are still a few hours left.”

Louisiana and Mississippi temporarily changed traffic flow so all highway lanes led away from the coast, and cars were packed bumper-to-bumper. Stores and restaurants shut down, hotels closed and windows were boarded up. Some who planned to stay changed their mind at the last second, not willing to risk the worst.

Forecasters said Gustav was likely to grow stronger as it marched toward the coast with top sustained winds of around 115 mph. At 8 p.m. EDT Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said Gustav was a Category 3 storm centered southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi. River and moving northwest near 17 mph.

McCain Curtails Convention - Nation Before Party

ST. PAUL, Minn. - John McCain tore up the script for his Republican National Convention on Sunday, as Hurricane Gustav churned toward New Orleans. “We will act as Americans,” not partisans, he declared.

“This is a time when we have to do away with our party politics, and we have to act as Americans,” McCain added as fellow Republicans converged on their convention city to nominate him for the White House. Aides said Monday’s program would be short and shorn of political rhetoric.

On the eve of his convention, McCain seemed determined to avoid the errors made by President Bush three years ago. “I have every expectation that we will not see the mistakes of Katrina repeated,” he said.

Bush and Vice President Cheney scrapped plans to address the convention Monday night, and McCain’s aides chartered a jet to fly delegates back to their hurricane-threatened states along the Gulf Coast. Campaign manager Rick Davis said the first-night program was being cut from seven hours to two and one-half.

McCain said in an interview with NBC that it was possible he would make his acceptance speech not from the convention podium but via satellite from the Gulf Coast region.

The formal business of the convention includes nominating McCain for president and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate on Wednesday. McCain’s acceptance speech, set for Thursday evening, is among the most critical events of the campaign for his chances of winning the White House.

The hasty reordering of an event months in the planning was unprecedented, affecting not only the program on the podium but the accompanying fundraising, partying and other political activity that unfolds around the edges of a national political convention. McCain said he was looking forward to being at the convention but did not say when he would arrive. He spoke from St. Louis after he and Palin received a briefing on hurricane preparations on a quick visit to Jackson, Miss.

McCain campaign manager Davis told reporters inside the convention hall that the opening program on Monday would be “business only and will refrain from political rhetoric.” To help those in need, he said, “We are working with the delegations, financial people, finance committees, many other concerned individuals to do what we can to raise money for various charities that operate in the Gulf Coast region.”

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Elizabeth Tarczy-Kovacs (center), with Ambassador Balazs Bokor and Hon. Consul General Eva Voisin, at the Golden Gate Park Concert.

San Francisco City Hall balcony with Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Proclamation of Hungarian Heritage Day in San Francisco

Passwords Are No Longer a Good Defense?

THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months.

Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember. And holding onto it forever.

I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.

That would be the case even if we had done a better job of listening to instructions. Surveys show that we’ve remained stubbornly fond of perennial favorites like “password,” “123456” and “LetMeln.” The underlying problem, however, isn’t their simplicity. It’s the log-on procedure itself, in which we land on a Web page, which may or may not be what it says it is, and type in a string of characters to authenticate our identity. This procedure — which now seems perfectly natural because we’ve been trained to repeat it so much — is a bad idea, one that no security expert would defend.

Password-based log-ons are susceptible to being compromised in any number of ways. Consider a single threat, that posed by phishers who trick us into clicking to a site designed to mimic a legitimate one in order to harvest our log-on information. Once we’ve been suckered at one site and our password purloined, it can be tried at other sites.

The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties’ authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see.

In short, we need a log-on system that relies on cryptography, not mnemonics. As users, we would replace passwords with so-called information cards, icons on our screen that we select with a click to log on to a Web site. The click starts a handshake between machines that relies on hard-to-crack cryptographic code. The necessary software for creating information cards is on only about 20 percent of PCs, though that’s up from 10 percent a year ago. Windows Vista machines are equipped by default, but Windows XP, Mac and Linux machines require downloads.

And that’s only half the battle: Web site hosts must also be persuaded to adopt information-card technology for sign-ons.

We won’t make much progress on information cards in the near future, however, because of wasted energy and attention devoted to a large distraction, the OpenID initiative. OpenID promotes “Single Sign-On”: with it, logging on to one OpenID Web site with one password will grant entrance during that session to all Web sites that accept OpenID credentials.

OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else’s website. Nevertheless, every few months another brand-name company announces that it has become the newest OpenID signatory. However, they are not willing to rely upon the OpenID credentials issued by others. You can’t use Microsoft-issued OpenID at Yahoo, nor Yahoo’s at Microsoft.