Liudvikas Bukys

Internet gets its own country code – 87810 [via Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list]

Can’t verify this but it’s interesting if true:

Glenn Reynolds:
“Salam Pax” is a pseudonymous blogger from Baghdad. He’s been
blogging for a while, and he seems to be genuine — people who
know the area have had a lot of correspondence with him and
think so. Here’s what he
reports:

A quick run thru what is going on in Baghdad before
uncles and aunts flood the house. The juiciest bit of
news actually happened about a week ago but I was told
about it today. A couple of days ago it was rumored
that all top officials had their phone numbers changed,
well who cares it’s not like I call Saddam every night
to chat, but today a friend explained why. Around six
days ago the phone lines of the Iraqi air defense units
were “attacked”. When you picked up the phone in some
of the command units you didn’t get a dial tone but a
male voice speaking in broken Arabic. What it said is
close to what the infamous email said, don’t use
chemical or biological weapons, don’t offer resistance,
and don’t obey commands to attack civilian areas and so
on. This went on for a couple of hours. Now everyone
has new numbers. I have no idea how that is at all
possible. I do know that for some rural areas we use
microwave signals for phone connections but they can’t
be so stupid as to use it for military purposes.

Way to go uncle Sam. This is going to make one hell of
a James Bond movie.

Clay Shirky:
Customer-owned Networks:
ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry
“Two years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, FedEx pulled the plug on ZapMail, allowing it to vanish without a trace. And the story of ZapMail’s collapse holds a crucial lesson for the telephone companies today. …
The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies’ most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail.”

The year in scripting languages
« This is a joint review of 2002 for the programming languages Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. It was a cooperative effort by people from the five communities. »
[Zope Newbies]

Gary North, via Jude Wanniski:
The World We Are Losing

During World War II, the British cracked the Germans’ military code. The Brits knew the times and routes of the oil tankers that were to supply Rommel’s forces in Africa. To keep the Germans from figuring out that their code had been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane,
which would make itself visible to the men on the tankers, and then run for cover. The plane would send a message announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The Germans on the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from the air. What bad luck! If they radioed home, they would
tell the command that they had been spotted. Then a British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never did alter the code.

The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception. So are the random searches of passengers and bags. They are to provide camouflage: (1) from voters who demand action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise get their swarthy clients released on the basis of racial profiling. Anyone who really expects searches like these to protect airliners is so abysmally dense that he might as [well] be a Congressman. The other purposes of the new surveillance system relate more to controlling average people than catching terrorists.

History:
A Study of the ARPANET TCP/IP Digest
and of the Role of Online Communication
in the Transition from the ARPANET to the Internet (Ronda Hauben, Columbia University)

The Public Library of Science
[NYT]
[SlashDot]

The Economist:
The race to computerise biology
(A layman’s introduction to bioinformatics)

Google’s new toys:
“Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google’s Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google’s Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google’s Froogle, which aims to be the world’s largest catalog.”
[Slashdot]

IBM to build fastest supercomputers. CNET Nov 19 2002 7:28AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]