fatigue

January 31, 2010 in Afghanistan, aviation

This might have been a bigger story than it is.

random Afghanistan links

January 31, 2010 in Afghanistan

Jean-Dominique Merchet writes about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and argues that the political preparation and the overall strategy of it give cause for optimism. I’ve thought this before, and then doubted it. There seems to be something of an optimism outbreak on after the London conference last week; here’s McChrystal, saying he expects that [...]

support from an unexpected quarter

January 31, 2010 in Tories

This feels wrong – but it looks like Prinny did the right thing. I wonder what Nigel Lawson or Monckton will say the next time they meet the heir to the throne?

Haitian logistics: one reader asks…

January 31, 2010 in logistics

A little more Haitian logistics. That’s what the container terminal looked like this week (from here). Nathan Hodge of Wired has two good pieces, about progress reopening the harbour and bringing in a huge barge full of drinking water, and surveying the bottom of the harbour, which may not be in the same place any [...]

now that’s what I call wanktankery

January 31, 2010 in Tories

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on the British wanktank movement. Here’s an example of the US version. It turns out that the people responsible for a break-in at U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, who apparently posed as telecoms company technicians in an attempt to “tamper” with the phones, were led by a character who [...]

spiritual healer

January 29, 2010 in Blair, Iraq

Patrick “unseasonably mild” Wintour’s predictably friendly piece on Blair going before the Iraq inquiry is unintentionally disturbing: No prime minister is indifferent to his or her legacy, and however much he feels stale controversies are being aired with little new public evidence, he knows tomorrow will be important for him, and his future public life [...]

Haiti: “forklift drivers without borders” doesn’t sound so good on TV

January 24, 2010 in logistics

So, are the Americans really “prioritising foreign soldiers over aid” in Haiti? Thankfully, the national press tried to answer this question with facts. Well, not really. Spencer Ackerman and Laura Rozen actually asked intelligent questions rather than the usual “Two days after the giant earthquake destroyed all port facilities, critics asked why UN aid was [...]

what these people need is…an updated frequency allocation table

January 24, 2010 in GSM, Internet

Rather less depressing; Wired reports on the array of open-source IT tools for disaster relief getting their first use in earnest in Haiti. I remember when your main source for things like Google Earth overlays of aerial photos was Kathryn Cramer, and that was in the United States. However, there’s something I saw that wants [...]

a single net of conspiracy

January 24, 2010 in intelligence and stupidity, statistics, strategy, surveillance, terrorism, Wanktanks, war

Well, this is hardly surprising; the FBI was in the habit of pretending to be on a terrorism case every time they wanted telecoms traffic data. Their greed for call-detail records is truly impressive. Slurp! Unsurprisingly, the lust for CDRs and the telcos’ eagerness to shovel them in rapidly got the better of their communications [...]

anti-patterns in security

January 24, 2010 in hacker, Internet, surveillance

A proposal to deal with linkspammers – set up a central blackhole where you send everything that you spam-rate, and use the feed of URIs from it as an input to your automated spam filter. Its own web page is here. Unfortunately, as I point out, there’s a serious flaw here. Basically, if we’re going [...]