"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
Defense Tech: The Law Catches Up To Private Militaries, Embeds
Topic: Current Events
6:11 am EST, Jan 4, 2007
Since the start of the Iraq war, tens of thousands of heavily-armed military contractors have been roaming the country -- without any law, or any court to control them. That may be about to change, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow P.W. Singer notes in a Defense Tech exclusive. Five words, slipped into a Pentagon budget bill, could make all the difference. With them, "contractors 'get out of jail free' cards may have been torn to shreds," he writes. They're now subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the same set of laws that governs soldiers. But here's the catch: embedded reporters are now under those regulations, too.
I've wondered why there has not been a high profile case of a contractor going over the line yet..
27B Stroke 6 | Pre-Crime Eye-in-the-Sky, Now Privatized
Topic: Surveillance
2:23 pm EST, Jan 2, 2007
Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, is now being patrolled by a surveillance helicopter complete with high-tech wizardry such as a zoom camera, insanely high-powered searchlight and an infrared camera, according to Jackson Free Press's Adam Lynch. But the real story isn't in Jackson's pretension to being a big city and wanting to use infrared cameras to illegally see into the homes of its citizens, its that the helicopter is mostly funded by private donations.
While spending $500,000 a year in operating costs on a crime-fighting helicopter might seem overkill for a city with fewer than 200,000 citizens, the city is actually paying very little -- most of the money is coming from private donors, including former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale.
Even better, McCreery has volunteered that the helicopter will using its infrared camera to peer into houses, something that's been ruled unconstitutional for police officers.
Now the city has signed on to provide $25,000 in startup costs and ongoing operating expense contributions. This strikes me as a supremely odd arrangement. There's now a snooping helicopter that can zoom over and peer into Jacksonian's houses, but its not clear who runs or owns the company.
What happens when you boil down one company's history into a series of keywords? We collected dozens of key Microsoft-related speeches, interviews, internal e-mails and other documents from the past three decades, and put them through a program that generated a timeline of tag clouds showing the 64 most commonly used words in each.
A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz, straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.
Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields much the same result. As of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces. It's hard to gauge its heft more exactly, since devices vary in speed, but to get a handle on The Whole Web instead of just the suburbs we're wired to, try tripling that figure-there are maybe ten times more mostly idle CPU chips in PC's than servers, and fewer very busy ones in the world's comparative handful of supercomputers.
Decius just posted a minor update to MemeStreams. There were a number of circles in MemeStreams that were broken. Many did not have names. These have all been deleted. If you did not have any circles before, you now have three: Co-Workers, Friends, and Interesting People, which are the same three that new users now get automatically. If you had circles before, your circles should not have changed. Please let us know if you observe any problems with these changes.
This video shows Saddam Hussein being hanged from the vantage of a witness using his or her cellphone. This shows almost everything -- except for the snap of the neck, viewer discretion advised.
There are five men in black face masks who are visible on the gallows platform around Saddam, acting as guards. As they guide him towards the trap door and put the noose over his head, they start chanting religious slogans with the names of Moqtada al Sadr (the head of the Mahdi army, accused of organizing death squads against Sunnis) and Baqr al Sadr (the father-in-law of Moqtada). Saddam, a Sunni, is outraged at this last-minute provocation, and tells them to “go to hell.” This is generally where the two TV stations cut the video, but on at least one occasion that we saw, Arabiya allowed the video to keep rolling: The cell phone camera is jerked down to the ground, as if the person holding it had to conceal the camera, then it is slowly raised up to Saddam again, and suddenly his body shoots down through the trapdoor. At this, the Arabiya anchor came on and made a scissors symbol with two fingers with a mischievous grin on his face, as if to say that they really shouldn’t have shown that, but so be it. A cynical voyeuristic ploy, nudge nudge wink wink.
However, the impact of this video could be quite significant. First, it will reinforce Sunni suspicions that the execution of Saddam was merely an act of Shiite revenge for decades of repression under Saddam. The building where the execution took place was expressly chosen because it was once used as a detention center by a division of Saddam’s secret police that was focused on the Shiite Dawa party. Some of the witnesses whom the government invited to the execution had themselves once been tortured in that same building. Indeed, Prime Minister Maliki, who signed the execution order the day before the hanging, is a long-term member of the Dawa party and had himself been sentenced to death by Saddam back in 1980 before fleeing the country.
Worse, it will also reinforce the fears of Sunnis that Maliki’s government is beholden to the Mahdi army, Moqtada’s militia. Executions are generally expected to be solemn affairs –- certainly not opportunities for thugs to score some final sectarian points before the “enemy” is disposed of. The video itself seems quite distasteful –- but it is informative to the extent that it reveals the political baggage that the current government carries on its shoulders. It does not add up to a pretty picture.
I've seldom seen as much disruption of the Internet as is still being caused by the Taiwan Earthquakes of 26-27 December. Six undersea cables cut at once may be a record, as may disruptions from Taiwan to Nepal.
This link has an animation of Internet routing chaos in Singapore after undersea fibers near Taiwan were cut. This doesn't actually convey much information worth a damn, but I think I lived it once, and was too screwed up to notice. Kudos to the Internet for making that possible.
Almost immediately, he caused a stir after he joined the White House Press Corps in 2005, making waves as the first reporter to ask then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan whether the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name might be considered an act of treason.
"There has been a lot of speculation concerning the meaning of the underlying statute and the grand jury investigation concerning Mr. Rove," Sanford asked. "The question is, have the legal counsel to the White House or White House staff reviewed the statute in sufficient specificity to determine whether a violation of that statute would, in effect, constitute treason?"
The guy who first asked the Valerie Plame question jumps off a building. Conspiracy theorists, start your engines!
