2005

Departing Sharjah 0300 hours for Baghdad. Irbis Air Co. Flight BIS6371. Running on US DOD fuel.

You can be, by following these simple instructions. Background: there is a popular software package for operating surveillance cameras over the Internet, called Axis. This program writes all the stuff coming from the camera into a cgi file which it puts in a subdirectory called /axis-cgi/. Therefore, all the URLs Axis creates in the world…

As far back as January this year, we were discussing a company called Natalco Airlines, registered in Sao Tome & Principe but really located almost anywhere else. Back then, it was possible for a source to put the Sao Tome CAA on the right track regarding an aeroplane, An-12 S9-BAN, serial no. 402111, that had…

Since the first reports of a Viktor Bout-related airline in Iraq, in the spring of 2004, there have been mentions of something called “Royal Air Cargo”, “Royal Airlines”, or some other combinations of those names. I knew from early on that Royal Air Cargo existed in Pakistan, where it resold the services of British Gulf…

I’m not sure anyone else didn’t spot this; but the name the rebels who invaded Nalchik used is significant. They called themselves the Caucasian Front. The original Caucasian Front was the Soviet army of Marshal Timoshenko, driven back from Rostov-on-Don to the mountains in the spring of 1942, who fought it out there to keep…

Everyone’s getting het up about the prospect of the current residual US responsibilities for the Internet infrastructure and the possibility that the forthcoming World Summit for the Information Society might give them to the UN, or more specifically the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN tech body that makes sure North Korean and Japanese phone…

Well, the good people of the House of Commons have done their thing. The closet fascists and crude worshippers of power did what they had to do. 25 Labour MPs did what they had to do, but of course never enough. 43 MPs failed to turn up. As seems to be normal today, the unelected…

Well, the grey men have spoken and Angela Merkel has, to my considerable surprise, ended up as Germany’s chancellor. It seems that the easy-life temptations of a grand coalition overcame the SPD’s desire to hang on to the chancellor’s office, and motivated them to give Schröder the push. This leaves Germany with a truly bizarre…

One thing that strikes everyone, I think, who visits Singapore is the apparent racial harmony. Here is (to British eyes) an example of a multicultural society functioning perfectly, people expressing their religious and national peculiarities within the scope of a shared identity in a sense indistinguishable from that expression itself. Or, to more integration-minded visitors,…

A new research paper from Caltech, which you can read here, has cast doubt on the characterisation of the Internet as a scale-free network. What the fuck is one of them things, and why care? Almost anyone who knows anything beyond “there’s this thing called the interwebs, it’s like TV that you read” knows that…