March 2006

It’s that blog awards time again. The Bloggies are up, and does anyone else feel they are just a bit dull? The winners are: Best Blog Application: Blogger.Best Asian Blog: Tokyo GirlBest ANZAC Blog: LoobyluBest Middle Eastern Blog: Baghdad BurningBest European Blog: My Boyfriend is a TwatBest UK/Irish Blog: Girl with a One-Track MindBest Latin…

Ultra-dodgy securico CusterBattles’s rampant Iraq corruption seems finally to have caught up with them to the tune of $10 million.

NMS Communications chap Brough Turner has an interesting set of photos up on installing a base station in Nigeria. With a VSAT satellite terminal for the backhaul and solar panels, it’s a complete drop-in infrastructure…

After the Kenyan censorblitz crisis, a curious story from the Nairobi Nation via AllAfrica.com. Apparently some poor chap turned up, bleeding, near a house occupied by mysterious white foreigners regularly visited by vehicles with GK- plates (i.e. Government of Kenya). Sez he’s been bitten by a dog. Locals say he’s dusting crops where there ain’t…

A long, grim report from the New York Times on Iraq – tortured corpses littering the streets, ethnic cleansing, 11-year-old gunboys building roadblocks, teenage checkpoints, lynchings, the full Lebanese monty. But this is really bizarre: Across town in a busy shopping area in western Baghdad, a 15-minute gun battle broke out between security guards, more…

I’ve decided to bring forward the next Monday Stranded Giant Container Ship post because there has been an unforeseen development – M/V APL Panama is afloat! Cargolaw: March 10 2006 — SHE FLOATS !!!!! M/V APL Panama — beached since Christmas Day 2005 — floated away from the Mexican beach at 4:41 a.m. March 10!!!…

Doug Farah is reporting that UAE authorities have grounded Irbis Air Company’s planes. No details as yet, but this could be big news. Stay tuned… Well, if you did stay tuned, as well as reports from the UAE that Irbis aircraft have been seized, you will be pleased to know that the 3C-QRF file has…

Who decides what our honest and trustworthy friends at Secure Computing will allow their clients (or rather, their clients’ subjects and employees) to read? Turns it’s a bloke called Tomo Foote-Lennox. No, that is not a typo. Mr. Foote-Lennox, it seems, is the one who ruled that BoingBoing was “porn” on the basis of that…

It’s almost three years since this blog began, and at last, a cat. Fefe says – hello world.

So there’s this American software firm called Secure Computing, that sells filter proxy software to fun-loving tyrannettes like the rulers of Saudi Arabia so they can keep their citizens from reading any of that awful, awful stuff on the Internet. (At least, those citizens who can’t afford an Inmarsat BGAN terminal.) Turns out their stuff’s…