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Indian seismologist says that mobile phones tend to fail 100 to 150 minutes before an earthquake. Going by the details the article gives, the mechanism must be the frequency shifts he describes – if transmissions around 1000MHz are shifted up to 1800-1900 and 2000MHz, that would put them right in two out of four GSM…

Last night’s RL test match, between Great Britain and New Zealand, pointed up something it’s easy to forget, thanks to the dearth of internationals. That is how the character of league-playing nations varies. The Australians usually come on tour with three annoying, but transparently gifted stars, but they aren’t the point. Neither is their traditional…

According to today’s Observer, No.10’s Respect Tsar (it nearly spells taser, after all) Louise Casey has turned against one of Blair’s brilliant ideas, specifically the scheme to take away “disruptive families’” housing benefit. Apparently she is concerned that the children of such homes have suffered enough without being turned out in the street where, one…

Well, accounts are now out of the insurgent attack on the Palestine Hotel. Apparently, there were three suicide car bombers…stop-groups in the streets around…and a storming party in the wings to take advantage of the car explosions. It sounds very much like the big assault on Abu Ghraibh that I blogged up in June. This…

In our last post we discussed watching other people’s Axis network cameras using Google’s inurl: command. In this post we shall have a look at how to control them. I now know that the inurl:axis-cgi search isn’t new. In fact, it’s just one of a wedge of Google searches that bring up plenty of cams…

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…