The Yorkshire Ranter

Renesys have an interesting report on how the internet backbone did just what Vint Cerf designed it to do when the hurricane hit. That is, keep working.

I’ve been asked to route some Katrina-related traffc to the following posts at Kathryn Cramer’s: FEMA Needs to Tell People What It Intends For Their Homes, and Black Water. You will probably not be disappointed.

Fascinating report from the Torygraph‘s Oliver Poole. Apparently the Iraqi government is trying to get rid of the rash of hired guns all over the country, or at least to set some limits to their activities. Iraq to bring private armies under controlBy Oliver Poole in Baghdad(Filed: 09/09/2005) Thousands of heavily armed private security contractors…

A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on…

There’s a lot of blogospheric fuss about the “ZDF tape”, the German TV report that describes relief equipment and personnel rolling up to Biloxi immediately before George W. Bush was due to visit and rolling right away again once he left. Everyone’s being terribly careful, Tim Ireland went so far as to ring up ZDF…

A group of German and Australian scientists have developed a new way of producing hydrogen from sunlight using genetically engineered algae. The scheme produces 13 times as much of the gas than a previous method of getting tiny plants to make it, and according to the team leader, it might be commercialised within five years,…

Spyblog discusses the leaked report in this weekend’s Observer that the intelligence services were considering as long ago as the summer of 2004 whether it was wise to have agents start posting to jihadi “websites” – bulletin boards presumably – in order to gain the trust of their members and persuade them against turning to…

The German election campaign is cranking up to as close to a throbbing wave of intensity as you are likely to find in modern Germany. Very soon, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is going to take on the CDU’s Angela Merkel in a televised debate. Merkel has always had to do it tough in the CDU, as…

Longstanding TYR colleague Kathryn Cramer has given over her blog lock, stock and barrel to providing sources of satellite imagery and geographic data, Google Earth/Maps hacks and such to those seeking information from New Orleans. The quality of what is available, and the depth of information (overlaying addresses, depths of water and damage reports onto…