The Chinese will provide the technology, according to the BBC. The justification of the proposed wiretap measures sound familiar:
The government has defended the proposal in the name of national security.
“The advancement in technology today means that no one is safe at all from the source of terrorism, mercenarism and organised crime,” Brig Gen Mike Sango of the Zimbabwe Defence Force told the hearing.
Ooooh. Be afraid. Be very very afraid so we can tap your phones. How else can we “help” you?
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s morefully of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For to world’s morefully of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than you can understand.
Data integrity issues live at the heart of any reference material, but Wikipedia and the rapid-release cycle of Internet content has created a whole new level of controversy.
The Onion has put together a fine example of this in their fun article: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
“At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” [Wikipedia founder] Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”
I love reading the razor-sharp work of the Onion, but I have just two words for them: Pot. Kettle. Black.
Take, for example, their recent analysis of the recent cease-fire by Hizbullah:
As the cost of rocket fuel soared to $630 per gallon Monday, Middle Easterners who depend on the non-renewable propellant to power 10-kilogram rockets have been forced to severely restrict their daily bombing routines, bringing this latest round of fighting to an unexpected halt.
“The way things are going, I won’t have any money left over for other necessities, such as anti-aircraft missiles, land mines, and machine guns,” said Hezbollah guerrilla Mahmoud Hamoui, who is just one of hundreds of Islamic militants compelled to scale back their killing until rocket-fuel prices return to their pre-2006 levels.
That’s rediculous. Everyone knows rocket fuel hit $972 per gallon.
The Guardian’s “free our data” series reports on a team of researchers including a Cornell professor who wanted to test their receiver with the publically funded Galileo geo-location satellite system. They first discovered that the signals were encoded. Then, when they requested access, they were told to wait. So, naturally, they instead cracked the codes:
Galileo’s spokesman downplays the significance of Psiaki’s code-breaking efforts. “We expected this,” he says, “because the codes on the test satellite are easy to crack. In the Galileo system satellites will use different codes and to crack them I would say they will need 100 years.”
In that case, why not publish them in the first place? The more significant question is the incident’s impact on private investors. It is unclear how a commercial service can make money competing with a free service. Galileo’s spokesman argues that subscribers will be attracted by the system’s guaranteed reliability.
Psiaki, however, says: “It always seemed to me a little odd that you could get enough subscribers to a paid service when the free one is pretty good to begin with.” He can sympathise if Galileo does want to charge “a nominal fee” for the open service. But one thing he says Galileo can’t do is protect the open service with more secure codes, because of that EU-US agreement. In the end, he says, “these simpler codes may be the ones that are the most valuable commercially, because these are likely to be the preferred codes for mass-market receivers”.