From Hollywood to CNN, I had come to know Arabs as oversexed oil sheikhs, tenacious warriors, mad terrorists, crazy crowds chanting “death to” something, and as interchangeable wailing victims. To encounter Arabs as ordinary people who trade sarcastic jokes. That was new.
Anthropologists think of a good joke as a successful virus. If it catches on, it may tell you something valuable about the host’s immune system. Most jokes I picked up in the Arab world dealt with the stupidity of the dictator and his entourage, and on the supposed easy morals of the dictator’s partner. The two strands come together in this one from the time Arafat was still around:
A Palestinian policeman is patrolling the beach of Gaza at night when he stumbles on a couple making out. He is about to arrest them when he realises it is Arafat and his wife Suha. “So sorry, rayyis,” the policeman fumbles as he tries to get away as fast as he can. But Arafat is adamant: “Arrest me! I have just launched an anti-corruption campaign and that’s how the rule of law works — no special cases.” Reluctantly, the policeman takes Arafat and Suha to the station where the Palestinian leader receives a 100 shekel fine. Suha must pay 200. “What’s that?” asks Arafat. Comes the answer: “For you it was a first offence.”
[The thieves stole] trophies for winning 64 tour tournaments, and finalist hardware from 24 others. It includes what he was presented for winning five season-ending ATP World Tour titles, for being on two Davis Cup winners, and for taking 11 ATP Masters event titles. It includes an Olympic ring, seven ESPYs and six trophies awarded to the player who was No. 1 in the year-end rankings. Sampras, now 39, was that from 1993 to ’98.
[…]
Sampras said he never considered that his things wouldn’t be safe.
“I was like, ‘What?'” he said. “I thought there were security cameras. I thought these things were locked up tight. I was shocked.
The tennis star has discovered the hard way a storage provider may have weak or even no security.
In February 2009 Nokia launched 3.0 of their maps with 3D enhancements. It was a throw-back to VRML maps of cities in the 1990s, but more practical because of GPS integration and mobile interface. You can use a Nokia phone to walk down a street looking at 3D view — a far more accurate visual confirmation of location.
# In 3D view mode, you can tilt the view by pressing 2 and 8
# 2D/3D mode works with all map modes, i.e. with Map/Satellite/Terrain
Integration with GPS meant it tracked you and the interface turned with you. Here’s a video demonstration from 2009 of what it looks like to navigate through Paris and London. Note that even the Thames water is animated:
Google maps may soon give Android users similar functionality.
Google is planning a huge update to its mobile location-aware map app in Google Maps 5.0 for Android. Here’s a look at what’s new:
3D Buildings:
You’ll now get a better sense for what the area looks like without having to load up Street View. That’s because 3D renderings of buildings now show up on the main map view.
I remember when working at Space Applications in the early 1990s GPS was said to be developed to assist military flights; the next phase was a zero-visibility 3D rendering for navigation so the crew could sit inside sealed bullet-proof titanium pods. Not sure if all that happened, but these mobile 3D maps make me think I could soon drive without the risk of thin glass in my car or travel in a titanium pod with a 3D HUD and two wheels…
The Swiss site (wikileaks.ch) itself has been heavily reinforced to avoid a repeat of what happened with EveryDNS, [chief technology officer at Renesys] Cowie said. To mitigate the possibility of one DNS provider once again shutting off the domain as EveryDNS did, WikiLeaks this time has signed up with separate DNS service providers in eight different countries, including Switzerland, Canada and Malaysia.
A total of 14 different name servers across 11 different networks today provide authoritative name services for the wikileaks.ch domain, Cowie noted. “If you ask any of those 14 servers where to find wikileaks.ch, they’ll point you to one of three differently routed IP blocks,” in the Netherlands, Sweden and France, he added.
The architecture sounds resilient — more resilient than before. I do not know what nearly immune means. That’s a fun phrase, though. Would a doctor tell a patient “you are now more immune than before”? I guess I did not realize there were levels of immunity, so nearly immune meant to me that something is not yet immune.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995