Category Archives: Security

Congolese Voting, Security, and Benefits

The BBC has reported on the security needed to end the civil war and help facilitate the first multi-party vote in the Congo in 40 years:

More than 25m people are entitled to vote, protected by the biggest UN peacekeeping operation in the world.

Over 9,000 candidates are running for parliament.

[…]

The presidential candidates include the four vice-presidents who took office in 2003 in terms of a transitional power-sharing deal.

Three of the four vice-presidents are the leaders of former armed factions.

And as if the political stakes aren’t complicated enough, there is also the problem of actually getting people to the polls to vote:

Election workers in Democratic Republic of Congo are putting the finishing touches to possibly the most complex and challenging elections the world has ever seen.

Helicopters, canoes, motorbikes and porters have been used to transport election material to almost 50,000 polling stations across a country two-thirds the size of western Europe, with just 300 miles of paved roads.

Compared to this effort, can you believe people displaced from the Katrina hurricane in Louisiana were unable to vote? If the Congo can get 25 million people in some of the remotest parts of the world a ballot, then you would think the US could figure it out.

Another report had a cute story about changes happening in terms of people’s sense of risk, which caught my eye:

This is good for the poor jobless youth who are having a fun fair shouting their voices hoarse and riding their bicycles silly, at times daring the UN mission (Monuc) drivers to knock them over.

I hear its big business – if you’re knocked over by a UN car, the dollars that come with the pain are appealing. At least no one was knocked.

This must be a big cultural shift from how the youth interacted with the warring militias. I mean how often did someone challenge a security/military vehicle with the hope to collect benefits from the vehicle’s owner?

Having fun with wifi neighbors

I’ve been running parallel wifi signals at home for a while, just to monitor who is actually in the airspace and trying to get on my networks, but this clever beaver has gone a few steps further and created a whole new way of seeing the world for people who try and connect to his signal:

My neighbours are stealing my wireless internet access. I could encrypt it or alternately I could have fun.

Very cute and harmless although, since it’s based on MAC, it’s not hard for the neighbors to bypass the access controls with only a slight modification.

I suppose a “don’t tread on me” message might be a little more effective since it would give a clear(er) message to people. I can just imagine the neighbors knocking on the door and saying “dude, did you know your wireless is all messed up?”

Whale sinks sailboat

Here’s some news from the Ultimate 20 newsgroup:

A San Francisco Based 40 foot custom boat “Mureadritta’s XL” that did
the Pacific Cup SF to Hawaii race was on its way home yesterday when they were hit by a whale 500nm north of Hawaii.

The crew was in contact with the owner via Sat phone. They tried stuffing the hole with sails and wrapping the outside of the boat with a jib to stem the flow but were not having any luck.

They eventually decided to abandon the boat on Tuesday morning. They were picked up last night around 8pm by a ship then transfered to a fishing trawler and are expected back at Honolulu on Friday.

All sailors are safe and un injured. They had all the proper safety gear EPIRB etc. Very lucky crew.

Lucky? I think proper planning was probably more relevant in this story since hitting a whale and sinking 500 miles from shore seems like bad luck to me.

Interesting that innovation has made sailboats lighter and stronger, and personal rescue equipment more reliable and comfortable, but there really is no open water hull-patch kit available yet. Stuffing the hole with sails sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie where people patch the hole in a space station with their pillows. Didn’t Heinlein write about that too? I wonder if there could be a better way, like pushing an umbrella-like device through the hole that could expand and then seal against the hull to stop the leak at least to the point where a sump could keep up with the flow. Probably too expensive to make it worthwhile to develop and test since the threat (being hit by a whale) is low and the asset value (of a sailboat) is only marginally high. I had my share of dangerous experiences sailing across the Pacific, but fortunately the only whales I saw kept their distance.

GDrive leaks

A snafu on the Google servers led to an exposure of another product about to be released to the public as a beta:

Writelys index page briefly showed an introduction to GDrive (as illustrated in the screenshot), then linked to pages available to Google employees only on the Google VPN.

Weak security, and scary foreshadowing of the safety of the product itself, or guerilla marketing?