2006

There has been a certain amount of comments spam advertising a variety of sites that claim to sell hotel rooms. It comes in, of course, from a wide range of IPs around the world belonging to insecure PCs. As usual, the best way to deal with most Internet annoyances is the economic way: target the…

So there’s this great big bunker fulla bombs and shells an stuff left behind by ol evil Saddam’s roving ghost just downs the street in Baghdad. What do you think they did? That’s right, call in an airstrike by four (yes, four) F-15Es. Call it faith-based strategy.

Southern Thai rebels download bomb development environment from iraq.com. Apparently the in-thing is putting your IED in a concrete shell shaped like a roadside milepost – not only for camouflage but for containment and flying lumps of concrete. Does that count as glorification?

Kingdaddy’s Arms and Influence is one of the best blogs around. Check out this post on the US military’s problem with management consultant speak (itself essentially IT-speak with the clue taken out). It’s a relief someone else noticed it – for example, when I read Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die, I was…

Most readers of this weblog will be aware that a political scandal recently occurred in Greece after it emerged that persons unknown had been illegally intercepting the mobile phone calls of a wide range of prominent Greeks, including senior ministers and ex-ministers of the Interior, Defence, Merchant Shipping (a Greek touch), and many civil servants…

Well, as the title suggests, I’m back from the 3GSM World Congress, the monster mobile telecoms shindig held this year in Barcelona. The doctors tell me most of the bullshit should have passed through my system in a few days’ time. Some points: Video-sharing through the IP Multimedia Subsystem, demonstrated at the show, sucks so…

Oh Lord. Apparently Glenn “Instawhatsit” Reynolds has been advocating some fool’s paean to the Madman Theory, that wonderful old idea that you can and should get your way in international politics by deliberately projecting the impression of irrationality. The Crooks have (of course) already made the point that the current US government would have to…

Well, how’s that Operation Firedump thing going? Crap, would be a fair assessment. All it seems to have achieved is getting various bits of the Romanian government to read this blog, starting with the Foreign Ministry, moving on to the Civil Aeronautical Authority, and landing up with the External Information Service – that is, the…

Does this surprise anybody at all? Yeah, the worst department of state is up to its old tricks again. Its accounts are so dire that the National Audit Office finds it impossible even to tell how bad they really are. That’s pretty fucking bad, I think you’ll agree. Apparently they can’t even do their bleeding…

Kathryn Cramer is under some unwelcome pressure from a PR flunkey for the UN force in Haiti after her series on the activities of a bizarre bunch of mercenaries calling themselves “Consultants Advisory Group” down there. Specifically, one David Wimshurst at MINUSTAH headquarters responded to an inquiry from her side with a very unpleasant slab…