Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
seaton-newslinks. USA expat in Europe ++
bilegrip Asu spleen ++
us-rockstroh a rant, not a blog ++
aboutmyplanet eco ++
sfgate ++
crookedtimber ++
onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
abutamam freeiraq ++
airamericaradio +
amygdalagf +
angryarab ++
annezook +
antiwar ++
norwegianity
terrorism-news
blogspot
ourtomorrow
politickybitch
welcome-to-pottersville
aviraqi
billmon ++ whiskeyB
consortiumnews ++
dahrjamailiraq
dailywarnews ++
drforbush +
english +
fallujahinpictures
freespeechradio
halcyondays ++
healingiraq
hereticalideas ++
icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

jamaicaobserver newspaper
jameswolcott +
lefarkins +
liberalgirlnextdoor ++
lonehighlander Libya, not lefty
mahablog +++ solid
maruthecrankpot +
indymedia melbourne
messopotamian +7Apr06
monkey ++
motherjones ++
fisk
nocapital +
norightturn +NZ
peakoil ++
pilger +
politicalhumor +
raedinthemiddle
rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
hegemon ++
ruckus ++
rudepundit ++
satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
aliveinbaghdad ++
riverbendblog ++
sideshow +++
signs-of-the-times +++
slashdot ++techy
talkleft ++
thinkprogress ++
thismodernworld +++
uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
warandpiece +
warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
allhatnocattle
alternet ++
americanpolitics
antiwar
gbruno ++YT
axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
bobharris +
bradblog +
buckfush +funnies
buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
counterpunch +++
crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
democracynow
democracyuprising
dissidentvoice
earthfirstjournal
earthstation5
empirenotes
foodfirst
fpif
fromthewilderness
geocities
granta
grist ??
gristmagazine
guerrillanews
gulf
hizbollah
huffingtonpost ++
informationclearinghouse
infoshop +
inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
jihadunspun
juancole ++
kuro5hin ++ notlefty
kurtnimmo ++
lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
lewrockwell ++
marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
motherjones
nilemedia
nybooks
occupationwatch
oriononline
palestine
prisonplanet
rall ++ Ted Rall cartonist
ratical
redpepper
rense
robert
rollingstone
scoop
selvesandothers ++
smirkingchimp
snappingturtle
socialistworker
spiked
tblog
theiraqiroulette
theleftcoaster +
thepoorman +
tnr ++ magazine
tompaine ++ mag
traprockpeace ++
truthout +
boondocks ++
crowning3
. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
worldtribunal +
worldwatch ++ $ required
zaman + Turkish news
youcantmakeitup + ?
youngfox ????????????
bareknucklepolitics videos?
popdrain videos??
discovery videos??
cs videos??
aegisIraq video??
mariyaguchi video??
iwilltryit video..
baghdadtreasure
ahram cairo newspaper
felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
shrillblog +
thinkprogress +
marchforjustice + pictures
messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
blogads liberal blogs by CPM $ per view
malakandsky ++ stolid?
republicoft + black gay parent??
dailykos ++
rawstory ++
democraticunderground ++
atrios ++
workingforchange +
leftinthewest +
dembloggers +
talkingpointsmemo +
firedoglake ++
vastleft ++
pamspaulding +
americablog +
washingtonmonthly ++
mydd +
politics1 +
bartcop ++
politicalwire +
sisterstalk black lesbian?
culturekitchen ++
alternet
wonkette +++
billstclair +
freefreedomtoldhere ++ pipe bomb

......
almuajaha defunct
whynot defunct
winstonsmith defunct
samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
vialls ++Dormant (joe is dead)
warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

18 August 2005

Ek Phnom, near Battambang, Hashed Speed cameras


DSCN0379, originally uploaded by Giordano Bruno.

Ek Phnom seems to be a hangout for local teens rather than tourists


___________________________________________________
Hash codes weak, Speed cameras thrown out of Court
nytimes
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 16 - Last year a Chinese mathematician, Xiaoyun Wang,..exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

Ms. Wang, a mathematician at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and her student Hongbo Yu were scheduled to present a paper in Santa Barbara on Monday on their successful attack on a United States government cryptographic function called Sha-1.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

..annual meeting of the International Cryptology Conference..
..Stuart Haber, a Hewlett-Packard computer security expert who is program chairman for t , Crypto 2005, being held this week in Santa Barbara. "We need to learn from them, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot."
______________
And in Aus:
Speed Camera fines have been thrown out because the hash algorithm (MD5?) is weak ???
Designed in the early 1990s by an American academic, MD5 safeguards against tampering by turning information into a 128-bit sequence of digits. However, researchers from China's Shandong University have proved it is possible to store conflicting pieces of information as the same MD5 sequence.
Nick Ellsmore, an encryption expert at the consultancy SIFT, said this theoretically meant the RTA could change the speed at which a car was recorded and retain the same code.
__________________________________________________
It seems that Both MD5 & SHA-1 have weakness...
rsasecurity
James Randall, RSA Laboratories March 11, 2005
The news of vulnerabilities in the SHA-1 algorithm emerged at a panel discussion at RSA Conference 2005 in San Francisco. An abstract from the research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin and Hongbo Yu described how two separate messages could be found that deliver the same SHA-1 hash using 2^69 operations, far fewer than the 2^80 operations previously thought needed to find a "collision" with an SHA-1 hash. This is basically the same kind of breakthrough as with the MD5 result last summer that required only 2^40 operations to find a collision.


As an expert, I maintain that the "weakness" would be theoretical, ie it would be vastly unlikely that the RTA could change the kph and retain the same hash. Although 2^40 operations aint many, something like a wet afternoon on a decent PC.
So my expert opinion is that RTA photographs could not be altered on a practical basis, and convictions based on speed cameras should stand.

but:
www.mckeay.net
From: Geoffrey Leeming >geoffrey@jcp.co.uk< href="http://www.mckeay.net.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html">www.mckeay.net eprint.iacr... cryptography@metzdowd

also: who is
"Luc The Perverse" a*SPAM*t_AND_a-DIE-ylor@csolutions.net
"Luc The Perverse" sll_noSpamlicious_z_XXX_m@cc.usu.edu
...any relation to P Smith of Herne Bay who infamously patented the LUC algorithm?
Farewell Spit from NASA

17 August 2005

Last Chance Texaco...

__________________________________________________________
iraqiroulette Saturday, August 06, 2005
It was a cruel cruel summer .......
30/8/2005{sic}
Last week was completely disastrous speaking service and security wise , the electricity is deteriorating with every hour , and it is even resulting in putting people out of business . Our local shop owner was getting bags of rotten hamburgers and chicken drumsticks out of his freezer since the generator could not catch up with the pressure. He was telling me that carpenters and welders are suffering just the same .
I popped by an internet café “closed for maintenance” they said and so on .
in AL Iskan Area sewerages wastes are flowing freely on the streets no one even can dare to pop his noses out of a car window .
And people are going on an on about it every where from TV screens to radio stations, a frustrated woman said with fury on one radio program the other day : I live behind al Jafari’s house and the power does not go out for a second there .
Al Jafari on the other hand was full of confidence two days ago announcing that Iran , Syria, Turkey are going to provide us with extra Mega watts of power he said and I qoute : the electricity has always been one of my priorities !!!!
I think this last summer has vanquished the last shred of optimism people had left.

________________________________________

motherjones
We Regard Falluja As a Large Prison"
By David Enders
July 27, 2005
Eight months after the second invasion of Falluja, there is hardly a street that does not still feature a building pulverized during the assault....
...Falluja General hospital..In the last week, they have received three civilian casualties of US fire, and say that this week has been below average normally, says Ahmed, they see one or two dead civilians every day, and that hundreds have been killed by coalition forces since the city was taken over by the US.


more Iraq blogs:

___________________________
occupationwatch
Where has all the money gone?
Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq
London Review of Books | Vol. 27 No. 13 dated 7 July 2005
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN's Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn't properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA's inspector general, 'there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.' Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The 'reconstruction' of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the 'liberated' country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA 'in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people'. Congress, it's true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.
________________________
Colonel Stephen W Davis, head of Regimental Combat Team 2, responsible for controlling the troubled western Anbar province.

"There are very few lessons that have not been learnt in history. The skill is to choose to rediscover them."

By his desk he keeps a copy of Lawrence's pamphlet The Evolution of a Revolt, which first appeared in Britain's Army Quarterly and Defence Journal in October 1920.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Ports, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy's organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen's definition of strategy, "the study of communication" in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.

cgsc.army.mil
___________________________________

Angelina Jolie watch:
Angelina, who has a number of tattoos on her body, last year got a 12-inch tiger etching onto her lower back to celebrate becoming a Cambodian citizen. .
The 'Tomb Raider' star revisited Thai tattooist Sompong Kanphai after she became convinced a tattoo of an ancient Cambodian script he had designed filled her life with good fortune
Tattoo pics
a b
stargods
c
d
e f g h i
nabouthe dragon

Akka Motordrive


Akka 103, originally uploaded by Departure Lounge.

taken with a Canon EOS 20D + motor drive?
Departure lounge strikes again

___________________________________
Camera woes:
My Ricoh G4 failed in Koh Samui. You cant get a digital camera repaired in Bangkok.
So I went to buy a Canon SD400, but got confused,because in Bangkok its called Canon IXUS50

So Bought a Nikon 5200 instead B12000 = US$300 = A$400, good price, Aus advertised at A$585!

Sadly the Nikon pictures are "soft", but fear not, photoshop is here
[BUT the Photoshop bootleg I bought in Pantip Plaza requires registration, and the serial number supplied wont register...
,.. so before you install, take a copy of your registry, so you can keep re-installing it as your 40 day trial expires]

review:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/CP5200/CP52A.HTM
In all of my shots, the camera's images had a "soft" look to them, but that seems to be a matter of very conservative in-camera sharpening, rather than any problem with the lens. The images took unsharp masking in Photoshop(tm) very well, revealing loads of fine detail.

The Canon IXUS 50 is probably better, but note one review complained about "soft" images in this camera also
____________________________

16 August 2005

Camp Casey, VJ day

Couple of questions:

Why no photographs of Camp Casey? The Greenham photos solidified a protest movement.
Camp Casey
Is this the best photo that can be made?
there is this movie, rather laid back, folks resting in camp chairs:
http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/campcasey512K.mov
__________________________________________

Why VP day (Victory in Pacific Day)? When it was always VJ (Victory over Japan day) - When did Australia go belly up to Nipon?
answer: right away, Aus always called it VP day
__________________________________________

Battambang from the Angkor Hotel. The Billy Bob Thornton view

15 August 2005

Mercenaries, Methane

In Baghdad in June, in a privately guarded coalition compound in the Green Zone,.outsourced security. He put the number of armed men around 25,000. (This figure is in addition to some 50,000 to 70,000 unarmed civilians working for American interests in Iraq, the largest percentage by way of Halliburton and its subsidiaries, doing everything from servicing warplanes to driving food trucks to washing dishes.)
Triple Canopy now has about 1,000 men in Iraq, about 200 of them American and almost all the rest from Chile and Fiji
Private gunmen, according to Lawrence Peter, are now guarding four U.S. generals. Triple Canopy protects a large military base. And throughout Iraq, the defense of essential military sites like depots of captured munitions has been informally shared by private soldiers and U.S. troops.

No open policy debate took place; no executive order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort.

the mercenary grew more and more marginalized and disdained, and in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 it was essentially outlawed, at least in wars between nations.

Its current contracts in Iraq, mostly with the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department, are worth almost $250 million yearly. And having succeeded in Iraq -- Triple Canopy hasn't had a single worker or client killed -- it has just been named one of three companies that will divide up $1 billion annually in newly created protection work with the State Department in high-risk countries around the world.

Triple Canopy's Fijians and Chileans make between $40 and $150 dollars each week and sleep in crowded barracks at the Baghdad bas

There is no effective regulation in Iraq of whom the firms hire or how the men are trained or how they conduct themselves. ...''At worst you've got cowboys running almost unchecked, shooting at will and just plain O.T.F. (Out There Flappin').''
_________________________________________
12/08/2005 4:17PM
..western Sibera ..an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres ..started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago..

..largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear .. will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide..
New Scientist today.
..lakes, some more than a kilometre across.
..Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else .. a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years...Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.

..methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.
__________________________________
Seen in Harpers:
"Post Autistic Economics" - Economics as if people are people.
_____________________________________________


Tonle Sap Al & Plastic coracles


_______________________________________________
Bayon, that Khmer smile