Parolski.com

According to this blog post from the SourceForge team, IP addresses from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria will be blocked from accessing the site.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

I can appreciate that these nations have been placed under sanction, but theres a few things that the US gov should probably keep in mind:

1. Its very easy to get around this denial of access: just use an open proxy from an IP thats not banned
2. How does the US gov measure whether or not a site is major enough to warrant putting specific restrictions on its export?  Surely the correct measure would be to determine how useful the code is, as opposed to the volume? With this in mind, surely every Linux distribution should also ban those IPs?
3. Will the US gov now prosecute any bloggers/ “small scale” producers of code who don’t conform to this law?

Bellow is a picture of a new type of skimmer being used in the USA use to skim ATM cards. The construction is HIGHLY convincing, and the placement of the pinhole camera is quite something! Even the tone of the colour of  the original receiver has been matched!

Thankfully, many ATMs in the UK use  a recess instead of a protrusion, so it should be more difficult to develop a device which fully fills the gap in a convincing manner.

Fox news posted this map of the middle east recently. Take a look where Egypt is:

LOL, slight move there!

All credit to the arabist.net for finding that! (And indirectly, credit to Mandy)

According to Tariq Hayat Khan its safer than Chicago! This interview is a fascinating insight into the area, especially into the amount of power vested in one man to aminister an extremely significant area in Pakistan (but of course, quite far its nuclear weapons).

There is a single moment that sticks in my mind about the 2008 US Presidential race. Maybe its not so significant, but if what it represents remains consistent, then the ideology executed in front of it will be far reaching in its effect. I’m talking about the moment that Barack Obama finished his election victory speech. He waited, thought about the moment, and then smiled. There is at least a 7 second gap.

His pause, before showing emotion, is very significant. Why? It signals his ability to contain himself, his ability to suppress ego (think what most men would do in his position), despite the temptation to go wobbly at the knees. This is a man who, when in front of 100,000 people, wasn’t grinning like some child whose most hated bully had been slapped in the face. He simply paused, absorbed the reaction, waited a moment and smiled.

The bit to watch out for is the last 10 seconds of the clip, although the whole clip is quite informative and worth watching.

The honeymoon will be over when the new elect President comes to tell America some truths:

• “Iraq” is Arabic for “Vietnam”
• Afghanistan can never be won, and Pakistan won’t be worth the effort (for the same reasons as Afghanistan)
• Their brand of capitalism will need serious welding to fix the banking/housing crisis
• Globalisation has permanently relieved the America economy of jobs

Click here for a high quality filming of the event and here for the script of the speech.

As for foreign policy, even Family Guy writers can’t write this stuff, they just copy and paste:

Possibly the best part of having Mr Obama as President, is that he’s going to open channels of dialogue with the Iranian Government. This can only be a good thing; as not too far in the future Iran might be nuclear capable, which is perceived to be an obstacle to international relations (even though its fine to break principles when cash is flashed).

Seeing a man who will clearly go on to be a great statesmen, I can’t help but look to the east and wonder where the great Muslim statesmen are. The leaders of Egypt, Syrian, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar fail to impress. A pity, since some of the greatest statesmen of history have passed through their lands.

May God have mercy on us all. Let us all be the change we want to see in the world. It sounds like therapy, but its what alot of people need to hear; yes, we can.

Well, if you get a sudden urge to go out and buy stocks in an energy firm in Qatar, then yes. Or if you buy a new Toshiba Tecra, then yes. Then again, thats probably because you’ve been watching the advertisements and not the news.

So why is this news channel controversial? Put quite simply, they don’t have a watershed. They will show any clip, no matter how scary/bloody/happy at any time of the day. If Bush says something, they show it. If Bin Laden says something, they show it. In fact, theres not much they won’t show. When the Russian Georgian conflict/invasion/defence operation/<insert your opinion here> kicked off, they interviewed the following people:

• Dmitry Medvedev – President of Russia
• The Georgian Foreign Minister

A short list of other people that are have conducted interviews with in the past few months are:

• Hans Blix – Former UN weapons inspector
• Hamid Kharzi – President of Afghanistan
• Nigers Environment Minister
• Anwar Ibrahim – Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia
• Ehud Barak – Current Isreali Defense Minister, former Prime Minister
• Chimon Peres – President of Israel
• David Cameron – Leader of the Conservative party, UK
• Jaime Bermudez – Columbian Foreign Minister
• Mahinda Rajapaksa – Current Sri Lankan President

So does AlJazeera brainwash? Maybe a better question would be, how many other news outlets make as many interviews? Of course, everyone should always read a broad spectrum of news, but for international relations, this is a good start.

It doesn’t fix greed, bad ideas, or worse still, embedded contradiction. You have no freedom, just rights, fact. house.gov is down, so if you were looking for a copy of the new proposal for the $700 billion bail out, you’ll have to wait. So Pelosi tells Wall street that the party is over. CEO compensation is going to be regulated. What, you mean they can’t decide for themselves how much they get? That is a restriction of their freedom, and quite likely a form of terrorism.

They’ve only just started emphasising the need for accountability. The first draft was essentially a blank cheque. Clinging onto a patchwork solution shows serious lack of fore sight, which is a pity, given that their governance effects billions of lives. To think that they want to export this form of governance to the rest of the world, completely unaware of the huge array of caveats.

On a more positive note, it will push the public to pay more attention to public affairs, internal and external. That you chose your future for yourself in a consenting manner doesn’t make it ok when it all goes wrong. It just means you implemented a bad idea. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Lets think a little more about the matter, or hire someone smarter than us.

It feels like it took a while, but now that storm over South Ossetia has calmed a little, the media has taken a step back and started digging harder. Lionel Beehner reveals to us his thoughts on why Dick Cheneny has arrived in Eastern Europe, (reosurces) with some aid in hand. It makes you wonder why the BBC don’t let the cat out the bag, when they showed a map of the region pinpointing the pipe lines, but saying nothing about them. Put simply, Georgian foreign policy is under the hand of the US and it probably won’t be long before military presence gets beefed up with an arms deal.

But for me the more interesting question is, when will it be publicly revealed that there is already American and Israeli ordinance in Georgia, and that the Russians have captured unmanned aerial vehicles? It won’t be long before that kit gets stripped down, reverse engineered and resold to the Syrians ….. (Bashar Al Assad has already made his visit to Moscow)

Government policies can sometimes make people feel like politicians have not observed reality enough. Given that politicians often believe that the sole purpose of a state is to preserve its own existence, this is not surprising. That a state is long lasting should be a result of its fine qualities, and not the other way around. Articles like this one only reinforce the evidence that they don’t look to the root cause of problems when trying to overcome them. I DO NOT condone suicide bombing; it was not the way of any of the prophets of any of the Abrahamic faiths, and is certainly not permitted in Islam. However, the reason that the disenfranchised always give is that the destruction they cause is a reaction to the foreign policies. Again, I am against these ill visioned jihadist sentiments. The trouble is, that they state the root cause for their actions, so surely the government should consider it, instead of trying to use some kind of poorly applied treatment.

Nevertheless the government’s counterterrorism experts acknowledge that real or perceived grievances about official policy, particularly foreign policy, discrimination or racism, and counterterrorism measures themselves, can also contribute.

“…can also contribute.” ? Its the sole reason they do it! It is a pity that fellow Muslims submit to this method of effecting change, especially as it wasn’t the example given to us by our beloved Prophets. I believe the most lasting changes in society are brought through sound reasoning, clear understanding and mutual respect. After all, the values that we all subscribe to are roughly the same. They just have a different origin.

It reminds me a little of a joke I read about some famous communists;

This is an interesting video of a story of stuff. I’d like to see the sources for the figures that get mentioned. If the figures are accurate, it would be a fairly good summary of the failings of Capitalism. Or maybe we aren’t “externalizing our costs” enough.