Category: Technology

The Atlantic has a report by Alan Cullison describing the contents of a computer stolen from Al-Qaeda’s office in Kabul, including emails by Bin Laden. It provides an insight into the daily operations of the organisation.

Wired has an interesting article on an architectural design competition for a women’s soccer stadium in South Africa as part of a health care project to combat AIDS.

My next car (if I ever have to buy one again, one of the joys of living in New York city) is going to run on vegetable oil. Greasel has more how-to information. Wired has an article on the appearance of advocates for biodiesel at the Democratic National Convention.

Stop Cat and catdestroyshomes.org is a movement to highlight the use of Caterpillar D-9 and D-10 armoured bulldozers by the Israeli occupation forces to destroy the homes of Palestinians. This has resulted in over 1000 homes being destroyed and several deaths, including that of a U.S.

A recent seminar by Noam Chomsky on the militarisation of space, given at MIT.

I’ve been reading Emmanuel Todd’s “After The Empire”, in which he references the Census bureau statistics on balance of trade in advanced technologies. The numbers speak for themselves, the U.S. is importing more advanced technologies than it is exporting, consistently, since 2001. This is less an indictment of the Bush administration specifically and more a…

In a bid to imprison the entire U.S. population, congressional committees are currently considering a bill which would lead to imprisonment for people caught sharing 2,500 files via peer-to-peer networks.

The Register is reporting a very large Chinese cellphone (90m subscribers) contract with Sun using Java. I’m not trying to be Chicken Little, but this does lend weight to my concern that there is a technology shift occurring towards open standards in developing markets that may lead to U.S. technology stagnation or bypass for home…

The geek blog Slashdot has an interesting interview with a journalist in Iraq who is a member of the Iraq Linux User Group. As the country emerges from political (incl. internet) repression, the open question is whether it will then come under corporate oppression, namely beholden to Microsoft’s pricing.