News items for tag worldnews - Koos van den Hout

Hamvention 2016 on aprs.fi, map from google maps

I am following the 2016 Dayton Hamvention safely from my own location. Lots happening there which is interesting and maybe I should go there one day. But for those 'playing along at home' there are lots of option nowadays: following hashtag #hv2016live on twitter, with interesting pictures and reports by @ke9v Jeff Davis on twitter and seeing the aprs.fi APRS map around Dayton which went from two or three APRS stations this morning (Dutch time) to a lot of active APRS stations at the moment (see screenshot).

Lately I have been annoyed a few times by the selection of news that makes the headlines on television and in the newspaper. This may be due to the selection I follow (NOS journaal and de Volkskrant) and my issues with current politics (how their actions will be framed in the news seems to be much more important than the long term effects).

Two recent news stories where I wanted a lot more information than my news sources wanted to give me were the damaged bridge in Weener and the flooding in parts of northern England.

The world wide web to the rescue, where I can find other news sources and a lot more information about things happening around the world.

Damaged bridge in Weener (Germany):

• Binnenvaart kan weer onder vernielde brug bij Weener door - rtvnoord
• Videoflug über zerstörte Friesenbrücke - ndr.de
• Schip ramt spoorbrug bij Weener - rtvnoord

Flooding in northern England. Noticeable to me was that visiting the BBC website at www.bbc.co.uk gave me a redirect to www.bbc.com which seems to stay away from news about England. Using news.bbc.co.uk gives a better result.

• Cumbria and Lancashire Floods - legionseagle with links to video and pictures
• Storm Desmond: Schools, hospitals and transport disrupted by flooding - bbc news
• Storm Desmond: Engineers battle to restore power to 43,000 homes - bbc news Updates about the aftermath. This article also has something clearly for 'web news consumers': video without audio, most likely the extra video collected in the area but not used for news reports: the "Aerial footage filmed on Monday morning shows the flood levels in Carlisle" video.

In general it seems when some foreign news attracts my attention it is better to find web sources than to wait for the Dutch news to get a hint.

And sometimes world news gets into my amateur radio contacts, even when both sides don't really want that:

Pse QSL via LoTW,eQSLc .. please no bureau now. War here

This was in a contact with a radio amateur operator in the Donetsk region in Ukraine.

Interesting story: Ahmed Al-Khabaz expelled from Dawson College after finding security flaw - National Post Canada. I can fully imagine the kind of thinking behind his actions "if I find this bug this simple, what can I find when I try it with security scanning software". I think some people at the software company / Dawson college overreacted.

From what I can see with a simple websearch there are name.omnivox.ca hosts for several institutes in Canada, each with an IP at the institute, so it's not a centrally hosted application which makes the remarks by Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech confusing:

He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack

My sarcastic self wonders whether they report the attacks they get from abroad daily to the police with the same energy.

Update 2013-01-24: Lots of new details on this story, and I can imagine there being a lot more to this story than what is published. One interesting opinion set of opinions at: Student’s Expulsion Exposes Computer Science Culture Gap - Security Ledger where Chris Wysopal who learned security testing at L0pth Heavy Industries and Simonelis, Computer Science professor from Dawson college react with interesting points.

I guess an awful lot of traceroutes will be done today and the results will be analyzed, after reading Suspicion over Dotcom net glitch - National - NZ Herald News:

Information held by the Herald shows Gen-I studied data showing the amount of time it took information on the internet connection to reach the Xbox server. It went from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds - a huge increase for online gamers.

The reason for the extra time emerged in a deeper inquiry, which saw a "Trace Route" search which tracks internet signals from their origin to their destinations. When the results were compared it showed the internet signal was being diverted inside New Zealand.

The data showed the internet signal had previously taken two steps before going offshore - but was now taking five.

Via @csoghoian: If you're a spy agency & are going to illegally intercept a geek's residential internet connection, don't add 3 hops + 150ms to traceroute.

There is a reason the technical rules for "lawful" intercept of Internet traffic in a lot of countries are quite strict that network routes should not change when a subscriber is tapped. But I guess being your own ISP would circumvent that and give the interceptors a problem.

Video Internet Infrastructure (East vs West) where someone visits the Philippines and is telling about the state of the (Internet) infrastructure filming above-ground telephone, power and TV cables. But I can think of "western" countries with above-ground wiring looking more or less like this and "eastern" countries were wiring is a lot neater.

An update about the collapsed transmission tower/mast collapse in Hoogersmilde:

The concrete tower part of the transmission tower at Hoogersmilde has been repaired and parts for the new lattice mast that will be on top are coming in to the construction site. Radio-tv-nederland has all the pictures and updates for the rebuilding process of the Hoogersmilde transmitter.

And last night the FM radio transmitters at Lopik were brought back to full power after repairs because of the damage to the transmitter in a small fire on that same 15 July 2011.

Via Radio-tv-Nederland

One victim of the budget cuts at Radio Netherlands Worldwide (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep): Media Network blog will close 24 March 2012. Media Network blog is something I follow the last few years. I'll miss it.

Remarkable news item: Israel raids Palestinian television stations - Media Network Radio Netherlands Worldwide. What I miss (and what I commented there) is any real reporting on the frequency of Watan TV and how it would interfere with air traffic control. None of the news articles I could find answered this question.

Some more searching found me Who's telling the truth about Ramallah TV station raid? - Elder of Ziyon where the same question is asked, with some more details on frequency use in the Middle East. I wasn't aware VHF band I (41.25 - 87.75 MHz) is still in use for TV in the Middle East. With these numbers it could be an option that harmonics or mixing products from the transmitter signal were causing interference but I'd still need to know the frequency of the station and the ATC frequencies to determine whether this was actually happening.

Good news: the lawsuit about the timezone database has been dropped.

The EFF helped defend against the Astrolabe lawsuit against Olson and Eggert. It's still not the ideal way to move the control of the database from Olson and Eggert to the Iana, and reading the facts about the timezone database lawsuit shows just how bad things were, from 12 January 2012:

And then we waited for Astrolabe to actually serve Olson and Eggert, which would allow litigation to commence in earnest. Perhaps realizing the absurdity of its legal position, however, Astrolabe didn’t bother to take that next step, leaving Olson and Eggert in legal limbo.

Today, we’re taking the battle to Astrolabe, and starting the process for seeking sanctions under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 11 requires litigants to conduct a reasonable inquiry into the facts and law before filing any paper with the court.

I hope this causes a bit more trouble for Astrolabe than just having to say "Sorry, we should not have done this".