News items for tag worldnews - Koos van den Hout

CBC Canada has a great special: Berlin Wall: 20 years after the fall. I am glad we visited Berlin this summer and saw all the historic places from up close.

What you don't want to see in your data center: Photos: Inside the Fisher fire - Techflash. One interesting effect from that fire was: TV station forced to go old school after fire at Seattle's Fisher Plaza. Found via The Risks Digest.

Good opinion article by The Register on the stance of UK police on cameras pointing their way: Police, Cameras, Inaction! - The Register with a great conclusion:

If the issue is not addressed soon – as the systemic problem we suspect it is - then the Police will only have themselves to blame for a massive loss of public belief in their integrity.

A good article with a readable view on what is going wrong with the police in England.

Just in CNN (US edition) breaking news e-mail:

-- Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers in Twitter contest with CNN.

I guess Twitter is now mainstream enough to generate its own breaking news. Ashton Kutcher first to reach 1 million in Twitter battle with CNN - CNN Technology which explains it: CNN news is big news for CNN.

Again the UK police show their worth by being more involved in the cause of the death of Ian Tomlinson than first reported: Video reveals G20 police assault on man who died - guardian.co.uk

Pub is closed by Monty Python grenade - Evening Standard You can't make this stuff up: a 'suspicious object' turned out to be the original Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the Monty Python movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
Via Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch Bomb Scare - Schneier on Security.

Back from a week in ... Egypt. A gift from Mirjam's parents. We saw Cairo, the pyramids, El Fayoum and Alexandria. It's an amazing feeling to visit 5000 year old man-made constructions. At the same time Egypt now is a very chaotic country with noise everywhere. For the first time I found Dutch traffic calm compared to what I had seen. Especially in Alexandria you constantly hear car horns.

Lots of security theatre ofcourse, but seeing 3 man militairy police (Koninklijke Marrechaussee) on Schiphol airport with automatic weapons was more shocking than seeing truckloads of police and soldiers with automatic weapons in Egypt. I sort-of expect it in Egypt (although the travel brochures downplay it a bit). The Egyptian 'tourist police' is everywhere and most places where tourists come are guarded. Metal detectors everywhere beeping but most of the time the beeping is ignored by the guards.

I could have done with less adventure: first one of our bags went missing on the flight to Egypt. Nothing really important in the bag but irritating. Then on Sunday evening we went walking in Cairo and found a police cordon in the area we wanted to visit. We had dinner in a restaurant near the cordon but it had moved a few streets back when we left the restaurant so all the international press was gathered and tried to get a statement from the obviously European tourists leaving the area. But we had no idea at that time what happened. Some of the group asked the reporters what happened and got a bit of idea: a bomb attack. Friends back in the Netherlands alerted us to the fact that we were on TV tuesday morning. I looked quite lost, which was exactly what I felt like at that time. And only when we arrived home and browsed the newspapers we noticed that an airplane had crashed near Schiphol during the week.

Happy new year! Our cable-tv signal dropped completely last evening of 2008 at 23:10. I guess some fireworks may have taken it out. So we watched the rest of the evenings TV using the dvb-t stick and the laptop. I called the cable-company this morning and reported the malfunction. Several neighbours I asked in the street are also without cable-tv signal.
Later in the afternoon the signal came back.

British Telecoms 21st century network initiative dubbed 21CN isn't very 21st century: no IPv6 support. Bwahahaha. Sorry, I have to laugh about this. That's not very future proof. Back to the drawing board!
Source: The Register: BT's 21st Century network, er... isn't.

I implemented xkcd - Tones. My Nokia 6300 now makes a real ringing sound.