More Links And Updates On Terrorist Attacks 971
psytek writes: "We have been collecting names of people that would like to volunteer and help set up computer systems and networks for the WTC companies. Go to www.webiest.com and sign up to help."
And rp44 writes: "There is a site collating offers of geek help in NYC and DC at srcdst.org. It's mainly focused on network infrastructure (came from seeing all the posts of assistance on the nanog list getting lost in the noise), but areas covered include telco circuits, space, geek help, and hardware. Last time I looked there were 50+ assistance offers there, if you can offer facilities, services or hardware, just register and enter them into the database. It's pretty functional in that you can maintain your own help offers in real time, come back later and modify/delete them etc."
caledon, volunteering in New York for the Red Cross, writes with word that "it looks from here as if the two items most desired here right now are: 1) Cash 2) Socks.
They have been swamped, but the Red Cross seems to want money more than the in-kind help. That way they can buy EXACTLY what they might need at the site or for other purposes. A lot of bandages might not help if what they need are asbestos masks. That's probably true of the tech stuff too here in the city.
About the socks, apparently these guys downtown like to change their socks as often as possible. It is wet, always wet, and they need their feet dry. Some of my socks (and, oh no, Linux T-shirts) were disposed of last night by my loving family while I was wiring together our little effort."
Drake42 writes: "This is an excellent analysis of why the terrrorists attacked the WTC." An anonymous reader pointed out this thought-provoking commentary on War and the Internet, which points out how certain hopes for the role of the Internet in promoting peace seem to have failed, at least for now.
Along with other moves to restrict freedom and privacy that many believe will follow last weeks events, darrellsilver writes: "The New York Times is running an article about the proposed, and probably little-opposed, security changes to the Manhattan area, Times Square and SoHo specifically. As the article quotes, 'A week ago, certain things would have been unheard of as safety options. But now you reassess, you reconsider.' What once stirred controversy now seems to be discussed as inevitable and welcome, such as face recognition software."
guygee also writes "Andrew Cohen , CBS legal analyst who correctly predicted key aspects of the recent ruling of the U.S. Appellate Court in the Microsoft case, has issued a warning of the coming government crackdown on civil liberties."
Rescue and recovery teams in New York are using some interesting technology: GPSguy writes: "This is still embryonic, but a friend in the broadcast RF business just had his stock of spares cleaned out. Seems that the latest approach to sub-rubble searching is to look for the security access cards all WTC employees had been issued. Excited by a low-power VLF source, they emit a response. Apparently, not the idea is to hit the pile with a much higher signal level and try to get a number of the responses and try to triangulate onto some of them. No URLs available, yet, and scant real information."
And DeathBunny writes: "According to a pair of articles at robots.net, a group of researchers from the University of South Florida are using six "shape shifting" robots to help locate survivors of the World Trade Center tragedy in NY. " They're running Linux, too.MrDelSarto writes: "From this zdnet article and this updated article author Steve Kirsch suggests a number of techniques for putting a plane in "safe mode" that auto-lands it's self in case of emergency ... hijacking or even the Payne Stuart situation. I'm sure /. readers will have a myriad of other ideas." As rackrent explains, "The article basically discusses locking out manual control of aircraft and forcing the autopilot to land them without any human control. Interesting idea, but certainly could have its problems, I say."
Liberal writes: "This article by a leading Iranian filmmaker is absolutely the deepest, most insightful thing I've ever read about that country. It was written before recent events; now that everyone is thinking about bombing Afghanistan, I think this should be required reading, to understand what the problems there really are, and to try and figure out what sort of long term solution may be possible (why it won't do just to massacre the Taliban)."
Finally, many readers submitted word of this photo album at Ars showing reactions around the world to the attacks. Sad though these pictures are, it may be one of the most encouraging things I've seen since Tuesday.
Musical Tribute to Victims/Survivors of Attacks (Score:1, Interesting)
I have mirrored the song on my site because their servers were pretty slammed since this song has been introduced. Below is a very, VERY rough translation of some of the words on their site (using Babelfish and my interpretation afterwards).
The Song "America Burns!" is not to be taken as a commercial product, please understand this. This track is being made available for free, downloadable in CD Quality MP3 format for all, who may also feel the dispair that we have felt and go the way of using music as a medium in hope to understand...
English Language Mirror:
http://www.expiredmilk.com/andone/ [expiredmilk.com]
Band Site (in German):
http://www.andone.com [andone.com]
The song is excellent and I hope others enjoy it. I am not a member of the group, but have been sharing the URL's with friends. I believe this might as well be the very first track written in tribute in light of recent events.
Cheers!
Making Money With The Bombing (Score:3, Interesting)
Synopsys:
NBC News has learned that investigators in Europe and the United States are examining whether Islamic fanatic Osama bin Laden may have financed Tuesday's terror assault on America by stock trades in European exchanges in the days before the attacks.
Re:Watching the news tonight... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: How to prevent air hijackings (Score:3, Interesting)
How many of the last 50 hijackings have ended in a suicide mission accomplished by the hijacker?
I would have to say roughly 4. Unless the hijackers are clearly prepared to die and have no other intentions than mass destruction of notable targets the chances of resolving the crisis in a manner that results in the least amount of loss of life are great. You follow their demands to a reasonable extent and perhaps land the plane and refuel etc.. Special forces come in and zap the hijackers and end of story..
Suppose you didn't comply and the hijackers killed few passengers. Would you want to live with that if the other (very likely) option would have been a peaceful resolution? And wouldn't that require all of the airline passengers to agree that their life is expendable upon hijacking and that the airline is released of all responsibility? I doubt that that will ever happen..
Out of all the hijackings in my recent memory (aside last 4) there has been a happy ending and most of the people survived. 90% of the time people performing these stunts are complete amatuers put in a desperate situation. A lot of times these people don't even harm anyone. It seems that only the extreme islamic militant groups are the ones that might be inclined to perform activites such as last weeks.
It is more than likely that there will be new security regulations in airline industry and that possibly these will involve pilots willingness to co-operate with hijackers(which has previously been 100% co-operation to prevent any unnecessary loss of life). However, out of recent memory it is certainly assertable that most hijackings have a peacefull ending and that changing the current way of dealing with hijackings will likely result in less secure flying enviroment(from passengers point of view). Changing the current code of conduct should be done with extreme caution and fully informing the passengers.
p.s. I personally take roughly a dozen intercontinental flights a year. Next one in two weeks(unless us airports close again, I'm flying from east coast).
Channeling Lenny Bruce (Score:1, Interesting)
I know I'm not supposed to, but I just find myself focusing on the absurd aspects of all this.
1) Not to make light of 5000 dead, but what exactly did we lose in the way of productive capacity?
The "financial industry" says the show must go on. We must "make markets". There can be no not "making markets". Everyone is relying on those "markets". Now that realistic rescue efforts are winding down, the main efforts in NYC are going toward reopening the stock markets. Well, I guess that's reasonable, since it's the source of NYC's wealth, but there's something bizarre about the great hurry they are in. I think they are terrified that the nation will discover that this "financial industry" provides no services.
As far as I can tell, any inconveniences in the hinterland have had to do with disruptions of air service and air freight, not with the absence of a "financial industry". It is odd that there is such enormous physical effort being put into reviving it. WHat's that about, restoring the "service" of volatility and instability to the economy.
Meanwhile, guys who sell gasoline have the government coming after them for "price gouging" if they decided to raise their prices considering a possible interruption of supplies. The government goes after them for "price gouging" and everybody hates them.
Why is a guy running a gas station who jacks up his prices a criminal while volatility in securities pricing is "making markets"?
2) Eliminate Satanic Influences! Cheap and Effective! Special rates this week only!
W. asks for $20B and gets $40B to "rid the world of evil". This is about $125 per capita. If it was that cheap, why didn't we do it long ago? Interestingly, this is almost exactly the amount that we got in our bizarre Treasury checks recently. Oh well, easy come, easy go.
3) Joe Stalin wasn't *that* bad, was he?
Everybody seems to be forgetting a part of the history of this mess. We armed the Taliban. We set them up to beat out the Russians, whom we refused to let enter the Olympics for invading Afghanistan. What a horror, Russians invading Afghanistan. How could a country invade Afghanistan. Bad, bad Russians.
Now we are going to end up invading Afghanistan before you know it. Mostly out of frustration, not to accomplish anything, mostly out of a need to blow something up.
The big problem is that there's nothing to blow up! What little there was has been blown up already! Where are we going to get a macho enough explosion to make up for the World Trade Towers, for Chrissake?
Maybe we should pulverize a mountain. If there's a good sized mountain near enough to Kabul it may cause the right amount of carnage and inconvenience and cool movie-like video footage, screaming pedestrians running away from the huge debris cloud, big fireballs, etc. That'll show 'em.
While we are there, presumably killing someone who looks vaguely like Bin Laden, we will need to overthrow the evil theocratic totalitarian woman-mutilating government and install the Northern Alliance. That'll be much better, right?
And who exactly is the Northern Alliance? Umm, wll basically it is our old friends the Soviet Puppets. Let's close the loop and not allow ourselves into the next Olympics, huh?
4) Our patriotic duty
This from redherring.com , I've seen similar elsewhere
I mean, really. You can't make this shit up.So any past concerns you've had about the environment or the exploitation of the third world are beside the point now. It's our duty to our fallen comrades, brothers. Spend! Spend! For the love of God, sacrifice yourself, steel yourself, pick up the yoke of duty and head to Penney's now for the End Of Civilization Smash Sale!
5) Getting the real message.
The fact is that no one believes in big, unprecedented threats until after they happen. It was like that with terrorist attacks on New York, and it will be like that with biological warfare, global warming, genetic engineering, nanobots and rogue artificial intelligence. The culture says that "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior", but that presumes a constancy of the environment. Past behavior is no predictor in an environment where such behavior has no meaning.
The "wakeup call" isn't that there are people who hate us, nor that they have the means to hurt us wholesale. We already knew that, or should have.
The wakeup call is that the planet has become a single neighborhood, and time is moving very fast, and old concepts like "war" and "finance" and "wealth" and "competition" and "enemy" and "progress" and on and on mean next to nothing.
We gotta start over, friends. This sucks bad. Maybe we need to lock things down so tight nobody will have any fun for a generation. Maybe not. But just calling this a "war" doesn't make it one, it doesn't make it clear what to do, it doesn't help.
6) What's with this "cowardly" jive?
The propaganda engines are eally cooking, though, trying to convince ourselves that we know what's going on and what to do. There's an "enemy", and we're going to "defeat" them. Uh-huh. The biggest tipoff for my bullshit detector is when someone calls this a "cowardly attack". Look, it's evil, it's horrible, it's spooky, but a guy who's willing to kill himself to take some of us down with him isn't a coward.
So you folks dreaming up the PR, get a clue, drop this "cowardly" item from your vocabulary. If you want to convince us you've got a clue, don't be flinging around words any idiot can see are lies.
7) My suggestion, which makes as much sense as any that I've heard
A military mobilization in this crcumstance is both absolutely inevitable and totally pointless. It really reminds me of the scene at the end of the Blues Brothers where every cop car and National Guard unit in Illinois is called out to meet these two sunglass-wearing wierdos in an old beater, all going hut-hut-hut-hut-hut and doing as much damage as the brothers did, and faster.
The best bet, the real solution, is to occupy Afghanistan and put up ski resorts, megamalls and some sort of Disney attraction. "Talibanland", that's the ticket. Maybe the PowerPuff Girls in Pink, Green and Blue chadors as mascots, and the Professor could convert to some watered-down version of Sheria Islam that has a big gift exchanging holiday in December.
The Taliban (R) brand has made a lot of progress on name recognition, but it needs some repositioning, it needs to be revitalized. I did like the Taliban guy's suggestion that W. could solve the whole problem by converting to Islam. That has some nice features, but we'd have to get options on 40 % of TLBN at 10 1/2 in exchange.
yrs truly Anonymous Coward channeling Lenny Bruce
I Don't Usually Say "I Told You So" (Score:3, Interesting)
But... I told you so. [slashdot.org] (this additional fluff added to dodge the postercomment compression filter).
UnBiased News Sources (Score:1, Interesting)
I have been using cnn and foxnews, but they definately have an obvious bias to the US point of view.
Does anyone know of any good sources for this type of reporting?
Die Hard With a Vengeance (Score:2, Interesting)
Die Hard (1): skyscraper in LA
Die Hard (2): airport in Washington
Die Hard (3): "terrorism" for a profit motive (... and a Cameo appearance of bombs in a school [cincinow.com])
For all we know, this might not even be Bin Laden behind all this, but just a very cunning and ruthless businessman, who somehow managed to convince a couple of Islamist fundamentalists to work for him...
A picture from space (Score:2, Interesting)
"Echelon warned of attacks" - German intelligence (Score:3, Interesting)
Telecom Paper (Holland) gives this English-language summary [paper.nl]: