In December of 2009 the USAF has officially confirmed the existence of a new stealth UAV – the Lockheed-Martin RQ-170. In the December 4 statement, the USAF said the new aircraft “aligns with Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates’ request for increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support to the combatant commanders and Chief of Staff [...]
I haven’t posted anything for a while now: been busy. It seems the subject I find hardest to avoid is the political circus in Ukraine. Maybe it’s because I am from there, or maybe it’s because I always liked circus. I guess, we’ll never know for sure. And so, Ukraine’s former Prime Minister and socialite [...]
Ahead of the presidential election in Russia, the opposition is pooling resources for an early smear campaign. The usual targets are other opposition leaders, the Communists, and the Kremlin. But the all-time favorite is, of course, Vladimir Putin. Will he run for president? Nobody knows. Gorbachev doesn’t think Putin will run. Nemtsov is certain that [...]
Some of you may still remember the strange hijacking on the Russian cargo vessel “Arctic Sea” in the Baltic in late July of 2009. The ship was boarded by masked men wearing police-like uniforms and armed with automatic weapons. The captain and the crew were forced to sail the ship to Africa. Inexplicably, the 4.4-ton [...]
The New York Times ran an interesting story on an unlikely diplomatic dispute between the US and Russia over fine art and inter-museum exchange. Apparently in July of last year a federal judge in DC ruled that Russia was supposed to hand over a collection of books and religious documents to a sect of Hasidic [...]
The FBI has announced that it executed 40 search warrants for suspected members of the Anonymous international hacktivist group known for its actions in of Wikileaks. Police in the UK has arrested five suspected members of the group. Anonymous is credited with the successful attacks against VISA and MasterCard payment systems late last year after [...]
Just read in Bloomberg that Kodak is looking at a possible loss in its ITC patent infringement case against Apple and RIM. Kodak says that the low-resolution preview feature found in most digital cameras is infringing on a Kodak patent. The ITC judge said that patent should be invalidated, because the low-res preview technology is [...]
I am at work, filling my office with clouds of cigar smoke and reading Jim Goad’s “Julian Assange’s Honey Trap: That’s Rape in Sweden“, perhaps the most entertaining account to date of Assange’s Stockholm adventure. And a seemingly redundant question popped into my head: why exactly did Assange go to Sweden? I know, he went [...]
Swedish prosecutors investigating Julian Assange told reporters that they were not involved in the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to appeal an earlier decision by a judge at City of Westminster magistrates court granting Assange bail. “Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden’s prosecutor’s office, told the Guardian: “The decision was made by the British prosecutor. [...]
A couple of days ago Claes Borgström (thank God I am not Swedish), the lawyer representing Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the sex case against Julian Assange, decided to explain some of the more obvious discrepancies in his clients’ version of events. Normally, this is what a good lawyer would be expected to do [...]
Today Wikileaks and Julian Assange gained two new influential supporters: the UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay and her nemesis the Batman (aka Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin). Putin’s vocal support of Julian Assange comes a day after a member of Medvedev’s administration suggested Assange should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. “When asked [...]
PayPal is backpedaling and there is good reason for that. While PayPal’s financial services remained accessible throughout the day, their performance was well below average. Prolonged, intermittent degradation of service can lead to the same loss of revenue as a complete but relatively brief outage. An intermittent degradation of service is also easier to achieve and harder to troubleshoot than a full outage. While PayPal’s PR representative was not lying when he said that attacks failed to crash PayPal’s services, they did degrade them significantly and it is just as bad, or worse.
As you already know, PayPal stopped accepting charitable donations for Wikileaks. The Guardian reported that PayPal froze about eighty thousand dollars donated to Wikileaks via PayPal Donations service. So far PayPal has refused to release the funds, nor has it issued refunds to its customers who donated the money. I know this because I donated [...]
The US government is pressuring Assange, his co-workers, Internet service providers, house pets, and even his lawyers. Ignoring the obvious illegality of this tactic, the more important question is: what exactly is the Department of State hoping to accomplish by harassing Wikileaks? The cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can. The entire collection of 250,000-some US embassy cables has already been widely distributed among leading newspapers and private citizens in various countries.
You have to agree that it would look rather strange if you were to approach some random person on the street and tell him that you you will not punch him in the face. From time to time NATO leadership likes to reassure Russia of the Alliance’s friendly intentions. But in the past couple of [...]
Andrew Osborne of The Telegraph talks about the unofficial online poll conducted by Putin’s United Russia party regarding the proposed burial of Lenin’s body. According to the poll, some 66% of the respondents believe that Lenin should be buried. It is interesting that Andrew Osborne is so quick to believe United Russia’s claims when they [...]
One of America’s preeminent diplomats (a title not hard to attain, judging by the Wikileaks’ publications), former VP of a leading private equity firm Perseus LLC, and former board member of AIG died at the age of 69 from a ruptured aortic aneurysm after a meeting with Secretary Clinton. Evil tongues claim Wikileaks was the [...]
An unnamed member of Medvedev’s administration told Russian new agency RIA Novosti that nominating Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize should improve his chances resisting legal and political pressure. While it is unlikely that such a nomination will come from the Russian administration, the fact that they are even talking about this in the Kremlin [...]
So, I am coming back from a quick trip and I was staying at Marriott. At times of economic uncertainty many hotel chains (airlines, car rentals, and even restaurants) try targeting the business customer. The newly designed rooms at Marriott look like my office filled with Ikea furniture. Smells like one too. It’s not a [...]
Here’s my scientific study* on the density of morons in various almost randomly-selected countries. We deal with morons on a daily basis. Some of us would swear we are surrounded by morons. But how many morons are there? I decided to try to answer this question and arrived at some unexpected results. Wikipedia defines “moron” [...]
I don’t know why, but today I stopped by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. I was greeted by a photo of Lake Debar located in western Macedonia near the border with Albania. When I hovered the mouse over little black squares on the photo, I was given a quick lesson in Macedonia’s history. My knowledge of [...]
Sorry to disappoint you: this post is not about some new secret CIA jail discovered in a budding Eastern European democracy. What’s on my mind is all the ridiculous secrecy surrounding the development of the iPhone 4 and Nokia N8 and how it hurts the sales of these devices. In case you haven’t heard, iPhone [...]
When a few years ago I bought my Xbox 360, I had to shell out almost five hundred bucks. One of the extras I got was the 60Gb hard drive. Even by those times, charging a hundred dollars for what essentially is a standard 2.5″ SATA hard drive with special firmware was highway robbery. And [...]
A Yak-130 advanced trainer jet crashed earlier today at the Lipetsk combat flight training center of the Russian AF. Both pilots ejected and were treated for minor injuries. There was no damage on the ground. The aircraft went out of control on takeoff during a routine training mission. This is first crash of an in-service [...]
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists published a report claiming there were 88 unsolved murders of journalists in Iraq between 2000 and 2009. Incidentally, nearly all of the 88 murders occurred in 2003-2009 when the country was under American occupation and some of these eighty eight journalists died at the hands of the US [...]
In his latest article on Russo-Polish relations Matthew Day, a Warsaw-based reporter for The Telegraph, provides a curious timeline of some major events in the common history of the two countries. According to Mr. Day, in 1919-1921 “Poland defeats Soviet Union in war”. A snafu like this I would expect from CNN, but a British [...]
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