The UK Guardian has a beautiful interactive timeline breaking down the chain of events as it pertains to the Middle East revolts, which involve Egypt, Tunsia and Libya. Cleanly organised by date, event and country, it’s a helpful way to make sense of a lot of information at the very least. [Guardian]
There are worse things to worry about in the Middle East than a robotic vacuum cleaner, but to the viper who thought it’d be a cozy place to sleep, it proved to be the end of his violent, snakey existence. More »
Earlier this year two telecom cables located in the Mediterranean were severed by passing ships. This is an extremely rare occurrence, which is why a second incident is cause for major concern.
Knowing that the government can keep us safe against evil dildos and penis pumpers, I don’t really give much importance to the fact that a guy got into the U.S. Homeland Security Department phone system to make more than 400 calls to his buddies in friendly countries like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to security consultant John Jackson, the hacking was very low-tech and old school, which probably would make Steve “Blue Box” Wozniak proud, but it was an embarrassment for the agency:
For the record, I would like to state that I’m really bored of these outsized erections popping up all over the Arabian Peninsula. This one is going up in the Dubai Marina. It’s called the Infinity Tower (because that is how long it seems that we have been covering these giant penile substitutes that are currently littering the Middle East) and its USP is that it twists 90º. This is the blurb on the 1,000-foot, 80-story, twisted monstrosity.
In this strange maritime epidemic, the number of undersea cables cut in incidents around the Middle East and South Asia now totals five, including Sea-Me-We 4 (in two places) and cables run by Flag Telecom located at Alexandria, the Dubai coast, and Bandar Abbas in Iran. (Insert not-so-funny-anymore Dick Cheney terror joke here.) [Khaleej Times via Slashdot]
Not a week after two massive undersea telecom cables were snapped—according to BBC News, most likely due not to Godzilla but a single tanker “dragging its anchor along the sea bed”—and the repairs are well underway. But how in the hell do you repair a nine-layer steel-reinforced cable located deep beneath the surface of the Mediterranean?
