Area 51 – used to be kept secret

T was rather interesting to discover that high-resolution aerial footage of Area 51 had been made available via Google Maps (and its sibling toy — Google Earth). You can review a little ‘photographic summary’ from those who have had a prolonged tour from up above. Do so if you do not wish to explore yourself.

In other news, related items were flagged to for me last night: “Google Satellite Photos Worry India Leader”

The governments of South Korea and Thailand and lawmakers in the Netherlands have expressed similar concerns.

South Korean newspapers said Google Earth provides images of the presidential Blue House and military bases in the country, which remains technically at war with communist North Korea. The North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon is among sites in that country displayed on the service.

UPDATE: I am noticing a similar CNN story, which has just been cited by Slashdot.

“Google takes governmental concerns about Google Earth and Google Maps very seriously. Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to Indian authorities about any concerns they may have,” Frost said in an e-mail statement Saturday.

s some of you may have read, my site came under a large-scale denial-of-service (DoS) attack some while ago. It managed to endure it, but I was used as a ‘human filter’, getting sporadic exercise, sleep and food for a couple of days. Below I present the aftermath in my logs, which leaves lessons to be learned.

Click image to see it full-sized

As you can see, the motives of the attacker may have been high Google listings through referrer spam. However, as my site was requested for around 50 GB of dynamically-generated pages in just 1 day, there might be more to it. I suspect that the hundreds of hijacked Windows boxes were programmed to primarily wreak havoc; they were targetting my heaviest pages specifically.

am never too aure as to how E-mail should be counted (if it can be counted at all). There is a certain amount of traffic that can be quantified when it comes to E-mail, but not all E-mails should be equally treated. Points to ponder:

• Should spam be counted?
• Or spam that sank in a BoxTrapper and gets reviewed on occasions?
• Should mailing lists be counted?
• What about newsletters that anyone can sign up for?
• E-mails with multiple recipients?
• Uninvited E-mails that are not spam?
• Automated messages?
• E-mail one-liners?
• E-mails sent to deprecated accounts that are rarely checked, if ever?

I have reached the conclusion that if E-mail bulk is ever to be counted, there must be some weighting applied to the variety of E-mail ‘types’. I have never counted my mail, but I am somewhat fed up with people who brag about the quantity of mail (or spam) they get. I have recently read somewhere that there services that one can sign up for in order to increase the amount of incoming spam traffic. Amazing, is it not? More amazing is the fact that people may actually sign up and welcome the increase in junk. It’s a market niche, right?

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

HE O/S industry continues to worry me. As a recent item suggests, if not practically reveals, Microsoft makes Windows-powered Dell computers cheaper than blank hard-drive computers, probably by subsidising hardware under the table.

This leads me to recalling a progmatic Ballmer reference to a $100 PC, possibly relying on kick-backs, lock-ins, steering of users towards MSN filled with adverts, not to mention extortionate Microsoft Office licences. When costs for hardware are being covered, it can be perceived as illegal practice if not bribery, which led to anti-trust lawsuits in the past. Software suffers the most from such legal loopholes due to (1) ‘duplicability’ and (2) compatibility, which make software different from most physical world analogies. Rules must adapt immediately to prevent a closed-circuit whereby competition is denied access.

If you are using Windows, be aware that 9 more vulnerabilities have been discovered today (check your favourite newsletter’s headlines for more details). Additionally while on the subject, Microsoft may soon be able to cash in on its own critical bugs, which is by all means outrageous.

OZILLA Firefox was voted best product of 2005 in a long and rather interesting list from PCWorld. Firefox snatched that honourable position despite recent criticism due to security vulnerabilities and growth that seemed to have stopped.

As a matter of fact, many Open Source projects have been ranked very well, which reflects on the changing trends, whereby inter-operability benefits the most.

30 frames, 63 colours, 200 KB in total (source)

N recent years we have seen the rise of (soon the demise of [2, 3]) blogs, as well as various personal homepages. The curious statistics include myself although I began when I was 15 with admittedly poor content. This dates back to the last century and is hence not considered “recent” either. Homepages used to be common habit among academics who wished to disseminate recent work, openly expressing to peers their research interests and showing (off) a list of publications.

This morning my 9-year-old sister approached me and asked for a personal homepage¹. She got envious since her friends have one already. Funny enough, she even wanted her own domain, but I stopped her right there. It was just over a year ago that she asked me to add a photo to a family photos page and I added several albums to the Genealogy section.

Trends appear to evolve and greed mounts enough to justify extending a single page, which soon becomes an independent, stand-alone site. It has become a norm rather than the exception and the ‘entry barrier’ is easier to get by. Several years ago there were only a few ‘brave’ individuals who boasted a page or a blog, but today these are so common that they are merely insignificant. The excess — or the overload as some would prefer to call it — makes visitors less willing to explore. In more and more forms and an increasing number of subscription we are given the input field “homepage” these days. So, individualism it no longer is.

Due to such homepages, it is also easier to access our minds, which as many other things can be used for better or for worse. One thing is for sure: the early years of the 21^st century will be remembered as the days when many people began erecting personal, self-centric sites (as opposed to scattered pages). Consequently, freedom of speech was on the rise (or conversely muted) and privacy jeopardised.

¹ I am afraid her homepage will remain unindexed by crawlers and accessible only to her friends for the time being.

I am still on vacation, but I would be sad to see the blog remaining static. The following are a few pointers that I have accumulated in recent days:

• Linux tablet – running fully-featured Linux on a modern tablet PC
• $100 laptop prototype – a proposal from MIT
• Why would a Linux device be as capable (or more) as any other platform which is expensive and bound to restrictions? See the Slashdot roundup of Web applications. The collection of links therein is makes an excellent proof of the emergence of AJAX in several major aspects of work, e.g. scheduling and spreadsheets. I mentioned this as a future possibility a few days ago and wrote a long essay about it on the plane just a day before coming across the item from Slashdot.

Did you know there was AJAX word processor, AJAX spreadsheet, AJAX calendar, AJAX presentation-building software, AJAX e-mail client, AJAX note-taking software and some other interesting applications, which, deployed on your local server, do not need installation and “just work” in a browser window?