Early this week a small Czech ISP, SuproNet (AS 47868) started announcing its prefix via a backup transit provider with an extraordinarily large number of AS (autonomous system) prepends, 252 to be exact.
Aside from sounding alarms all over the world with routers logging errors related to maximum AS-path limits, it also ended up triggering a previously unknown bug, crashing routers running a certain firmware from a certain vendor *hint hint*.
So how did this happen? One usually doesn’t go prepending an AS number 252 times.
A jury in Moscow voted unanimously Thursday to acquit three men in the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, dimming hopes for justice in a case that has mocked Russia’s claims to be a modern democratic nation.
The brazen 2006 slaying of the crusading investigative reporter sent a grim signal to other dissenters in Russia, proving that even the most prominent of Kremlin critics could be murdered with impunity.
And it provoked international outrage, raising suspicions that her death was ordered by prominent public officials.
A jury acquitted two Chechen brothers and a morose ex-cop following a trial that defense attorneys and Politkovskaya’s supporters said was marred by prosecution errors and oversights.
This is what happens when 3 loosely culpable suspects are put on trial and the feeblest of attempts is made to prosecute them within a legal system that is a sham, at least when it comes to politically motivated cases.
I’ve been in China for awhile. The past 12 days to be exact.
I’m still pondering on what to write about next, as well as greater questions of where do I go from here.
Meanwhile, I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1 with the automated upgrade tool. It works surprisingly well! Simply enter the FTP parameters (hostname, username, pw) and it upgrades itself nicely. Cool!
In a world where frustrations with technology have become a way of life for many who are unacquainted with the nuances and intricacies (or mundane stupidities) of electronic devices, it’s interesting to imagine how things that we take for granted today might have been viewed very differently several centuries ago.
Welcome to the world of Scroll 2.0.
p.s. I hear that this is much funnier if you understand the Norwegian dialogue.
I recall reading about this sometime back – possibly in the transcript of an interview with Rick Warren, the author of several well-known books such as The Purpose Driven Life, and who also happens to be the very person who will deliver the invocation at the Presidential Inauguration on Jan 20.
It just so happened that today’s xkcd comic referred to Pascal’s Wager in an indirect sense which got me thinking about Pascal’s Wager itself. The following blog post includes personal opinions that may be of a controversial nature. If you are easily offended, please read something else. Otherwise, read on.
Proposed by the 17th century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, the Wager is a demonstration of probability and logic in a religious context. To put it in a nutshell – if a man lives a life in the belief of God, he has everything to gain if God exists and he goes to heaven to enjoy the afterlife. On the flip side, if God does not exist, this man loses nothing at all.
Thus, the logical decision would be to believe in God since he has nothing to lose, and everything to gain by doing so – or at least this is how the Wager is used to substantiate arguments for the belief in God.
A beautiful story, a great cast and a recurring theme of the ugliness of racism and self-imposed ethnic supremacy that brought about the century of the Stolen Generations.
An era of injustice either unknown to or forgotten by many outside Australia; children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were forcefully taken from their families by the Australian Government and Christian Missions, largely on the basis of unfounded fears of miscegenation (genetic mixture of different ethnic/racial groups through reproduction), and racial impurity. Fuelled by ignorance and a general sense of white supremacy, this policy was in place for almost a hundred years until the 1970s.
The story of Nullah (Brandon Walters) is interspersed between other sub-plots of the film. Telling the story of a half-caste; the son of an aboriginal woman and a white man; who is not only cast aside by society, but perpetually having to hide from the authorities who will take him away from the land he belongs to. As he says, “I not blackfella, I not whitefella either. Them coppers come take me away and make me into a whitefella”. His bastardized sentence structure peppered with Aussie colloquialisms are in fact an implicit reflection of his mixed origins.
There are several moments in the film where you think that it might end, but the story goes on, beautifully.
p.s. it’s out in sg cinemas on Christmas Day (today!) – eric, andy and I only realised that we’d watched the sneak preview when we came out of the theatre yesterday…
