Charlie's Diary

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Tue, 31 Dec 2002

DRM on ...

According to this report, the DRM system for Microsoft Reader e-text files has been cracked. So authors putting their trust in locks to keep readers from copying their work are going to be disappointed again -- as opposed to those authors who put their trust in readers.

As Tim O'Reilly points out, piracy is progressive taxation in another guise; authors and artists have more reason to be afraid of obscurity than piracy. Using DRM tools to lock your work up so that it can only be read by people who paid for it, using one specific computer, increases obscurity and decreases the chance that new readers will be exposed to the work -- readers who might buy later works as a direct result of enjoying the free taste. So I'm going to give my qualified applause to this crack -- and hope that Microsoft have more sense than to go after the authors the way that Adobe went after Dmitri Sklyarov and Elcomsoft.

[ Link ] [ Discuss writing ]



posted at: 17:34 | path: /copyright | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 29 Dec 2002

Hoping for a Happy Hogmanay ...

According to The Guardian:

Edinburgh's Hogmanay, the highest-profile New Year festival in Europe, is set to take place amid unprecedented security following concerns of a terrorist attack by al-Qaeda.

Although police have attempted to play down the significance of the arrest of three Algerians in the city just before Christmas under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, civic leaders are concerned that increasing speculation about a possible attack in Scotland could lead to a poorer than expected turnout.

Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebration is one of the biggest in the world, arranged around a four-day carnival of events, and is estimated to boost the local economy by £36m.

More than 100,000 revellers are expected to attend and highlights will include a huge concert in Princes Street Gardens on Hogmanay, the Night Afore Fiesta in George Street on 30 December, and the traditional Torchlight Procession and Fire Festival, which will kick off the festivities the previous day.

Although Lothian and Borders Police insist there is no evidence that anywhere in Scotland, let alone Edinburgh, is a terrorist target, the timing of the arrests, just two weeks before New Year's Eve, and the fact that all the suspects, along with four more arrested in London on the same day, are now being held in Scotland rather than London has led many to conclude that the Hogmanay celebrations are indeed being threatened.

While the IRA deliberately avoided carrying out attacks in Scotland, al-Qaeda makes no such distinctions. Scotland would also be attractive because the authorities there have almost no first-hand experience of dealing with terrorism.

Security sources have been quoted as saying that the Hogmanay party would provide an ideal soft target for terrorists.

Cars loaded with explosives could conceivably be parked near barriers marking off the street party, where tens of thousands of people with special street passes gather in the centre of Edinburgh to see in the new year.

The three arrested men had moved to Edinburgh from west London in September and were picked up in an operation, which had been two months in the planning, co-ordinated by Lothian and Borders Police and backed by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police.

All seven men appeared in Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Christmas Eve, arriving as part of a large police convoy with a helicopter escort, an unprecedented level of security in Scotland. All were remanded in custody for another week. The hearing took place in a closed courtroom and no further details of the charges or circumstances surrounding the arrests were released.

Meanwhile, civil leaders have been attempting to dampen the fears that the arrests generated. The City of Edinburgh Council insisted it had no plans to change this year's Hogmanay street party.

A spokesman said: 'At this stage, we have not been alerted to any specific threat to Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebrations. The message we want to put across is that we are open for business and looking forward to a fantastic Hogmanay.'

Here's hoping for a happy Hogmanay.

I don't have tickets for the street party, so if there is an attack I'm unlikely to be directly affected -- although I'll probably be close enough to give an eye-witness account. I think the fact that arrests preceeded the event is hopeful -- but the newspaper report is correct: the two biggest public gatherings in the UK this year will be at Edinburgh (in Princes Street Gardens) and in London at Trafalgar Square and if anything Edinburgh is larger, not to mention less secure.

[ Link ] [ Discuss 9/11 ]



posted at: 23:57 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

Finally, a solution to the DMCA and copyright fascism!

It turns out there's an exemption to the DMCA for the exercise of religious freedom. So ...

[ Link ] [ Discuss ]



posted at: 12:35 | path: /copyright | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 28 Dec 2002

Alternative American perspectives on terrorism

Robert Wright, writing in Slate, has some interesting things to say about the problem of terrorism. And for once, despite being an American -- and therefore [understandably] hypnotised by the fallout from 9/11 and unable to look at it from a non-ideologically- constrained point of view, he shows several signs of cluefulness:

Bush sees that, thanks to advancing munitions technology, a few well-organized terrorists can now do lots of damage. But he gives short shrift to the fact that, thanks to advancing information technology, intense anti-Americanism is more and more likely to become clusters of well-organized terrorists.

... We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally a "meme" -- a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme ... But some forms of killing and arresting -- especially the kinds that get us bad publicity -- do so much to spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss.

... Once you emphasize both trends, you see what a pickle we're in. Many things you would do to "smoke out" terrorists could increase the amount and intensity of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and elsewhere. Yes, it's nice to hunt down the few remaining al-Qaida troops in Afghanistan. But if every once in a while you accidentally bomb a Muslim wedding and kill 50 civilians -- providing Al Jazeera with a week's worth of programming, fanning hatred of America across the Arab world -- is the prize really worth the price?

Rephrased in these terms, the point I've been trying to drive home is that, for technological reasons, memes are getting faster and slipperier. The information age is doing for these "viruses of the mind" what dense urban living and interurban transport did for biological pathogens during the late Middle Ages. (The result of humankind's failure to reckon with this was the Black Death.) And few things drive terrorism memes farther and faster over their new electronic conduits than doing an ill-thought-out job of neutralizing people already "infected."

Seen in this light, some American anti-terrorism policies appear if not clearly wrongheaded, at least more dubious than before.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. (But it's nice to see someone in the mainstream American media admitting it, even if he seems to labour under the delusion that Iraq is a hotbed of state terrorists just slavering to be let loose on the west with their arsenal of mass destruction.)

Recommended, not least for the fact that his prescription, while incomplete, looks like it's aimed straight at the root causes of the disease, rather than the symptoms. Although he'd do better to stop pretending that European ambivalence is rooted solely in a desire on the part of European leaders to act as free-riders on the back of an American anti-terrorist campaign, to start asking why Iraq is on the shit-list in the first place, and to ask just what will happen to America's relative status in the sort of world he's asking for.

[ Link ] [ Discuss 9/11 ]



posted at: 16:48 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

More shameless self-promotion

I made The Scotsman's annual round-up of the best new British SF and fantasy (with the obligatory Scottish bent, of course):

Another Hugo nominee this year, Stross has gene-spliced HP Lovecraft and Len Deighton to produce an SF thriller that is both witty and unsettling: the Many-Angled Ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set and only Britain's occult secret service stands in their way ... Fantastic stuff in every sense of the word, The Atrocity Archive will see American hardback publication next year.

[ Link ] [ Discuss shameless self-promotion ]



posted at: 16:26 | path: /promo | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 27 Dec 2002

Overspill from the Clanceyverse

According to the LA Times, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is pushing the Defense Department to build up a secret army for black operations overseas -- directed against terrorist targets and any country designated as a "rogue state" by the White House.

Known as the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, when it was established in 1981, this unit fought in drug wars and counter-terror operations from the Middle East to South America. It built a reputation for daring, flexibility and a degree of lawlessness.

In May 1982, Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called the ISA "uncoordinated and uncontrolled." Though its freelance tendencies were curbed, the ISA continued to operate under different guises through the ill-starred U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992 and was reportedly active in the hunt for Bosnian Serbs suspected of war crimes.

Today, the ISA operates under the code name Gray Fox. In addition to covert operations, it provides the war on terrorism with the kind of so-called "close-in" signals monitoring -- including the interception of cell phone conversations -- that helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Gray Fox's low-profile eavesdropping planes also fly without military markings. Working closely with Special Forces and the CIA, Gray Fox also places operatives inside hostile territory.

Hostile territory?

Here's the rub: when North Korea or Iran do this sort of thing, it's called State Terrorism. It's illegal as hell within the (admittedly Hobbesian) terms of international law, in which state sovereignty is held inviolable and military actions against a nation may be deemed grounds for a declaration of war. Because it's illegal, it tends to be carried out quietly and without oversight. Because there's no oversight there's limited regard for legal niceties. It is, in short, a recipe for potential war crimes. not to mention straightforward criminal acts ordered by those in authority and carried out by military personnel. The action against Pablo Escobar would have been grossly illegal if carried out within US jurisdiction -- a violation of the law of posse comitatus. US courts seem to be currently in the throes of asserting their authority over entities outside the United States (as in, for example, the Elcomsoft trial) while refusing to grant non-US residents detained overseas the right to defend themselves in court. It's a confused picture, and an unpleasant one: foreigners can be accused in American courts of crimes committed completely outside US jurisdiction, the US military can be sent after them, and they can be deprived of any and all legal protections if the US military simply refrains from dragging them back to US territory for detention.

Let's remember that this is the US administration that's been trying desperately hard to spike the International War Crimes Tribunal, perhaps because of fears that incidents like this might in future generate calls for prosecution of US military personnel or, more importantly, politicians who give the orders.

Maybe someone is thinking about securing their re-election by "acting tough on terrorism"? It all adds up to a rather nasty picture; as I've said before, the US stance on the international war crimes tribunal -- given the way the court really works -- suggests that the US government wants to be free to commit crimes against humanity, and the promotion of the Gray Fox operation to a major tool of state terror implies that this is how they will go about it. At least, this is the cynical, capabilities-based interpretation that every other government on the planet is going to have to put on the current actions.

If Iraq or North Korea did something like this, we'd bomb them. So how come we aren't bombing the White House?

Hint for warbloggers reading this: reading comprehension is important! I am not accusing the current US administration of committing war crimes -- at least, not yet. I am accusing them of setting up an infrastructure that will allow them to do so in future, using the very tools of State Terrorism that they denounce as the defining characteristics of the nations in the "axis of evil". Get the picture?

[ Link ] [ Discuss 9/11 ]



posted at: 12:28 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 25 Dec 2002

Some holiday reading

SciFi.com have been publishing in serial form a novella I wrote with Cory Doctorow, Jury Service. Well, the last part is up -- so if you've been waiting, now's the time to read it.

("Jury Service" is unusual in that Cory and I wrote it without ever actually meeting -- we did it entirely via a somewhat demented exchange of emails. One of these days, if we dare, we might even attempt a sequel.)

[ Link ] [ Discuss writing ]



posted at: 16:37 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 24 Dec 2002

Hapy yuletide

Cthulhu says hi!

Cthulhu-tide



posted at: 19:37 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 22 Dec 2002

Introducing Faberge's new line in hand grenades

Antonio Riello has spent years "using modern weaponry as conceptual artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military armament have been restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies of the future. Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16's, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others."

Here you can find leopard-print fake fur covered explosives, anodized and chromed anti-tank rockets, delicate little assault rifles, and the ultimate in Faberge hand grenades.

[ Link (via Haddock)] [ Discuss toys ]



posted at: 20:48 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 21 Dec 2002

Meet the new owners ...

Well, I got back to work yesterday, but we didn't get out to the cat and dog home until today. Which is why we now have two new owners, snoozing under the bed. Frigg and Mafdet (not their original names, but why on earth were two females called Frankie and Mac?) are both more than somewhat overweight, and in need of some dental work -- de-scaling -- when we've got their weight down. They are both middle aged females, whose elderly owner died without any next of kin; her cleaner took them to the dog and cat home, which is where we found them. Evidently she didn't stint on either love or double cream, so they're going to have to do without the latter until they've both lost a kilo or so: but they're both extremely friendly, if a little bit perturbed by the change in their surroundings.

Now it's time to get back to work.

[ Discuss cats ]



posted at: 15:39 | path: /cats | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 19 Dec 2002

I'm back ....

And tomorrow I get back to work, and start the search for a cat to adopt. Meanwhile, here's a PC power supply problem you definitely don't want to troubleshoot by touch ...

[ Link ] [ Discuss funnies ]



posted at: 22:55 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 16 Dec 2002

Brief interlude

Been suffering from the SAD a bit lately, as well as grappling with a novella that doesn't want to go anywhere. I'm going to be a bit quiet for the rest of this week, too -- I've got an article to finish for Whole Earth Review, a critical essay to write, a novel to edit, and I'm off to Leeds to visit my relatives before the railways get completely jammed with festive season travellers next week. Events this month have generally left me weeks behind schedule on my work, and the blog suffers while I'm playing catch-up.

I've also been grappling with a second-hand Psion Netbook -- which is my idea of what a PDA ought to be; just a shame it's an orphan machine. (The Alphasmart Dana won't be shipping in the UK until March, and this Netbook turned up at the right price -- not the £800 Psion want for a new one -- and what was I to do?) Sooner or later I'll have to write up my notes about it, but not until I get home and have some spare time.

(Finally, some good news: the contract for "The Atrocity Archive" has successfully battled its way through the pre-Christmas postal traffic jam and arrived on my doorstep today. So I can breathe a sigh of relief -- and now try to figure out when I'll have time to write the sequel.)

[ Discuss toys ]



posted at: 11:50 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 13 Dec 2002

Some neccessary GUI features

Sometimes you gotta hand it to Jerry Pournelle, who pointed out the existence of the following useful new user interface innovations.

[ Link ] [ Discuss stupid webby nonsense ]



posted at: 13:15 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 12 Dec 2002

Silent house -- afternote

We finally heard from the veterinary practice about Sekhmet's cause of death. She died of septic peritonitis caused by a ruptured intestine -- some days before the final collapse. If we'd noticed and rushed her to the vet hospital she might have survived. But as the vet commented, cats try to hide it when they're feeling ill. A human being with a ruptured intestine would have been screaming in agony, but Sekhmet was sitting by her food bowl asking to be fed when we left. She complained mildly when I picked her up, but that's about it. The vet's opinion was that we probably wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong until it was far too late to do anything about it.

Poor little brave cat, hiding the pain from us for three days -- until it killed her.

No cause of the rupture was found, and short of sending tissue samples for cytology there's no way of knowing whether it was cancer or some other weird pathology that led to it. I don't want to know that badly: it wasn't anything obvious like chewing on a rubber band. But in future I'm going to be really paranoid about cats and signs of gastric distress.

Anyway, we'll have her ashes to bury next week -- closure of a sort. And then it'll be time to start calling on the local pet rescue charities to see what cats they have in need of a new home.

[ Discuss death ]



posted at: 19:26 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 11 Dec 2002

Irresponsible Capitalism

Somebody hand Vladimir Putin a Clue: he urgently needs one.

Russia has a cash flow problem. To deal with this, Russia exports toys to the rest of the world. But I hope I'm not the only reader of Pravda who thinks that exporting NUCLEAR-CAPABLE STRATEGIC BOMBERS to INDIA is a bad idea.

Sorry for shouting: it's just that India is a nuclear power that lacks really effective delivery platforms. It's at daggers-drawn with Pakistan, a nuclear power that lacks really effective delivery platforms. Eyeball to hairy eyeball confrontations between nuclear powers -- especially ones who have been at war five times in the past half century -- are not rendered more secure by selling 'em supersonic bombers capable of low altitude penetration and delivering nuclear weapons at long range.

Compared to the sale of Tu-22M Backfires, I could almost forgive them for selling the Indian navy a bunch of Akula-class nuclear powered hunter-killer submarines and a load of strike fighters. But the Tu-22M (assuming the bombers are the 22M, and not the earlier and hopelessly obsolete Tu-22 Blinder -- Pravda is unclear) is a scary toy to be selling to guys who think nuking their north-eastern neighbours is a good idea.

[ Link ] [ Discuss ww3 ]



posted at: 22:32 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 10 Dec 2002

From the more-power-is-better school of naval architecture ...

... Comes the Lucy Ashton, a 1888 vintage paddle steamer which, in 1951, was up-engined to accomodate a brace of four Rolls Royce Derwent IV turbojets (each pumping out 3600lbs of thrust) for propulsion; the idea was to experimentally confirm existing theories about drag and friction using a full-sized ship hull. It was apparently so loud that the wheelhouse had to be soundproofed to 60dB of attenuation; there were no brakes, so to stop the vessel they fitted large metal flaps that could be lowered from the outriggers.

Also at the same web site: combat cutlery, an archive of Victorian rotary steam engine designs, and the incredible armoured narrowboat.

[ Link ((Thanks, Simon!)] [ Discuss toys ]



posted at: 20:09 | path: /toys | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 09 Dec 2002

More bad news ...

Also while we were away, a huge fire gutted almost a city block of Edinburgh's Old Town -- a UN world heritage site and extremely close to some of our favourite haunts in town. The Old Town (so called because it's older than the New Town, which is only slightly older than the United States of America) is a mediaeval warren of eight storey high stone buildings. The fire broke out in a night club and spread like crazy through chimney pipes and sealed rooms, some of which may have been walled up for centuries -- due to a lack of up to date survey reports the fire brigade had a hell of a time dealing with it, needing 130 fire fighters on site and taking almost 48 hours to put it out.

(We nearly bought a flat about fifty metres away from the site of the blaze, some years ago -- but our current location is comfortably distant.)

[ Link ] [ Discuss Local news ]



posted at: 15:34 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Silent house

Feorag and I are just (in the past fifteen minutes) back from our annual pre-Christmas shopping trip to London. The flat is silent. For the first time in seven years, there's no excited blob of orange and brown fur chasing her tail in circles to welcome us back home.

Sekhmet died while we were away.

She was a brown-and-orange female cat with a white bib (normally male coat markings, which tended to confuse people) who we adopted from Lothian Cat Rescue. She was smart enough to know that the red dot came from the human hand holding the laser pointer, smart enough to know who to complain to when it disappeared from the carpet -- and, unusually, an incredibly human-friendly feline. Most cats pull the I-love-you-now-feed-me trick, then stalk off once they've eaten their fill. Sekhmet, after being fed, would climb into my lap and purr with gratitude for a few minutes before falling asleep. She liked people, even strangers. About the only things that would make her run away were vacuum cleaners, and mice. (Yes. We once had a confused mouse wander into our flat. Sekhmet saw it -- and ran away.)

I work at home. Sekhmet would come up to me several times a day and demand attention -- crawling into my lap, sitting on my wrists while I was typing, lying with her chin on my shoulder purring in my ears. If she thought I was dirty she'd wash me, and frequently she'd take me to task and explain to me in maternal feline style that I was being a clueless kitten and ought to do things her way. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and she'd either be sitting vigilant guard duty on the window sill above my head, watching the garden for intruders, or sleeping on my left foot. If we went out for an evening on the town, when we got back in she'd be sitting there in the hall, indignantly lashing her tail: "what kind of time do you call this? And where do you think you've been?"

Feorag and I usually do a pre-Christmas shopping trip to London. We were away when, on Saturday afternoon, I got a panicky phone call from our cat-sitter. He'd been in to feed her and play with her in the morning; she'd been her normal friendly self. But he'd just arrived for her afternoon session to find her lying comatose in the living room, food untouched since morning. He took her to the veterinary hospital but was too late: by the time he got there she was dead.

We don't yet know what happened. My money is on either a bowel cancer leading to an internal haemorrhage, or on something like a rubber band. More likely cancer -- looking back, she'd been more than usually sedate over the past few months, and had lost a little weight -- but we won't know until we get the post mortem report on Wednesday or Thursday.

What I do know is: we're grieving.

She died young -- only about eight years old, early middle age for a house-cat -- and alone, probably in pain. Even if you don't dote on your pets, you owe them a duty of care: we were four hundred miles away when it happened, leaving us with the inevitable burden of guilty what-if's.

The flat is too big without her.

[ Link ] [ Discuss death ]



posted at: 13:27 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 04 Dec 2002

Hiatus

I'm off to London for a long weekend, and off-net for a while. So this blog won't be updated again before Monday. Only one piece of news to report recently; I've just had an offer for French language rights to "The Atrocity Archive". Voila!



posted at: 18:41 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 03 Dec 2002

Thinking outside the box

Fascinating essay here:

Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced

Think for a moment on how our culture characterizes "magic". Generally, it is envisioned as "occult" -- the obscure and arcane. It requires intensive specialized training, and even then, it is so dangerous and sensitive to tiny errors -- get one word wrong in a spell, and... -- that ordinary people can't possibly use it. It is capricious and erratic. And when magic is preformed by an adept on behalf of the uninitiated, often there is a terrible, punitive cost. The "magic" we imagine is rare and strange and uncanny and scary and very, very marginal to every day life ...

Every so often you come across someone who looks at the box from outside, scratches their head, and says "why are you sitting in that thing?" Now here's someone smart enough to have done it to Clarke's law, with the logical corollary: really profound technologies don't look magical at all: they just let things happen that would otherwise be impossible.

[ Link ] [ Discuss singularity ]



posted at: 21:23 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Flame wars, 11 o'clock high

Back in August at ConJose (the word science fiction convention) I found myself invited to sit in on a panel on Scottish SF writers. Along with me there were China Mieville, Pat Cadigan (who couldn't make it, due to a family emergency), Lawrence Person (editor of Nova Express, a critzine) and Eric Raymond.

The panel turned out to be a blood in the water event. Lawrence, who invited everyone, is a libertarian. Eric is a red blooded libertarian -- I think he wouldn't take exception to that description -- while China is a politically active socialist and I'm just a hapless SF writer who lives in Scotland and got caught in the crossfire when Eric and Lawrence decided to go after Scottish SF in general as being eeeevil pinko commie stuff. Or something like that.

About five days ago, NTK now ran a somewhat sarcastic piece discussing Eric's politics. This in turn spawned a thread on rec.arts.sf.written in which Eric (and the usual libertarian peanut gallery -- naming no names, you guys know who you are) turned up and ... well, it was interesting to see how memories of the event differ depending which side of the barricades you're on. After I showed up, and even China found himself unable to resist the urge to comment, it began deteriorating into the usual ideologically loaded flame war; Eric seems to think it appropriate to call China and other socialists -- a category so broad that by his lights it includes me -- genocidal psychopaths, and we choose not to be so labelled.

What really intrigues me about the whole thing is the way that libertarians seem to elevate individual liberty to a quasi-religious status. It's not simply a major human need; it's the only human need in their eschatology. Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" is interpreted as a literal statement of principle, not as the rhetoric of a blowhard revolutionary trying to whip up support for a war which will replace one kind of government with another. The fetish of freedom, taken to an ultimate conclusion, seems to bring out just as much evil in people as its absence.

[ Discuss ESR on Scottish SF ]



posted at: 00:17 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


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Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
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Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
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Counterspin Central ]
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NTKnow ]
Encyclopaedia Astronautica ]
Fafblog ]
BBC News (Scotland) ]
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Meerkat open wire service ]
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March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)



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