Fall = busy travel times

If you called me today and asked "when is your next open week to schedule travel?" my answer is "Thanksgiving!"

Next week, here in the Netherlands.  The following week, Norway.  The following week, Seattle.  The following week, Belgium.  The following week, England.  The following week, Belgium.  The following week, Greece.

And then we're in Thanksgiving week, and I will give thanks if I am not on an airplane!

Sheveningen

This is the big beach with a long "strand" about 10 minutes from our office in The Hague .... Ocean Shores with much better restaurant/nightlife choices.  Windy as hell.  Cool pier.

Homeward Bound

Booked tickets today for a trip home to Seattle in October for work.  Mostly.  Jet City here I come!

Saturday Boats

Everybody was out on the canals enjoying the mild weather on Saturday:

Our Buddies

We're opposed to ruthless dictators everywhere in the world ... oh, unless they cooperate with us and provide strategically useful military bases, like naval ports:

In one of the bloodiest days of Yemen's uprising, government troops backed by snipers and shelling attacked a square full of Yemeni protesters and battled with pro-opposition forces in the capital, killing at least 40 people and littering the streets with bodies.

The violence signalled an accelerated attempt by President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his loyalists to crush their rivals and tighten his grip on the country after his return a day earlier from Saudi Arabia, where he has been undergoing treatment for the past three months for wounds suffered in an assassination attempt.

Least Surprising News of the Year

From the BBC:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says he has accepted a proposal to stand for president in March 2012.

Addressing the ruling United Russia party's annual congress, Mr Putin and current President Dmitry Medvedev backed one another to switch roles.

Yeah, it really took the Psychic Friends Network to see that one coming.

Last taste of summer

Leaves are starting to turn, but we're getting a few pleasant days near the end of September (finally!) here in Amsterdam. From a walk over to the Westerpark:

Direwolf!

Secluded spot

SSL/TLS Vulnerability Exposed

Well, this isn't good. Slashdot and The Register report on a significant vulnerability in the encryption that we rely on for ... everything:

Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that's passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.

The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the internet's foundation of trust. Although versions 1.1 and 1.2 of TLS aren't susceptible, they remain almost entirely unsupported in browsers and websites alike, making encrypted transactions on PayPal, GMail, and just about every other website vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers who are able to control the connection between the end user and the website he's visiting.

At the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires later this week, researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo plan to demonstrate proof-of-concept code called BEAST, which is short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS. The stealthy piece of JavaScript works with a network sniffer to decrypt encrypted cookies a targeted website uses to grant access to restricted user accounts. The exploit works even against sites that use HSTS, or HTTP Strict Transport Security, which prevents certain pages from loading unless they're protected by SSL.

The demo will decrypt an authentication cookie used to access a PayPal account, Duong said.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn ..."

The chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani, has been killed with several others in a bomb attack in Kabul, officials say.

Mr Rabbani was killed at his home by a suicide attacker who officials suspect had concealed a bomb in his turban.

He was meeting members of the Taliban at the time. The council leads Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban.

Mr Rabbani is a former president of Afghanistan and also led the main political opposition in the country.

Solo v. Nash

Caligula

Magistrates investigating an alleged prostitution ring in Italy have published wiretaps in which Silvio Berlusconi boasts of spending the night with eight women and complains that meetings foreign heads of government and the Pope are interfering with his partying.

The wiretaps were released at the conclusion of an investigation into entrepreneur Gianpaolo Tarantini, who is accused of paying women to sleep with Berlusconi, 74, at his homes in 2008 and 2009.

The wiretaps throw doubt on the Italian Prime Minister's claims that he has never paid for sex.

Ya think?

Flying Above Earth

Time-lapse assembly of 600 photographs from the International Space Station:

China Clones Tough Pig

You just can't make some of this stuff up:

Chinese scientists have cloned a pig which was hailed a hero in 2008 after surviving more than a month under earthquake rubble, a newspaper reports.

Six piglets have been produced with DNA identical to Zhu Jiangqiang, or "Strong-Willed Pig", the Hong Kong-based Sunday Morning Post says.

The cloning project was a success even though Zhu is castrated and is five years old (60 years in human age).

Zhu survived the 8.0 magnitude quake that rocked Sichuan province in 2008.
More than 90,000 people died or went missing in what was considered in China to be the worst natural disaster in a generation.

The 330-pound (150kg) Zhu is thought to have survived in the ruins of his sty by chewing charcoal and drinking rainwater, the AFP news agency reports.

He is said to have suffered severe trauma from being buried under rubble for 36 days.

I chose ... poorly

Right, instead of spending an extra day lingering in sunny German wine country over the weekend, I came home immediately so I could get chores done on Sunday, and enjoy weather like THIS:

Cruising the autobahn

If you're cruising at 150 km/h (90 mph) like me, you are barely keeping up with traffic, and will have cars BLOW past you in the fast lane (didn't capture that here, it's nothing compared to the Maybach that went past me doing 140-150 easy).

Germany or Iowa?

Sometimes, hard to tell!

Mythbusters, Libya-style

The dream of every kid who ever did insane things with bottle rockets:

Back from Bavaria

Had a great couple days in southeastern Germany, and the 6 hour drive was mostly under sunny skies on the autobahn ... 'nuff said.

Full gallery at the link.

Rush Hour

Den Haag HS station ... school is back in session in Leiden, this train was packed to the doors when it left, I waited 10 minutes and had a comfortable seat on the next train.

Well, I Don't Drive

I like the 'digital moat' metaphor but ... not so much the surveillance state approach:

The police will soon start scanning the number plates of every vehicle entering Amsterdam by installing what police chief Bernard Welten describes as a 'digital moat' around the city, the Parool reports on Wednesday.

Cameras are currently used to control if lorries which break pollution regulations enter the city boundaries. By the end of the year, the images taken by the scanners will also be used to trace taxi drivers who cause a nuisance and 'young criminals', the paper says.

The police are currently only allowed to use number plate recognition systems on an incidental basis.

Mayor Eberhard van der Laan told the paper he did not think there were any legal obstacles to the plan. The city council will discuss the plan on Thursday.

Alley Cat

This guy greeted me with a loud yowl when I was in the Jordaan ... healthy, no collar, thin ... huge feet, he's going to be enormous if he gets enough to eat.

Rugby World Cup

Digby Ioane of Australia's "Wallabies" against Italy

9-11-11

I'm remembering Tom Glasser, Class of '82, today.

The Glasser Hall of Achievement at Haverford's athletics center commemorates this outstanding track athlete for Haverford and Israel who perished in the fall of the towers on 9/11.  I remember Tom as the skinny kid who hung out with teammate Jim Lindner at some of our Thursday Night parties senior year, wit as sharp as a razor.

O-kay then

UK on board with US fusion project

There's a lot of potential here ... really hope we see it realized:

The UK has formally joined forces with a US laser lab in a bid to develop clean energy from nuclear fusion.

Unlike fission plants, the process uses lasers to compress atomic nuclei until they join, releasing energy.

The National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US is drawing closer to producing a surplus of energy from the idea.

The UK company AWE and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have now joined with Nif to help make laser fusion a viable commercial energy source.

At a meeting this week sponsored by the Institute of Physics and held at London's Royal Society, a memorandum of understanding was announced between the three facilities.

The meeting attracted scientists and industry members in an effort to promote wider UK involvement with the technology that would be required to make laser fusion energy plants possible.

"This is an absolutely classic example of the connections between really high-grade theoretical scientific research, business and commercial opportunities, and of course a fundamental human need: tackling pressures that we're all familiar with on our energy supply," said David Willetts, the UK's science minister.

 

Rugby World Cup

Don't even bother trying to get New Zealand's attention for the next couple weeks.

Follow the action at the New Zealand Herald:

Walking On The Moon

Not just a great song from The Police, now the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has provided the best pictures ever of the paths taken by astronauts on the moon:

Good News, Bad News

Okay, global warming is bad, I get that, but ..... it's a million new King Crab, that isn't entirely bad news to me.

King crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of warming in the region, scientists say.

Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.

They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.
The crabs are voracious crushers of sea floor animals and will probably change the ecosystem profoundly if and when they spread further, researchers warn.

Related species have been found around islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and on the outer edge of the continental shelf.

But here the crabs (Neolithodes yaldwyni) are living and reproducing in abundance right on the edge of the continent itself.

Too True

Working life ...

Tuesday Night Football

The biggest international football (soccer) tournament is the World Cup. Midway between World Cups is the 2nd biggest international tournament, Euro.

Euro 2012 takes place next year in host nations Poland and Ukraine. Qualifying is taking place now in the early rounds of Europe's soccer championship.

At the Leidseplein sports bar where I go to see "any game that's on" (NFL late on Sunday) there were 5-7 games on at once between European national teams. I was there to see England vs. Wales, but the Netherlands were finishing up against Finland so the whole downstairs bar was watching that game. Upstairs were a big crowd watching Denmark v. Norway (happy loud drunken Viking fans), Germany v. Poland, France v. Romania, Italy v. Slovenia, Scotland v. Lithuania, and Austria v. Turkey.

Unlimited ribs w/fries or baked potato, 10 euros ... not the best ribs ever but really decent (there is a full rack stacked there).

Holland Hacked

Attackers who hacked into a Dutch Web security firm have issued hundreds of fraudulent security certificates for intelligence agency Web sites, including the C.I.A., as well as for Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the Dutch government said on Monday.

Experts say they suspect the hacker — or hackers — operated with the cooperation of the Iranian government, perhaps in attempts to spy on dissidents.

The latest versions of browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are now rejecting certificates issued by the firm that was hacked, DigiNotar.

But in a statement on Monday, the Dutch Justice Ministry published a list of the fraudulent certificates that greatly expands the scope of the July hacking attack that DigiNotar acknowledged only last week. The list also includes certificates that were sent to sites operated by Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, AOL, the Tor Project, WordPress, and by intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad and Britain’s MI6.

N.Y. Times

JAWS

A hunt is under way for a shark that killed a 21-year-old man in Australia as police praised the courage of two surfers who brought his body back to shore.

The victim was in the water off Bunker Bay, a popular tourist spot on Australia's west coast, when the shark attacked on Sunday, biting him so badly the lower half of his body was torn away, police said.

Local reports said a Great White Shark, up to 4.5 metres long (14.7 feet), was thought to be responsible, with a plane and boats scouring the coastline to find it with the beach remaining closed.

Sergeant Craig Anderson from Dunsborough police told reporters it was "perfect shark conditions".

"It was dark and gloomy water, overcast skies, light rain falling, there was whale action in the bay and some seals about," he said.