the fourth place

I couldn't really see how much was acheived in Lebannon during the recent conflict, and I had come to the depressing conclusion that another war will be required to eliminate Hizbullah militarily and to disable the tactical role they play for Iran:

Last May, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Rear Adm. Muhammad-Ebrahim Dehqani stated, "We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel." He didn't mention Hezbollah or Lebanon, but it didn't take much discernment to see that Iranian retaliation would at least partly come from [there].

As I said, I couldn't see how the latest conflict changed that situation much. Hizbullah were not destroyed and it seems unlikely that the UN or Lebannon will disarm them. Should Israel choose to insist that Hizbullah disarm (which I beleive was part of the ceasefire agreement) immediatley then we could see Israeli troops still in Israel being reactivated and war resuming.

But if disarming is part of the ceasefire, then why would Israel tolerate the retension of arms? Perhaps the threat has already been reduced to acceptably low levels for a long term disarmament process to be an option:

Hezbollah is believed to have many more rockets in storage and its network of bunkers in south Lebanon is probably mostly intact. However, it cannot initiate a conflict without facing the political fallout of imposing new suffering on its already traumatized Shiite community. Almost a million Shiites were thrown into the streets by Israeli bombardments between July and August.

Nasrallah would likely obey an Iranian request to attack Israel once again if the Tehran regime deemed that to be necessary. However, Shiites making up Hezbollah's base of support may not be so eager to be turned into cannon fodder for a country thousands of miles away. That's why the party's deterrence capacity has suddenly become very costly.

So while the loss of civilian life in Hizbullah areas, whether deliberate or collateral, is certainly horrid could it be that it was this precise harm that made a toothless disarmament promise acceptable to Israel and brought about the early ceasefire?

Some photos apparently from Qana, where an Israeli airforce strike killed 28 people.

This is a very interesting image showing a funeral with Hezbollah and civillian coffins on show. Keeping in mind Palestinian stage management it's interesting that there are the four clearly marked coffins and I counted 23 individuals with matching yellow hats - a visual confession of Hezbollah affiliation. Of course, this imples that there may have been a similar number of terrorists in the area compared to total civilian casualties. Those are statistics that put the hype around this incident into a slightly different perspective, but I'm not forgetting that what happened there must have been horrific.

Commentary on the images is available in Arabic from Nora Younis, but unfortunately I can't read it. The BBC also carry a somewhat different set of images.

I have occasionally written in to radio programs and got read out. John Peel read out my email once suggesting Glastonbury website users turn off images in their browsers naively assuming that the problems there were bandwidth related. I was quite pleased by that given that John Peel is no longer with us, but it was pretty cringeworthy. Anyway, I'm reminded of why I don't do that too often by my experience just now at Sky.

I was impressed that they got it on so quick, either they have low traffic or they are moving very fast there. I think the latter as only the one small part of the email was read aloud. - less than a complete sentance - and they gave my name when I asked them not to. Because of the butchering and the name giving, I thought I'd post about that I did actually say.

To clarify a soldier had come on to talk about recruitment, and was invited to respond to a parent of a soldier killed in Iraq who highlighted the problems with equipment. He said that it was upto soldiers to ensure they were effective and that they shouldn't moan about the equipment. He did not say that equipment didn't matter or that soldiers died due to their own incompetance.

I did not say simply that it was the soldiers responsibility to make themselves effective. I merely responded to mischaracterisations of what a soldier had come on and said by re-iterating it and correcting an earlier email contribution. It was worth re-iterating if only to put my point into context, but it the extra wordage was a liability. I kept it short, but less words next time, huh...

The original thinking that I did add was that most professionals buy equipment for themselves for the purpose of making themselves effective. Accountants buy smart shoes, salesmen buy flashy suits and get ridiculous haircuts, plumbers buy tools, we all need diaries and organisers. Soldiers want comfortable boots and brighter torches than the standard issue.

I also added that it is refreshing to hear a soldiers individualist perspective rather than guilty hand-ringing about crappy APCs - however justified that is.

I'd bring you a verbatim copy of what I did say, but my computer swallowed it (I know, I know, very convenient, also very embarrassing).

I guess I have to look on the brightside - a tough-liberal meme was circulated (if only to the newsroom) and a dweeb at Sky picked my message from the others to hand to the anchorman. Horaah! If only my parents gave me more praise ;-)

PS When I heard my full name read out on global TV I sent that bit about please not giving my surname again in 24pt red bold. You have to wonder what else they get wrong.

I refer to the principle that the Internet is a dumb or stupid network, with the intelligence at the edges or the ends of each connection. It is the design principle that keeps the internet open and keeps inovation on the internet rapid. It's something to do with a "universe of ends".

I just can't remember what this principle is called, or where I read about it. Links welcomed.

JZ is having a productive chat with the Groklaw community, which I used to follow obsessively and like many people began to forget about as each issue got debated to death.

Anyway, its about the way the Internet is becomming less open in the Open PC Open Network sense and is becoming more controlled both at the network level and at the device level. JZ examines these trends and appears to have identified many shades of grey between closed and open.

I am worried about the "appliancization" of the Internet. I see a possibility that the physical devices that mainstream Internet users commonly use to access the network will be much more limited in the outside code that they can run, and more directive to users about what to do or where to go online. In other words, the Internet will become as boring as television, and as limited in the audiences who can contribute to it. [...] for example, a box can be built using free software that is not readily modifiable by mainstream users (TiVo is a good example), while PCs running proprietary operating systems can be nearly completely reprogrammed and repurposed with a click or two, or a CD-ROM. The more that mainstream users access the network using information appliances, the fewer opportunities there will be to easily deploy innovative new applications

The discussion touches on IPv6, which is interesting. There is a lot of discussion from folks like Adriana Cronin-Lukas and Glenn Reynolds about how cheap pod- and video-casting is revolutionising society and creating less conformity and more cultural diversity. One commenter places IPv6 centrally in this revolution:

multicast is built into IPv6. This means that a broadcast to 1000 people does not use 1000 times the bandwidth required to deliver the data to 1 person. In fact, it requires exactly the same amount of bandwidth as that required to deliver the data to 1 person. [...] This means that anybody can broadcast. Cheaply. This could bring about as large a social change as that which occurred when the Internet became popular. If anybody can broadcast, then people will want the freedom to do so, and will want all the flexibility that goes along with it.

I unearthed a couple of good pieces from The Register regarding the risk to the trustworthyness of forensic methods and the risks to your car and to you, of too much high-tech.

Well, really! has some excellent coverage of recent ID cards developments including rumours of a plan to turn mandatory updates to the NIR into a revenue raising tax.

not only will we face ever increasing and ultimately unbearable intrusion into every aspect of our once private lives, but that encroachment will be fuelled by Government greed as much as by their control freakery.

He's also got a good quick summary of the Science and Technology Committee report, also covered by NO2ID.