This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this:
<Swan/+report> test to see if infoserver is echoing
messages to group +war. well all this info is probably old.
The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a
couple miles wide. It's 12 times the size of that caused
by the exxon valdeez. It's not known if wells are actively
pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped
stored reserves. If they're pumping at max capacity, it'll
get bigger by a factor every 3 days. in other words it
will be 13 times the size of the exxon valdeez in 3 days,
14 in 6, 15 in 9. (I realize I said that wrong). That's a
worst case. It's not possible to overstate how concerned
Bush seemed by this. I think he aged a few years last
night. the spill is not military significant, but
ecologically its a nightmare of course. There is some
concern about water problems, the oil might threaten
desalination plants. Yesterday the weather was much better
over iraq, so they set a record for the # of sorties in a
single day. 2700 I think. they launched 2 missiles at
saudi arabia today, and 7 at israel. (scuds). One hit in
israel, lightly wounding a bunch of people, killing 1. 1
person died in saudi. Patriots knocked out a whole bunch
of them. I just heard from Cheneys mouth that Bush has
something planned to deal with the oil spill. --mcneil
lehrer
An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage.
Really? You never saw photos of all the oil-covered birds? I thought it was pretty well-known.
Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).
The air strike was to prevent further spillage:
> On January 26, three US F-117 fighter-bombers destroyed pipelines to prevent further spillage into the Persian Gulf.
IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
Fun thing is: It's 512 bytes for everything, not just the part you typed. So this includes the command and channel, the trailing CRLF and I think when routing through different servers the server name gets stuck in there somewhere, too. Which means that a client has no idea how long the actual message is that it's going to be able to send.
Worse, because the server doesn't bounce back your own messages, most clients provide no indication that your message was cut off - it appears whole to you, but doesn't arrive in full at others' clients.
Most clients that do attempt to split long texts into multiple messages get one of these wrong:
- They miscalculate the number of bytes available for payload, because they don't check with the server's idea of their hostmask (which can change during the session e.g. due to authentication) to calculate the length of the preamble as seen on the receiving end.
- They count characters and ignore the number of bytes they actually encode to (either in the message or the preamble, or both: there are some networks like the Korean Ozinger that allow Utf-8 nicknames).
KDE's Konversation does both correctly (it also has some other nice visualizations of server/protocol-imposed limits, e.g. when you try to change the channel topic it'll color text past the server limit in red, again taking into account character and formatting code encoding).
With ircv3 the actual limit is 1024 characters, but it is has to be enabled with the capabilities negotiation extension.
Though it's 512 characters for tags, and 512 for the message.
IIRC at least znc crashes, other clients like xchat start having rendering issues and some (I think irssi) completely disregard content after the 512th byte
I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
A lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops.
A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth.
But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op.
These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.
I always thought major reason for the decline was all the other alternatives coming up back then (msn messenger and the likes) and more recently things that aren't really an alternative but steal time anyway (facebook and the likes) ?
I agree here, my friends weren't affected by ops (we were all ops in our own channels) - they moved to MSN and gave up on IRC. Then MSN was dropped and they moved to facebook/google chat, and now it's almost like IRC was by using group chats in whatsapp, but without meeting any new people.
I've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.
Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them.
39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched.
The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remains classified but is greater than four. Most of the rest self-destructed in flight.
The Patriot was so overhyped and yet so bad in practice that Israel went and developed its own missile interceptor system (Iron Dome), because they realized that from the claimed 80+ % success rate, Patriots really intercepted less than 10%.
And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.
The Patriot system used in 1991 was an anti-aircraft system that was hacked up to work against missiles. The Patriot system being fielded today is considerably different and much improved.
Iron Dome isn't comparable. Iron Dome is made to shoot down short-range rockets and shells. It makes intercepts against slow moving targets at low altitudes. It would not likely have much success against a mach 5 Scud that would spend only a few seconds within Iron Dome's engagement range before impact.
Iron Dome is vastly superior to Patriot in one key area, namely cost. Shooting down cheap Palestinian rockets and mortars at $2 million/missile for Patriot would not be feasible, but at $30-50,000/missile for Iron Dome is completely doable. I don't know what Patriot's success rate would be against these targets, but given its cost, it doesn't matter if it was 100%, it still wouldn't be workable.
I'm sure you realize that the Patriot system has been upgraded some in the last 24 years.
However, I think one of the brilliant things about Iron Dome is the fact that it doesn't try to shoot everything down. If a missile is determined to not threaten anything, it is allowed to crash on its own.
That may not be as big an optimization against opponents with good aim, but the people who fire rockets at Israel are often using old equipment that they can't aim well.
War has always been a game of each side adapting their offensive/defensive weapons to their opponents' defensive/offensive improvements. I expect that to continue. But that doesn't prevent me from admiring clever optimizations along the way.
IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.
I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.
I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.
Taking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult.
Yes, but remember that DDoSing individual servers and taking over channels through the resulting netsplits was a favorite pastime of bored teenagers around the world.
I remember very clearly sitting in my first math class in my first term of college, talking about the Gulf War when it started. I was 18 at the time. The big concern we had was another Vietnam, dragging on for years with a new draft. There was a lot of talk on campus about that, until it became clear the war was not going to last long.
Russia invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. Carter re-instated draft registration the following June. I'd just turned 18, and thought Afghanistan or Iran (hostage crisis) would be my Vietnam.
I wonder if the IRC logs from the Iraq War (round 2) will ever be declassified and released. IRC is used pretty extensively by the military for communications (generally just called "mIRC", since people associate it so strongly with the official military client), and there were a bunch of different channels on different networks to discuss operations in realtime.
> mIRC is part of the communication infrastructure of the US military,[15] which includes controlling unmanned airstrikes from the DGS-4 in Ramstein Air Base.[16][17]
<CaptainJ> THE LIBERATION OF KUAIT HAS BEGUN
<Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
<Goofa> The liberation of Kuwait has begun.
<Anipa> Mr Fritzwalter: the liberation of Kuwait has begun
<Tylenol> WAR HAS STARTED!!!!
<Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Went to watch the July 4 fireworks in SF tonight, but it was cloudy, causing the fireworks to soften into a vague burst of color. I thought, "This looks just like CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. Except without all the fear and death. Damn, I'm lucky -- no war here!"
#Belladona# Bagdad Radio reports Saddam has ordered his
troops out of Kuwait IMMEDIATELY!
#Scott# unconfirmed, keep it to +war/+report
#alex# belladona - stop making rumors ....
> Not to belittle the signifigance of these events, but you do realize that this means a whole slew of "anti terrorist" and probably "anti violence" laws will be passed through congress.
> Any "anti terrorist" laws will be given almost a blank check to do what is necessary. I'd be surprised if in 6 months you'll be able to make a domestic call without it being monitored.
> That's the way terrorism works. It's not the attack that hurts most people. A couple of hundred people die -- every death is tragic, but the truth is the real tragedy will be the loss of freedoms for the survivors.
IMO it was obvious on that day what was going to happen. Just about everybody who wasn't immediately calling for such laws was predicting that they'd be made.
If you want insightful, this notorious article from The Onion, of all places, really takes the cake:
That was months before 9/11 when just about everyone thought Bush was a harmless goof. I remember reading it (on paper!) when it came out and thinking it was amusing and way over the top.
> Now this is weird, since last week was the first showing of that X-files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" in Austalia. The plot of the first one was that some government group was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Life imitates art?
Eee... WHAT? I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.
The scale of the September 11 attacks was greater than most predictions (given that no terrorist attack in history had ever been that destructive) but planes into buildings and terrorist attacks on the WTC were frequently predicted events.
The Empire State building has been hit multiple times by planes including a serious incident involving a B-25 in 1945:
I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.
There were two aspects to 9/11 which surprised people. First, that it was four planes which were hijacked: For security screeners to allow one armed hijacker onto a plane may be poor luck, but for armed hijackers to get onto four planes looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.)
Second, while the prospect of planes crashing into towers had been considered -- and in fact all modern skyscrapers are designed to survive such an impact -- the aftermath of 9/11 was the first time the prospect of aircraft fuel being used to bring down a skyscraper was ever widely contemplated. If the two planes which hit the WTC hadn't been carrying enough fuel to reach LAX, the fires would not have burned for long enough to bring the towers down.
I suspect in some dark, obscure corners, ghastly scenarios far worse have been conceived and considered for contingency purposes. But given supposed reasonable assumptions, many such scenarios are filed somewhere between the circular bin, and long term storage in an nondescript, largely forgotten warehouse, much to the same affect.
The most unfortunate thing about this whole mess is that doubt about otherwise reasonable assumptions has been magnified. It is akin to running continuous integration tests for things such as disk space and basic standard output ... things that normally should be allowed to be taken for granted and should not require such extensive devotion of resources to largely unproductive activities.
It was nothing to do with security screening, it was a philosophical attack. The hijackers knew that SOP in the event of a hijacking was everyone sit tight and let the negotiators deal with it. Everyone thought that the only reason to hijack a plane was to take hostages. The "weapons" they used were blades less than an inch long. The passengers that did react, overpowered them quickly (tho' by the time it was too late).
"Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers." -- Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/news-072.html)
It's telling that every post-9/11 security incident I've read about, from "person gets drunk and agitated" to "person attempts to light bomb in underwear" have been defeated by a door or a passenger.
The Japanese used suicide pilots in the 40s. The leap to airliners is not so big.
For something in the terrorism realm, check out Air France 8969. It was hijacked with the intent of using it to destroy the Eiffel tower (either by crashing into it or by blowing up the plane over it). It never happened because the French discovered the plan while the plane was on the ground and attacked it.
"The Path to 9/11" has a few historical inaccuracies but it provides a good dramatization of the key events in the 90s that led up to 9/11. It's well worth watching.
Clearly they meant the general public thought it was outside the realm of things that would actually happen, as opposed to realistic seeming (yet safely 'impossible') things of fiction.
For example Tom Clancy's Debt of Honour wraps up with a Japanese airliner flying into the Capitol Building killing off the majority of the US Government.
No, I believed that it was outside the realm of imagination, that the concept of flying a passenger plane into a building as a form of suicide attack never entered the collective mind of the society. I stand corrected though, thank you and shepardrtc for the Tom Clancy reference. I guess one gets to learn something new every day ;).
You may also be interested to see the originally intended album cover for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music that was planned for release in september 2001.
The "no one ever imagined" line is put forward by DC insiders to cover for the fact that they never planned for a well known attack vector. Reporters spend a lifetime building connections to senior civil servants and have no problem running with lines like that if it will help their contacts keep their jobs.
Fascinating. I was in Dominica at the time. They threw a national street party for the day to celebrate "the big house falling down". I guess there's something of a grudge to be borne there, from hundreds of years of slavery.
Re: the thread, it's saddening quite how many were immediately desperate to go to war - with bin laden, nonetheless. This is generally a bit odd, given that OBL was only really known in the west for the Kenyan embassy bombings in 98 - and before that knocking off a German spook.
So, I guess my question is: Why we're folks so quick to choose OBL as the perp, even while every group on the planet was taking credit? Why this relatively unknown group who've done little in 3 years?
I suppose it's just odd that many seemed primed to have the same response, of "let's bomb Afghanistan".
Oddly enough, I was also in Dominica at the time. I don't remember hearing anything about that "national street party", but everyone I came in contact with immediately after 9/11 was incredibly kind and most seemed more emotionally affected than I myself felt.
Dominica or Dominican Republic? I mean Dominica... Wandered into Roseau, there were people literally dancing in the street - asked what the occasion was and that was the response. All the cruise passengers stayed on their ships from what we could tell.
Hmm. I wonder what the IRC logs of the Venezuelan "liberation" will look like? Actually for Venezuelan's sake hopefully the economic warfare already going on, along with the encroachment coming from the direction of Brazil during World Cup, will be enough to "integrate" them into the system (i.e. "liberate" them of control over their resources) without requiring overt military action.
Large areas of WW2 were oil-related: North Africa, Indonesia, southern USSR (leading to Stalingrad), etc. I've not yet seen someone write the oil-orientated history of that war.
The Prize by Daniel Yergin devotes several chapters to the impact of oil in WW2, notably the destruction of the Shell complex at Balikpapan in the Pacific and Ike's decision to allocate fuel to Montgomery instead of Patton when stocks ran low, boosting Montgomery's march towards Antwerp but stopping Patton two days short of the Saar.
He covers everything from Japan's desire for the oil production of Indonesia to Germany's doomed synthetic fuel effort. The author also covers Nimitz's focus on denying oil resources to Japan, a strategy that eventually let him land several fatal blows to the Imperial Navy and end the war in the Pacific.
Nimitz was so successful in that strategy that near the end of the war, the Japanese began using kamikaze attacks against American naval vessels as a fuel-saving tactic, since pilots only required half as much fuel to complete their mission.
> As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.
I like that idea. It could be really interesting and educating to play with an interactive map showing that. There are things like that appearing from time to time (like the article about Syria and Iraq from yesterday[0]); I hope that concept trend will catch on and we'll see more and more old and modern history knowledge expressed in interactive, explorable forms.
I think it would be good to have a map and timeline like that going back to the 10th century. Because I think that people _really_ could use some perspective.
Kind of an unified, explorable map of historical events, in which you can see how the borders looked like, could see various information overlays like trade routes, major wars, events, etc.? It's quite an endeavour but I believe a worthy one, and I hope a project like that will start soon.
This could have tremendous effect on people. It's BretVictoresque stuff, things that could expand the space of thoughts we have, and vastly increase our comprehention of information available.
>To my former memory, the United States had always existed—there was never a time when there was no United States. I had not remembered, until that time, how the Roman Empire rose, and brought peace and order, and lasted through so many centuries, until I forgot that things had ever been otherwise; and yet the Empire fell, and barbarians overran my city, and the learning that I had possessed was lost. The modern world became more fragile to my eyes; it was not the first modern world.
>So many mistakes, made over and over and over again, because I did not remember making them, in every era I never lived...
"CENTENNIA is a map-based guide to the history of Europe and the Middle East from the beginning of the 11th century to the present. It is a dynamic, animated historical atlas including over 9,000 border changes. The map controls evolve the map forward or backward in time bringing the static map to life. Our maps display every major war and territorial conflict displaying the status of each region at intervals of a tenth of a year."
For immediate satisfaction you might search history map of the world on YouTube. There are plenty of videos. At the other extreme you might buy an historical atlas. In between there are sites like http://www.chronoatlas.com/
The youtube one is a joke, it's got a lot if inacurracies, and it's not just about borders, but more importantly populations. That is what the Middle East is ultimately learning.
I toyed with this idea for my senior thesis back in college (and obviously never did it). My idea was to somehow identify specific geographic references in Wikipedia and correlate them with as specific a point in time as is possible, based on the context of the surrounding article, using the links between articles to show how people, events and places were related across time and space, somehow visualizing those connections.
(note all the "somehows")
In the end I took on a similar but much less difficult problem but the original idea has always been at the back of my mind.
somehow I think a supercomputer would come in handy for that, and who knows, someone is already "on it"! definitely interesting way to "see" this sort of information
I have wanted this for a few years now. This would definitely put things in perspective and make lots of people (and me!) understand history much better.
Too bad I am not competent enough to actually build something like this. I would definitely be up for helping out, though.
