B10[m|g]

I'm a big fan of Bloglines to keep track of the news and over there, I follow the RSS feed of planet.nl (a Dutch ISP that provides news as well). Today I noticed a headline with a truly bizarre summary of the news article:

The text translates to:

Prostitutes no longer welcome in the player's hotel in Austria

The wives of the soccer players won't come closer than the hotel lobby.

Excuse me? The soccer player's wives are now called prostitutes?

The full article puts the line in perspective:

Translation:

The rules are clear. The players are allowed to meet their wives or girlfriends only every now and then in the lobby. Prostitutes, matter observers and consultants aren't allowed in the hotel at all during the tournament.

Bad bad summary, Planet.nl!

Every year, the Big Brother Awards are given to persons, companies and governmental organizations that blatantly violate, ignore or disregard privacy. Of course, the name of the award is taken directly out of Orwell's 1984 (as is the image of the award itself, I assume ;-)

I, as one of the last Mohican's who value privacy over terrorism FUD safety, was pleased to see the results of the category "Persons". This year, the award went to "the Dutch citizen". The jury felt the Dutch citizens were the biggest threat to their own privacy out of disinterest and the "I've got nothing to hide" point of view.

Wholeheartedly I applaud this award for I claim for years that no one cares about privacy anymore. Only a few people see that PGP/GPG encrypted mail is useful, regardless of having something to hide. People dump their entire life on facebook, myspace or any of the other completely useless sites and people just don't seem to care (or even know about) data retention proposals and/or laws. A lot of people don't care about mandatory identification laws and the list goes on and on.

I accept the award on behalf of my uninterested countrymen. Hopefully it does make the news (besides the geeky RSS feeds ;-)

We all know that Google censors the content for our Chinese friends. A simple query for tiananmen square on different google servers shows you the difference. But what some of you may not know (I stumbled upon it only today) is that Google censors not just based on domain name (google.com vs google.cn) but also on language.

Let's look at the German domain, first without language settings:

Now just add &hl=zh-CN behind the URL and Tank Man has disappeared (mostly, the images now fall through the cracks of the google filters now and then).

The reason for this was a burst of ignorance and stupidity by one of our members of parliament Geert Wilders He's notorious for his ignorant proposals like calling the immigration of Muslims a "tsunami of Islamisation" and of course he wanted a ban on burqas.

But today he went completely berserk and deemed it necessary to propose a ban of the Qu'ran, just like we still have a ban on Hitler's "Mein Kampf". But he wanted to take it a step further. He wanted to make it illegal to even possess a copy of the Qu'ran. Yeah ... and the best part, his party is called "Party for Freedom". Freedom for white, christian males, that is (probably).

Not soon after, reports were filed with the police for insulting a section of the community. Let's see if that works.

I always find it very strange that a Party for Freedom wants to ban so many things. Banning books is like being Google in China. Do we really want that? I doubt it.

The 4day march is an annual four day event (the name kind of gives that away) in the Netherlands. This joyful happening attracts visitors from all over the globe. People from many countries come to the city of Nijmegen to walk ... and walk ... and walk.

For years, soldiers from many countries walk this route too. Recently, however, the Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported about armed CIA and DIA presence. These secret service officials were walking along to protect the 65 participating US soldiers. The 936 British and 1713 Dutch troops do leave security to the Dutch authorities.

The Netherlands, a sovereign state, clearly does not allow foreign armed forces within its' borders, yet for the US officials, an exception seems to be in place, according to the news paper's internal sources in the Ministry of Justice.

Not long after the article was posted, an online news website (nu.nl) posted an article with the response of the Ministry of Justice. The spokesman claims to have no knowledge of the presence of CIA/DIA officials, nor does he deny it. He tells us the US indeed has to ask permission first, which clearly never arrived at the ministry. The request for an investigation was dismissed by a simple "we've already investigated it".

Investigations, especially from government bodies, take a long time, yet in this case, the Ministry of Justice was able to investigate this delicate matter within hours. Leaving me with the thought that at most the ambassador was questioned briefly. Unfortunately, the results and facts of this investigation are nowhere to be found.

I might be biased, but the investigative qualities of this body aren't the greatest. The invasion of airplanes by CIA planes to Balkan CIA prisons was never really caught and I can probably list numerous accounts of such incompetence.

After these news paper entries, the media has completely moved along. Either no one cares about this grave invasion by US officials, or there is really nothing more to report. I however do not like the deafening silence and called upon my political party to get more information. Hopefully they will succeed, but seeing the recent trend of unsolved mysteries (like blocked investigations to the real reason why the Dutch participated in the war on Iraq), I doubt they will be able to do much.

Let's see if I myself, as a concerned citizen, can pry some information out of the Ministry of Justice or the US embassy.

Hopefully to be continued!

Update: I just emailed the Ministry of Justice, asking for the findings and conclusions of the investigation. The part that is still unclear to me is that they cannot deny CIA presence, nor confirm it. What did they investigate then?

I can't believe how I was able to keep track of the news and sites in the pre-RSS era. I truly am addicted to RSS feeds and find myself quite lost if a site doesn't offer a feed.

A site I want to track, but rarely do is The Jakarta Post. They don't have a RSS feed (or at least I couldn't find it), so I thought of scraping it myself and building a feed, like I did with Fokke & Sukke.

Then I remembered there were services out there that did this for you and one of them is Feed43. Within a minute or so, I had my Jakarta Post feed set up.

The site asks for the URL of the page and then for some matching rules (think of regexps, but way more simple). It's really easy to work with! Keep it in mind if you ever come across sites that don't have RSS feeds available (yet).