A reader, commenting on a recent post on Somali piracy, asks “Could the Indian warship destroying a Somali pirate vessel have anything to do with the November attacks in Mumbai?”. My guess is “no”; most evidence, such as it is, either points towards Pakistan, who have plenty of other reasons to cause trouble in India without using anti-piracy efforts as an excuse, or to a long-term, well-planned effort precluding India’s involvement in pirate-hunting… or both.

I have been thinking about the piracy issue, though.
Read the rest of this entry »

India, it should be clear to anyone who’s watched the news in recent days, or who followed events in Mumbai on the web, is very, very different from the United States. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s just the way things are. The broad, sweeping social and cultural changes that have taken place in recent decades - and which continue to this day - may be changing India, but in doing so they haven’t made the country “more American”, or “more British”; the country remains - and will probably remain - uniquely Indian… and that’s a good thing.

I get accused of being unpatriotic whenever I say this sort of thing, but I really believe that the United States is not a country that others should aspire to emulate. History, I think, bears this out; out track record on social and cultural exports isn’t exactly earth-shattering. That’s one of the reasons I’m concerned about a recent announcement from India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t hear about it as much these days as in years past, but the shipment of radioactive material - mainly spent fuel rods from commercial reactors - by trains is still a contentious issue, particularly for those folks who live near the railroad tracks involved. Well, courtesy of my newest addiction - the Life Magazine photo archive - here’s a pretty fascinating look at a slightly different sort of railroad transportation of radioactive material:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’d hoped to spend the day with family, lazily working off the post-Thanksgiving stupor without thinking about, you know, computers and things. Alas, the siren call of the cooling fans drew me back, to post a brief warning involving the crisis in Mumbai, India.

I - and no doubt thousands of others - have spent part of the last two days watching developments unfold in Mumbai in real time, thanks to the local television station NDTV and their live online feed. Having checked the feed yesterday in Internet Explorer (I know, I know), I was quite surprised when my anti-virus software started going berzerk, warning of several trojans and viruses loading from that page.
Read the rest of this entry »

I admit, yesterday’s cipher, courtesy of the FBI and the Life Magazine photo archive, is neat, but not really all that exciting. That’s okay, because what I’ve got today is immensely awesome: An example of a pre-war German espionage code.

No, really…
Read the rest of this entry »