nion's blog

From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.


The messages were broadcasted "live" to the global community — sychronized to the time of day they were sent. The first message was from 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, and the last, 24 hours later.


Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

Wow, this is an interesting release! I am not yet sure if I completely like it as it probably also carries a lot information that is not in the public interest and maybe shouldn't be public but nonetheless it is interesting to see this.
More info on: http://911.wikileaks.org/ (index).

This in combination with the release of the Toll Collect contracts really made my day. Thanks wikileaks! You are doing a great job!

A bunch of ex-Google employees just launched cuil which should be an alternative to the famous Google search engine with a special attention towards privacy concerns.

Cuils goal is the same as the one of its big brother, indexing the whole internet and analyse its content to get only relevant information.
Referring to the cuil privacy policy they don't keep any logs and they don't record cookie information on their servers.
Interesting about this policy is that they also plan to announce changes to this policy on their home page (front page?) 30 days before the change becomes effective.
But privacy doesn't seem to be the only thing that makes cuil an interesting candidate for a useful search engine, the number of indexed pages also is.

Compared to the number Google indexed they state that they already indexed 120 billion pages which is 3 times as much as the indexed pages by Google (Google indexed 1 trillion unique URLs but not web pages).
So far the search is optimized for the English language, other languages should follow soon and like Google they plan to finance this project by advertisement.

Cuil also provides some other features and a Safe Search option which "will filter pornography or other objectionable material from your search results. However, Cuil can’t guarantee that all objectionable material will be filtered out."
Even the black start page is a win, remember of past measures to save energy ;-P

Looking at the latest privacy issue with Google involvement I think it may be worth to see how cuil works out.
The search results could be better so far but that may improve in the future.

it seems the cuil server is a bit overloaded at the moment, you might want to check it later
[via F!XMBR && silicon]

Today the country specific web sites of wikipedia like for example de.wikipedia.org were not available for some minutes.

First it looked like:


Then like:


So maybe a database problem when looking at the first screenshot. Anyone knows more? I never noticed something like this before as long as I use
wikipedia.

Just happy that it is running again now, wasn't sure if they decided that no article on wikipedia is relevant enough and shut the whole thing down ;-P

(No I am not interested in the Priapswurm this is just some random wikipedia article script I use as startpage