2009

There were 52 posts published in 2009 (this is page 5 of 6).

The Palestine Chronicle blocking entry from Israel?

Anyone know if The Palestine Chronicle blocks access from Israel, or perhaps just certain ISPs (mine’s Bezeq)?  If so, it may be a punitive reaction to damage done by Israeli hackers:  “Palestine Chronicle Hacked” (from early January 2009).  Or maybe it’s PACBI .  But I’m intrigued as it’s the first time I’ve come across something like this.

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /
on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.41 Server at www.palestinechronicle.com Port 80

Social network relay tag

If you are a member of a number of social networks and don’t want to manually update all of them, you start looking for a workflow that will enable cross-postings or relay of information, in order to reach these various services without having to spend too much time with them.  But this can cause issues of duplication, such as when two different aggregators place the same item in Facebook.  I never really sat down to carefully work out all the connections between the various networks that I use and, as I discovered, even four or five different services create endless complexity.  What’s more, it is unlikely that there are two people who use exactly the same set of services, so googling to find a solution isn’t very successful in this case.  Eventually, after making four or five pages of pencil notes, and doing lots of erasing and re-writing, I figured out a method that will probably work better. 

I understood that the basic services I need to consider are blog, status blog, links and photos.  Other kinds of information are less important for me, since I deal with them less.  My basic publishing sites for these kinds of information are currently my blog/lifestreaming site, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, Twine and Picasaweb.  These services support varying degrees of interoperability and sharing.  For instance, it’s easy to get information into Facebook, but harder to get it out.  Twine is a network based on interest groups around hyperlinks, but when Twine links are aggregated through other services, they link back to Twine, rather than to the  original articles.  Friendfeed aggregates everything, and can pass on information selectively to Twitter. 

I discovered that I have to deal with each publishing category differently, but when I had hit upon the right method, this could save me a lot of time.  For instance, for links I can take a news item aggregated by my rss reader, then email the link simultaneously to two different services, which will then relay the link through my networks.  For my photos on picasa, I can publish both to picasaweb and to Facebook (using picasa’s facebook plugin). 

Like lots of things in IT, a little time spent setting up a workflow program saves lots of work and annoyance down the road.  In this case it’s hard to attain a perfect system, but possible to devise one that works reasonably well.

Thousands of Gazans remain homeless

090218-irin-homeless-th.jpg

GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) – Thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip remain homeless after their houses were badly damaged or destroyed during Israel’s recent military offensive there. The Israeli army began with aerial bombardments of the enclave on 27 December and added a ground assault from 3 January. Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on 18 January while Hamas, the de facto ruling authority in the Strip, declared its own ceasefire later that day.

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ma.gnolia wiltdown

A while ago I wrote how a beta service I’d tried suddenly died.  This week the geek-niche social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia reported a loss of all its data.  Users came to know about the existence of a certain Larry who, it turned out, had been running Ma.gnolia all along.  Larry came in to say sorry, but there was no backup.  He is doing what he can to recuperate data – but it sounds as if the future of Ma.gnolia is now in doubt.  On the Ma.gnolia site, he is even suggesting that customers open an account at a competing service, diigo.

Fortunately, since I was using Flock browser to upload bookmarks to Ma.gnolia, these are all stored offline too.  I uploaded these to my old account at veteran social bookmarking site del.icio.us.  Just in case any were missing, I also uploaded all those that had been captured by friendfeed, too.  The lesson to be learned from all this is that if one is storing data online, to be careful to store it in more than one place.

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They declare a ceasefire

For the people in Gaza it was a war that threatened to destroy life in a split second or slow agony. For the rest of us it was a war of words and images; a testing ground that showed us where friends and nations stood. We will never forgive some of these, just as those who have been maimed or traumatized by falling bombs may never forgive those who have launched them.

I cannot speak of the pain of the victim – it is unintelligible to me. I can only speak of my own, lesser pain – that of being able to do nothing while the dealers in death are having their market day. Of living among people made blind by what? By hatred, paranoia or indifference? I don’t even fully understand what lies behind it. My assumption is that the motivation really isn’t any of these, but a kind of mass psychosis that affects people in times of war. Perhaps those of us who are not so affected have no right to judge those who have been. After all, the roots must be in human qualities that we all share and if conditions had been a little different, it might have caught us too. There are other kinds of mass hypnosis affecting all of us, some of the time. It just happens that war fever is one of the worst.

With all of that, there are some people who are not actually taken over and occupied by the national spirit. They just quietly succumb to it, or retreat into themselves, asking to be woken up when it’s over. The Middle East is mad againe – nothing to do about it.

But there are no private havens and no way that our spirits cannot be affected by war. It is inside and outside. When people are dying, a part of us is being killed; a part of us is doing the killing. Hey, this is crazy talk! No wonder they gave me my exemption.

Boycott Israel?

Naomi Klein has an interesting article in The Nation, January 7: “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction”. The idea just reiterates what has been said for years – that if the policy worked in South Africa, it could work here. Klein deals in the article with the main reasons for boycott and the main objections. She doesn’t go very much into the psychology; about how this might affect Arab-Jewish relations, for instance, or how Jews react to what they see as a contemporary example of age-old antisemitism.

Perhaps, in order to be effective, boycott and sanctions could be more enthusiastically adopted by Jewish and Palestinian peace organizations, working together. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but doesn’t have to be. Klein does give the example, in her article of the Free Gaza Movement, which also has a letter calling for sanctions and signed by Israelis. Gush Shalom, the Israeli “peace block” has long advocated a boycott of produce from Israeli settlements. Today I received an email from Juliano Merr Khamis (dramatist and co-director of Arna’s Children) an invitation to sign an open letter to Mira Awad. Awad has been chosen to represent Israel together with Noa (Ahinoam Nini) in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The letter calls upon Awad to rescind her decision because “The Israeli government is sending the two of you to Moscow in order to propagate a false image of Israeli-Arab “co-existence” and obfuscate its daily massacre of Palestinian civilians.” (for more, see the letter itself). Mira Awad is a Christian Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. On the other side of the Green Line, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has long been active, with partial success. In 2006, the organization was responsible for persuading ex-Pink Floyd artist Roger Waters to move his performance from Tel Aviv to Wahat al-Salam – Neve Shalom. That Waters made the concession of moving the concert to the Arab – Jewish peace village satisfied Palestinians at the time. Would it today?

By converting Gaza into a blood bath, Israel has convinced the whole world that when it comes to “self-defence” it means business. Today the body count stood at 914 Palestinians for 13 Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens. The world needs to show Israel that it too means business, if it wants to reverse a pattern of steadily escalating regional violence. And unfortunately there may be a need for some form of sanctions.