This is supposed to be the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. According to the US briefers his name is Abu Ayyub al-Masri [nom de bomb Abu Hamza al-Muhajir] and a “known associate” of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, who is definitely the number two in the original al Qaeda.

Okay, why is an Egyptian wearing a thobe and a ghutra with a agal on his head? That says Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States, not Egypt. Most Egyptians who use the keffiyeh [headscarf] wear it as a turban, like al-Zawari, but usually those who wear a hat, just wear a skullcap.

Parts of this guy’s résumé sound stolen from the “work history” of Abu Khabab al-Masri, an al Qaeda bomb maker that Pakistan claims to have killed.

Of course, he’s definitely different than Abu Hamza al-Masri, who lost an eye and both hands fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now is in a British prison for preaching hate and violence.

[Read more →]

“Want a Smart Network or Dumb Pipe?”

That’s the new scam by the telcos and cable companies. From them you want a “dumb pipe”, because that’s their function in the Internet, already a very smart network.

The Internet is all about open standards; it doesn’t care if you have a Mac, a Wintel box, some flavor of Linux, whatever; it works. Everything is sliced into packets with “to” and “from” addresses and a sequence number. The packets flow to their destination by any path available and are reassembled at the other end. A simple, but elegant, solution that doesn’t get hung up when a hurricane rips up part of the network.

What the telcos and cable companies want to do is reserve part of the Internet and make it into a toll road. If you pay the toll you get preferential treatment.

[Read more →]