Iraq’s economic ‘recovery’

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From a piece by Zaid Salah in OpenDemocracy…

It was revealed on 9 March 2006 that oil production in Iraq is in fact at the lowest rate since the war. In August 2004, oil exports stood at 1.9 million barrels per day (mbd). Less than a year later, in July 2005, they had fallen to 1.42 mbd. We have now learned that in December 2005 exports fell to 1.1 mbd, their lowest rate since the war. This stands in complete contrast to the declarations made by US and Iraqi officials on the state of Iraq’s oil industry. From Paul Wolfowitz, who famously declared that Iraq would be able to finance its own reconstruction, to Iraqi officials who declared in December 2004 that oil production would reach 3.5 mbd within less than twelve months: all have been involved in a huge operation of deceit.

The oil industry is crumbling, and the more it crumbles, the more we can write off any hopes for the rest of the country. This development impacts on Iraq in three ways. First, it translates into less monies available for the government’s general budget (by way of example, the ministry of justice’s budget for 2006 was reduced by two-thirds in comparison to 2005); second, oil shortages can be felt at petrol stations throughout the country, where average Iraqis often have to queue for days at a time in order to fill up their gas tanks.

Third, it affects electricity production, which incredibly also declined to its lowest point since the start of the war in March 2003, with the overstressed power network producing less than half the electricity needed to meet Iraqi demand. Most of Iraq’s power installations run on oil, so the fuel shortages have a direct impact on electricity production throughout the country. In addition, the fact that Iraq is exporting less will necessarily mean that reconstruction of the electricity sector, and even maintenance of the inadequate supply that is currently available, will suffer as a result.

The long arm of the law

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This morning’s Observer column…

Although the established order struggled initially with the challenges posed by the net, in general it has made astonishing strides in getting the unruly beast under control. That control will never be perfect (witness the way the file-sharing genie escaped from the bottle), but the long arm of the law has had little difficulty reaching into cyberspace when it chooses to make the effort.

And although libertarians will no doubt protest, sometimes these intrusions may have beneficial effects. Those of us who want the net to serve as the Speakers’ Corner of the 21st century have to accept that speakers must take responsibility for what they say.

Even in the US, freedom of speech does not include the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.

And in Britain it should not include the right to call somebody a sex offender when he is not.

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Bushism of the day

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“No question that the enemy has tried to spread sectarian violence. They use violence as a tool to do that.”

George W Bush, Washington, D.C., March 22, 2006

From the amusing feature in Slate.

New York Times discovers the Slingbox

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Yep — there’s a piece by David Pogue.

IN the olden days, Americans gathered in front of the television sets in their living rooms to watch designated shows at designated times. You had a choice of three channels, and if you missed the broadcast, you’d feel like an idiot at the water cooler the next day. Quaint, huh?

Then came the VCR, which spared you the requirement of being there on time. Then cable TV, which blew open your channel choices. Then TiVo, which eliminated the necessity of even knowing when or where a show was to be broadcast. What’s next — eliminating the TV altogether?

Well, sure. Last year, a strange-looking gadget called the Slingbox ($250) began offering that possibility. It’s designed to let you, a traveler on the road, watch what’s on TV back at your house, or what’s been recorded by a video recorder like a TiVo.

The requirements are high-speed Internet connections at both ends, a home network and a Windows computer — usually a laptop — to watch on. (A Mac version is due by midyear.)

Today is another milestone in society’s great march toward anytime, anywhere TV. Starting today, Slingbox owners can install new player software on Windows Mobile palmtops and cellphones, thereby eliminating even the laptop requirement.

On cellphones with high-speed Internet connections, the requirement of a wireless Internet hot spot goes away, too. Now you can watch your home TV anywhere you can make phone calls — a statement that’s never appeared in print before today (at least not accurately).

New Internet backbone map for North America

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From BoingBoing. CIO.com just published a new detailed map of the North American Internet backbone. 134,855 routers are mapped, each colour-coded to indicate which provider owns it. The colour coding is interesting.

Red is Verizon, blue AT&T, yellow Qwest, green is other backbone players like Level 3 & Sprint Nextel, black is the entire cable industry put together, & gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.

The CIO journalist who produced the map with Bill Cheswick of Lumeta suggests that what it tells us is that the debate on net neutrality needs to be understood not only in terms of the last mile, but also in terms of the backbone. The players are increasingly the same.

Large version of the map (pdf) available here.

Here’s a close-up of one region.

Feds back Apple against France

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Surprise, surprise! Macworld UK report…

The US government has taken Apple’s side, condemning France’s move to legislate for interoperable copy protection technologies.

Speaking on CNBC, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said he needed to take a close look at France’s proposals, but warned: “Any time that something like this happens, any time that we believe intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiaitive.”

French lawmakers this week passed a bill which would force Apple, Microsoft and others to ensure that files purchased with one form of digital rights management (DRM) would work on computers and portable devices that employ another of the standards.

The move seems set to open up the industry, allowing songs purchased from Napster to play on an iPod, or tracks acquired from iTunes to play on a Windows Media-backed player.

Apple has condemned the move as “state-sponsored piracy”.

Ho, ho! See what Cory Doctorow has to say about that.

That Microsoft delay

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Lots of commentary on the anouncement by Microsoft that Vista will be delayed again. Here, for example, is Good Morning Silicon Valley‘s take on it…

Microsoft is portraying Thursday’s shake-up of its Platforms & Services Division as a restructuring, months in the works, aimed at achieving “greater growth and agility” and unrelated to the repeated slippage in the release of Windows Vista, the latest announced this week (see “Don’t you know Lunar New Year is the new Christmas?”). And that may be true as far as it goes. But the problems with the OS may be much uglier than some tweaks needed here and there. Smarthouse News in Australia is citing “a Microsoft insider” saying Vista at this moment is a dog’s breakfast, with more than half its code needing to be rewritten. Smarthouse’s source says programmers and engineers are being pulled off the Xbox and Viiv teams to resolve problems with the entertainment and media center functions in Vista, and that both Vista and an updated Viiv would be targeted for release at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January….

Hmmm… That means that Vista will miss the 2006 Christmas market. It’s also been announced that the next release of Microsoft Office has been put back. But that’s probably because the folks at Redmond don’t want to steal Vista’s thunder by releasing Office 2007 before the new version of Windows. Clearly, running a bloatware-creating monopoly is not all fun and games…

Britannica retaliates

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Remember the study in Nature that concluded Wikipedia is about as authoritative a resource as Encyclopedia Britannica (see “Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown ends in carrel throwing brawl”)? Turns out it wasn’t the rigorous piece of erudition you’d expect from the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal. In fact, it was anything but that. According to Britannica, everything about the study — from its methodology to the misleading way Nature spun the story in the media — was ill-conceived. “Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” Britannica’s editors wrote in an annihilative bit of deconstruction entitled “Fatally Flawed”. “Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

Bush makes an elementary mistake

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I saw a clip of the Bush press conference the other day, in which he indicated that he would take a question from Helen Thomas, a veteran White House reporter he’s been studiously ignoring for most of his term in office. She warned him that he’d be sorry, and he was. But the TV clip only skimmed the surface. Here’s the transcript.

Thanks to James Miller for finding it.