Aside

WashPost: The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network. “Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from…

During my freshman year at Berkeley (that’s 2000), I wrote an article for The Daily Californian about how Pleasures, a sex toy shop in Alabama, was being supported by Berkeley’s own Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations, a Berkeley sex toy store, is supporting the cause of Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures, a small chain of sex shops in northern Alabama, whose business may be in jeopardy. In 1998, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill that added a ban on the sale…

My cousin, Karim Sadjadpour, will be speaking at 5:30 pm tomorrow at 145 Dwinelle Hall on the UC Berkeley campus to talk about Iran. He’ll speak for about 40 minutes followed by a Q&A. The event is being hosted by Harry Kreisler, Executive Director of the Institute of International Studies.

The overwhelming majority of Iranians are neither Moslem nor Communist fanatics. They are illiterate and poverty-ridden peasants without any clear political conscience. Tell them their lot is well night intolerable, and they will instantly agree. Their basic attitude is one of hatred of government. The government to them is a symbol of oppression; it is the tax collector who squeezes the poor and the grafter who mulcts the state. Wide sections of the population are ripe for communism. — “Iran…

Two videos recently came across my radar: Best line: “You can deny the Holocaust all you want, but you can’t deny that there’s something between us.” [via Noah Breuer] This is a public service announcement by the firefighters (sapeurs-pompiers) of Geneva. Apparently people still confuse the emergency fire number (118) for the old information number (111). They’ve been inundated with calls and figured that the best way to solve this problem was to make a rap video featuring rapping and…

Apparently seeing the world through my own two naked eyes are over — here’s to the new eyeglassed me! That’s right, after constantly being amazed that Becky could see things at a distance when I couldn’t (and spending many hours in front of a computer screen), I gave in and finally had a proper eye exam at the University of California Berkeley School of Optometry. (I probably haven’t had an optometrist examine me since at least high school if not…

Both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker have astonishing profiles of Bobby Egan, a “freelance diplomat” to the DPRK who otherwise runs a BBQ joint in Hackensack, NJ. The New Yorker: Egan, who has run Cubby’s for twenty-five years, is well known in Hackensack, though not solely for the quality of his ribs. For nearly fifteen years, he has served as a kind of unofficial ambassador—a go-between and a gofer—for the government of North Korea. He is, as he puts…

I was with Boyk and Michele today in downtown Oakland, and we happened to park in front of a new Belgian beer bar that’s about to open up on 8th St. at Broadway. Dude, Belgian beers! Right here in Oakland! The Trappist: The Trappist is owned and operated by Aaron Porter and Chuck Stilphen. We strive to bring you the finest beer available, served properly at the correct temperature and in the correct glass. Our bottle list features over 120…

Pico Iyer on Orhan Pamuk: Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often they converge as his journeys through his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent decades of his life — 15,300 days, he calculates — in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse,…

Time: Elsewhere, the trend looks unstoppable. In Estonia, for instance, technology website operator and wi-fi evangelist Veljo Haamer has helped convince hundreds of cafés and parks to install wi-fi, getting the city of Tallinn involved and bringing in advertisers. He’s even helped to put wi-fi on an international bus that runs from Tallinn to Riga in Latvia. Interesting that it’s wi-fi and not cellular delivering a lot of the broadband to Estonians on the go.