Month: January 2008

Internet Outages Hit Middle East

Internet goes down, everything goes down…

Life came to a standstill in Dubai, home of the renowned “Media City” and modern “electronic government,” after an extensive Internet failure affected much of the United Arab Emirates…

[…]

Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.

[…]

The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.

[Source: CNN]

And all around the Middle East and beyond as well:

Internet services and usage have been disrupted across large parts of the Middle East after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged.

Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 per cent of the country’s internet network was down on Wednesday.

India was also affected, losing more than half its bandwidth initially.

Residents of Gulf Arab countries reported a slowdown in internet connectivity and disruption of services…

[Source: Al Jazeera]

This is what’s so scary about technology; we quickly get so used to it, we integrate it into our everyday lives and work, we become dependent on it for everything we do, and then when it fails for one reason or another our lives stop, we’re left crippled and helpless; we can’t go back and we can’t move forward; we just have to wait for things to be sorted out so we can go back to life as usual.

We’re too dependent on technology, and we don’t have a fail-safe plan; a major technological meltdown in the future could bring the whole world to a stand-still; and blow us back centuries into the past.

Israeli Lobby Unwritten Contract With American Media

Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said in a speech: “The American media is much, much more geared to understanding that there is an unwritten contract between them and us…”

What is this “unwritten contract”? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s an agreement to censor anything and everything that offends the Lobby and its glorified, sanitized view of Israel. Here, after all, is a country that practices apartheid, imprisons children, and was founded on ethnic cleansing and bigoted religious obscurantism – and yet they present themselves to the world as a valiant little “democracy,” a beleaguered outpost of “the West” in the midst of an Arab sea. It takes a lot of cosmetics to hide the true face of this dog, and that’s what CAMERA is all about – prettifying an increasingly ugly reality. The Lobby reserves the right to censor any material that presents Israel in a more realistic light, and anyone who opposes them in their mission on behalf of a foreign power is smeared as an “anti-Semite.”

— Full article: The Lobby, Unmasked by Justin Raimondo.

links for 2008-01-29

The World’s Richest Arabs

ArabianBusiness.com have just released a list of the world’s 50 richest Arabs.
Most of them are from the gulf region, mainly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates; with the rest divided among Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and one person from Jordan.
No one from the Arab Maghreb is anywhere to be seen on the list.

Here are the Top 10 sorted by net worth:

1. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud (Saudi Arabia): US$ 29.5 Billion
2. The Al Rajhi Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 24 Billion
3. The Hariri Family (Lebanon): US$ 17.8 Billion
4. Nasser Al Kharafi (Kuwait): US$ 12 Billion
5. Maan Al Sanea (Saudi Arabia): US$ 10 Billion
6. Mohammad Al Amoudi (Saudi Arabia): US$ 9.2 Billion
7. The Bin Laden Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 8.5 Billion
8. Abdulaziz Al Ghurair (United Arab Emirates): US$ 8 Billion
9. The Olayan Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 7.2 Billion
10. The Sawiris Family (Egypt): US$ 6.2 Billion

Check the full list and more details here: Arabian Business Rich List 2007

Bionic Eyes: Contact Lenses With Circuits And Lights

Remember those bionic eyes some of our favorite sci-fi characters had to zoom in on far-away things, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs?
Well those could become an attainable reality for everyone soon enough.

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside; opening many doors for useful applications of these contact lenses.

Installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out; and even thought the current prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, the technique could be used on a corrective lens.

Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens.

I personally think this is a very cool invention which could be used in several areas, for serious and professional purposes as well as for leisure purposes too.
I can’t wait to see this rolled out and the different uses it will be applied in. I’d certainly want one, that’s for sure.

[Source: Science Daily

Tunisiana’s GPS Weenee Brings GPS To Tunisia

GPS WeeneeJust a couple of days ago I was wondering when GPS would finally make it to Tunisia, and to my great surprise today, by accident, I came across a new website launched by Tunisia’s first private mobile operator Tunisiana publicizing a new product they’re launching called GPS Weenee. (Weenee in Arabic means: Where am I? or Where is it?)

The product should be currently available at Tunisiana’s service centers in the Grand Tunis area: Les Jardins du Lac, La Marsa (Zephyr), Ariana, Medina, Tunis-Carthage Airport.

The details of the service are as follows:

– Coverage: The Grand Tunis area and inter-urban Tunisia for the time being.
– Vocal and symbolic guidance
– 2D and 3D Maps
– Multilingual: Tunisian accent, Arabic, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
– Search for interest points in the proximity, sorted by distance
– Search for addresses in the Grand Tunis area
– Automatic route recalculation
– Optimised route calculation (time/distance)
– Possibility to save favorites and last addresses
– Alerts when speed limit is exceeded
– Positions for hotels, restaurants, fuel stations, …etc.

I’ve found no information about the price on the website, so I guess I’ll have to pass by one of the service centers to check that out. Hopefully them not putting the price doesn’t mean it’s really expensive.

I can’t understand why I had to find out about this by coincidence, where is the communication a product like this deserves? where are the ad campaigns? where are the billboards?

Personally, I find this very very interesting, a great move by Tunisiana, a product everyone needs and that simply sells itself, something I’ll totally go for if the price is right.

Update: The information I got about the price from a Tunisiana insider is a one-time 900 DT for the device. Very expensive and unpractical, I think.
A friend of mine rightfully joked after hearing the price: You could spend your whole life getting lost in Tunis and taking taxis to wherever you want to go and it still wouldn’t amount to 900 DT.

Aquaduct Mobile Filtration Vehicle

The results of the Innovate or Die competition, which challenged inventors to evaluate environmental issues and develop ingenious solutions surrounding climate change using pedal based machines, have recently been announced.

Team Aquaduct was declared the winner out of 102 entries by utilizing the human ability to pedal to bring an easy and effective solution and lots of hope to people in the developing world who struggle daily to gather, transport, filter, and store clean drinking and cooking water.

A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.

Aquaduct is the creation of Adam Mack, Brian Mason, John Lai, Paul Silberschatz, and Eleanor Morgan. The quintet will share the $5,000 grand prize, and each will receive a Specialized Globe bicycle

Lawrence Lessig’s Book ‘The Future of Ideas’ Now Free

The Future of IdeasLawrence Lessig and his publisher Random House have released another one of his books “The Future of Ideas” under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect and argues that as the Internet faces the challenges of intellectual property laws, it should not become so controlled that it discourages innovation and creativity in the digital world.
He explains the historical context of the Internet and its relationship to the “commons” and argues that, for the Internet to evolve and be an open environment, there must be a balance between intellectual property and the public domain.

You can download the book for free here: The Future of Ideas.

You can find his other books and where to download them here: Lessig.org