Julia D sent this to me a couple of days ago. Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site (registration required). I rant on enough about the cultural hegemony inherent in the actual structure, utilities, encoding and code of the internet. I sometimes forget to look at what's going on on the surface. In this case, it is unAmerican to provide web services to nonAmerican media sources.

[Full text of the article is below, in case you're worried about the registration fro NYT getting you dumped on an unAmerican government list]

Akamai Cancels a Contract for Arabic Network's Site

April 4, 2003
By WARREN ST. JOHN

In a move sure to complicate the efforts of Al Jazeera, the
Arabic news network, to get its English-language Web site
running, Akamai Technologies abruptly canceled a contract
on Wednesday to provide Web services for the site.

Employees at Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said
they were frustrated by the decision, though not entirely
surprised. "It has nothing to do with technical issues,"
said Joanne Tucker, the managing editor of the
English-language site. "It's nonstop political pressure on
these companies not to deal with us."

Akamai, based in Cambridge, Mass., would not comment on the
reason for the cancellation. But Jeff Young, a company
spokesman, issued a statement confirming that Akamai would
no longer do business with Al Jazeera.

"Akamai worked briefly this week with Al Jazeera to
understand the issues they are having distributing their
Web sites," he said. "We ultimately decided not to continue
a customer relationship with Al Jazeera, and we are not
going to be providing them our services."

The English version of Al Jazeera's Web site was shut by
hackers roughly 12 hours after it went online on March 25.
For a time, Web users trying to gain access were directed
to a Web page bearing an American flag. Akamai, whose
clients include MSNBC and CNN, maintains a broad network of
servers that provide protection from hacking attempts. It
was for that reason, Ms. Tucker said, that Al Jazeera hired
the company.

"Basically this was our answer to the hacking that has been
nonstop and pretty aggressive," she said. "We had a
done-and-dusted deal on March 28. Then yesterday, we get a
letter from them terminating the contract."

Akamai's decision is one in a series of headaches for Al
Jazeera since the start of the war. Defense Department
officials criticized the network for showing images of dead
and captured American soldiers. After that episode, the
network's American financial correspondents were banned
from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the
Nasdaq. On Wednesday, Iraqi officials expelled one Jazeera
correspondent from Baghdad and barred another from
reporting there. American officials have also accused the
network of unduly emphasizing civilian casualties in Iraq.

Al Jazeera contends that much of the traffic that shut
down its site was from Web users simply curious about its
coverage. The search engine Lycos reported yesterday that
"Al Jazeera" was its most-searched-for term last week.

Ms. Tucker said that Al Jazeera hoped to have its English
site up within 24 hours, but that without Akamai's many
servers, the site would be more vulnerable to hacking
attempts.

The site went live just after 7 p.m. last night.

"It
doesn't derail us," she said. "We can withstand the hacking
up to a point, but if they focus it all on one server it
would put a lot of pressure on that server.

"We hope that won't be the case," she added. "We're working
on it all the time."

Ms. Tucker called the hacking attempts "pathetic." "It's a
narrow, pro-censorship attempt to silence a news site," she
said.

This is not the first time that Akamai has had to deal
first-hand with tensions between the Arab world and the
United States. The company's co-founder and chief
technology officer, Daniel Lewin, 31, was on American
Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001, when the plane
crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/technology/04WEB.html?ex=1050593603&ei=1&en=9e9846594854ea35

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Richard Bennett's Omphalos: notes: abc new's article Another human shield bites it in Israel. I like his wit: "ABCNEWS.com reports that another human shield was killed by the Israeli military after jumping in front of some Palestinian terrorists, and fellow shields are shocked that the soldiers fired even though the shield was well-marked. Apparently, the Israelis use Kryptonite bullets capable of penetrating moral certitude."

TIME.com: Best Of The War Blogs -- Apr. 07, 2003 is a neat article. Caught it thanks to "robert m. tynes" on the aoir.org list.

I've had four separate CBC producers contact me about warblogging, but it doesn't seem I'll make it to the radio this time. There's a lot of interest in students who are warblogging. I mentioned JuliaD to them as well. Julia told me that Salam Pax's dear_raed.blogspot.com is no longer being updates. No doubt because of the lack of electricity in Bagdad.

Blogs will never be the same again.

Thanks Julia (sometimes Julia_D) for the headsup on this article in the Glob [sic] on war blogging called "Where everybody is a war reporter"

The first Gulf War did it for CNN. The new one may do it for 'blogs' -- personal Web pages of news and opinion, tracking and debating Iraq's fate by the minute. As JOHN ALLEMANG writes, they're now many people's first choice for unembedded journalism

Joi Ito's has a list of a couple more interesting Satire blogs related to current events. such as GWB, Saddam and Kim Jong Il.

And Joi's blogrolled me back, so he gets a gold star next to his name, and can sit inside during recess to check his email.

Yuka found this first on CNN.co.jp, but I found it on the english site as well.... CNN.com - Soldier 'bloggers' report from war - Mar. 26, 2003

This article says:

One of the most popular is a site run by "L.T. Smash," the blog nickname for a reservist in the U.S. Navy who arrived in the Gulf last December. His site, www.lt-smash.us, carries the moniker "Live from the sandbox." L.T. Smash's accounts range from the ordinary and the oddball to the touching.

I was suspicious, as there's no real info as to who is blogging and whatnot that we expect from a blog. So, I did a whois lookup. (http://www.whois.net/) Whois lookups show who creates and owns a site.

The Domain was created last week: "Domain Registration Date: Fri Mar 21 23:03:28 GMT 2003"

So how come it is a) as popular as CNN says, and b) by someone who has been in the Gulf since december? Sounds like some strange pseudo-blog... where an institutional organization fakes a blog so that it appears like it is from an individual.
Here's the Registration info for lt-smash.us:

Registrant Name: Bart Simpson
Registrant Organization: LT Smash
Registrant Address1: 123 Main Street
Registrant City: La Mesa
Registrant State/Province: CA
Registrant Postal Code: 91941
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.6195555555
Registrant Email: ltadmin@cox.net

Yuka found a reference to 12 year old Charlotte Aldebron on the Asahi New web site. She seems to be getting a lot of press for her view on war. Of course, it took us forever to find her web site, as names are written different in Japanese, and we had to guess... Charlotte's Peace Rally Speech is interesting to me, as it is something that gets heard in the media in times of trouble... young people taking the future by the horns and making an impassioned plea for peace/the environment/willy the whale. I'm a teacher, so of course this is good. But what triggers the ever close to the surface cynic in me is how great a sound bite it makes in the media, and again how easily it is dismissed by most people with the condescending "children just don't understand the issues" retort..