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RE: [Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone
by Trei, Peter 25 Aug '05

25 Aug '05

Eric Cordian writes: > RAW forwards... > >> Wiring the War Zone > >> It's a typical morning at Camp Anaconda, >> the giant US military base 50 miles north >> of Baghdad - light breeze, temperatures >> heading to 100 degrees, scattered mortar fire. >> Ryan Lackey is getting ready for today's assignment: >> installing a pair of satellite Internet connections at >> Camp Warhorse about 30 miles away. > > Ryan Lackey needs to star in an Ayman al-Zawahri produced > video, making short-lived gurgling and whistling noises. > > Making a fast buck off an illegal war of aggression > is a far cry from running a secure data repository > on an oil platform. Eric, I think you could nuance this a bit. Ryan isn't supporting Bush's little war - the military has plenty of comm channels for C&C which Ryan wouldn't be allowed near. What he's doing is supplying US soldiers with an independent, uncensored and unreviewed channel through which they can find out outside views of the war, information which their superiors won't pass down to them, and a means by which they can pass back their own views and opinions. Frankly, I'm suprised the brass are letting him do it. How do you think the prison abuse photos got back to the US media? Would you rather the soldiers rely on Stars & Stripes for info on the changing situation back home? If anything, what Ryan's doing advances the so-called 'cypherpunk agenda' more than anything being done at the ideologicaly pure but practically insignificant Sealand. Just my opinions.... Peter Trei

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[Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone
by R.A. Hettinga 24 Aug '05

24 Aug '05

--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:31:24 -0400 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: [Ryan Lackey in Iraq] Wiring the War Zone <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/posts.html?pg=2> Wired Issue 13.09 - September 2005 Wired 13.09: POSTS Wiring the War Zone It's a typical morning at Camp Anaconda, the giant US military base 50 miles north of Baghdad - light breeze, temperatures heading to 100 degrees, scattered mortar fire. Ryan Lackey is getting ready for today's assignment: installing a pair of satellite Internet connections at Camp Warhorse about 30 miles away. Lackey, 26, is founder and CTO of Blue Iraq, a war zone startup that has operated out of Anaconda since December. It's a bootstrap operation - three employees, tent accommodations, Army chow - that has been profitable from its first day. "The military's a great market," he says. "They have lots of money, and they know what they want." His customers are mostly base commanders and DOD contractors, plus the occasional group of soldiers who chip in to get Internet access. Lackey dons body armor and a Kevlar helmet and heads out to the flight line. A pair of Blackhawk helicopters is making a run to Camp Warhorse this morning, and Lackey is hitching a ride. He packs his equipment and tools into one helicopter and climbs into the other. Inside, everything is painted black. Door gunners sit behind machine guns mounted on flexible arms. The crew chief distributes earplugs, the passengers strap themselves in, the rotors start to turn, and the ground falls away. But not too far. Blackhawks fly just 100 feet above the ground, at 200 mph. It's a smooth, exhilarating ride, landscape zooming past like a dream of flying. As wartime commutes go, it can't be beat. Lackey has been taking risks since he dropped out of MIT at 19 to work at a startup on the Caribbean island of Anguilla. Two years later he moved to Sealand, a North Sea oil rig, where he cofounded a data storage outpost that claims sovereignty and is theoretically beyond the reach of any nation's laws. (It was the subject of a Wired cover story in July 2000.) He is happy to cash in on what he calls risk arbitrage. "There's sort of a dark calculus when people are afraid," he says. "Prices for everything go up. And if you understand the risk better than they do, you can price that into everything." The Blackhawk touches down at Camp Warhorse, a 1,000-soldier forward operating base near the insurgent stronghold of Baqouba. In a freak accident at the helipad, the rotor wash hurls one of the boxed satellite dishes into Lackey's chest like a massive Frisbee. His armor saves him from anything worse than bruises. The first of two installations takes a few hours. Lackey sets up a 4-foot-diameter dish on the ground outside the base HQ, then assembles the metal support arms that hold the satellite electronics at the focus of the dish's parabolic arc. He has to be careful: After five minutes in the midday Iraqi sun, metal can sear an ungloved hand. Cables run from the dish to a modem indoors that in turn connects to a local area network. Ryan hooks his laptop up to the modem and adjusts the dish's elevation and azimuth until his software confirms the system is locked on to the correct satellite. Just like that: the Internet. The iDirect system is robust enough for Iraq's extreme heat, dust, and wind, and even handles voice-over-IP calls. The second install takes longer. Anti-radar camouflage netting overhead interferes with the signal. By the time he's done, Lackey has missed his helicopter lift home. He winds up stranded at Warhorse for two days before catching a ride back to Anaconda on an armored convoy. This means spending an hour in the back of a truck traveling through some of the most active insurgent territory in Iraq. Back in Anaconda, he has to deal with Blue Iraq's literal cash flow problem. The military pays in greenbacks, meaning he routinely has to fly on a cargo plane to deposit thick wads of currency at his bank in Dubai. That's the cost of doing business here. And business is expanding: He foresees cell service, ATM networks, and expansion into Afghanistan, and, he says with a bleak grin, "any other markets the US military opens up for us." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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RE: [declan@well.com: [Politech] Montana Supreme Court justice warns Orwell's 1984 has arrived [priv]]
by Bill Stewart 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

At 10:39 AM 8/23/2005, Trei, Peter wrote: >Tyler Durden writes: > > Yes, but the old question needs to be asked: How much of this > > crime would go away if crystal meth were legal? > >Actually, if we ever managed to kill the culture of prohibition, >I suspect that crystal meth would be about as popular is bathtub >gin is today. It's terrible stuff. Meth is not fundamentally that different from Sudafed, and the nasty chemical processes of extracting the sugar coating and filler material and moving around a couple of methyl and hydroxy groups and disposing of the bodies of the people you thought were ratting you out to the police and the space alien biker gangs could all be avoided if you could make it legally at a big pharma company. Before the War on Drugs started helping us by making Sudafed hard to get, the generic pills tended to be on sale for about ten cents per 30mg dose. If I'm reading Erowid correctly, and guessing the kinds of quantities a tweaker might use if it were readily available and nearly free, a buck or two a day would cover all the meth you could use, and you could easily make that much at a minimum-wage job in the extra hours you've got that you used to waste sleeping, and you wouldn't have to resort to crime unless it seemed like more fun. Also, you could use somewhat calmer amphetamine relatives instead of meth; can't be *that* much nastier than tobacco, and much of the cost of legal pharmaceutical amphetamines today is the DEA paperwork. Opiates are another drug for which crime would be unnecessary if the stuff were legal. The last time I got codeine for dental work, I think I spent about $5 for 20-30 pills. That's enough for a day of Rush-Limbaugh-quantity abuse, and enough for a couple of days' worth of withdrawal-prevention for an average addict, and stronger opiates are similar in cost; opiate addiction doesn't need to be as expensive as tobacco addiction. By the way, if you've watched the TV medical drama "House", the star is an acerbic doctor who's addicted to Vicodin, as an after-effect of leg injury, and it's interesting to see the wall of political correctness cracking a bit.

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RE: [declan@well.com: [Politech] Montana Supreme Court justice warns Orwell's 1984 has arrived [priv]]
by Trei, Peter 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

Tyler Durden writes: > Yes, but the old question needs to be asked: How much of this > crime would go away if crystal meth were legal? Actually, if we ever managed to kill the culture of prohibition, I suspect that crystal meth would be about as popular is bathtub gin is today. It's terrible stuff. I'd expect the big pharmas to start 'recreational drug' wings, which would bring real research power to the problem of finding highs which are fun, safe, affordable, and with minimal physical addiction. "I need a new drug..." Peter Trei

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Re: New Drugs
by Steve Furlong 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

On 8/23/05, R.A. Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > At 1:39 PM -0400 8/23/05, Trei, Peter wrote: > > >"I [want] a new drug..." > > I would request the irony-impaired actually look up the lyrics of this paen > to endogenous ero-endorphins, written by a drug-hating San Francisco > "acid-kindergarten" refugee. Especially the closing line of the refrain. I think the point was that if you get laid regularly you don't need drugs. Works for me. -- There are no bad teachers, only defective children.

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[declan@well.com: [Politech] Montana Supreme Court justice warns Orwell's 1984 has arrived [priv]]
by Eugen Leitl 23 Aug '05

23 Aug '05

----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> -----

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