Invasion literature (or the invasion novel) was a historical literary genre most notable between 1871 and the First World War (1914). The genre first became recognizable starting in Britain in 1871 with The Battle of Dorking, a fictional account of an invasion of England by Germany. This short story was so popular it started a literary craze for tales that aroused imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers, and by 1914 the genre had amassed a corpus of over 400 books, many best-sellers, and a world-wide audience.^[1] The genre was influential in Britain in shaping politics, national policies and popular perceptions in the years leading up to the First World War, and remains a part of popular culture to this day.

You can find The Battle of Dorking online, here.

His family was surprised by his return. “We didn’t press him,” his mother says. “We figured if he wanted to talk about it he’d talk about it.” For a short time, he drove a school bus. He also found a psychiatrist and began taking antidepressants. During this time, he traced his breakdown to his not really wanting to be a philosopher. “I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity,” he later told McCaffery.

He began to write fiction. Until then, Wallace had seen novels primarily as a pleasurable way to get information. (Even in later years, he admired the novels of Tom Clancy for their ability to pack in facts.) But he realized that fiction could order experience as well as philosophy could, and also provide some of the same comfort.

I find it fascinating, but not altogether surprising, that David Foster Wallace admired the novels of Tom Clancy. When I was young I devoured the novels of Clancy (and also the novels of half a dozen authors doing similar things to Clancy: writers of techno-thrillers), and looking back I do think I was mining them for information. My mother used to say, when I was younger, that I was obsessed with jargon, details, facts, that I collected information like a magpie. It makes sense that Wallace was a magpie.

Chris Stringer said that studying the landscape beneath the North Sea was crucial for a better understanding of prehistoric movements of humans into the British Isles.

"We have Neanderthals at Lynford (in Norfolk) 60,000 years ago, though we only have stone tools. This specimen might indeed be the kind of Neanderthal that was crossing into Norfolk around that time. It will help us understand our British sequence when we can much more precisely map what's under the North Sea," he said.

Professor Hublin said the individual was living at the extreme edge of the Neanderthals' northern range, where the relatively cold environment would have challenged their capabilities to the limit. Neanderthal remains have been found at only two sites this far north.

"What we have here is a marginal population, probably with low numbers of people," Professor Hublin explained.

"It's quite fascinating to see that these people were able to cope with the environment and be so successful in an ecological niche which was not the initial niche for humans."

Whiles [sic] some governments block certain web sites with a heavy hand or cut off web access entirely, Iran has taken a far more subtle approach. The state-owned Data Communication Company of Iran (or DCI), which acts as the gateway for all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country, has slowed web access down to a crawl. The assumption is that DCI dialed back the bandwidth in order to better inspect which content and packets needed to be censored. Instead of viewing the packets through a fire hose, they turned the pipe into a garden hose so that equipment can sift through the packets and let legitimate traffic through. In a blog post today, Arbor Chief Scientist Craig Labovitch writes:

I can only speculate. But DCI’s Internet changes suggest piecemeal migration of traffic flows. Typically off the shelf / inexpensive Internet proxy and filtering appliances can support 1 Gbps or lower. If DCI needed to support higher throughput (say, all Iranian Internet traffic), then redirecting subsets of traffic as the filtering infrastructure comes online would make sense.

Indeed, web traffic was stopped following the election, then reopened, but at much lower levels. But this may prove to be a partial victory for web censorship, and an opportunity for some unscrupulous equipment vendor who wants to interest the Iranian government in better deep packet inspection equipment.

[...] in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said.

"If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Mr. Roome.

Deep Packet Inspection by governments

See also: network surveillance and censorship

In addition to using DPI for the security of their own networks, governments in North America, Europe and Asia use DPI for various purposes such as surveillance and censorship; many of these programs are classified.^[15]

[edit] United States

Main article: NSA warrantless surveillance controversy

The NSA, with cooperation from AT&T has used Deep Packet Inspection technology to make internet traffic surveillance, sorting and forwarding more intelligent. The DPI is used to find which packets are carrying e-mail or a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone call.^[16] Traffic associated with AT&T’s Common Backbone was "split" between two fibers, dividing the signal so that 50 percent of the signal strength went to each output fiber. One of the output fibers was diverted to a secure room; the other carried communications on to AT&T’s switching equipment. The secure room contained Narus traffic analyzers and logic servers; Narus states that such devices are capable of real-time data collection (recording data for consideration) and capture at 10 gigabits per second. Certain traffic was selected and sent over a dedicated line to a "central location" for analysis. According to Marcus’s affidavit, the diverted traffic "represented all, or substantially all, of AT&T’s peering traffic in the San Francisco Bay area," and thus, "the designers of the ... configuration made no attempt, in terms of location or position of the fiber split, to exclude data sources comprised primarily of domestic data."^[17] Narus's Semantic Traffic Analyzer software which runs on IBM or Dell Linux servers, using DPI technology, sorts through IP traffic at 10Gbit/s to pick out specific messages based on a targeted e-mail address, IP address or, in the case of VOIP, phone number.^[18] President George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales have asserted that they believe the president has the authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad without obtaining a FISA warrant.^[19]

The Defense Information Systems Agency has developed a sensor platform that uses Deep Packet Inspection.^[20]

[edit] China

Main article: Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China

The Chinese government uses Deep Packet Inspection to monitor and censor network traffic and content that it claims harmful to Chinese citizens or state interests. This material includes pornography, information on religion, and political dissent.^[21] People within China often find themselves blocked while accessing Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989, political parties that oppose that of the ruling Communist party, or a variety of anti-Communist movements.^[22] China also blocks VOIP traffic in and out of their country (though skype seems to work without problem),^[18] as well as visual media sites like YouTube.com and various photography and blogging sites.^[23]

Cyberwar guide for Iran elections

Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 16, 2009 3:25 AM | permalink

Yishay sez, "The road to hell is paved with the best intentions (including mine). Learn how to actually help the protesters and not the gov't in Iran."

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter.

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP's over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

3. Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don't retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.

5. Don't blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don't publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don't signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind...

#iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners (Thanks, Yishay!)

Then comes one of the main attractions: two water-spraying machines. They're huge, the size of a bus but taller, with fenced windows and two water-guns on top of each. We burst into laughter. They don't know how to use it. They shoot second floor windows, riot police and the people, if they do at all, and these including girls in tight manteaus. It's more Zurich than Tehran. One machine is stuck. They don't know how to drive it. It's a hot day, and it feels good to become wet. Much of the time, the sprays are not very powerful. It's as if they're watering the grass.

And it just does not fit the horror that's in the air, the aggression with which the people are hit with batons. A beautiful day. It has been beautiful throughout the past week; you wonder whether nature is ironical.

They push the crowd back and forth, but soon realise people are on all sides. In a couple of minutes, the crowd goes away, the anti-riot police leave, and the students are gone. We don't know why. Deprived of communication, you never see the big picture. Maybe they have attacked the university from behind.

At Towhid Square the scene changes. The streets to Azadi are blocked. But this time, people don't change their path. They fight for it. There's a shower of stones. Tear gas. Fire. The battle extends to nearby streets. People are shouting, "Down with the dictator". Riot police throw back stones. I also grab a broken brick and throw. I'm amazed. Never thought I'd do it. But I need practice: it was a very bad shot. I grab another one, the size of a pomegranate and hide it behind my back. I am part university teacher, part hooligan.

We get a lift to avoid the teargas. Then there is the attack. A woman is beaten. She's hysterical but so is the anti-riot police officer facing her. She shrieks, "Where can I go? You tell me go down the street and you beat me. Then you come up from the other side and beat me again. Where can I go?" In sheer frustration, the officer hits his helmet hard several times with his baton.

A couple of minutes later we get off. Here's a true battleground. This time it is vast. Columns of smoke touch the sky. You can hardly see the asphalt. It's covered with bricks and stones. Here people have the upper hand. The street consists of three lanes, the middle one separated by opaque fences, under construction for the metro. The workers have climbed up the fence and show the V sign. They start throwing stones and timber to the street to supply needed armament.

The Voyage to the Ends of the World

By yaohong | Published: June 16, 2009

My friend, Jovian Lim, recently graduated from the fine art program at NTU. His graduation piece, The Voyage to the Ends of the World, was one of my favorite series on exhibit. The prints were simply gorgeous to look at. It was a pity that they were taken out of context somewhat, as the series is strongest when presented as a whole.

TOP TO BOTTOM, from (”The Voyage to the Ends of the World“)
© Jovian Lim, 2009

From his statement:

This body of photographic work relies on the ‘heroic journey’ often seen in mythology. While the ‘heroic journey’ is deemed an ancient idea, the process of growth, change and self discovery still continues to present day.

The constructs of the landscape and topography are not of a natural environment; These abstractions however serve to draw the viewer into a timeless time, free from the clutter and distraction of our overcrowded world.

Although this voyage isn’t a literal one, they seek to mirror an inner reality as we pass through life.

For more, check out the project’s website. His personal portfolio can be found here.

Hello Kitty Is 35 Years Old!

Sanrio

The Hello Kitty Family
A year after Kitty's debut, Sanrio introduced her father George White (top left), mother Mary (top right) and twin sister Mimmy (lower left), who, we are told, is Kitty's best friend.