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twelve Iranian engineers in Afghanistan have been kidnapped by the Taliban
five Afghans who were working with the Iranians were also captured source

» It happened in Farah province, near the Iranian border. Afghanistan’s embassy in Tehran called for swift action, as Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said he wants “Kabul authorities to exercise their responsibilities with regard to Iranian nationals and to take firm and swift action on this kidnapping.”

Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

13 Apr 2011 14:28

» Welcome to Free Libyana: With international support, in particular the help of a telecom executive in Abu Dhabi named Ousama Abushagur, the Libyan rebel forces now have a hijacked mobile phone network operating within the eastern part of the country. The network, called Free Libyana, was built on the equipment foundations of a Gaddafi controlled network called simply Libyana. Mr. Abushagur, a Libyan who was raised in Alabama, led a crew of engineers and some bodyguards into Benghazi in order to secure the network for the rebel forces located there.

Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it.
Facebook employee Robert Johnson • Explaining why Facebook was so broken today. Simply put, there was a configuration error so huge that it caused the entire site to fall over itself. It created a feedback loop in a cluster of databases and couldn’t handle the number of requests. All engineers could do to stop it was turn off the site for two and a half hours. That’s right. The entire site. It’s not often that Facebook crashes at all, let alone in the middle of the day on a weekday. That was epic, eh? source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

creepy A Google employee was fired for reportedly breaking the company’s internal privacy policy. Which is pretty darn creepy.
creepier According to Gawker, he was hacking into the Gmail and Google Voice accounts OF CHILDREN HE KNEW. Yikes. source

» One caveat: It appears the abuses weren’t sexual in nature (because we know that’s what you were thinking.) Rather, this was a 27-year-old guy hanging around with kids half his age, because that’s perfectly normal and won’t raise any eyebrows. It appears the abuses were him just showing off to the kids more than anything.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink