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Alaska Highway Opens as a Hedge Against Invasion

October 29th, 2007 by iDunzo

October 29, 1942: The Alaska Highway officially opens to military traffic.

Until the early 1940s, Alaska was a neglected U.S. territory. The Klondike gold rush of the 1880s and ’90s was a distant memory, and oil had not yet been discovered.

There were a bunch of trees and rivers and snow, but nothing really worth exploiting, so the vast wilderness was pretty much left to the bears and the hardy few who lived on the frontier.

Although proposals had existed since the 1920s for building a highway through western Canada into Alaska, the Canadian government wasn’t very keen, and the plans were shelved.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, coupled with their military incursions into the Aleutian Islands, changed things in an instant.

Suddenly, Alaska became a potential Japanese invasion route to Canada and the Lower 48, so both governments agreed that the road would now be built.

Military necessity dictated the route. It was a far cry from the original highway-commission blueprints and their more topographically friendly, meandering roadways.

The Alaska Highway — like the Burma Road for moving Allied supplies from northern Burma to China — would take little account of mountains, wilderness, water or elevation.

The U.S. Army assumed control of the project, and the Corps of Engineers — augmented by thousands of civilian contractors — began construction through the northern wilderness. By any measuring stick, it was grueling, backbreaking work.

A Canadian army observer remembers:

Those U.S. troops — I felt sorry for them to begin with — then was amazed at what they did. If you weren’t there, you just couldn’t understand it. I saw fellows so tired, they were ready to drop in their tracks. It was rush-rush-rush. Fellows were doing 18 to 20 hours a day on bulldozers. One was up to his neck in ice water repairing timbers in subzero weather. God, I admired them. Most were southerners — they’d never experienced cold like that. And in the summer, it was mosquitoes — like they’d eat you right there, or pack you away to eat at home.

In the end, the 1,500-mile highway, stretching from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska, was completed in an astounding eight months.

In many places, it was a “highway” in name only, instead resembling a glorified footpath with stretches of unpaved road, murderous switchbacks and no guard rails or shoulders.

Apparently vehicles had a tough time negotiating the road, and traffic didn’t really pick up until 1943.

After the war, major improvements were made to the highway, and it opened to general traffic in 1947 after wartime travel restrictions were lifted.

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Apple Updates iLife Suite For Leopard

October 26th, 2007 by iDunzo

Apple has rolled out a set of updates for its iLife suite. Some are intended to improve compatibility with today’s launch of the new OS X 10.5 Leopard, but others are aimed at Tiger users as well.

Apple’s release notes offer little hint of what’s changed beyond the usual vague statements about stability enhancements, compatibility improvements and “other minor issues.”

Suffice to say these are not major upgrades unless you’re moving to Leopard.

I can tell you that the GarageBand 3.0.5 is solely for Leopard and didn’t even show up in Software Update on my Tiger install.

iDVD 6.0.4, however, seems to be intended for all users and reportedly “improves overall stability” in addition to providing Leopard compatibility.

The iLife support app has also been updated for Leopard and “improves overall stability, addresses a number of other minor issues, and supports general compatibility issues.”

Of course Apple recommends this update for all iLife ’08 users.

Since I plan to do a clean install of Leopard this afternoon, I’ve skipped the iLife updates for the time being, but I haven’t seen any reports of problems from those who have upgraded.

As always, YMMV and make sure you have a backup before diving in.

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CSI:NY Crosses Over Into Second Life Tonight

October 24th, 2007 by iDunzo

Set your TiVos–tonight’s episode of CSI: NY ventures into the world of Second Life.

CSI:NY will be maintaining a permanent presence in Second Life, allowing visitors to take a crack at solving a crime based on evidence found at in-game crime scenes.

Ok, that part actually sounds pretty cool.

The CSI:NY area will be geared more for CSI fans than Second Life enthusiast, and will apparently be far easier to use as a result.

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Comcast Traffic Filtering Could Lead To Legal Showdown

October 23rd, 2007 by iDunzo

Comcast continues its double speak and carefully crafted workings regarding the company’s policy of throttling BitTorrent traffic, but already the lawyers are beginning to circle and Comcast could face lawsuits in the very near future.

CNet’s Chris Soghoian reports that because Comcast’s filtering technique uses forged TCP reset packets to disrupt traffic it is essentially impersonating its customers.

The forged headers allow Comcast to say it doesn’t block traffic — it doesn’t, the traffic continues to flow, it just gets altered into forged packets that constantly reset the peer connections.

But forging headers is hardly the “cutting edge technology,” Comcast claims it is and it may well be illegal. Assuming your identity and forging packets is roughly the same thing your friendly Nigerian e-mail scammer does to infiltrate your e-mail inbox.

As Soghoian points out, were Comcast to do to e-mail traffic what they do to BitTorrent traffic, they would be in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and libel for fines and jail time.

So why can they get away with doing it to BitTorrent, Gnutella and Lotus traffic?

The answer is simply that no one has challenged them yet, perhaps they can get away with it, perhaps they can’t, but we won’t know until someone brings a suit against Comcast.

Many states have laws already on the books that make impersonating someone an crime, especially when the impersonation is intended to benefit the person doing the impersonating.

In this case, because Comcast stands to gain from filtering BitTorrent traffic — less strain on the network and BitTorrent is increasingly being used to deliver movies (legally), which makes it a Comcast competitor — the company may soon find itself a sitting duck for consumer lawsuits.

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Quarter Of A Million Apple iPhones Unlocked

October 23rd, 2007 by iDunzo

According to Apple’s quarterly results, fully 17% of all iPhones sold are unlocked and roaming on networks other than AT&T’s.

Apple’s recently reported third-quarter results were full of interesting figures.

Perhaps the most interesting is that of the 1.4 million iPhones sold, 250,000 (or 17%) of them have been unlocked.

They believe this because they’ve subtracted the number of iPhones activated on AT&T’s network from the total number of iPhones sold.

Um. That figure is pretty danged high.

Not only that, the iPhone Dev Team is reporting that there have been 500,000 downloads of its AnySIM 1.0 unlocker program.

That means more than one-third of everyone who bought an iPhone has decided that they might hack it.

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AT&T Adds Napster For Wireless Customers

October 22nd, 2007 by iDunzo

AT&T said this morning that it will soon make available a music service from Napster, allowing its wireless customers to download more than five million full-track songs on their mobile devices.

AT&T customers will have a choice of downloading five tracks a month for $7.49 with the Napster Mobile Five-Track Pack plan or purchasing songs for $2 each without the plan.

Napster Mobile will come with a feature that sends a music track to a mobile device wirelessly and at the same time makes a duplicate copy available for download to a PC.

AT&T claims it is the only wireless carrier in the United States that will let customers buy full-track songs wirelessly from both Napster, a mainstream nationwide provider of digital music, and eMusic, the largest retailer of independent music.

The carrier was the first to offer the iPhone, which has a built-in iPod for listening to music and watching video. iPhone customers can purchase music from Apple’s iTunes store.

As a comparison, songs on iTunes cost 99 cents each. Apple last week slashed prices on copy-protection-free songs from $1.29 to 99 cents.

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