Monday morning links

I'm traveling today, so I'll leave you with some posts that are worth your while.

The Kings Of War write on Al Qaeda's self-inflicted wounds:

The findings are sharp, counter-intuitive and they face head-on the almost paradoxical nature of the threat — to put it bluntly: al-Qaeda became stronger and weaker at the same time. The report should raise a humbling question for the objectives in the war in Afghanistan. What can actually be achieved there against jihadist militancy?  – The authors add a note of caution at the end. Recognizing internal divisions enables weakening jihadi groups, they write, but it will not lead to “a grand solution” to the problem of Islamist militancy.

Radiation scientists question safety of TSA PervScan™:

The news about the potential health dangers of the TSA's naked body scanners just keeps getting worse. An increasing number of doctors and scientists are going public with their warnings about the health implications of subjecting yourself to naked body scanners. These include Dr Russell Blaylock (see below) as well as several professors from the University of California who are experts in X-ray imaging.

Their argument is that while the total dosage from the scanners is low if distributed across the entire body, that's not what the scanners do.  Rather, the entire dosage is concentrated on the skin and tissues immediately below, resulting in a far higher dose.  Orders of magnitude higher.  Keep your eye on this story.

The shift from IP version 4 to the new IP version 6 remains controversial.  ISPs simply don't want to do it, because it will cost them a lot of money, and their subscribers won't notice any difference.  As a result, the ISPs are doing more NAT (Network Address Translation) to save IP addresses.  It looks like this will help spammers.  Slashdot has a good article, with some very interesting comments.  This is techno-geeky stuff, but good techno-geeky stuff.