There are new reports surfacing about a possible cover-up of a conspiracy of the US Government in the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks. According to several reports online, it all started when the US government blocked the release of this book by Anthony Shaffer who worked at the Pentagon before 9/11. You can read all the comments on Amazon from people that bought the book but it was never delivered to them.

Shaffer reveals in his book that the invasion of Afghanistan was planned a year before the 9/11, Bin Laden was a CIA asset, paid and trained by the CIA when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 70’s 80’s (reference: Charlie Wilson’s War) and most likely died early 2002 of kidney failure. An apparent conclusion is that the “War on Terror” is fake and mostly staged. The US, UK and Israeli intelligence have been attempting to infiltrate the so called Muslim Terror cells for decades and set them up. The “terror scare” is used to justify the “perpetual State of War” in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan and have replaced the “Cold War with the complicity of US mainstream media.

You can even check the links in Amazon with people saying they allowed the REDACTED format for security reasons, so they basically removed any incriminating information from the book. 9/11 was a tragedy but not everything is what it seems, there seems to be more going then a lot people knew or at least had the evidence to prove it.

Recently I was in need of making an electronic purchase for a gift, I decided that the best option was getting in Kuwait since waiting for a delivery from Amazon would take too long. I need to get a Wifi iPad 16GB and decided to check out all the different pricing from Eureka, Xcite, and Electrozan. After calling around Xcite was the most expensive and Eureka was the cheapest, then a friend of mine told me to check out Blink and they were even cheaper but I was worried about delivery since I was traveling the next day. For delivery next day shipping to your house is free but for an extra 2.5 KD you can get it same day and in my case it was still cheaper then Eureka. They have a nice assortment of items and if you don’t feel like going to the store to pick it up Blink does offer some competitive prices. After looking at different products the cheapest pricing is between Blink and Eureka, it differs from product to product but Electrozan & Xcite are mostly on the more expensive side.

Link: Blink

Internet throughout the house, thats one of the biggest annoyances people have when at home. You are usually stuck where the router is, and that is probably where you have the most powerful signal. In my case I went to an insane extent to wire up different rooms throughout the house so I can spread the wireless signal coverage. Most cases your stuck with the wireless signal you have, but in this case you have powerline networking. I have always been a bit skeptical about this technology, it usually doesn’t produce that speeds that I am looking for and I’m always thinking that it just won’t do. But there have been a lot of successful kits and this is just the latest development. If you are having internet coverage problems and putting ethernet cables through what little space you have in your walls is not possible then the WD Livewire Powerline Networking Kit is your best option.

There are drawbacks with powerline networking but it’s a simple solid solution when don’t have a wired option. You have four ports with the WD Livewire, the throughput is around 200MB/s which your machines will interpret as 100 MB/s since it’s not a Gigabit connection which is 1000MB/s. Sometimes with sound there is interference but if you need to this get your network where you need it to go. You would have to buy it from Amazon UK to get the right plug with it, but you can change it you buy it from the US as well.

Check out the Review at WeGotServed.com
Link: Amazon

I have gotten used to iTunes for all my iPad needs and music downloads, luckily I do have a US Credit Card that I use with the account. But every once in a while the account acts up and says that my Credit Card is denied, when I call the Credit Card company they tell me nothing is going on, and everything is fine. I try again and still the same issue, I tried different cards and the same problem. Then I leave it for 24 hours and try it again, and everything works like normal. Its very strange.

There was a little news a little while ago that some accounts which have iTunes and paypal attached got fraudlent charges of ridiculous ammounts. One guy got charges up to $800’000 which is insane, but he managed to sort it out between paypal, iTunes, and his bank so he didn’t get completely screwed but it is scary. When this strange account thing started happening a few months back I changed all my passwords on all the accounts that I’m using with iTunes just incase, because I was a little freaked out. Then it just happened again so I emailed Apple about the issue with my account.

There reply was good and reaction type was great, within a few hours they told that they had some minor glitches in the system and reset my account so everything is fine. Also because of the incovenience they gave me credit for 6 free single songs which is fantastic. I would have been happy with them just fixing my account but they went above and beyond that.

You hear a lot of good things about big companies, especially tech companies but there is a lot of dirt to go around but very few talk about it. Well not as much as Valleywag, they are the TMZ of tech companies, they bother everyone, talk about their dirty theories and spread bad news like wildfire. It’s always good to know that Google and Apple aren’t the saints they try to portray, every company has its dirt and what every Steve Jobs has they bring it to light. They seem to love to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, the guy behind Facebook and all his dirty tricks and skeletons in the closet and how they have the new movie about them. They talk about HP and Oracle like it’s a big boys club, and the sex listings on Craigslist that has just shut down. Anything dirty on tech companies can be found at Valleywag and its always entertaining.

Gawker Media Sites, Gawker

Google, Craigslist, Mark Zuckerberg, Apple, Steve Jobs, Oracle, HP

Link: ValleyWag

Taking some time off the internet has left my Google Reader pile up to a readiculous number. I think at this point it has easily gone northwards of 7000 articles to catch up with. Some article I skim through and some I actually read, and I really don’t like hitting the “Mark as Read” button so I end up taking the time to go through them or at least scroll through them. At this rate I think it will take me two to three weeks to catch up with all the articles and its a hell of a lot. I really wish Google Reader had a more descriptive tag then “1000+” so that I know I really am making a dent in some of these feeds, for some sense of online accomplishment. I’m just going to have to keep pushing through until I get under 1000.

I don’t think anyone has been using it except for the first month or two that it was out, I tried using it and seeing if it could be useful but damn it was annoying. You didn’t know which panel you were on and who was talking to who, jumping into big conversations or collaborations was confusing. Google tried to make something that people can use as a tool but it didn’t have the right type of integration to enjoy using it. Then they brought Buzz which I think is fantastic because its simple integration but they got it a bit wrong by forcing people to use it right away with all settings set to open, so that took some time to fix. Google had a few hits and misses but its great they keep trying to make these interesting products, but its good that Google is dropping Wave.

Link: Gizmodo

“With no solution available and in the public interest … Blackberry Messenger, Blackberry E-mail and Blackberry Web-browsing services will be suspended until an acceptable solution can be developed and applied,” Telecommunications Regulatory Authority director-general Mohamed al-Ghanim said in a statement carried on state news agency WAM.

I was surprised as anyone else for UAE’s and Saudi’s announcement that they will be cutting off all Blackberry Service of all kinds. Meaning that even if you have a service from another provider from another country it will not work in the UAE or Saudi.

There were announcements a few months back that they were contemplating shutting down the service in Kuwait, but luckily they are too lazy to go through the politics to do it, and it would be an damage many of the telecom company’s bottom end.

They cite security reasons as the main reason not censorship, but the reality is that they have no control over Blackberry services what so ever when people use them. In reality it’s very difficult to figure out someone from their Blackberry PIN, and so they can broadcast msgs, send items to people without having it intercepted or scanned. Blackberry came on fire over the past two years in the MiddleEast, everybody wanted the service, and it really took off. But the authorities weren’t to happy, in Emirates they have a lockdown on communications of all sorts, but this one seemed to have slipped them and they aren’t too happy about it, and the same goes for Saudi.

Now for the real interesting part, last year there was a little debacle with Etisalat trying to install spyware on their handsets through a Blackberry software update. That was really the Spyware product of SS8 which can monitor communications of Blackberry, but it was removed by RIM the manufacturer of Blackberry and people were pissed. Now here is the little details they fail to mention, SS8 develops products such as these but they have to take license proprietary software from RIM to use it. SS8 is only licensed to sell the software in the US, Canada, and the UK which they have to the governments, and they aren’t licensed to sell in any other country including the Middle East, that is why they were pissed about the Etisalat debacle in 2009. So I think the tactic of Saudi and UAE are trying to put pressure on RIM to allow SS8 to sell in the Middle East or the service will be shut down and they will lose a large amount of revenue. I don’t know if they do or don’t block the service in a few months but its going to be a hell of a blow to RIM’s income.

There is no question that we have issues with our Internet Service in Kuwait, and with a country that is wealthy and hungry for better service we just can’t seem to get good quality in most cases. We are luckier then most countries in the middle east but its still no excuse for bad service, our infrastructure needs a major overhaul and it was supposed to be complete by 2007 but I don’t we are going to see that. Luckily our GSM operators have offered Internet service such as Wataniya, Zain, and Viva, some better then the other in different locations. Then there are the normal ISPs which are doing well in some areas and struggling in others. Click the image below for some detailed info about the regular ISPs.

This country ranks in 85th place. Results were obtained by analyzing test data between Jun 30, 2010 and Jul 29, 2010. Tests from 120,759 unique IPs have been taken in this country and of 985,263 total tests, 9,776 are being used for the current Index.

All the results are taken from Speedtest.com relative to each ISP, and they have to have at least 10’000 Unique ISP tests for each result and people are asked for their opinions. So we are all using speedtest not knowing that the ISPs are getting ranked which is genius. But in this case you can see from the image above that Qnet has the fastest speeds but the worst satisfaction. KEMS has the 3rd speed but one of the highest satisfactions, even though the difference is small its still a difference in this case. I’m surprised Fasttelco isn’t there, but I think its because they don’t use the speedtest.com testing program so it can’t tally up the data. Overall we need faster internet.

Link: NETINDEX

I was so excited to download the game that I have been waiting all day to come home and click download. I tried predownloading the game, but I got an error stating that it was too early and I can only download from the 27th, so as soon I got home and went to the Battle.net portal to proceed with the download. Made the payment, clicked all the buttons, filled all the information, and proceeded to purchase. One thing though, I did this all through my VPN, so that it appears I was making the purchase from a US location, I don’t know if that made a difference but I didn’t want any hiccups telling me that the game hasn’t been released in my country yet.

Now it begins, at first it said 3 days but after about 20 minutes, it flew through the list and I got to the download stage. Whats great is that my machine already counted what I had predownloaded a while back so I only had 1 GB left to download, and it wouldn’t be too much longer. I’m going to go through the installer and hopefully I can be playing by the end of the night, I’m not sure when but I want to free myself to play this game fully without any stops, it may not be anytime in the next few days, but Ramadan is around the corner, meaning I get off work early so more gaming time. 6.28 GB of 6.99 GB!