The Blog That Goes Ping

U.S. policy was to shoot Korean refugees – Yahoo! News

More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war’s chaotic early days has come to light — a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.The letter — dated the day of the Army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 — is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government.

I thought that was just a few “bad apples,” not a policy…

Anti-Hugo Chavez video game by a company  which denies it has any U.S. Government ties, which is a lie; they’ve done work for the Army before developing simulation games.  The game presents the ruler of Venezuela as a power-mad tyrant, and the country as on the verge of chaos, neither of which is particularly true. (Via rigorous intuition)
Meanwhile the US Army recruitment MMORPG becomes the site for a rather unique protest:  A user named ‘dead-in-iraq’ stands in place and types out, by hand, the names of American soldiers dead in Iraq, in instant messages to the rest of the users.  If somebody kills his avatar, he just comes back again and does the same thing.  (Via reddit)

YouTube – Flippin’ Cars On I-96 In Michigan

Scary but amazing video of an SUV not just flipping, but spinning across and off the road, in my area.

Google drop large numbers of pages. “The Madness of King Google”

Changing the focus from what is in a page to what other websites and pages say about a page (the link text), produced much more relevant search results than the other engines were able to produce at the time.The idea worked very well, but it could only work well as long as it was never actually used in the real world. As soon as people realised that Google were largely basing their rankings on link text, webmasters and search engine optimizers started to find ways of manipulating the links and link text, and therefore the rankings. From that point on, Google’s results deteriorated, and their fight against link manipulations has continued. We’ve had link exchange schemes for a long time now, and they are all about improving the rankings in Google – and in the other engines that copied Google’s idea.

I have muttered this darkly myself many a time.

COTSE-Something is broken at Google

I’ve noticed this myself.  Sites which I know exist and have been indexed in the past turn out to be unfindable on Google, but easy to find on other services.

Reminded me once again of Oleg K’s notes here –

“In general, I got an uneasy feeling about Google. They seem to be too much ‘cowboy programmers’. One day it will cost them.”