Ciao!

Also, www.blogsofwar.com had a posting 3/27 that said Uruklink had been hacked. Paul Boutin had confirmed that Salam Pax logged in via Uruklink - quoted in an online article this week (don't have url handy). So either Uruklink was bombed, or hacked (to prevent Iraqi gov'mt "propaganda") as the blogs of war post indicates.
http://www.blogsofwar.com/archives/week_2003_03_23.html#000698

While surviving the various bombardments of Baghdad Iraqi Press web site Uruklink is no longer available as source of propaganda: it has been defaced! The main page now states:

Hacked, tracked and NOW owned by the U.S.A.

Rob Kaper

This sucks. I had been checking Salam Pax's blog daily since I spotted a link in this one. Unfortunately, I didn't understand how the format of his page was set up, so I thought it was shut down a while ago. I hadn't been scrolling down to see the new postings--my weblog puts the new entries at the top of the list, not below them. I scrolled down for the first time last night. I got pretty upset. Now I'm upset again knowing he has lost his voice, and perhaps, his life. This sucks. Good luck, Salam Pax. I hope you get out of this shit alive.

Love,
Micah

While stuff on the blogsofwar site seems fairly accurate - I've tried accessing that web site several times now: www.uruklink.net and I only the standard error screen. Maybe it was hacked briefly - but that might have been done this side just through networking changes etc.

Somehow I think Salam is OK for now... I hope he's still writing. I pray he survives the battle of Baghdad. I hope as many civilians of Baghdad as possible do....

Salam is probably still writing using a pblog (as he did when he wrote the 23-24 march posts) and will upload if/when he can. But the Iraqi ISP is down.

I wrote Beth Gillin, who had written one of the detailed articles about Salam in the philly news - she sent me back this reply this morning:

From: Gillin, Beth [mailto:bgillin@phillynews.com]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 9:16 AM
To: Lee
Subject: RE: where is salam pax?

Hi Lee, Actually, I think that's wrong. There's a site called uruk@uruklink that has a first page that says hacked, tracked, etc.
Enter it and it's a global chatroom allegedly started in December by somebody in America. But uruklink.net still seems to be up. You need a Greek translation pack to read it in English. How strange. Beth Gillin (Thanks for writing)

I just tried doing a ping to uruklink.net and it seems to be live... but that doesn't mean it is functioning as an isp necessarily:

$ /usr/sbin/ping uruklink.net
ICMP Host redirect from gateway [...] for www.alneda.com (65.89.91.148)
uruklink.net is alive

What you're probably getting is information that Uruklink is still registered and "operational". But if you go to uruklink.net you'll notice that it's indeed been hacked.

This has truly become an information war. Sci-Fi has come to life.

Whoa... I tried to go to http://uruklink.net and it indeed shows the "Hacked, tracked and..." message. Then it bounces one to this web site:
http://www.itshappening.com/index_three.html

which is a bizzare site, which appears to be a kind of internet version of the conflict between the American and Muslim/Arab worlds. I haven't read much further than the front page yet...

Miguel,
So did you get redirected to itshappening.com after the hacked and tracked screen???

Yep, it looks like hackers have joined the war. Reports are they took down al Jazeera's webiste last night.

A month ago, the took down al Qaeda's website (yes, the bastion of anti-western imperialism has a website) and replaced it w/ porn. Imagine all the uptight religious extremists going to read the latest rant about how to become "jihad martyrs" by blowing up women and children and end up watching porn. What a shock that must've been.

Oh, yeah. I'd been seeing the reports that al Jazeera's new english web site had been hacked by denial of service style attacks, I think since Monday. Did you see they also threw al Jazeera off the stock exchange?

If America has been the "melting pot" then the internet is the inferno, in terms of exposing cultures to each other....

So did you hear NPR today? They were talking about the Salam Pax blog, speculating on if he's real or not and talking about how blogs are a good resource non-corporate news but you need to question who'se writing them. I bet you could find it on npr.org but I'm at work and this computer is super duper slow, or I'd link it to you.

Thanks for posting about the NPR program...irregardless of whether Salam is a "real" person (and I do, but it is based on nothing but my subjective opinion of the fresh quirkiness of his writings) - that blog clarifies many things. Clear writing is clear writing. And many of the angles are supported by other articles coming out from disgruntled or disillusioned human shields.

But on the topic of watching for Salam, I found this article which speculates that food supplies will be cut off to Baghdad for an extended period - grim. If Salam is still there he is going to have to endure a very difficult period. I really pray for some quick resolution to this battle.
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=17131

On Friday, Pax - a gay man in a repressive society, an atheist in a Muslim land, a lover of democracy but a hater of war - filed a worried dispatch as he awaited the first shock-and-awe assault on the city he cherishes.

He is, like many in his part of the world, conflicted about the war. At times it seems he hates Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush in equal measure. When soldiers arrive in Baghdad to liberate him, Pax warned, "Don't expect me to wear a 'I heart Bush' T-shirt."

His Friday message showed him to be nervous, but not too scared to abandon his trademark sarcasm: "The most disturbing news today has come from Al-Jazeera. They said that nine B52 bombers have left the airfield in Britain and are flying 'presumably' towards Iraq. As if they would be doing a spin around the block."

A short time later his Web log, "Where is Raed?" (www.dearraed.blogspot.com), went dark, and fans around the world began to worry.

Had an errant bomb fallen on his house? Had the Iraqi government shut down his Internet service? Or was the blog a fraud, an intelligence front that had hastily shut down? Who could say?

Salam Pax....Wishing you and your love one's safe until end of this war....we hates dictator not the people of Iraq....we love Iraqi....!