For all you folks, fan of the civil liberties as well as the Olympic games, here's the integral text of the International Olympic Committee Blogging Guidelines for the accredited persons. It's the perfect companion of the recent decision from the Olympic Chinese Committee to ban the flags from the stadiums.

As you will read, blogs are admitted but:

But you are lucky, still you can use your plain white Olympic blog homepage to test the brightness of your screen.   

... enjoy and please comment the official text  

The unbelievable security failures of 9/11 exposed, among many other issues, the effects of more than two decades of cutting resources to the public sector and outsourcing government functions together with essential security services to profit-driven private corporations.

It clearly came out that, while everything seems fine and dandy when business is as usual, this way of managing security crumbles to pieces as soon as something goes wrong.

As an example, think of the North American air transit system, which was privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security jobs performed by underpaid, poorly trained, unmotivated, barely English speaking workers.

On September 10, when flying was as easy as taking a bus and airports looked like a mix between a mega shopping centre and a Luna Park, none of that seemed to matter: business was good, profits were as high as possible, and the perceived risk was close to zero.

But on September 12, putting 6-dollars-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport security seemed an unforgivable foolishness - which, in fact, it is.

In the West, for the last 60 years or so, thanks to the continuous availability of cheap energy which allowed a massive inflow of raw materials and the mass production of any conceivable good, a “bigger / better / faster” lifestyle was purposely spread among the masses together with a generalized growth of wages, “rights”, and education, thus creating a huge middle class of happy consumers, on the whole improving everyone's health and way of living.

Due to the conditions existing at the time, market driven liberal / social democracies created and distributed never-before-seen amounts of wealth among their citizens.

Since conditions have changed substantially from those times, we must look at reality in an unbiased way, realize that this historical period has reached its maximum and peaked, and that we are now living in the twilight of the Cheap Energy / Mass Hedonism Age: average health and wealth standards are recessing, signs that the Big Shiny Happiness Machine is chocking and breaking down are everywhere, and the already shrinking middle class is destined to disappear.

One thing is clear: world is about to change. What can we expect? New leaders of two big countries will be elected. In case of new US president it is now clear, that next president will be from democrats. And in Russia, well, whole land is waiting for a signal from Mr. Putin.

In U.S. the main discussion is now about the war in Iraq (and a bit in shadow remains still unfinished battle in Afghanistan). Every observer can see two main streams, from which one says, that U.S. troops should return immediately from their foreign missions, the other says, that the world is still in war with terror and that it is wrong to step back now. But as in every country, also in U.S. there are many groups, that are interested on results of the presidental elections and many that will profit from it.

In good old Western movies, a typical character is the Snake Oil peddler, a "doctor" with dubious credentials travelling around from town to town, selling miracle potions, lotions, and every kind of bogus panaceas.

Those fake medicines were useless, for the most, if not poisonous. But by the time the Snake Oil dealer left town, it was nearly impossible to bring him to justice; moreover, those who fell victim of the scam were not easily convinced to complain publicly, because, righteously, everyone would have laughed after them.

Last days brought to whole world really interesting news. After Mrs. Merkel visited China and spoke about hacker attacks against German ministries, also Financial Times revealed, that Pentagon was target of such attacks from China. If this is not enough, also Guardian recently reported about such attacks on governmental networks in UK. Titan Rain - as US called the raising Chinese hacking activities, seems to be stronger than we could imaginne.

General assumptions from specialists are, that behind these attacks is PLA - People's Liberation Army - or if you want: Chinese army. This assumption is supported by the several facts, like target selection, attack levels (even IT security world would for sure invite more details on how the attacks were performed). It is also another known fact that China trained hackers already years ago. Then why this all is surprising some of us?