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Power To the Pop-Ups 204
Most news and information websites carry advertisements, but usually not more than one pop-up ad, if they have pop-ups at all. This is because the costs of running the sites are low enough that they can usually pay for their costs with revenue from regular ads. Surely the site owners would like the extra money that they could get from pop-ups, if their viewers had nowhere else to go. But if they tried to get away with too many pop-ups on a typical news site, visitors would just leave for their competitors' sites instead. Competition keeps the "prices" — in terms of the ads that you have to view in order to visit a website — low.
By contrast, most proxy sites [that's not a link to one of my sites, so quit yer whining] — sites that you can use to get around Internet blocking, by using a form to type in the URL of the site that you want to access so the proxy site will fetch its contents for you — are festooned with pop-up ads, sometimes on every page load. As I can easily attest, the bandwidth and hardware costs of running a proxy site are sufficiently high that there would be no way to pay for the sites with the revenue from normal banner ads and AdSense blurbs. It's no exaggeration to say that most proxy sites, which enable people to circumvent government filtering in countries like China and Iran (not to mention helping millions of students get on Facebook and YouTube from school), would not exist without the pop-up ads to prop them up. (This may not be true of a proxy site that your high school classmate set up for himself and some friends, but it's true of most proxies created to serve a wide audience.)
Unfortunately it's becoming more expensive to run an effective proxy service that enables users to get around most enterprise filtering programs. If it gets to the point where normal pop-up ads do not bring in enough revenue to pay for the service, we might need a new breed of even more intrusive (and better-paying) ads. More intrusive than the drop-down ads that play noisy videos. More intrusive than the Flash animations that crawl across the screen on top of the words you're trying to read. I'm going to argue that a company that figures out how to run the most intrusive ads of all, could be the new best friend of Internet freedom. But first a note about why the costs are increasing.
Two years ago, I thought the cost of maintaining a proxy site to help people get around Internet filtering, would steadily fall, as bandwidth and processing power got cheaper. But bandwidth and hosting costs didn't drop as much as I had hoped, and the cost of maintaining an effective anti-filtering service has actually gone up, due to some advances made by Internet censoring programs. In 2007, the then-current versions of filtering programs like Smartfilter, Websense, and the 8e6 R3000 would typically only download updates to their blacklists once in the middle of the night. This meant that I could mail out a new proxy site to my proxy mailing list just after midnight, and it would be accessible to the mailing list subscribers all of the following day. (You wouldn't be able to get to them if your local network administrator subscribed to the mailing list and added the new sites to the local blacklist as soon as they came out, but most network admins didn't bother.) As of 2010, though, the latest versions of most enterprise filters are configured to automatically update their lists every hour or two. So to stay ahead of the filters, I have to mail out several sites every morning to different portions of the mailing list, so that the filtering companies generally learn about them and block them at different points throughout the day. Just registering several .com domains every day is not cheap. (GoDaddy sells .info domains for less than a dollar apiece, but this proved to be an ineffective solution because too many censored networks simply block all .info sites.)
There are also the increasing costs of maintaining compatibility with complex sites like Facebook and YouTube. Accessing Facebook through a proxy is still a hit-or-miss proposition. (I steer my users toward accessing the mobile version of Facebook, http://m.facebook.com/ , through the proxy, because it's a stripped-down version built for compatibility with mobile devices, and this simpler version is less likely to break when accessed with a proxy script.) YouTube access depends mainly on whether the latest YouTube plugin for the Glype proxy script is compatible with the current YouTube interface, and likewise can be working one week and broken the next. It's not hard to run a proxy site that provides compatibility with the most popular sites that people want to access, but it takes real work -- you can't just upload the script and forget about it.
(Many users in censored countries also use tools like Tor and UltraSurf to bypass their country's filters, but some of my contacts in those countries say that those tools are often too slow for them, so they end up using proxy sites instead. Since UltraSurf and Tor are free services, funded by donations and staffed by volunteers, the demand for those services can easily swell until they slow down from the overload.)
So what happens if maintaining an effective anti-censorship service becomes too expensive to pay for using just pop-up ads? Well, you could charge money for using your proxy site, but that brings with it a whole host of other problems. You have to set recurring billing in order to be paid through PayPal or some similar service, and run the risk of your funds being frozen if someone files a crank complaint against you. If one user has a paid account, you have to worry about them sharing the account with their friends or posting the account credentials on a public message board. And there are many proxy operators (including me) who would like to think that the proxies do provide a valuable public service to the world, and wouldn't want to exclude people who can't afford the monthly access fee.
I propose that ads which are even more intrusive than pop-ups -- thus grabbing more of the user's attention and providing more value to the advertiser, thus enabling them to pay more to sites which run the ads -- would enable proxy site operators to fund more of the costs of their operation, and hence would be a Good Thing. The existence of such intrusive ads does not mean that they would suddenly be plastered all over every proxy site. If your user base can be served for a lower cost, then you don't have to "charge" as much (in terms of advertisement intrusiveness) to use your proxy service. Over 90% of the traffic to my proxy sites is to domains that have already been blocked a long time ago by Websense, Smartfilter, Lightspeed, and most of the rest of the censorware companies. Apparently there are a lot of users who are on censored networks and who need proxies, but whose network admins just haven't updated the blacklists in a very long time, or who haven't paid the subscription fee to keep downloading database updates. Since you don't need to register 10 new domain names every day to serve that audience, there would continue to be proxies for those users with less-intrusive ads on them. But the more-intrusive (and higher-paying) ads would also enable proxy webmasters to serve a "higher-end" audience, the ones who need several new sites every day, to stay ahead of the more frequently-updated filters.
I can think of several ways that more intrusive ads might work. My favorite would be a "quiz" model wherein a drop-down advertisement appears in front of the site you're trying to access, consisting of some promotional content, and a little form at the bottom. In order to make the drop-down ad disappear, you have to read the ad and fill in the answers to some one-word questions or multiple-choice questions about the content, to prove you actually read it.
Perhaps I'm biased in favor of this idea because I'm tired of ads that contain splashy graphics and expensively licensed music and never contain any actual information. The only television ad that I can recall viewing in the past year which prompted me to actually buy the advertiser's product, was the Pizza Hut ad announcing that you could get a large pizza with any number of toppings for $10. That's what I want in an ad. I give you $10. You give me a pizza. (And this extra plug for their $10 pizza promotion, can be considered a thank-you to them for running an ad that actually had something to say.) Most ads on TV are far less informative, serving mostly to give a glossy sheen to the advertiser's brand name. Yet these ads are paid for by corporations who do the market research and the focus grouping, so the ads must work. Many economists, including Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist and Steven Landsburg in The Armchair Economist, have explained why companies pay for ads that do nothing except look expensive: Because they prove to the viewer that the company intends to be around for a long time, in order to capitalize on the long-term exposure given to them by the ad. This has become so standard that making an ad which actually gives the user information seems tawdry by comparison. The most ghetto-sounding word in TV advertising is "infomercial".
But I think that some companies could benefit from greater exposure of actual information about their product, just as there are companies that pay for informercials. And if a company like Linksys really wanted to run a splashy ad that contained no actual information, and then make me answer some questions at the bottom like:
Linksys is:
(a) the leading manufacturer of wireless adapter cards
(b) the leading manufacturer of wireless routers
(c) the leading manufacturer of wireless monitoring cameras
(d) all of the above!!!
then that's their prerogative. The quiz-advertisement model only says that advertisers can require users to answer a question before closing the ad; it would be up to the advertiser to decide what question works best. I suspect that the actual-information model would work better for quiz ads, but advertisers could try both and see what works.
There are already some websites that require you to "complete an offer" (i.e. become a customer of some third-party company, at least for a free trial period) in order to use their services, but most proxy sites have so far declined to carry advertisements like these. Evidently their users consider this too high of a price to pay to access a proxy site. Filling out an offer is not just time-consuming, but leaves the door open to future problems -- will they sell your name or your e-mail address? Will they make it hard to cancel your "free trial", and then start billing you? The problem seems to be that there is too large of a gap between the "fees" associated with the two options -- a normal advertisement doesn't bring enough money to the proxy operator, but a complete-an-offer advertisement is such a steep price that most users won't pay it. The "quiz ad" is like a "fee" that falls nicely in the middle -- a smaller time commitment, and your worries are over after you fill in the quiz and hit submit.
If the very thought of such an ad still seems too annoying for words, then I think that objection misses the point. If the revenue from "normal" ads (pop-ups, drop-downs, AdSense widgets) is enough to pay for the operation of a "high-end" proxy service (catering to the people who need several new proxies every day), then such proxy services with "normal" ads will continue to exist. Indeed, anyone who tried running the more annoying "quiz ads" would not be able to get off the ground, because users would flock to the competing proxy sites using normal ads instead. If "high-end" proxy services flourished that were using quiz ads, it would only be because you simply can't provide a high-end service for less money than the quiz ads are bringing in.
It's possible that some advertisers would be reluctant to display ads in a manner that users would continue an annoying obstacle, but I'm not sure that's really a problem. The most intrusive advertisements currently in use on mainstream websites are probably the "premercials" that display before some news videos on CNN.com and other news sites. Unlike drop-down ads which can be closed with the click of a button, the video pre-mercials can't be skipped. Since you're actually expecting the news video to come up immediately when you click the link to start playing the video, you would think that many users would grit their teeth in annoyance upon seeing the "pre-mercial", and transfer that irritation to the advertiser's brand name, but there are so many big-name companies buying those pre-mercials that they must believe it's having a positive effect. So intrusiveness itself doesn't seem to tarnish a brand.
But I don't propose to micro-manage suggestions for how the more intrusive ads would look, or how advertisers should tailor their ads to fit the format. I'm just saying that a new breed of more intrusive ads, even more annoying than pop-ups, might be just what we need to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated Internet censors. It's still technically quite trivial to release a steady stream of new proxy sites that defeat most Internet filters, but it costs money to buy domains and maintain the service, and the money has to come from somewhere.


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Stripboeken browse by: Shop category:
Artist Sy Barry Bill LignanteBeschikbare series in de webshop categorie "Stripboeken"
Sy Barry in the COMICLOPEDIA
" Seymour Barry, brother of comic artist Dan Barry, studied at the New York School of Art and Design. When he graduated, he went to the Art Students League, while working as an assistant to his brother. In the late forties and early fifties, Sy Barry did freelance work, mainly as an..." [ Lees meer ]

subset: commoncrawl


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By Karin Calloway
Related Menus
Recipe Categories
Spicy Southwestern Chicken Wings
We are big chicken wing fans at my house, and my husband is usually in charge of firing up the outdoor cooker and frying up some classic Buffalo wings. Recently, I've taken over the wings and have come up with several varieties that require no frying and meet another criterion: They can be made ahead and reheated on the grill or in the oven.
These Spicy Southwestern Chicken Wings are flavor-packed. While the list of ingredients is long, the steps are all simple and there are a few shortcuts which can be taken. First, substitute prepared Southwestern seasonings (such as Emeril's) for the spices listed in the recipe, substitute store-bought barbecue sauce for the homemade and stir in a little chile powder and two finely chopped chipotle peppers. For the dipping sauce, pick up your favorite ranch dressing and stir in one clove of minced garlic and some chopped fresh cilantro.
While shortcuts abound, the recipe is definitely worth making as written. Serve it up at your next casual winter party or at a tailgate event during football season. Those who like things spicy will give you rave reviews.
Before serving, preheat grill. When hot, grill wings until heated through, turning continually, about 4 minutes. Place wings in a large bowl and toss with the sauce. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro and serve with the Chipotle Ranch for dipping.
Chipotle Barbecue Sauce
Cilantro Ranch
Makes 6 to 8 servings


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prAna® June Yoga Tote :: This bright summer yoga tote has natural moisture managing properties thanks to hemp and organic cotton. A zipper pocket at the front provides an easy space for keys and cash.
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1. So, how difficult is it to modify the Bitlash controls? Ideally I would like to have a virtual joystick, basically just a circle with a dot in it that can be dragged with the mouse for driving the rover. Like putting it in the top left would make it steer left while moving forward. Is there a GUI I can use to redesign the Bitlash GUI to be something like this? Do the controls act like a continuous input until released and "auto center" when released? If not, how hard would that be to program? I would want it to stop as soon as I released the slider/joystick or if there was an interruption in the connection.
2. Could the Bitlash webpage be hosted on the arduino itself like on an ethernet/wifi shield? If possible, I could use an RF solution of getting the video to another PC for the video encoding and not have to have a PC on the rover. Or maybe it would be better to use an XBee between the server and the rover/arduino and only have arduino, and XBee and an RF video TX on the rover.
npm install
node index.js
module.js:340 throw err; ^Error: Cannot find module '/Users/Max/index.js' at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15) at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25) at Module.runMain (module.js:492:10) at process.startup.processNextTick.process._tickCallback (node.js:244:9)
/Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/node_modules/bindings/bindings.js:85 throw err ^Error: Could not load the bindings file. Tried: -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/build/Debug/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/build/Release/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/out/Debug/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/Debug/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/out/Release/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/Release/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/build/default/serialport.node -> /Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/compiled/0.8/darwin/x64/serialport.node at bindings (/Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/node_modules/bindings/bindings.js:82:13) at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/Max/bitlash-commander/node_modules/serialport/serialport.js:7:44) at Module._compile (module.js:449:26) at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:467:10) at Module.load (module.js:356:32) at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12) at Module.require (module.js:362:17) at require (module.js:378:17) at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/Max/bitlash-commander/lib/bitlash.js:6:18) at Module._compile (module.js:449:26)
$ npm install $ node index.js


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privacy policy
Levi Strauss & Co.'s Privacy Policy
This online Privacy Policy was last updated on January 29, 2014.
Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&CO) is deeply committed to the relationship of trust we have with you — our consumers. For more than 155 years we have been creating authentic products by leading with our values. As we continue to innovate in how we bring our products to life online, we'll match cutting-edge technology with your privacy interests.
Our Pillars of Privacy
We want you to know what and how information is collected when you interact with our websites.
We will offer you choices about how your information can be used by us and our trusted business partners.
Data Integrity
We will take reasonable precautions to protect information we collect about you on our websites through the use of secure technologies.
Information Collected
What Information Do We Collect?
Personally Identifiable Information ("PII")
Any information that can be used to identify you is considered personally identifiable information or PII. This includes your name, physical address, e-mail, phone number, fax number, and credit card information.
Browsing Information
Information we collect about your activities on our websites through the use of technology such ascookies and web beacons is referred to as browsing information. This browsing information is linked to an anonymous IP identifier and not to you personally. If for any reason your browsing information is linked to information that can personally identify you, we'll treat it as PII.
Information You Post
All information that you share about yourself, whether PII or not, in a public open forum – on a social network, in user-generated content elements of our websites, etc. — will be considered public information for the purposes of this policy. If you don't want it to be public, don't post it.
Who Collects Information?
We collect information from you when you interact with our websites. We may also collect information about you from third parties. Our trusted business partners also collect information from you on our behalf in the course of helping us operate our websites and provide services of interest to you. Any reference to "we" or "us" may also refer to our trusted business partners. We also permitthird-party advertising companies to collect your browsing information as well to provide ads on our behalf that are tailored to your interests. Click here for more information on interest based ads and your choices regarding your information.
When you interact with our websites information may be collected in several different ways. It may be collected in obvious, active ways, such as when you provide your name and address or other information when making a purchase in a store or online, when using the customer service chat feature, when you enter a contest or sweepstakes or if you upload a photo or product review to our site. It may also be collected passively or automatically when you visit and move around on our websites through the use of cookies and web beacons that capture your browsing information to enable us and third-party advertising companies to better tailor content and advertising to you.Click here for more information about how cookies and web beacons work.
In general, collection of your PII, browsing information and information you post or provide may vary across our stores and websites depending on their purpose, functionality or unique aspects.
Use and Sharing of Collected Information
We use information collected on our websites for four primary purposes.
- First, we use information collected to facilitate your online shopping and to offer you information and promotional material about the products and services you see on our websites.
- Second, we use your browsing information to help us analyze our websites, services and offerings. We consider such information analytics data.
- Third, your browsing and shopping information is used to provide you with interest-based advertising. .
- Fourth, we may use information you post in public areas to provide you with an interactive social media experience that brings aspects of your social networking community to our websites.
We may share your PII within our family of companies under common ownership; we do not share your PII with third parties for marketing purposes or other than as described in this privacy statement. Any trusted business partner receiving PII is contractually prohibited from discussing, disclosing or making any use of such PII except as directly necessary to provide us with the services for which we have contracted. We will get your consent first if at any time we would like to share your PII with other third parties for marketing purposes.
Definitions of Terms Used in Privacy Policy
A "cookie" is a computer file that acts as an identification card for your computer. When you visit our sites, unique cookies are placed on your browser. The purpose of the cookie is to distinguish your browser from all other browsers that visit our sites. However, by recognizing your browser, we can serve you better. For example, the cookies allow us to hold the selections in your shopping cart when you navigate away from the order page and then return to complete the order; because of the cookie, you don't have to start over with your shopping. We can also keep track of what pages of our website your browser visited and whether you purchased a product. That way we can measure such things as how effective our advertising campaigns have been. Working with third-party advertising companies, the use of cookies also enables us to provide you with customized banner ads that we think will be more useful than randomly-generated ads because they are based on your past purchases and page visits to our sites.
Web Beacons
When you visit our ecommerce sites, web beacons will recognize specific cookies that have been placed on your browser. Web beacons can convey information that a browser with a recognized cookie has accessed a page or a certain part of a page on our website, depending on where the web beacon is located on the website. For example, a web beacon located on our purchase confirmation page will record that a browser with a recognized cookie accessed that page which means that we can conclude that the browser was used to purchase a product. The web beacon does not, however, tell us that you specifically (by reference to PII) have purchased a product because the cookie is only the browser's identification card; it is not your personal identification card.
We use web beacons to measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns and to improve our websites by recognizing which pages are visited and whether those visits result in purchases. Web beacons also allow third-party advertising companies we work with to select and serve banner advertisements to your browser that you would be most likely to be interested in.
Trusted Business Partners
We work with industry-leading business partners who help us operate our websites and provide important services to our customers and visitors. Our business partners may change over time but we are committed to building relationships with third parties who are dedicated to providing you a safe and satisfying experience on our websites. Our trusted business partners are contractually obligated to collect and use any information collected from you on an LS&CO site or on behalf of LS&CO in a manner that is consistent with this privacy policy.
Third-Party Advertising Companies
We allow certain companies to collect information from browsers of our websites to use to serve interest-based ads. These companies are usually third party ad servers, ad agencies, technology vendors or providers of sponsored content. Using cookies and web beacons, these companies collect data from a particular browser about web viewing behaviors over time and across unrelated websites and use such data to predict user preferences and to deliver advertisements to that browser which are calculated to target that browser's predicted preferences.
Analytics Data
Information collected through cookies and web beacons to keep track of what products you viewed and purchased and what areas or pages you viewed on our websites is called "analytics data". We use analytics data to improve the design and content of our websites, to help us learn things like what pages are most attractive to all of our visitors and what promotions visitors like to see, and to gauge the success of our advertising campaigns.
Interest-Based Advertising
Interest-based advertising has become commonplace across the Web. It is the term we use for the activity that enables us to tailor ads to your interests and activities. Either LS&CO or third-party advertising companies we work with may look at your browsing activity, such as the types of content you access, ads you click on, and searches you conduct. We can then infer certain interests you have and place ads and offer you deals that meet your needs. Our goal for interest-based advertising is to show ads to people likely to be interested in the products we offer at LS&CO. Click Here to learn more about our practices with regard to interest-based ads.
Friend's Store
The Friend's Store is a section on our levi.com website, offered in partnership with Facebook, that allows you to share the products you like with your friends and find out what they "like". If you interact with our Friends Store or click on the Like button on our levi.com website, you will essentially be using our website and Facebook at the same time but your "Friends" experience will be governed by the privacy and other policies of Facebook.
Data Integrity
We keep your PII confidential, and we require, by contract, that each of our trusted business partners who may have access to any such PII information keep it confidential as well. Our trusted business partners, in turn, may share information with their own service providers pursuant to similar confidentiality restrictions.
We will not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer any of your PII to any other outside parties without getting your consent first. "Outside parties" do not include companies owned by LS&CO or our trusted business partners who help operate and provide services on our websites.
Of course, to the extent we reasonably believe that a disclosure is required by law, to enforce our website policies, or to protect your or others' rights, property or safety, we reserve the right to do so.
Safeguarding Your PII
When you register at our sites, we ask you to set up a password that you can use to access your information at our sites. If you want to cancel your password or change it, or something happens to your password, click on the "Contact Us" link found in the Help/Customer Service sections of our websites.
We use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to encrypt transmissions of sensitive information from your computer to our servers. However, when you communicate with customer service via email or chat on our websites, these communications are handled via unsecured transmissions. Please be aware that information provided (such as email address, payment information, etc.) may be accessible to others. For that reason we ask that you protect yourself and not share sensitive information via these communication channels.
Contact Us
Contact Us Regarding Your Information
If you have any questions or concerns about Levi Strauss & Co.'s Online Privacy Policy, please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com; call us Toll-Free at 1-866-290-6064; or write to us at:
Levi Strauss & Co.
General Counsel
1155 Battery Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
Online Updates to the Privacy Policy
If we modify this Privacy Policy, we will post the revised Privacy Policy on this website. We also may post a notice on this website or send an email describing the changes if the policy changes in any material way. You should check this website regularly to see if any recent changes to this Privacy Policy have occurred.
Choices Regarding Your Information
Your PII
With your PII — like the information you give us to fulfill an order or sign up for an online offer or contest – we will always give you the right to change or correct your information and the choice of not hearing from us again. There are several ways you can control our use of any submitted PII in connection with promotional communications.
When you set up an account, or either click on "My Account" from any page or "Manage Your Account" from within the Help Desk area of one of our websites, you can access, correct or update your choices/settings.
If you receive email communications from us on behalf of any of our brands and want to opt out of receiving such communications in the future from that brand, you can opt out by clicking the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the promotional email or by clicking on the "Unsubscribe" button at the bottom of any of that brand's websites.
If you have any difficulty managing your communication preferences, please email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Your Browsing Information
We work with third-party advertising companies that may collect your browsing and shopping information in order to provide LS&CO and other advertisements of interest to you. We refer to this practice as interest-based advertising. We believe these interest-based ads are more useful to you than randomly-generated ads because they are tailored to your shopping and product interests as indicated by your browsing habits.
If you would like to learn more about interest-based advertising and see what choices you may have about how companies use your information, please go to http://aboutads.info/choices/ or http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/. We do not operate or control these sites, and are not responsible for the opt-out choices available there. The only way to fully opt-out of online tracking is to adjust your browser settings to reject cookies or to notify you when a cookie is set. Please remember, even if you opt-out of interest-based advertising on or through http://aboutads.info you may still receive ads from LS&CO, as interest-based ads are only one form of advertising.
Finally, it is important to note that in most cases opting out drops an "opt-out cookie" on your browser. As a result, if you delete, block or otherwise restrict cookies or use a different computer or Internet browser, you'll need to renew your opt-out choice.
Controlling Cookies
Because cookies and web beacons are the technology generally driving collection of browsing information, you can also block cookies to control data collection related to interest-based advertising. You can typically do so through your Internet browser. For instructions, check your browser's technical information. Preventing your browser from accepting cookies prevents the collection of your browsing information for purposes of delivering interest-based ads. However, it may also disable or interfere with shopping features on our sites and other sites that you may visit. For example, cookies allow us to hold your shopping cart selections when you navigate away and then return to the order page. Cookies also allow us to recognize you as an account holder when you return to our sites. Most browsers accept cookies automatically. We recommend that you leave cookies "turned on" so we can offer you a better shopping experience on our sites.
Interacting with Social Media on our Websites
Social Media provides tools that many of our customers use and enjoy, and we include links to various social media platforms on our websites. If you interact with these social media tools through our websites, your experience on those social media sites will be governed by the privacy and other policies of those sites. So, the privacy settings you have chosen on those sites will determine the degree to which your information is made public. We encourage you to choose your privacy settings on those sites accordingly.


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Both the British Centurion and Soviet T55 tanks trace their roots back to the second world war. With the Centurion, the woeful British tanks of the second world war inspired designers to make sure that the Army never went to war with such sub-standard armoured vehicles again. Not only that, but it proved very succesful as an export. Meanwhile the T55 owed much of its design to the legendary T34.
Although both were designed to combat the German Panthers and Tigers, increasingly as the Cold War developed they faced each other in North Europe, on either side of the Iron Curtain. They never faced each other in action, but they did however equip many of the second and third world states, particularly in the middle east. This book by Simon Dunstan compares the performance of the machines and the men who operated them, using the Yom Kippur War of 1973, between Israel and Syria and Egypt, as a case study.
Comnparison in history is crucial. Particularly in military history. It is one thing to say that a tank is impressive, but how does it fare against its contemporaries? That is the real acid test of any military hardware. Can it defeat its opponent? If not, then its occupants are in trouble. Therefore, the duel series is onto a winner in my opinion.
But comparing the machines alone is not enough. Without the men to operate them they would stand idle. In the case of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Centurions and Arab T55's were finely matched technologically, but the Israeli's training, leadership and motivation proved decisive. After being caught off guard and then holding back a strong attack at the beginning of the war, the Israelis held their ground and launched a decisive counter-attack. And this very much mirrored the British and NATO policy. They could never hope to build more tanks than the Russians, so chose to concentrate on quality, and training. And when opposing forces are matched in terms of a balance between quanitity and quality in equipment, training usually proves decisive, backed up by morale and leadership.
Simon Dunstan has written widely on both the Middle East and Armour, and this breadth of knowledge pays dividends in this book. Different factors are considered, without being disparate, and the broader context of the Cold War and the Second World War provide a sound basis. This book informs greatly our knowledge of armoured warfare. Not only that, but it makes me want to go to Bovington to look at some tanks!
Centurion vs. T55 is published by Osprey