Birthday Present

July 29, 2008 in CCTV, Home Office, action, hacker, politics, surveillance

So, walking back from dinner, what did I catch lurking in a side street? Yes, but yes, one of these..
There it waited, with a 4-way CCTV installation lunging out the roof like a Blairite erection…I took photographs, and the driver suddenly reversed. But he or she didn’t go. So I called the phone number on [...]

Radio silence

July 16, 2008 in admin

I’m off on holiday, so talk amongst yourselves until the 25th…

Avient, Again

July 13, 2008 in 4GW, Iraq, Operation Firedump, Zimbabwe, action, aviation, corruption, mercenary, pirates

So, what if there was an airline that uses the Zimbabwean registry in order to get around most people’s idea of aviation safety, is almost certainly in cahoots with the Zimbabwean government, and was involved not just with running guns into the DRC in the late 90s but also with actual combat air missions, dropping [...]

Security By Audacity

July 13, 2008 in ID, electronics, geekage, intelligence and stupidity

Does anyone else think the reason the Oystercard system had a multi-hour outage might be somehow connected with the fact that TFL’s response to the class break of the NXP MiFare Classic cards it uses has so far been even worse than the manufacturers’? NXP’s contribution to dealing with this has been to sue the [...]

Two odd things

July 13, 2008 in 4GW, Hezbollah, Israel, architecture, cultures of war, hacker, rockets

First: the Ethiopian army claims to have killed a Canadian colonel fighting with Somali insurgents. I assume they mean a Canadian who claims to be a colonel in the insurgency, rather than a Canadian colonel who joined, but who can tell these days?
Secondly, here’s a special one – Jewish settler caught firing improvised rockets into [...]

Aaaand….we’re operational

July 10, 2008 in Operation Firedump, Python, Viktor, action, aviation, hacker, maps

View Larger Map
The ViktorFeed is now operational! The map’s permanent link is here (aren’t Google URLs snappy?); the raw data is available as an RSS 2.0 feed with Simple GeoRSS tags here, at least until I decide on a permanent URL. It is updated every 5 minutes. Huge thanks to all at MySociety.

dive! dive! dive!

July 7, 2008 in 4GW, Sierra Leone, drugs, logistics, naval, open source, pirates, ship, smuggling

Der Spiegel has an interesting story regarding the Colombian drug smugglers’ homemade submarines. These have so far been considered a curiosity, but apparently they are becoming more and more common, and the technology is developing fast. The biggest vessel captured so far displaced 46 tonnes, presumably surfaced, with a payload of 10 tonnes. Apparently the [...]

The Guardian Is Not Serious About CVF

July 7, 2008 in British Army, Europe, F-35, France, Harrier, Iraq, Kettle, RAF, carrier, cultures of war, fisking, naval, politics, special relationships, strategy, stupid procurement

There hasn’t been much progress on my long-term beef with Martin Kettle for a while. But it’s worth remembering that if the Guardian has a major leading article that isn’t a business/economics story, it’s probably him. And Saturday’s second lead (behind a rather competent finance story) bears the Kettle hallmarks.
Forty years ago the Royal Navy [...]

Using up al-Hashemi

July 6, 2008 in 4GW, Iraq, politics

We said the Iraqi political situation was getting worse, and the main political group that represents the ex-insurgents was splitting from them. Abu Aardvark has much confirmation.
Check out the troll freakout in the comments.

Perhaps he’s dead, I’ll just make sure…

July 6, 2008 in Cameron, London, Tories, civil service, conservatives, engineering, ideology, politics, special relationships

Boris Johnston really is turning out to be as bad as it was blindingly obvious he was going to be. There are no shortage of examples, but this one in particular makes me shudder with fear. Yes, it’s the desalination plant.
Desalination? Yes. But it’s not just that. A desalination plant that will produce about as [...]