you know; you can’t go home

April 26, 2009 in Operation Firedump, Viktor

Now here’s something. Remember British Gulf International? The first, founding mob in the Viktor Bout story. Still, as late as last year, by far the biggest source of dubious aircraft movements through the UAE, almost all going to markets in the War on Trrr. The data speaks for itself; between the Viktorfeed going live and [...]

those dangerous four words: “I’ve had an idea”

April 26, 2009 in geekage

My heart sank when I saw these words: Firefox user interface guru. And yes, he’s had an idea. A suggestion: rather than a fancy new UI, how about having a crack at stability? FF 3, and the later FF 2s, were and are crashy, hangy, and inconsistent. It regularly (daily) gets its knickers in a [...]

cool

April 26, 2009 in RepRap

RepRap made circuits.

HOWTO be a Cyberwar Expert

April 26, 2009 in hacker, intelligence and stupidity, Internet, terrorism, TWOS

F-Secure Labs’ blog points to Cyberwar is Bullshit. I say yes! And I point you to Evgeny Morozov‘s cracking 10-step guide to cyberwar fearmongering. Follow his simple plan and you’ll be able to spread arrant drivel to the underbriefed with the best of them. I especially like: 2. Begin the story in Estonia, with a [...]

Chalabi: a place in history

April 26, 2009 in intelligence and stupidity, Iran, Iraq

Interesting to see Ahmed Chalabi admit essentially everything I suspected of him back in 2004. This must surely count in the top ten intelligence triumphs of history, along with ULTRA, VENONA, the Rote Kapelle and the Normandy deception plan.

Jordan Barab

April 26, 2009 in mastur/metablogging

I’m late to the party with this; but this is fantastic. Jordan Barab of Confined Space, the workplace health & safety blog, is now going to be the US government minister in charge of just that. He was one of the very first people ever to link to this blog back in 2003; he was [...]

powerpoint tank watch

April 12, 2009 in stupid procurement

I don’t know what the cancellation of FCS, the US Army’s whizzy all-things-to-all-men, fancy wheeled vehicles, robots, computers etc supergig, will mean for the UK’s FRES, which is a scaled-down version of a very similar vision – lighter, highly mobile wheeled armoured vehicles, heavily networked, using fancy sensors and precision indirect fire rather than heavy [...]

an “I’m sorry” attack on the constitution

April 12, 2009 in ORGANISE, protest

Whoops, my flashmob stormed parliament. Really got to get my ORGANISE config sorted out…

the science of drivel

April 12, 2009 in intelligence and stupidity, memes, politics

The impact of terrorism; new research demonstrates that people who survive terrorist attacks think more highly of themselves. Terrorism causes arrogance. Meanwhile, I enjoyed this Bartholomew’s Notes post, in which a self-made terrorism expert who is currently doing the Nazi-memorabilia circuit with his Barack Obama-is-a-foreigner act turns out to have been a pusher of 1990s [...]

artefact = ideology, again

April 12, 2009 in snark

Speaking of industrial innovation, which we sort of were, Sadly, No finds Mark Steyn being even stupider than I thought possible. He is arguing with every appearance of seriousness that a) General Motors should invest in bigger cars and b) that otherwise family sizes in the US will shrink and TEH NIGRAS!!! Seriously; he’s got [...]