someone has to stay in control

January 30, 2011 in hacker, politics, press

Something else. Around the table sat his son James– the head of News Corp’s European and Asian operations – Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of its British newspaper division News International, plus the editors of the Sun and the Times, Dominic Mohan and James Harding respectively. Meatballs were on the menu, although staff preferred not [...]

the tapes

January 30, 2011 in politics, press

So what about that Murdoch? Gordon Brown is suing, and the government has been claiming that meetings between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks were covered by MP-constituent privilege; Tessa Jowell (for it is she!) alleges that the monitoring was going on as recently as last week. The police investigation is back on with a new [...]

surveillance

January 30, 2011 in aviation

The Viktorfeed shows an Eastern Skyjets (icao ESJ) flight from Cairo into Dubai. Flight number ESJ020, arrived 2300Z, very likely one of their two executive-config DC-9s.

Dumb Blond

January 30, 2011 in Tories, Wanktanks

The Philip Blond test: if you have a new policy idea, ask if Philip Blond would support it, and if so, bin it.

interesting project

January 30, 2011 in GSM

This looks interesting. The low-cost base station element is already increasingly well served commercially, and also by the OpenBTS team. But I’d be really fascinated to learn more about the mesh-WLAN side, and I rather think they ought to concentrate on one or the other.

in the future, trolls will be a natural resource like oil

January 30, 2011 in Internet, introspection, Iran, memes, music, networks

Looking back at Tunisia, and forward at Egypt, I think there’s an important point that this post almost hits but not quite. Specifically, I’m fairly sceptical about “Twitter Revolutions” and such – if your revolution has someone else’s brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? – but I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I’m feeling [...]

fan service

January 29, 2011 in aviation

I wonder who is heading on a steady course of 280 degrees True along the Mediterranean in their Boeing Business Jet from the Texan/Saudi operator MidEast Jet. If they started from Egypt, given the time they came into range and their air speed, that would fit with the BBC reporting that prominent persons had left [...]

fremdscham

January 24, 2011 in press

Faintly disgusting at the Register. “The corporation vowed to increase the spending on “devolved nations” – which is Beeb-speak not for Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea, you may be surprised to learn, but Wales and Scotland. This will increase from 12 per cent to 17 per cent.” Because people who aren’t as pale as Andrew [...]

migration: lazyweb

January 23, 2011 in mastur/metablogging

Does anyone know if I can trust this stack exchange answer (referring to wordpress bug 14818) that wordpress won’t mangle all the Google Maps, video, ManyEyes visualisations and the like from the old site during a programmatic import? I’m now down to two blockers before moving TYR Classic.

I thought I was following you…

January 23, 2011 in politics

For George Osborne read Bernie Madoff: he’ll take your money and take your job, but don’t worry – if you wait long enough, he promises you’ll get it all back from someone else. (Ed Balls, here.) Note he didn’t say “Of course, we accept the necessity of cuts, but George Osborne is really like Bernie [...]