it could be you, but not while she’s around

August 28, 2011 in hacker, statistics

This is fascinating, especially when you remember GTech’s role in our own dear sordid raffle. Great reporting, too.

various official agencies knew about the usual lobotomised pc crowd

August 28, 2011 in funny ha ha

This Melanie Phillips piece is remarkably insightful.

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest

August 28, 2011 in Tories

Tanya Gold brings the fisk to A4E: Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison’s PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? “Emma believes there are jobs,” she replied. “There are hidden jobs.” Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of [...]

A little story about Google Mail

August 27, 2011 in Internet

Jamie Zawinski and Charlie Stross pitch in to the poisonous row about Google + and its “real names policy”. Now G+ seemed like a good idea to me because of this instant-classic paper, which demonstrated that a) people hate creepy targeted-advertising schemes even if you pay them to put up with it, b) we manage [...]

exclusion zone

August 27, 2011 in Blair, CCTV, class, demographics, politics

I bet you thought I was kidding. But try this lede: Taped to the inside of a Sainsbury’s window in King’s Lynn, a printout of a map reminds teenagers of the town’s restrictions. Next to it, a notice on Norfolk Constabulary headed paper spells out the terms of a dispersal order: within the marked area, [...]

so…

August 21, 2011 in politics, press

Tom Watson’s twitter feed linked the transcript of the BBC Radio story on re-opening the Daniel Morgan case. There’s not much in there that’s new if you’ve been reading this, but I’ve excerpted the best bits. 1: The story that vanished But the Report can tonight reveal that we’ve seen a copy of a witness [...]

your call could not be connected – please check the number and try again

August 21, 2011 in GSM, hacker, Home Office, Internet, networks, surveillance

The Obscurer has possibly the first intelligent article on the whole “turn off their Facebook! that’ll learn em!” furore. Notably, they interviewed one-man UK mobile industry institution Mike Short. Go, read, and up your clue. I especially liked that the piece provided some facts about the 7th July 2005 terrorist incident and the mobile networks. [...]

Yes, they are all black

August 21, 2011 in politics

Back in 2006, I said to Charlie Stross that the zeitgeist of the near future would be exasperation. I also said something similar as a comment on the Halting State book-in-progress, so if you think everyone in it seems grumpy, you’ve got me to thank. But, of course, we’ve now landed in the near future [...]

slightly less lazyweb

August 14, 2011 in admin, geekage

So I couldn’t just drop the OAuth library into the plugins directory because I didn’t have sudo rights there, so I wgot and zipped it and uploaded it as a plugin via the web interface and changed the include to point there. And now the end of the bifurcation era may be in sight. Not [...]

technique of generalised mayhem without any particular direction

August 14, 2011 in football, GSM, Home Office, Internet, London, Met, mindless violence, protest, surveillance

Over at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves [...]