Remember the great Vodafone Greece/Ericsson AXE hack? We blogged it and some of its freakish consequences. Now, the IEEE Spectrum has published a detailed analysis of the hack, here. It’s fascinating stuff, but if anything it deepens the mystery. What essentially happened; well, somebody who probably had physical access to the switch used a rare…
Read More Damn Strange “Teenagers”This is an image of the cockpit of the next-generation Russian air superiority fighter, the Sukhoi 35. (h/t Aviation Week) What strikes me about it is that user-interface design for combat aircraft has caught up with what computer-game programmers thought it was like in 1997. Sukhoi have clearly leapt ahead in the glass cockpit trend…
Read More GUI for JetsPerhaps that should be in Every Boy’s Handbook? RSA reports on an online shop set up specifically to drain stolen credit cards. A card costs between $2-5 a throw, presumably reflecting a low success rate in sucking them dry. Setting up a merchant account and DIYing, as most of Landslide’s customers did, is clearly the…
Read More HOWTO launder dodgy credit cardsThis interview with the architect of MySQL looks very cool indeed. Rather than just hoicking data out of files on a big hard drive, the latest version can use a Web site, or multiple Web sites, as a source of data on which database operations can be performed and the results served up to something…
Read More When the Web is your monster databaseSo last week’s mobile-phones-kill-bees screamer front page was bad enough. They ignored all the countervailing evidence and picked out a tiny uncontrolled study carried out in someone’s spare time that neither mentioned the condition they were interested in, nor even attempted to measure how much RF energy they were using. This Sunday, they were at…
Read More The National Inquirer, now fortified with Patrick CockburnThis tale of Google Earth being used to monitor violence in Darfur, as well as this, raises an interesting point. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke tells of how the Bosnian War parties were hugely impressed by the mapping software running on computers the US State Department brought to the conference – they could pull up…
Read More Diplomacy by visualisationNo beheadings in this story, though. Congolese radio station aims to give a microphone to those whose voices have never been heard before. I liked this line: The show’s technicians – after getting caught in Army-militia crossfire twice – finally managed to put up antennas in the region’s more remote rain forest areas. So now…
Read More Just to make a living and help out the CongoleseOK, so I’m trying to create a dropdown menu with around 40 options using the Python lib Tkinter. I’ve just learned that you can’t just define a command – call it get – and pass in the option as a variable (i.e. def get(variable) and then, for option X, command=get(X)), which brings me the horrible…
Read More Bleggin’Note that blogging is currently slow, due to a little project of mine that is taking up spare mindshare. The Guardian Column Generator should be operational by next week or thereabouts. Gah, it’s hard to start programming again, but it’s the satisfaction of craft.
Read More Slow BloggingOK, then, someone’s been complaining about this blog’s general appearance, specifically the javascript clock that Internet Explorer sufferers can see around their cursors. It’s Web 2.0. Honest. Fools. Just imagine if I had decided to ignore the user testing feedback and unleash this TYR Beta from December, 2004 on the world. I really can’t imagine…
Read More Somebody’s been criticising my web design