So our fine Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne is going to launch an “international marketing campaign” in order to attract more immigrants. Does anyone now remember that David Blunkett launched a propaganda campaign to put immigrants off, emphasising fine British institutions like rain and railway disruption? Clearly Byrne doesn’t. But perhaps he’s hoping to target the…
Read More The stupid – it’s Byrne’s!Charlie Stross’s space-colony überthread brings a couple of things to mind. First up, the best thought-through space elevator project is costed at $40bn, not far off £21-22bn. The Al-Yamamah contract was £43 billion – two space elevators. The degree of corruption involved is, literally, mindblowing. Perhaps the BAE managers and Tory bagmen I regularly insult…
Read More Your circuit’s dead – there’s something wrong!The Dallas Observer reports on Richard Chichakli’s lawsuit against the feds, and also runs his reply. Essentially, the court threw out his case, but good. The Observer also gets the honour of Chichakli comments spam – like this blog and Eurotrib, a sockpuppet calling itself “Graceland” rocked up to claim that he’s innocent, on the…
Read More Bout-Chichakli updateThere is no British netroots, and God forbid there ever will be. Why? Well, the original thing is/was an effort to mobilise the grassroots support of the US Democratic Party, to shove in the underpinning of a mass party that it doesn’t really have. This was intended to a) supply activists and donations, and b)…
Read More I never wanted the love that you showed meYou probably don’t know that the government wants to implement wholesale filtering of URL requests from the end of next month, do you? Not that the national press, TV, or anything else has reported on it, nor has there been any serious parliamentary debate. Nuh. But the Home Office is pressurising British ISPs to install…
Read More It’s for your own good (again)The next big miscarriage of justice makes it to the BBC. Great. But this is impressively dishonest from Jim Gamble, former supercop and head of the Home Office’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre: He also defended the record of the operation and told the Radio 4 programme that more than 90% of the individuals…
Read More Jim Gamble: no integrity at allWhat would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite…
Read More The Next Big Miscarriage of JusticeOK, 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 designLooking at this inspiring achievement, I fell to wondering exactly how YouTube is serving up its videos. Now, so far I can remember seeing YouTube content from hostnames with the form lax-vXX.lax.youtube.com or ash-vXX.ash.youtube.com, where the x stands for an arbitrary number. Clearly those are either LA or Ashburn, Virginia, where the big Equinix East…
Read More YouTube and the “series of tubes”A lot of ISP people are concerned about the volume of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, especially thick stuff like video. To be more specific, they are usually concerned about the volume of P2P traffic their users draw from outside their networks, as after all, it’s the extra upstream transit they pay for, or the…
Read More Topology-aware P2P