So the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which…
Read More killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphereI don’t quite know what to make of this: Q What other sites, remember any particular internet sites you looked at? A When I was doing research about MPs, I looked at one called theyworkforyou.com and I think another one was called publicwhips [publicwhip.org.uk]. Q So, have you carried out any research to … about…
Read More Sometimes, FaxYourMP Just Isn’t EnoughThe rate of intrusion attempts on US government networks has fallen this year. Obviously, this is going to be a data series dominated by the spikes, so a good botnet between now and Christmas could change that. But it’s a nice correction to the constant “cyberwar” bollocks. Also, check out the hilariously .com boom era…
Read More the Pentagon unchecks “internet connection sharing”Does anyone have any idea why I’m banned from reading ForeignPolicy.com? For the last few days, the three FP blogs I subscribe to haven’t been updating, and trying to read this I had to use an anonymous SSL-proxy server. Just for that “test your practical circumvention skills” feeling! I can ping and traceroute to their…
Read More RSTI do worry that a lot of the continued drive for government data release is really about the hope that the public will find useful sunday-for-monday press release fodder that will help spin the cuts. (By comparison, you try finding a full list of cuts.) Did you know New Labour was spending your money on…
Read More two links about freedom of informationHere’s a question. Having seen the Google’s new “Priority Inbox” feature and also John Graham-Cumming’s POPFile application, both ways of using a Bayesian classifier to guess which e-mail you will want to read first and to file it automatically, I was wondering if anyone had applied the same idea to RSS. I’ve recently started to…
Read More replacing myself with a rather complicated PHP web application, it seemsIf I hadn’t been fiddling with file permissions to get WordPress running last Sunday, I’d probably have been writing about the Haystack saga. I’m a bit gestört by some of the coverage of it – Evgeny Morozov, typically, has been doing good work in the general war on bullshit, but I’m less convinced of his…
Read More “Cyberwar” and Iran: the other side of the hillThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyOK, so some more on Aldrich’s GCHQ. Obviously, technology is at the centre of this story. I’ve said that the signals intelligence world is special among spooks because it guarantees results – they may not be the right results, they may not be helpful, but you can usually depend on it producing something to whack…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 2 – GCHQ and the Tech Industry