It is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture: The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material. He plans to approach US…
Read More Burn, Hollywood, Burnham!Reader Chris “Chris” Williams recently came up with an interesting idea regarding the unnerving incident during the Mumbai terrorist assault when somebody called Mr 10%’s office and, posing as the Indian foreign minister, threatened war. Chris reckons that not only are the two linked, but the phone call was actually the main effort; in fact,…
Read More HOWTO spoof the Pakistani Foreign MinistryThis BBC Radio 4 documentary about the British nuclear deterrent and the people who operate it is absolutely cracking. Not surprisingly, the man behind it is none other than Professor Peter Hennessy (can we call him Henn-dawg yet?). One of the things that stands out is the amount of desperate psychological coping going on. The…
Read More mentalities, bunker, and otherwiseZombies march on Sarah Palin campaign event, as they do in Halting State (although this seems to have been planned well in advance, and that was a flashmob). Charlie couldn’t predict Sarah Palin, however; politics can always outweird science fiction. Relatedly, the BT 21CN network upgrade always promised to unearth a ton of weird things…
Read More World of Charlie Stross WatchWhat have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper. The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say,…
Read More All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfyMore China convergence blogging. Declan McCullagh reports on efforts by the US and China to sneak something nasty into the ITU standardisation process, through a committee that doesn’t publish its documentation or let anyone else in the room. But the Chinese appear to be the ones leaning forward; The Chinese author of the document, Huirong…
Read More They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father TimeHere is the presentation I delivered at OpenTech 2008: | View | Upload your own I’d publish the text, but I didn’t prepare a text:-) Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I’ve been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of…
Read More The ViktorFeed: DocumentationHere’s a visualisation of today’s output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes‘s network graph function. Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can’t I have arrowheads? Rest assured the definitive version is coming…
Read More Political Pathetic Python AgainWell, I asked for details of that Hezbollah converged telecoms network, and some appeared via the comments at Abu Muqawama. First of all, there’s a map. My first reaction on seeing this was that it looked a lot like a rather underdeveloped, dated official backbone network – there’s not much redundancy anywhere, and there’s only…
Read More I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hallJust to explain my absence, first of all I’ve been changing ISPs – you may recall I promised to give Virgin Media the push. Bogons Ltd – Internet for the Clueful were tapped after the normal exhaustive procurement process, and I spent last Sunday afternoon setting up an ADDON ARM8200 modem/router to work with my…
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