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Hijacking the blog for work purposes. I know quite a few readers here develop software or design things in a freelance, startup, or small business context. What is it that telecoms operators/ISPs, both fixed and mobile, aren’t offering you at the moment? What are they selling you that you don’t want? Leave your thoughts in…

As the news fromm Venezuela has become progressively worse – and let’s be clear, it’s still getting worse from this absolutely terrible baseline – there’s been some arguing around the Internet about politicians, like Jeremy Corbyn, who were very supportive of Hugo Chavez’s government there. My beef here is that someone like Jean-Luc Mélenchon went…

Peter Pomerantsev goes to Mongolia and meets the president, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur turned politician. Specifically, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur and martial arts champ who named his company after The Godfather. This isn’t just eccentric; in Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta has a fascinating chapter on the role movies played in the making of…

I may be going to munch a few pages myself later on, but at least I don’t have this honking great phone directory to chew.

Jeremy Paxman spent a whole career interrogating and humiliating politicians over mistakes they made and very definitely over supposed transgressions in their private lives (eh). The BBC – that’s us, in other words – paid him a prince’s ransom for it. The TV programmes he worked on reported in detail on the phone-hacking scandal and,…

If you were looking forward to the talk at OpenTech I cancelled, this will give you about 60% of the content.

Those of us who blogged through the Iraq War will of course remember the Friedman unit, a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq, conventionally equal to six months, named for Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman of the New York Times. But I didn’t realise the unit has…

This Chris Cook piece about campaigning strategy is good. Here’s something I noticed which he doesn’t call out specifically. The party leaders’ activities by ITV region are actually very similar. Going by Chris’s table, Theresa May has made 23 visits and Jeremy Corbyn 22. Both leaders have concentrated their operations on two regions, Greater London…

It looks like the worldwide ransomware attack on Windows XP machines originates from one of the exploits in the so-called Shadow Brokers dump, a collection of exploits developed or bought by the NSA. Oliver Rivers asks: Where was GCHQ? Well, the answer is more like: Where was CESG? Or LCSA? Through the Second World War…

So the NHS got hacked. Jeremy Hunt saved £5m a year in payments for extended Microsoft support and now look what’s happened. This reminded me of something important. Software engineers have a concept of “technical debt” that is worth remembering. Technical debt arises when you decide to put some work off to the future, so…