2004

It is reported that senior Mexican officials including the attorney-general have had identifying chips implanted into their persons. These are intended to control access to sensitive information and provide a means of locating them in the event of kidnapping. Presumably the “chips” are RFID devices, which would emit a radio signal containing a unique identifier…

The Register reports that a group of Romanians have invented wireless mobile music sharing. “Instead, it’s a small two-man smartphone software company based in Bucharest. Best known for its Symbian Series 60 software, Simeda recently introduced a small piece of file discovery software for wireless Pocket PCs which implemented Apple’s Rendezvous service. Now they’ve gone…

Sunday Times report Almost all the news concerning the British sector in Iraq has involved the area around Amara in one way or another, but it’s been hard to pull together. The Sunday Times (Sunderer, perhaps?) has done a good job though, with this story on the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regt in the area.…

NO question as to what the main story at the moment is. The suggestion that Blair was talked out of resigning last month is a beauty, whose importance is only borne out by the race by cabinet ministers to distance themselves from it. A small industry has already grown up producing weird conspiracy-ish explanations. One…

The Guardian reports that Afghan police in Kabul have uncovered a group of mercenaries who were operating their own prison under the cover of an “import business”. In the building they had several people hanging upside down, who had apparently been beaten up first. Lovely. Although the group’s leader is apparently one Jonathan Keith Idema,…

Firm whose washing machine cooked worker fined £325,000 This case, which I blogged at the time, has finally been nailed down. To recap, Paul Clegg ventured into a 40ft long industrial washing machine to clear it of sheets tangled in the workings. He was overcome by heat inside the thing, but although people outside knew…

Back in May, I asked readers to contact me if you saw any signs of a flood of Eastern European migrants after their failure to arrive. Despite, I’m sure, your best efforts to locate them I had concluded that somehow they must have been mislaid, all 2 million of ’em, by the tabs, Tories and…

The BBC achieved a small triumph last night when it managed to follow a repeated Yes, Minister episode from 1981 concerning a hospital with no patients with a Newsnight special on the difficulty of measuring public-sector productivity and the temptation for politicians to exploit this by using dodgy figures. This is something the Ranter touches…

It is reported that Microsoft has patented technology for networking mobile electronic devices through the user’s skin. Gear like PDAs, phones etc would communicate by using the skin’s electrical conductivity. Further applications could supposedly include producing power for such devices from your movements, rather like a self-winding watch, and even displaying information on the skin.…

Numerous reports in the main media suggest that the Ministry of Defence is going to come out very badly in the current public spending round (yes, I know it’s not called that any more). In so far as the leaks agree, they seem to be suggesting a 1% budget increase. Whether this is real terms…