Were purchased from leftover Bosnian war stocks for the Iraqi security forces by U.S. agents in BiH, and flown out of the country by Aerocom in four runs with the Ilyushin 76 ER-IBV, serial no. 3423699. But where they were delivered remains a mystery, and it is feared that the weapons actually went to the…
Read More 99 Tonnes of GunsOf course they will! Major Chip’n’Pin securifart. It’s essentially the exploit described by Prof. Ross Anderson of the Cambridge Computer Lab, as described on his cracking blog (in both senses of cracking) – thieves have converted some point-of-sale terminals to collect the data from the cards’ magnetic strips, then made new cards. They can only…
Read More ID Cards Will Make Us SaferOne of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/GapAt 2022 CET, 5th May, relay2.cia.gov was in the house, googling for “east-west cargo sharjah”. They read this post. One of the best ones here, I think.
Read More King of ReferrersWhat a reshuffle it was, too. Despite all the pre-election expectations management (it’ll only be serious if it’s a loss of 400), it looks like the local elections really perturbed Blair’s systems. Take a look. So, after all the stand-by-your-man stuff, it’s the Angolan option after all, as Alan Clark would have put it. The…
Read More Chainsaw ReshuffleWell, after almost a full fortnight of semi-frantic canvassing and leaflet dropping around the streets of Englefield Green East, that’s it. I was not elected to the council. No surprises there. I polled some 282 votes, compared to 165 for the Lib Dems last time out. The two Tory candidates got in with 591 and…
Read More Runnymede Report BackThat’s it. It’s done. The most stupid remark possible. The Sistine Chapel of stupidity. Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then. From…
Read More The Climax of Stupidity“My family was advised that his deportation to Jamaica could be a typo which is indicative of the mistakes made on my brother’s case.” So where would he have been deported to but for the typo? Jamaida? Bamaica? Chile, naturally. The Home Office, a credit to the British government for sheer efficiency.
Read More Some TypoI was amused to see in this weekend’s Indy that a British financial advisor has got himself into trouble by selling his clients securities issued by a US firm specialising in death futures, properly called viatical investments. His situation doesn’t look good, as he seems to have told his clients that 20 per cent of…
Read More Killed By DeathFor a magazine that prides itself on being at The Cutting Edge, that even named itself after the Internet before 90% of the population knew there was an internet, Wired seems to break its HTML a lot. (Note – something like normal TYR and AFOE service should be restored after the election.)
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