OK, this is it. Not only must the Home Office go, so too must the Association of Chief Police Officers, the newest political party on the block. Its president, Ken Jones, now wants not just 90 days of detention without charge, but unlimited detention without charge. After all, it worked so well in Northern Ireland.…
Read More ACPO Must GoAges ago, during a comments thread discussion here about British nuclear weapons and Trident replacement, Chris Lightfoot (peace and blessings be upon him) suggested the option of “virtual” nuclear capability; that is, maintaining all the necessary technology, keeping the plans on the books, but not actually making a bomb. The canonical example is Japan, which…
Read More Fear of a Swedish BombRussians demonstrate swarming UAVs down in sunny Aberporth. Which reminds me – I once met a man who lived near there and claimed to have seen numerous UFOs. Yup, just across the bay from the RAE/DERA/WhateverIt’sCalledNow missile range. Still, Flight doesn’t give much detail, but here’s the maker’s webpage. Damn, a swarm of those would…
Read More Flock: the social UAVRemember the great Vodafone Greece/Ericsson AXE hack? We blogged it and some of its freakish consequences. Now, the IEEE Spectrum has published a detailed analysis of the hack, here. It’s fascinating stuff, but if anything it deepens the mystery. What essentially happened; well, somebody who probably had physical access to the switch used a rare…
Read More Damn Strange “Teenagers”Rob Farley has reviewed a book I’ve just been rereading, Marc Levinson’s The Box. It’s a history of containerisation and how it had a massive impact on the economy – Levinson argues that port and cargo handling costs were so great pre-containers that containerisation itself was enough to bring about a huge reorganisation of world…
Read More Big Big Steel Boxes!The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Agency, BKA) recently decided to try out one of those face recognition programs on CCTV cameras placed in a railway station in the city of Mainz. And what happened? Well, having installed the software in October last year, they recruited 200 regular travellers as volunteers, whose faces were recorded in…
Read More CCTV Face Recognition: Not Just Evil, Useless Too