So, I’ve been remiss with the book blogging. Here goes. Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley is a group biography of the phone phreaks, possibly the original geek culture, exploiting the in-band signalling that phone companies relied on up to the late 70s for fun and if not profit, at least free calls. I liked…
Read More Books: Exploding the PhoneThere’s a lot that could be said about this weekend’s political entertainment, but the bit that stays with me is that I fear we’re losing the best thing about Ed Miliband, which was calm, sitzfleisch, and the ability to wait out stupid media bullshit. This really is something you want in a leader, and we…
Read More A bad signSo we’re waiting to know if the UCU’s higher education committee has decided to call off the action or not. It’s been a tense couple of weeks – the “EPF” came out with its super-extreme and deeply dodgy plans, the UCU rolled out, the universities threatened a variety of draconian punishments, and then they began…
Read More Waiting for #defenduss…Many IMSI. So catching. Much aeroplane. Such Dirtbox. OK, so the US Department of Justice, or more directly, the FBI is flying around in light aircraft carrying an IMSI catcher in order to spy on the cellular traffic of evildoers and, hey, anybody else in the 37km max diameter of a GSM cell centred on…
Read More the British origins of #dirtboxCon trick. £30bn extra cuts. That lower immigration thing is no longer operative. Voting on the European Arrest Warrant or maybe not. They get precisely nothing from their “renegotiation” and then the courts take the whole point away. Miliband goes to the CBI and the members hiss a journalist for talking leadership crisis. The Libyan…
Read More Still the Omnishambles governmentA bit more Guardian journamalism. Here’s Nicholas Watt having at “Ed Miliband’s supporters”. You might not notice that he managed to report one of the two “plotters” backing out of the plot, but buried the lede right down to the very last par. The internal critics agreed. But they took issue with the leadership’s response…
Read More Never give up.Here’s an astonishing piece of journalism from last weekend’s Labour mini-crisis. Daniel Boffy, The Obscurer‘s policy editor tells us: Even more significantly, this newspaper has learned that 20 Labour frontbenchers have indicated they are “actively considering Ed Miliband’s future”. The information came from a senior Labour MP who last week canvassed the parliamentary Labour party…
Read More Forget letters from 20 MPs. Remember ScotlandThe sheer mendacity of the USS management, or rather, the Employers’ Pension Forum, has been breathtaking. The outrage ought to be greater. Dennis Leach of Warwick is doing a great job calling out the bullshit. For example, the EPF’s Q&A document supposedly explaining changes to the scheme gave the increase in life expectancy since 1974…
Read More a brief collection of the EPF’s lies on #ussWhy are a lot of professors going on strike? Or rather, on a marking boycott? The answer ought to worry anyone who is a member of a pension scheme, of any kind, in the UK. To start with, we’ve got the USS, the pension fund for the universities as they were before 1992. All the…
Read More #solidarity with the UCU: if you have a pension you want to read thisTheresa May says that #CSAinquiry can start its work even though it does not have a chairman/woman. (Panel’s first meeting next week.) — ExaroNews (@ExaroNews) November 3, 2014 Perhaps they could have an empty chair? Or what about a serious suggestion? As Chris Brooke was saying in the other place, couldn’t we borrow a Commonwealth…
Read More A serious suggestion.