Churnalism is a brilliant idea – no surprise that it was originally one of Chris Lightfoot’s. Basically, it allows you to determine how much of a given newspaper article was copied from which press release. There’s a nice graphic visualisation, and a diff, so you can see precisely what was altered and what taken over…
Read More Fun with nonsense and hash functionsSultan al-Qassemi kicks in a data point to the ArseDex. Apparently Libyan agents are distributing flyers in Guinea and Nigeria calling for mercenaries to fight for $2,000 a day. Yesterday, loyalist thugs cost $500 a day in Libya. Even with the huge supply of potential thugs in sub-Saharan Africa’s demobilised militias being available, the ArseDex…
Read More the CIA decided they wanted Roland dead, so that son of a bitch Van Owen cut off Roland’s headYou can consider MWC as being a giant augmented-reality computer game. You run frantically in and out of different constructed environments, very varied but actually deeply conventionalised, trying to score points. You get points for collecting gossip, useful information, sales leads, and shiny gadgets; you lose them for queuing, being publicly humiliated, or getting stuck…
Read More from the MWC gossip columnSo I had the opportunity to take part in an Augmented Reality standardisation meeting on the fringe of this year’s 3GSM Mobile World Congress. First of all, it was the year the heavens opened (someone on twitter said it was as if the show had turned into Glastonbury) and I got drenched and my shoes…
Read More i haz bin in yr AR standardz, facilitatin yr interop. kthx!Pulling together various resources, I’m beginning to get a picture of what happened with the cut-off and restoration of the Internet in Egypt. First up, at least in some senses, it may be valid to say that the Internet played a role – Arbor Networks observed that traffic to and from Egyptian networks (and between…
Read More A Little Bit of Egyptian Internet TwaddleThanks to reader Koranteng for this data point. You may recall this post about the market for thugs in Egyptian politics. Specifically, when the government needed arseholes to attack the protestors, it had to pay four times per capita GDP to get them. In Libya this week, it is said that the government is using…
Read More Market forces live: ArseDexIn other, tangential, mobile industry news, I was amused by this: Apparently, if you drive around Alaska with a spectrum analyzer on the front seat of your car, nobody stops you. This is awesome. It’s awesome, and it’s also true of huge nuclear reactor complexes near Bratislava, where I once did just that back in…
Read More Admin: MWCNon-Thursday music link. But on Thursday! Richard X vs. New Order “Jetstream”.
Read More musicMeanwhile, a scoop from Robert Fisk. This is amusing; if some sort of art-terrorist group had wanted to mock US policy, could they have done better than appointing as special envoy a man whose father was the CIA’s head of planning and who is actually Mubarak’s lawyer? The State Department should probably review personnel policy.…
Read More lawyerDaniel Davies‘s post about arseholes, and more formally about the importance of the reactionary mob as an institution, has been a well deserved hit. Here’s something interesting, though. Fairly serious rumours reckoned that the arseholes were being paid as much as $68 a day. In theory, if an arsehole was on duty 340 days a…
Read More Cash rules everything around me (but perhaps less than you might think)