So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failureWhat is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…
Read More The politics of call centres, part oneDear Lazyweb, has anyone seen a data series showing the forecast for the UK government budget? Or will I have to download all the Treasury statements and re-chew it?
Read More lazyweb: old budget forecastsQuick-hit update to the Baluchistan/US/Iran post; Daniel Drezner has a crack at rounding up the news and comes pretty close to arguing that the Americans are trying to stop the Israelis getting them into a war with Iran. Akbar Ahmed argues, in a must-read, that things in Baluchistan have been getting much worse lately and…
Read More links…Reading through tehgrauniad’s riots deep-dive, the impression that I get is that the whole “riots as an insurgency” idea wasn’t that far off. I’ve been indisciplined in that I took notes but didn’t keep links (a problem with paying for and reading the actual newspaper), so you’ll have to trust me on this. Obviously, blaming…
Read More A quick look back to the riotsFollowing up on the earlier post about IMSI catchers and shopping malls and Hezbollah, I wanted to link to a really excellent piece in Le Monde about mining call-detail records (“fadettes” in French, from “facture détaillée téléphonique”). The URI, here now leads to an annoyingly cutesy 404 page. However, the search function turns it up…
Read More 404How much of a bastard was Jack Straw again? This much. Scotland Yard has opened a criminal investigation into secret MI6 rendition operations that resulted in leading Libyan dissidents being abducted and flown to Tripoli where they were subsequently tortured in Muammar Gaddafi’s prisons….The year after the joint UK-Libyan operations were mounted, Straw told MPs…
Read More Jack Straw, still repellent after all these yearsEveryone’s linked to Mark Perry (of Conflicts Forum/Alistair Crooke fame)’s piece on Israeli spooks running around Baluchistan posing as the CIA already, but I will too as it’s very interesting indeed. I’m not sure what their bag in this is, other than the notion of “always escalate” and hope to profit from the general confusion.…
Read More a short telegram, or a very long tweetHere’s something interesting. You may remember this story from back in November about the CIA spy network in Lebanon that met at a Pizza Hut they codenamed PIZZA, and which was rolled up by a joint Hezbollah-Lebanese military intelligence investigation. The key detail is as follows: U.S. officials also denied the source’s allegation that the…
Read More The intersection of electronic warfare and mall managementOK, so I eventually finished listening to the 793 songs in the 2011 SXSW torrent and rating them all. This was a while ago, but it was only yesterday that I reorganised some stuff in the collection and remembered that the couple of gigabytes of mediocrity was sitting there. It was clearly time to implement…
Read More Konsidered a waste of time