Jamie Zawinski and Charlie Stross pitch in to the poisonous row about Google + and its “real names policy”. Now G+ seemed like a good idea to me because of this instant-classic paper, which demonstrated that a) people hate creepy targeted-advertising schemes even if you pay them to put up with it, b) we manage…
Read More A little story about Google MailI bet you thought I was kidding. But try this lede: Taped to the inside of a Sainsbury’s window in King’s Lynn, a printout of a map reminds teenagers of the town’s restrictions. Next to it, a notice on Norfolk Constabulary headed paper spells out the terms of a dispersal order: within the marked area,…
Read More exclusion zoneTom Watson’s twitter feed linked the transcript of the BBC Radio story on re-opening the Daniel Morgan case. There’s not much in there that’s new if you’ve been reading this, but I’ve excerpted the best bits. 1: The story that vanished But the Report can tonight reveal that we’ve seen a copy of a witness…
Read More so…The fact that there was a run on the bank in the autumn of 2007, when bank deposits had been guaranteed by the Government since effectively forever, was a political fact that should have told us much, much more than it did. Discuss. I seem to spend all my time watching enormous institutions that seemed…
Read More things fall apartThe Obscurer has possibly the first intelligent article on the whole “turn off their Facebook! that’ll learn em!” furore. Notably, they interviewed one-man UK mobile industry institution Mike Short. Go, read, and up your clue. I especially liked that the piece provided some facts about the 7th July 2005 terrorist incident and the mobile networks.…
Read More your call could not be connected – please check the number and try againBack in 2006, I said to Charlie Stross that the zeitgeist of the near future would be exasperation. I also said something similar as a comment on the Halting State book-in-progress, so if you think everyone in it seems grumpy, you’ve got me to thank. But, of course, we’ve now landed in the near future…
Read More Yes, they are all blackSo I couldn’t just drop the OAuth library into the plugins directory because I didn’t have sudo rights there, so I wgot and zipped it and uploaded it as a plugin via the web interface and changed the include to point there. And now the end of the bifurcation era may be in sight. Not…
Read More slightly less lazywebOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionAh! Found it: although Yates told the House he had the mobile operators inform the hacked, and named Vodafone and Orange, he didn’t. Specifically, Orange identified about 45 victims but didn’t tell anyone. Vodafone identified 40 and only told a few who were considered VIPs. T-Mobile UK claims not to have found any. 3UK isn’t…
Read More Who’s got the logs?