Celtel terminates its roaming charges between East African markets. Now, SMS credit transfer is a currency acceptable across East Africa. How long before this is recognised? How long before more operators start interworking? GSM airtime – the African single currency. You heard it here first.
Read More Connectivity as currency, againRemind me not to go back to Dubai if at all possible. It’s what happens when you leave the keys where the postmodernists can get at them, a formless mass of rapid urbanisation running along the coast from the border with Sharjah to beyond the docks at Jebel Ali. “Sprawl” doesn’t describe it, because sprawl…
Read More Brainfuck CityAccording to IEEE Spectrum, the Holmdel Laboratory, the centre of Bell Labs in their heroic age, is probably going to be knocked down. The structure was once home to the world’s best privately-run research organisation, with some 6,000 scientists and engineers and a library second to none. The work carried out there included the development…
Read More Creative destruction and the Holmdel LabHugely detailed NYT report on the subversion of the Iraqi oil industry and the insurgent management of its production. Apparently, the supply of crude oil from the northern fields is permitted to reach precisely the capacity of the Baiji refinery, as any more would be exported. Exports are valuable to the government, and stolen crude…
Read More The black economy, yet againMarginal Revolution says: In Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, David Warsh notes in passing a bizarrely ironic use of markets by the Soviet KGB. It is 1984: The Cold War is entering its climatic phase. There are war fears at the highest levels of government. In London, KGB agents have been directed to track…
Read More Market, market, market…whoopsOf course they will! Major Chip’n’Pin securifart. It’s essentially the exploit described by Prof. Ross Anderson of the Cambridge Computer Lab, as described on his cracking blog (in both senses of cracking) – thieves have converted some point-of-sale terminals to collect the data from the cards’ magnetic strips, then made new cards. They can only…
Read More ID Cards Will Make Us SaferOne of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/Gap