You may remember my brief involvement with AR standardisation (the annotated whiteboards are here). As a result I’m on the mailing list for various things, and the Open Geospatial RFC for the ARML 2.0 spec just dropped. Being on a plane, I got around to reading it. I have comments. Back in Barca, in order…
Read More Commenting on ARML 2.0This piece on Android Police is painfully true, even though to be honest the screenshots show a huge improvement over the versions I’ve used. But the UX is really the last thing to hate about Android. Well, it was on the first one I had, which was a poorly integrated hacky mess. No, the worst…
Read More Whining about AndroidHere’s a post, first of a three-part series, from The Monkey Cage about inequality and power. The point Martin Gilens makes is that where a policy has broadly similar support across US income groups, its chance of being put into effect follows a well-behaved response curve with its approval rating. But a policy on which…
Read More The reactionary Internet predates ‘t other unYour 3 favourite Nokia devices. Easy enough – the 2001-looking 6230. The 6230i put in a better camera but let carriers cover it in placky silver gubbins, when it was a piece of classic European product design. The N73, intended as a smartphone but which was at its best as a camera. Mine had the…
Read More 3 favourite NokiasWell, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials: One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing…
Read More Canalising the marshes: tidying up the peopleIt looks like Daniel Davies’ plan to classify the world into people who file their accounts with Companies House on time, and people who don’t, may be less eccentric than it seems. News International missed, and asked for an extension. Obviously a dodgy lot of bastards. Anyway, check this quote out. Coincidentally, News International’s company…
Read More Companies House Webcheck, fount of moral judgment. And a full list of USSD code numbers, at lastWell, speak of the devil. Peter Foster makes his appearance in the Murdoch scandal and fingers the Sun directly. He said he then received an email from a Dublin-based private investigator calling himself ”Autarch”, who told Mr Foster he tapped into his mother’s phone in December 2002. That month, The Sun published the ”Foster tapes”,…
Read More the missing link between slimming tea and tactical electronic warfareIn a perfectly normal Jamie Kenny comments thread, weird machines are seen, circling the skies of West Yorkshire. What’s up is that someone has been reading Richard Aldrich’s book on GCHQ (my five-part unread series of posts starts here and refers here). Basically, the intelligence services maintain various capabilities to acquire electronic intelligence. As well…
Read More Do this help?Here’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 managementWell, here’s a contribution to the debate over the riots. The Thin Blue Trots’…sorry…Police Federation report has been leaked. Among the failings highlighted by the federation, which represents 136,000 officers, were chronic problems, particularly in London with the hi-tech digital Airwave radio network. Its failings were one reason why officers were “always approximately half an…
Read More Can you hear me now?