What are national security numbers? Why would you think TalkTalk would have some? Why would you believe anyone who claims to have them is the real deal, when: The UK doesn’t have a thing called a Social Security Number Nor does it have a thing called a National Security Number It does have a National…
Read More There is no such thing as a “UK national security number”So I got round to reading the original paper about automatically predicting who’s likely to be a troll. This was always likely to be fun: Defining trolls as those who get banned for trolling, a pragmatic solution if nothing else, they obtained a large corpus of comments from three high-volume sources, CNN, a gamer news…
Read More if you can’t spell this you might be a trollI want a Web standard for password creation and revocation. So does Larry Seltzer at ZDNet Zero Day, and points out that it would even make password rollover every x days acceptable.
Read More PasswordsI am really impressed both by this OpenNews post about how to tackle a huge pile of documents, and also by the tools recommended. After all: What I received a month later from Nash County, N.C., were two boxes filled with thousands of printed pages of emails. Double-sided. One of the problems it solves is…
Read More OverviewLook what our reader Dan O’Huiginn is up to! I’ve always thought a great extension for DocumentCloud would be a plugin that generates a concordance of the documents, as it still strikes me as a big heavy way of just dumping out a lot of scanned-jpeg PDFs, which is what most people do with it.
Read More Readers.OK, a bit of Lobster. Two things have happened recently to up my tuit on the project. First, I learned that Drew Conway of the Zero Intelligence Agents blog has given NetworkX the ability to generate a force-directed graph in d3.js, which you can stick right in a web page. Second, I’ve been reading the…
Read More Project Lobster user storiesSo, Wired writes up three West Point professors and their algorithm to decide which members of a terrorist network to zap. Apparently they implemented it in 30 lines of Python. The paper is here, with some pseudocode and the tantalising hint that they used NetworkX, but no Python. However, even the Wired piece tells us…
Read More Lib Dems: not quite uselessWell, this is a story. Who hacked the French presidency? The original source of the story is Le Telegramme de Brest, a bit of a surprise but not the first time a really crazy news story got out in the regional press first. It suggests the attack took place at some point during the transition…
Read More Theme: Cyber-OddnessSo I completely forgot I needed to register for OKFN’s Open Interests Europe hackathon last weekend, which even had a lobbying track, and just round the corner from the office, too. I decided to have my own lobbying hackathon by eating pizza and caffeine pills and being misogynistic spending my weekend finishing the Lobster Project’s…
Read More A Project Lobster progress report!Other stuff from Netroots UK. Having chugged through my official Brown Bag Lunch (which actually included Ribena, in a disturbingly infantilising touch), I went to the open space group on the Leveson inquiry. This ended up merging with the one on the LIBOR scandal. I was able to contribute by knowing how the LIBOR panel…
Read More Netroots UK catchup