People are talking about using “cyberwar” to assist the Iranian opposition. Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and covertly of course, to disrupt Tehran’s ability to shut off the flow of information to Iranians and between them This makes no sense at all, even less sense than “cyberwar” usually…
Read More what is cyberwar?I’ve just been geocoding. In fact, I’ve been putting together a non-GPS geocoding function for FixMyS60. Specifically, I can say that I have no use whatsoever for geonames, which although it has an interesting range of Web services doesn’t seem to have any data in it. I love OpenStreetMap, and it’s possible to query its…
Read More easter eggAn idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it. Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co.Observation 2: Political campaigns of all kinds…
Read More don’t leave me hanging on the telephoneA data point from Germany. You may recall the debate regarding whether or not it was possible for the 7th July bombers to have concentrated their own hydrogen peroxide without needing special equipment; Dsquared took it to the point of carrying out dubious experiments in his freezer. It seems that the so-called Sauerland group of…
Read More …but there’s lots of girls with peroxide curls and the black & tan flows freeF-Secure Labs’ blog points to Cyberwar is Bullshit. I say yes! And I point you to Evgeny Morozov‘s cracking 10-step guide to cyberwar fearmongering. Follow his simple plan and you’ll be able to spread arrant drivel to the underbriefed with the best of them. I especially like: 2. Begin the story in Estonia, with a…
Read More HOWTO be a Cyberwar ExpertSelf-satirising ID card madness. So they’ve actually got as far as issuing some significant contracts. We’ll begin by noting that one of them has gone to CSC, last seen introducing the joy of Cerner software to the NHS National Programme for IT. But much more to the point, what is this talk about using the…
Read More it is now absolutely certain that the national ID card will be compromisedMinor triumph. Hacker News dropped 2,095 hits on this post yesterday, which just shows you what a bit of well-directed whining can achieve; the fleeting attention of one million social-network Skinner-box pigeons. But yes. Anyway, Reggie makes a very good point in comments – why can’t I subscribe to somebody’s contact details and have them…
Read More contacts, againIf you want to upload something to rapidshare.com, quickly, and you only have command-line access, what do you do? This script was promising, but failed on line 30 because a regular expression didn’t match on something that turned out to be an empty (NoneType) object. I replaced this code:def upload(self): sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((“rapidshare.com”,…
Read More command-line rapidshare uploadWhy is contact management implemented so poorly in every software package I’ve ever encountered? It’s almost as bad as the all-time worst application, voicemail. Outlook, Gmail, KDE Kontact, MS Entourage, Mozilla Thunderbird; they’ve all been carefully pessimised to incorporate every possible pain in the arse. For a start, file formats and vendor lock-in. There is…
Read More contacts considered crappyHere are two news stories whose contrast should tell you a lot, via Charlie Stross. Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack: INTELLIGENCE chiefs have warned that China may have gained the capability to shut down Britain by crippling its telecoms and utilities. They have told ministers of their fears that equipment installed by Huawei, the…
Read More spybreak!