hacker

by 2 comments on "Still addicted"

So, the Obscurer snagged an interview with Gordon Brown. And what did he have to say? Well, he spoke of identity cards. And the news is not good at all. It seems that Brown is ill-informed about his own proposals (something which we have seen already from past ministers), is still committed to the most…

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by 0 comments on "Pakistan, NOIA, and a rebel data centre"

This NYT story is an example, I think, of the way one’s mental models control one’s perception. The report deals with a proposed U.S. policy of providing the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary police of the North-West Frontier Province, with aid directly rather than via the Pakistani military. This is one thing. It is not an…

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by 0 comments on "Concise"

The Register has been having fun with a script that removes all mention of the word “iPhone” from webpages; a necessary function these days. Better, they developed it to work on an iPhone; but just check out the code. // JavaScript here //This one thinks it’s an object var myRequest = new XMLHttpRequest(); //This is…

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by 1 comment on "Google: the world’s favourite command line"

Google is, essentially, a honking great unix system whose command line interface is addressed through URLs. This came to mind preparing the embedded map for the G3 Systems post; Google Maps autogenned a slightly different location than the view I wanted every time, although I could link directly to the right view. So, of course,…

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by 1 comment on "The jamming signal increases its hum"

The story that Israeli satellite TV viewers have been experiencing constant interference for several weeks is an interesting one. As has been pointed out, it can’t be the jamming presumably employed during the Deir ez-Zor raid, which would have been over weeks ago. According to the Israeli government it’s all the fault of the Germans!…

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by 2 comments on "HOWTO Build a Healthcare Computing System"

Remember this post regarding the trainwreck that is the NHS National Programme for IT? In it, we discussed the institutional factors that made it a trainwreck, and specifically the way demands for commercial secrecy made it impossible to involve the users in designing the system. Well, now there’s a discussion at Kevin Drum’s about how…

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by 1 comment on "Communication of the unconscious"

A question that the Chinese-hacker thing brought to mind: why are so many countries that censor the Internet for political speech also riddled with commercial, or just vandalistic, network abuse? Russian Business Network, the well-known all-purpose dodgynet, is a case in point. My own theory is that, especially in China, this may reflect a choice;…

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by 3 comments on "A Mystery, Wrapped in Cat-5 Cable.."

This Spyblog post, regarding the Grauniad’s splash story yesterday that the TITAN RAIN inquiry into alleged Chinese hackers attacking the US government had spread to attacks on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, raises some interesting questions. For a start, like all Chinese-hacker stories, it’s based heavily on semi-military sources and quotes from doctrinal publications. What,…

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by 3 comments on "The jamming signal increases its hum"

We don’t just moan about today’s government surveillance projects and fiddle with other people’s webcams here. No. Sometimes we can offer you better things; like the solution to a huge mass-surveillance IT disaster that hasn’t even happened yet. Spyblog reports that even before Alastair Darling’s deranged scheme to monitor all motor vehicles by GPS has…

Read More The jamming signal increases its hum