So we’ve discussed GCHQ and broad politics and GCHQ and technology. Now, what about a case study? Following a link from Richard Aldrich’s Warwick University homepage, here’s a nice article on FISH, the project to break the German high-grade cypher network codenamed TUNNY. You may not be surprised to know that key links in the…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 3 – FISH, a case studyI’ve finally got around to answering my own question here. The scraper is work in progress at the moment; the original pdf is rendered by pdftohtml into a tiresomely semi-structured (i.e. worse than no structure) tagpile. I was trying to tackle this through recursion, but I might either try using Python’s continue keyword or perhaps…
Read More scraping the barrelExpanding on my comment here, I think the most illuminating way of looking at the debate about how big a society (ha!) needs to be to support certain levels of technology may be to look at some natural experiments. Specifically, we know about a number of cases where societies have decided to acquire complex new…
Read More learning a world of missilesI recently sent off another report through FixMyStreet, pointing at the horrible state of the roads round here. (I am more than a little disappointed with the Android client app, by the way.) Within a week, some of the worse potholes had been tar’n’gravelled. Meanwhile, even more seem to have appeared or worsened. What it…
Read More ticket punchingI want one of these. There’s more here; the sheer coolth of a USB-based PCR analyser is hard to beat. Even if the potential for Wakefield-scale contamination fuckups is not to be denied. In general, I’m trying to get up to speed on things biotech. it is true that, so far, cyberpunk has been a…
Read More peering over the bows…ContentFree Comment has been turning up some real nuggets just lately.
Read More sampling the ambientOne outcome of all the MySociety work for this election was the survey administered by DemocracyClub volunteers to all candidates. The results by party are graphed here, with standard deviations and error bars. Some immediate conclusions: Surprising egalitarianism. Look at question 1, which asks if the budget deficit should be reduced by taxing the rich.…
Read More a centre-left nation needs what kind of government?Apple’s internal security team may be scary – and especially the name (Worldwide Loyalty Team). But they are as nothing, in terms of creepiness, to this Microsoft web page, which provides the criteria against which MS employees are assessed for their use of humour and the targets they are given to improve. You will not…
Read More killer meme watchI have been scraping things with Scraperwiki this weekend. Which made me wonder about this post on Spyblog about that Israeli diplomat who one of the Milibands told to pack his bags. Mark quotes from the official London Diplomatic List, which turns out to be issued every month as a PDF by the Foreign Office…
Read More self-compulsion notice: diplomatsThe new Shadowserver Foundation report is out; everyone has ooh’d over folk stealing the Dalai Lama’s e-mail, etc. Others have pointed to the concentration on the Indian military establishment. Technically, all that’s interesting here is that the attackers used mass market Internet services, like Yahoo! Mail, as transports for their botnet command-and-control messages, and that…
Read More exporting Chinese chaos, importing Indian chaos