Does anyone else think the reason the Oystercard system had a multi-hour outage might be somehow connected with the fact that TFL’s response to the class break of the NXP MiFare Classic cards it uses has so far been even worse than the manufacturers’? NXP’s contribution to dealing with this has been to sue the…
Read More Security By AudacityLess blogging than usual due to OpenTech 2008 preparations. Must keep hacking, the clowns are gaining. Anyone know much about GeoRSS? I’m on in track 2 (the Upper Hall), sometime after 1.30pm.
Read More Reduced BlogOK, so have you heard the one about the bloke from Goole who was planning to start his own race war? Probably not, because it’s not been on the news at all. Rather like the BNP guy in Burnley, whose trial was also shrouded in tebbly tebbly concerned silence. Martyn Gilleard, a 31-year old lorry…
Read More Get public attention with poetry, not bombsHo ho ho. Another pack of secret docs left on a South West Train. One of the compensations of commuting on the Waterloo-Reading/Windsor & Eton Riverside route was the astonishing things civil servants read and said on mobile phones – I recall reading quite discreditable things about St Blair’s Academies, overhearing someone discussing the urgent…
Read More mystery trainSaid Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There’s some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it. David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be…
Read More one intelligent soldierHere’s an interesting question about the finally-released Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report about the use of intelligence on Iraq. The “Shorter” for Phase II A is quite simply that “yes, it was all bollocks”, and specifically that it was all bollocks in the same way it was in the UK – caveats were removed,…
Read More selling the dummySo, the US Army’s research centre employs a climate-change denier as a scientist, and then sets up a blogger conference call with him. I’m less interested in the fact he’s a weirdo on the specific issue than the simpler point that he’s talking out of his arse. Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research…
Read More Now that’s what I call sciencinessHere’s a visualisation of today’s output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes‘s network graph function. Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can’t I have arrowheads? Rest assured the definitive version is coming…
Read More Political Pathetic Python AgainTurns out Abu Muq was Andrew Exum all along. Which is interesting; I’d read and been impressed by Exum’s work on Hezbollah and Iraq, but I’d never have thought it was him, chiefly because the man behind the stylish blogger template was obviously both smart and struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained wingnut streak. There…
Read More I View the Checksum: It was ExumRemember when we nixed the January 2007 Iranian weapons scare? We explained how pretty much any competent terrorists could build an EFP, and followed up with the revelation that the steel balls came from an Indian bike parts factory. Well, this made me smile. Iraqi officials also have accused Iran of meddling in violence and…
Read More which in your case you have not got