So, Richard Aldrich’s book on GCHQ. This looks like it’s going to be another in our occasional series of multi-part book reviews that nobody reads, as the book is nothing if not comprehensive. (It’s a mere Laundry-esque 666 pages in paperback.) Apart from being packed with good things, like paper and words, as Spike Milligan…
Read More GCHQ Review: Part 1, The World’s Most Classified Blog and Other StoriesI’ve been reading Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology, a postmodernist account of the failure of a massive French project to develop a Personal Rapid Transit system. Latour’s book contains chunks of fiction, interviews, historical documents, and authorial comment, broken out by the typography – the experience is more like reading a long…
Read More project failureLaura Rozen takes us to meet the Iranian government’s loyalist bloggers. The hardliners have fielded hundreds of pro-regime bloggers, most writing in Persian, emphasizing particularly the importance of supporting the Supreme Leader. The bloggers range from students to clerics, with many claiming to be members of the Basij and children of war veterans or martyrs.…
Read More trolls of the AyatollahSo we were talking about China exporting its internal chaos, while also importing Indian internal chaos. Then, the good folk at 31 Jin-rong Street, Beijing gave us a practical example. That would be AS4134, CHINANET-BACKBONE, aka China Telecom’s long lines/Internetworking division. Starting at 1558 GMT, they leaked a very large number of other people’s routes…
Read More export anyProgress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakRather less depressing; Wired reports on the array of open-source IT tools for disaster relief getting their first use in earnest in Haiti. I remember when your main source for things like Google Earth overlays of aerial photos was Kathryn Cramer, and that was in the United States. However, there’s something I saw that wants…
Read More what these people need is…an updated frequency allocation tableA proposal to deal with linkspammers – set up a central blackhole where you send everything that you spam-rate, and use the feed of URIs from it as an input to your automated spam filter. Its own web page is here. Unfortunately, as I point out, there’s a serious flaw here. Basically, if we’re going…
Read More anti-patterns in securityAlso spinning off that post, I’d like to reiterate a couple of points from this post and this one. As far as I can see, not much has changed since Beijing was identified as the world’s biggest concentration of compromised Windows machines; Spamhaus ROKSO looks pretty bad for the big provincial networks in ChinaNet and…
Read More more “cyberwar” nonsenseSomething interesting about the NHS NPfIT project. During my recently completed two-week conference binge, I spoke to people from a British telecommunications company who were fresh, if that’s the word, from tangling with the NHS IT Zombie, and had apparently escaped before it ate their brains with a spoon. I also heard people from a…
Read More the problem with NPfIT is the “NP” bitReally delighted with the changes you’ve seen in Britain? Especially the ones embodied in architecture, the art that we shape and that then shapes us? Let the Labour Party, and any other party that shows up (we like a good party) know, by adding your photos of change to this Flickr group! So far I…
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