protest

Ordinary Pakistanis appear to have a very clear idea of their country’s problems. Angry protesters at the site of the bombing raised slogans against Israel, the US, the Taliban and the ultra-orthodox strain of Wahhabi Islam. I don’t know about the first one of those, but you can’t have a demo without someone getting het…

Read More clarity found

I’m actually quite pleased with our little demo. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic when we assembled in Trafalgar Square, where various speeches were made of which not one word was audible (note to the various orgs involved: I’d happily spring for some batteries for the loud hailer. I mean, my student union would have got that…

Read More I don’t know what they mean by that…

The affair of the stolen HadCRU e-mail should tell us a couple of things. The first is that this is why you should worry about privacy. If you do enough naive traffic analysis, not only will you find a pattern – people communicate in patterns – but you’ll be able to find something that you…

Read More Links And Ties

Another On Roads thing is the special role of the North; indeed, as he points out, it’s the construction of the M62 that made the North of England a sensible geographical construct rather than an awkward stereotype that uneasily combined Lancashire and Yorkshire. And so much early motorway building started up north; you have the…

Read More yet more roads

After the Mancunian love-in at Jamie Kenny’s, my own thoughts on Joe Moran’s On Roads are inevitably coming. I didn’t know that we have Tony Benn to thank for the big-box supply chain logistics industry. But yes; at the end of the 1960s, the then Minister of Technology tore off a £150,000 innovation grant for…

Read More slip inside this (giant distribution ware)house

We keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…

Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…