The Yorkshire Ranter

I’m not sure anyone else didn’t spot this; but the name the rebels who invaded Nalchik used is significant. They called themselves the Caucasian Front. The original Caucasian Front was the Soviet army of Marshal Timoshenko, driven back from Rostov-on-Don to the mountains in the spring of 1942, who fought it out there to keep…

Everyone’s getting het up about the prospect of the current residual US responsibilities for the Internet infrastructure and the possibility that the forthcoming World Summit for the Information Society might give them to the UN, or more specifically the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN tech body that makes sure North Korean and Japanese phone…

Well, the good people of the House of Commons have done their thing. The closet fascists and crude worshippers of power did what they had to do. 25 Labour MPs did what they had to do, but of course never enough. 43 MPs failed to turn up. As seems to be normal today, the unelected…

Well, the grey men have spoken and Angela Merkel has, to my considerable surprise, ended up as Germany’s chancellor. It seems that the easy-life temptations of a grand coalition overcame the SPD’s desire to hang on to the chancellor’s office, and motivated them to give Schröder the push. This leaves Germany with a truly bizarre…

One thing that strikes everyone, I think, who visits Singapore is the apparent racial harmony. Here is (to British eyes) an example of a multicultural society functioning perfectly, people expressing their religious and national peculiarities within the scope of a shared identity in a sense indistinguishable from that expression itself. Or, to more integration-minded visitors,…

A new research paper from Caltech, which you can read here, has cast doubt on the characterisation of the Internet as a scale-free network. What the fuck is one of them things, and why care? Almost anyone who knows anything beyond “there’s this thing called the interwebs, it’s like TV that you read” knows that…

Just north of the city centre in Singapore is a park on a hill. The hill is the site of Fort Canning, the first seat of British colonial power there. In that park is the place where the biggest military defeat in British history was mismanaged, the Malaya Command Battle Box. This headquarters was created…

1) The Kurd who’s been made President – really as a side payment for not declaring independence – just said he wants the Shia prime minister to quit, the same week as it turns out they’ve cut a deal to get out their oil without everyone else. 2) The Shia just (as good as unilaterally)…

Step one: Don’t call Vodafone customer service when you find that the thing was delivered without GPRS access settings. Step two: Don’t assume that the settings are on your SIM card. Step three: Don’t believe the Vodafone propaganda that they have a “GPRS Helpline” – your call goes through to the generic helpline in the…

One field where Singapore keeps up with its reputation for barely concealed dictatorship is the use of mass surveillance technology. You can’t use the new tube system, nor the older light rail system, without being issued a reuseable plastic card as a ticket that triggers the barriers at a distance. (You are strongly encouraged to…