So we’re all doing the Iran war scare thing again. Where are the US Navy’s aircraft carriers? As always, there is a useful summary here. Whatever John Bolton may say, Abraham Lincoln didn’t deploy last week. In fact she sailed from Norfolk, Virginia on the 1st of April. She had to sail around this time…
Read More A check-in on USN carriersAnnoyingly, Adam Elkus is going to delete this thread. increasingly thinking that the best or only justification at this point for people that aren’t techies learning about computer programs is understanding the way in which the social world is being flattened into categories that computers can understand. — QWRhbSBFbGt1cw== (@Aelkus) April 22, 2019 I…
Read More Flattening computers into social categorisersSo, the Huawei oversight report is out and it’s apparently terribly scary. If you’re interested in the content rather than the mood-music there’s a good key points summary here, and if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, the report itself is here. The point I would like to make, though, is that…
Read More If we could only get the same oversight of Facebook we have of Huawei UKA lot of people seem to believe that the UK can solve its Brexit problems by “just staying in the single market” or a similar form of words. To put it another way, the underlying theory here is that the European Economic Area agreement gives the European single market an existence independent of the European…
Read More Can you “just stay in the single market”?Any discussion of Huawei relating to the Chinese “National Intelligence Law” has to start out from the recognition that all states, always, have tried to weaponize telecommunications systems and have taken considerable legal powers over people and property involved, even where they didn’t create the assets and organizations themselves. Take a look at Section 94,…
Read More Enough with the bad faith about Huawei.I recently read John Grindrod’s Concretopia and re-read Joe Moran’s On Roads one after the other. One thing that struck me: Grindrod’s is the better book, essentially because he goes to the places and talks to the people and avoids the temptation of filling up on old newspaper. Too many people setting out to write…
Read More Opinion editorial is the worst historical source imaginableAlan Feuer’s amazing Twitter reportage from the trial of El Chapo is a case study of the ambiguous relationship between security, surveillance, and social trust. Much of what we think we know about the emergence of the state and the creation of institutions derives from the problems of long-distance trade, usually in luxury products, in…
Read More El Chapo and your websiteThis piece from Bridget Phillipson MP makes a strong case that a hypothetical second referendum campaign would need to be much more unashamedly European and come in from a more marked left-wing direction. Relatedly, Aditya Chakrabortty says that: I can’t see any way for remain to secure a convincing victory, apart from to present itself…
Read More You can’t run as an insurgent if you agree with the government, and you might have toIf you’re looking for some TV that speaks to typical TYR preoccupations, 54 Hours might be it. This BBC/WDR coproduction retells the utterly berserk story of the 1988 hostage-taking in Gladbeck, West Germany, and successive police forces’ Keystonesque efforts to end it. I liked how it was recognizably a film noir without using any of…
Read More TV recommendation: 54 HoursBack at the end of 2007, as we dived into the trough of the Great Recession or Great Financial Crisis or Second Great Depression or what you will, a crucial decision was taken. Verizon Wireless, then still a Vodafone division, chose LTE for its new mobile network, and put one of the most important women…
Read More Ten Years of 4G: Trump, Snowden, Huawei, and Brexit