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British Cybersalary Clippings
Something about this just does not strike me as a joined-up strategy. Also my first job, as a university systems programmer, with sparse qualifications, paid about £16,000. That was in 1988. “Cyber Specials” – HomeOffice (current) The Home Office, which received £63m under the programme, will lead the work in the Strategy on tackling cyber…
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OLPC makes self-taught strides forward in Ethiopia # GOOD READ /ht @mjj122
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php “We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were…
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ORG London October Podcast: Dominique Lazanski on “Should the UN take over the Internet” /cc @openrightsgroup
An upcoming meeting of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Dubai in December is widely tipped – and denied – as being the kickoff of a international power-grab for governance and control over the Internet. Some are positioning it as an attempt by the ITU to regain some of its otherwise shrinking remit and power,…
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Unified theory of Cthulhu # includes white paper on gravitational distortions and madness ; HT @jimfinnis
In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen`s descriptions of…
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BBC News – Cold Calling: The victim who fought back – and won # #PPI scams beware
Back in July, Mr Herman answered a call from an overseas call centre inviting him to make a PPI claim, he decided to stay on the line. He answered the caller’s questions until he was eventually passed through to a UK operation, called PPI Claimline, and told them he wanted to be taken off their…
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Royal Society journals open access # Going to be JSTOR & @aaronsw all over again, but British? HT @geoffarnold @openrightsgroup
Compare: Royal Society journals open access – The Panda’s Thumb. With http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-07/20/swartz-arrest?page=all
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TIL Encryption systems are (or were) *heavy* – really heavy. Must have been all those One-Time Pads.
…and that’s why terrorists could snoop Predator video feeds: There were reasons for this. The original Predator, just 27 feet long, was little more than a scaled-up model plane with an 85-horsepower engine. It had a payload of just half a ton for all its fuel, cameras and radios. And encryption systems can be heavy. (Big…
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Rethinking the Computer at 80 – NYTimes.com #PGN # MUST READ FOR ALL SECURITY GEEKS /ht @fanf
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many people cite Albert Einstein’s aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast. One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering…
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Cops outraged after NYU class requires students to plot a terrorist attack | Fox News #fairandbalanced
Especially note the “He was blasted to hell in Yemen last year in a CIA drone strike“. No editorialising there, then. Heavens forfend these folk ever attend a proper security conference, too. A New York University class on transnational terrorism is requiring students to “hypothetically plan a terrorist attack” — and shocked cops say the…
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Tsunamis on Lake Geneva: Lake monsters | The Economist
IN 563AD a tsunami devastated Geneva. Two accounts of the disaster, one by Gregory of Tours and the other by Marius of Avenches, have survived. What caused the wave, and the extent of the damage that resulted, have been matters of conjecture for centuries. But over the past decade several groups of scientists have pieced…