That gaggle of elite geeks who have been arguing against the horrible possibilities an internetworked world offers to fraudsters and state bullies for years have often said that one day, there’ll be a horrible crunch. A disastrous moment of truth. As Chernobyl finished the reputation of nuclear power for 20 years, the Privacy Chernobyl will [...]

…I’m getting rather worried about the normally reliable B92. Doug M expertly dissected the organ-legging story a week or so ago; I’ve just come across this article from 26 March reporting on a UN document describing Kosovo as the “heart of [the] Balkan drug route”. Alarming stuff - essentially confirms the rumours and prejudices of [...]

So what exactly happened with the allegedly Russian-orchestrated DDOS attack on Estonian Internet interests? Some people have been talking about the first act of “cyberwar” against a sovereign state, others about a bizarre fuss about nothing. AFOE asked Gadi Evron, a world expert on botnets who runs Israel’s CERT and who took part in the [...]

You may have noticed that the Satin Pajama Awards back in February. First my job got in the way, then my computer died, then I moved to a new city, and, well, I never got back on track, until now. They’ll be held on Tuesday May 15 22.
Nosemonkey’s doing his fourth euroblog roundup.
Still some time [...]

Well, sort of. But don’t be scared, gentle readers, I’m not torturing you with a video of myself watching Edward Hugh watching Alex Harrowell watching me watching Edward, thus entirely disregarding the possible value of such a video for media theorists and social psychologists as well as the fact that all the cool kids are [...]

The problem that has caused comments from regular readers to be treated as spam should now be resolved.
For the information of other MT and Akismet users, it relates to how MT handles multiple spam tests. MT-Akismet assigns a score of +/-6 to each comment, then the e-mail and URL fields are checked against past comments [...]

What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a quarter?

Read more… or Read more right here… »

That’s the [...]

It says something about AFOE charter member and - to use a NASA title - principal investigator Edward Hugh that, when Nosemonkey recently did a roundup of new European blogs, the top one on the list had already been roped in to EdWorld, as a contributor to Demography Matters and Global Economy Matters.
You will be [...]

Nosemonkey suggests that the cross-European effort to make data on the CAP’s beneficiaries available might be an example of how a European demos could function. There’s more detail at Martin Stabe’s, and the searchable database is at Farmsubsidy.org.
I’m quite keen on this. Not so much because I’m sympathetic to the whole “lacking a European demos” [...]

Intellectual property rights in technology. Great, aren’t they? Consider Brio, the middle-class fave range of wooden toys, whose manufacturers have neatly locked out competitors who want to make toys that will go with theirs by using couplings and fasteners that are proprietary and non-standard.
Elsewhere, on the NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) list, they [...]