A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.
– Guy Fawkes, political activist, performance artist and architectural critic (1570-1606)
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“Privacy never an absolute right” in spook, translates as “state shall be able to invade privacy if convenient, without particular reason”. November 4th, 2014 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Normally it’s rather difficult to get the news media to lose their shit like a bunch of screeching schoolkids over a story like, “Defense Manufacturer Offers New Product That Makes Incremental Advances on Existing, Widely-Used Technology.” But fortunately for Israeli defense manufacturer Rafael, the maker of the Iron Dome short-range air defense system, reporters don’t always understand what it is they’re reporting on. November 1st, 2014 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 31st, 2014 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was only vaguely aware that Russia Today existed until our venerable chum Paul Marks mentioned it for the hundredth time, usually whilst he was sharpening a cavalry sabre (I may have imagined that last bit). So eventually I just bit the bullet (picked up on a battlefield in the Crimea I might add) and I actually went and found the damn thing on-line. Oh boy what fun I was missing! Russia Today is as much of a hoot as listening to Radio Tirana back in the great old days of Enver Hoxha, which is to say, it is AWESOME. These guys actually play it dead pan most of the time, as if people are going to take them seriously! I really do LOVE them! Of course I am sure the people who work there don’t really think that, but hey, as long as they keep getting a pay check for providing us with giggles, it is a win-win for all concerned! I mean they even have Steven Seagal! How cool is that? Seagal always wanted to be a good actor, a respected commentator and a friend of gay icon and all round great guy Vlad Putin… do not scoff! Do not titter! Face it, achieving one out of three of your life’s ambitions is more than most people ever do! October 30th, 2014 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apple CEO Tim Cook comes out as homosexual! Wonderful! Marvellous! Actually to be honest I truly do not give a damn. It might be because it has nothing to do with his job. People can announce what they do with their genitalia all they want, just do not expect me act as if this is something I need celebrate. He can shag goats for all I care, just please, make iTunes better than the steaming pile of poop it became in version 12. Should homosexuals be given grief? No. Now that we have settled that, please just STFU and run the company like a good little capitalist. October 30th, 2014 | 68 comments - (Comments are closed)
…mobile phone technology! VICE has a very interesting report, looking at at how the US military is adjusting to the astonishingly rapid proliferation and deployment of cheap drone technology. Faced with using multi million dollar weapons platforms firing munitions costing hundreds of thousands of dollars against these things, they are seeking more feasible ways to counter air threats costing thousands or even mere hundreds of dollars. And the threat is not hypothetical: even the daesh Islamic State claims fairly plausibly to be using cheap reconnaissance drones right now, and Hezbollah appears to have fairly sophisticated armed drones (fast forward to 1:25 or thereabouts to see the boom and hear the invocations to Admiral Ackbar or whatever). We really are entering a new era not just commercially but also militarily. October 29th, 2014 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
If mankind can fix paralysis, we will move into a whole new era of promise and possibility. The raising up of the lame that humanity now seems capable of – which springs from decades of research into cell growth and cell manipulation, the development of new technologies, and much experimentation – crashes violently, and gloriously, against the way man is understood and discussed today: basically as a pest, a planetary poison, not capable of much besides hatred and destructiveness. October 27th, 2014 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is an interesting observation by Jo Nova of two sets of reactions in an article titled Company stops Ebola, Bureaucracy puts it on a plane:
Read the whole thing. October 24th, 2014 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently the sergeant-at-arms in the Canadian Parliament is not just a ceremonial position. An Islamist by the name of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed a Canadian soldier on guard duty at a war memorial, before entering the House of Commons in Ottowa… whereupon 58 year old sergeant-at-arms Kevin Vickers shot him dead. Nicely done, sir. October 23rd, 2014 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a good article on TechRaptor about alleged Chinese intrusions into iCloud.
And just in case you think China is the only Bad Guys we need to worry about…
Big Brother has many guises. October 23rd, 2014 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had an e-mail asking if Samizdata had any views on the GamerGate issue, and where are the best places to read about it. So… for those of you who do not know, it is a scandal about corruption in the games industry and the serious lack of journalistic ethics in sections of the games press. Indeed the sites who cover games in the Samizdata sidebar are specifically ones who actually have some notion of journalistic ethics like, you know, real journalists should. If you do not see any of the large mainstream games sites linked, there is a very good reason for that: they are not worthy of your clicks so I sure as hell do not want to send traffic their way. IGN is actually a noteworthy exception to the ‘mainstream = corrupt’ paradigm, in that they actually accepted that yes, there is a problem. So kudos for that. The only reason I am not linking them in the sidebar is not that they are corrupt, it is that they are crap. I do not actually propose to expound on GamerGate at length other than to say “I support the objectives of #gamergate” and link to various articles about it. The TL:DR version: many games companies have been getting the best product reviews that money can buy, and also many of the reviewers are a networked coterie of far-left Critical Theory fans who sometimes do hatchet jobs on games for purely ideological reasons. This annoys the hell out of many gamers who are not interested in “does this game objectify women?” but rather just want to know if the cover mechanics work well and is the game-play fun? Also part of the whole GamerGate thing is an attempt by the anti-GamerGate side to re-frame it all as being about misogyny. To wit, a number of the principal actors (actresses actually) have claimed to have received ‘death threats’ as part of a plot to “force women out of the games industry”. However there is, to put it politely, some speculation that some of these ‘threats’ may be part of a viral marketing campaign to sell stuff to the beta-male/feminist demographic. The best overall explanation of the pro- and anti- side was written on TechRaptor. Other good sources are found on Niche Gamer. There is also good stuff on GamesNosh, also here. Breitbart Network has been covering this rather awesome soap opera. And there are the twitter hashtags of #GamerGate and #NotYourShield. And for a rather, ahem, robust set of views, there is the vastly entertaining Internet Aristocrat. Oh and Gawker takes an arrow to the knee over this. How cool is that? The spectacle of the cultural left getting absolutely reamed over and over again by angry villagers with pitchforks in full view of anyone who cares, is something that really makes for compulsive viewing, even if you are not a self-described ‘gamer’ (I am, I might add). Grab some popcorn and enjoy 😀 October 22nd, 2014 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
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