In Ascension Churchyard, Cambridge. People leave the strangest objects and messages on the grave of the great philosopher.
For example:
The ashes of my first wife, Carol, are buried in this loveliest of churchyards, and whenever I go there I always check Ludwig’s grave on the way out. Sometimes the messages are deeply poignant, and make one wonder what lies behind them. There’s a novel here, somewhere.
From Roy Greenslade.
You have just missed one of the great modern journalistic opportunities. An advert on the journalism.co.uk site (but just removed because its closing date was today) was offering the princely sum of £10 per 1,000 words.
It was placed by Snack Media, which boasts: “We specialise in the creation of high quality new media content”.
In its advert, the company said it had received “some big orders” and required writers to complete the wide-ranging briefs.
This involved “writing answers to user questions for a Q&A website – quite easy and fun” and “travel writing” (without, of course, actually travelling).
It added: “We pay £10 per 1000 words. This is non-negotiable.”
Wow!
Fascinating piece by James Ball.
Yesterday, media lawyer and legal blogger David Allen Green published the full text of the gagging order signed by almost all WikiLeaks employees earlier this year.
It's an extraordinary document. WikiLeaks staffers face a £12m penalty if they reveal any information about WikiLeaks' day-to-day operations, let alone any documents given to the whistleblowing organisation.
In a move reminiscent of the UK's reviled superinjunctions, even revealing the existence of the gagging order is itself a breach.
Within minutes of the publication of the gagging document, WikiLeaks supporter Asher Wolf pointed out to her followers that I, during my time with the organisation, had refused to sign the document. Others quickly pointed out the leaked document was unsigned.
Yes, it was my copy of the agreement that was published.
The leak was hardly premeditated though – it emerged through the refusal of transparency campaigner Heather Brooke to believe I was not joking when discussing the terms of the WikiLeaks contract.
Inadvertently, I sent her a photograph of a portion of the document publicly rather than privately, over Twitter. Needless to say, this provoked a lot of interest, and one thing then led to another.
Who’d have thought that the humble USB-drive could be so useful? First, it turns out that it’s the distribution medium for the Stuxnet worm. And now we find that it was a key element in Osama Bin Laden’s comms system. Here’s The Register’s version:
Osama bin Laden didn’t have a phone or internet connection, but for years he was a prolific user of email who frustrated Western efforts to track him by saving messages to a thumb drive and having them sent from a distant internet cafe, the Associated Press reports.
The process was so tedious that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at the al-Qaida chief’s ability to maintain it for so long, the news service said. Bin Laden would type the messages on a computer that had no connection to the outside world and then instruct a trusted courier to drive to a cafe so they could be emailed. The courier would then save messages addressed to bin Laden to the same drive and bring it back so his boss could read them offline.
US Navy Seals seized roughly 100 flash memory drives when they killed bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound a week and a half ago. Officials told the AP they “appear to archive the back-and-forth communication between bin Laden and his associates around the world.” The cache of messages is so big that the government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over them.
En passant:
The New York Times account of OBL’s daily life in his walled compound suggests that the lifestyle of a terrorist mastermind leaves something to be desired. He didn’t even have a guy to tidy up his power cables.
David Pogue’s take on Microsoft’s purchase of Skype.
Every time some big clumsy corporate behemoth buys a popular consumer-tech product, I cringe. It almost never works out. The purchased company’s executives take a huge payday; promises are made all around that they’ll be allowed to continue operating independently; and then, within a couple of years, the product disappears altogether. A little star of the tech sky is snuffed out, for absolutely no good reason.
Yahoo bought GeoCities, Broadcast.com, HotJobs.com, MusicMatch, Konfabulator and Upcoming. AOL bought CompuServe, Netscape and Xdrive—all gone or irrelevant now. Cisco bought the Flip camcorder, and then killed it last month.
But what about Microsoft? Its acquisitions list includes the Sidekick (Danger) service, Groove, Placeware, Massive, LinkExchange and WebTV.
It has shut down all of them.
(As my Twitter follower @jfhaft notes, “Microsoft = King Midas in reverse.”)
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m skeptical. This feels more like an 800-pound-gorilla move than anything that will wind up benefiting you.
