Daily Archives: November 6, 2016

Q1: Who wrote this? Q2: And of whom does it remind you?

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Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Answers:

  1. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism
  2. One of the current candidates for the presidency of the United States.

So the government is serious about cybersecurity? Really?

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This morning’s Observer column:

On Tuesday, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced that the government was “investing” £1.9bn in boosting the nation’s cybersecurity. “If we want Britain to be the best place in the world to be a tech business,” he said, “then it is also crucial that Britain is a safe place to do digital business… Just as technology presents huge opportunities for our economy – so to it poses a risk. Trust in the internet and the infrastructure on which it relies is fundamental to our economic future. Because without that trust, faith in the whole digital edifice will fall away.”

Quite so; cybersecurity is clearly important. After all, in its 2015 strategic defence and security review, the government classified “cyber” as a “tier 1” threat. That’s the same level as international military conflict and terrorism. So let’s look at the numbers. The UK’s defence budget currently runs at £35.1bn, while the country’s expenditure on counterterrorism is now running at about £3bn a year. That puts Hammond’s £1.9bn (a commitment he inherited from George Osborne, by the way) into perspective. And the money is to be spent over five years, so an uncharitable reading of the chancellor’s announcement is that the government is actually investing just under £400m annually in combating this tier 1 threat.

All of which suggests that there’s a yawning chasm between Hammond’s stirring rhetoric about the cyber threat and his ability to muster the resources needed to combat it…

Read on

Lucky me!

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Aw, isn’t that nice. Matt Brittin, the UK boss of Google has just written to me to inform me that I’ve won a big prize in a lottery organised by the company.

Here’s the beginning of his email:

google_scam1

Note the impressive ‘watermarking’ on the email.

But that’s not all, there’s a ‘seal’ on the bottom (to show it’s legit) and it’s even signed by Larry Page himself.

google_scam2

I wonder who falls for this stuff?