The £500m question

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This morning’s Observer column.

The news that, according to the national security review at least, cyber attack comes second only to terrorism as the gravest security threat facing the nation will have come as a great surprise to most citizens. We are conscious of the annoyances of malware, viruses, worms, spam and phishing, but for most these are just minor irritations, not threats to the nation's survival.

Yet the other day we had the foreign secretary gravely intoning why, in the midst of the most savage spending cuts in living memory, it is suddenly necessary to give an extra £500m to GCHQ to protect us against nemesis in cyberspace. At the same time, in America, we see the Pentagon setting up a whole new cyber command, USCybercom, with all the usual paraphernalia and awash with funding.

What, you might ask, is going on?

There seem to be two broad answers to the question…

Reverse engineering Facebook’s ranking algorithms

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Interesting experiment to see how Facebook decides which of your friends see your news feed.

The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook’s personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you’re shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you ‘stalk’ your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

I would like to retain ‘fart in your general direction’

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Ahem. This is a transcript of a letter I discovered on a lovely site called Letters of Note. It concerns the exchanges between the team that made Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the British Board of Film Censorship.

PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD

Registered Address: 20 Fitzroy Square, London W1P6BB

Registered Number 1138069 England

August 5th, 1974.

Dear Mike,

The Censor’s representative, Tony Kerpel, came along to Friday’s screening at Twickenham and he gave us his opinion of the film’s probable certificate.

He thinks the film will be AA, but it would be possible, given some dialogue cuts, to make the film an A rating, which would increase the audience. (AA is 14 and over, and A is 5 – 14).

For an ‘A’ we would have to:

Lose as many shits as possible

Take Jesus Christ out, if possible

Lose “I fart in your general direction”

Lose “the oral sex”

Lose “oh, fuck off”

Lose “We make castanets out of your testicles”

I would like to get back to the Censor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain “fart in your general direction”, “castanets of your testicles” and “oral sex” and ask him for an ‘A’ rating on that basis.

Please let me know as soon as possible your attitude to this.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed)

Mark Forstater

A photograph of the original can be found here.

I’m reminded of that other great letter — from Groucho Marx to the Legal Department of Warner Brothers.

Photographic Impressionism

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Interesting report of an interesting project — with some sample images.

For the French Impressionists, pink haystacks and cloud-like water lilies captured how the world appears to us — not as a sharply focused technical diagram but a montage of reflections, refractions, lights, colors and movements, often at the periphery of our vision.

Ken Holden uses photography to pursue that alternative realty on the edge of conscious awareness, synthesizing impressionism into a conceptual vision. Over the course of three years and 80,000 images, Ken has been taking photographs in San Francisco’s De Young Museum, yielding two distinct interpretational bodies of work: Photographic Impressionism The Unaltered State of Reality and the Photo Anagram™ Image Series (2008 – 2010)…

It’s funny how things come round. Photography’s ability to capture exact likenesses provoked a crisis in painting. Now that very exactitude has become a kind of straitjacket from which contemporary photographers struggle to escape. (I write with feeling on this matter.)