A decade ago, I appeared on the 361 Podcast to give my advice about mobile security. This was the era of the iPhone 5 and Android KitKat. BlackBerry was trying to have (yet another) resurgence and Nokia was desperately trying to keep Windows Phone alive. What advice did I give then, and is it still relevant? Stay Sceptical In at number five is just stay sceptical. I mean, quite often, lots of mobile viruses and mobile scams spread by text message, by email, by Twitter. And these are all…
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This is a fucking audacious thriller! I literally stayed up way past my bedtime, tearing through the chapters, gasping out loud. The core of the story is simple - a woman steals her dead friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own. Will she get caught? The hook (for want of a better term) is that the plagiarist is white and the original author is Asian-American. It's often said that most racists don't perceive themselves to be racist. Because the book is told from the point-of-view of…
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This is an excellent pop-science book. It gently weaves a personal tale (nearly getting crushed by a whale) into the current cutting-edge research of animal communication. It takes in along the way philosophy, geopolitics, and the crushing inevitability of death. At its heart is this question - if modern AI is brilliant at extracting semantic meaning from unstructured data, can it do the same with whale song? Mustill's joy of discovery is wonderful. He's adept at weaving autobiography into…
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What does it mean to block someone on a social media site? Way back in the mists of time, we dealt with trolls on Usenet with the almighty PLONK - PLaced On Newsgroup Killfile. It meant your newsreader never downloaded their posts. They could rant at you all day long, and you'd never hear from them. It's what we would nowadays call "Mute". But, whether you're on Usenet or a modern social network, muting someone doesn't actually stop them replying to you. The miscreant can still see your…
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This is a bit niche! A few months ago, I received a mysterious £25 from National Savings and Investments. A prize from the Premium Bonds! Not enough to make me rich, but enough for a takeaway. Oddly, after checking their app and website, I could find no record of the win. Curious. A few days later, this letter popped through my door. My bond was one of a tranche purchased in 2013. I sold it in 2019, yet it won in 2024! Why was the person ineligible to win? Why had it come through to me? …
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The Mirror has a rather wonderful image gallery of behind the scenes photos from Doctor Who. Lots of lovely black-and-white photos of classic stories. And then, right at the end, this: Cor! Four classic Doctors each with a mobile! This photoshoot was, apparently, done at the Hammersmith Ark which was holding an exhibition to celebrate 30 years of Dr Who. There isn't much information about it online - other than this press cutting - but there is another photo from the same series: …
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I went for a spelunk through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok. {<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It turns out that, lurking on the Internet are Dictionary Servers! They exist to allow you to query dictionaries over a network. For many years, the Internet community has relied on the…
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Big Finish have been pumping out Doctor Who audio dramas for quarter of a century. But this, apparently, is the first time they've recorded one live and in front of an audience. It was glorious! Big Finish could have cheaped out - even with a bare set and a cast of newbies, the fans would have flocked to it. Instead, we got this lushly decorated set: The console pulsed away during the interval. Swirling lights played around the TARDIS when the *Vworp Vworp* SFX played. And the DALEK told…
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It may be hard for you to understand this; reading is a skill. Unless you have recently started learning a new language with an unfamiliar writing system, you probably do not remember the tedious and agonising process of having to train your brain to recognise printed characters. Extracting meaning from the words you are reading is seamless. The occasional antediluvian aphorism notwithstanding, your eyes glide across the page and your brain rapidly fills with thoughts. I can feel your fingers …
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Much hullabaloo about Oasis using "Dynamic Pricing" for their concerts. There are far more fans than there are tickets, so prices rise. There are all sorts of complicated economic theories around how efficient markets can be, and whether "reverse Dutch auctions" are sensible. But the end result is always the same - the richest fans get to see their heroes and the rest of us pay inflated prices. But that's not the only way dynamic pricing works. Some shows don't sell out. Even the biggest…
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I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series - Her Majesty's Royal Coven. The basic premise is that there is a secretive cabal of witches which run a shadow government organisation. There's skulduggery, slattern-ish behaviour, and sexy scandals. And lots of violence and death. And a big dollop of modern-misogyny to make it particularly zeitgeisty. It is delightful in its playfulness with language. It relishes in its tropes: She had finally become the thing he feared. The thing she…
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Several years ago, I posted this poll on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf the recent Twitter hack had exposed they way you voted on every Twitter poll, how would you feel?(There is no suggestion that this has happened, I'm just curious about people's relationships to voting and privacy.)Meh. So what?: (167)167Hmph. That's annoying.: (68)68Umm… This could be bad!: (32)32Delete account & run away: (8)8❤️ 0💬 8🔁 005:55 - Thu 23 July 2020 Most of the tech world that I interact with has …
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