My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by violent racists who strictly segregated the non-white population. This was Apartheid. There's not much…
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I have been reading a wonderful account of how The ANC in South Africa developed and used encryption to avoid persecution by the Apartheid regime. The article is a good 15,000 words and will take you some time to read. It is a fascinating account of how an ersatz encryption technology was developed by enthusiastic amateurs using acoustic couplers, DTMF, tape recorders, and early mobile phones. I'm going to ignore the technical aspects - which are wonderful to read - and talk about the human…
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I've written before about the difference between a person being childless and being childfree. It is a simple matter of intention. Those who want children but don't have them are childless - whereas those with no desire to procreate are childfree. This is quite an important distinction - and yet it is almost completely absent from the recent Office of National Statistics' report saying "one fifth of women are childless at age 45." They recently put out these data as an infographic on…
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I'm sure that the Word Of The Year for 2014 will be Polinfographic - a hideous portmanteau I've just constructed of "Political" and "Infographic". Infographics are the content-lite, citation-free, colour-heavy spurts of marketing jizz which have replaced the sound-bite as the political parties' weapon of choice. Voters, apparently, can't remember such complex ideas as "Education education education" or "If you want a [racial slur] for a neighbour, vote Labour". So along comes the political…
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Earlier this year, I went to the annual "Ada Lovelace Day" lectures at Imperial College. There, a succession of impressive ladies demonstrated that women are perfectly capable of participating in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths/Medicine) careers. We all nodded dutifully - and applauded the women who had pushed back the boundaries of science and science communication. All was going well, until one of the presenters displayed a slide talking about gender-specific toys. In…
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Imagine, just for a moment, that the Government wanted to keep a record of everyone's sexuality. They need to know this detailed demographic data because it will be highly useful in civic planning. It will help them work out what provision needs to be made for sexual health services, how many children are likely to be born, how many schools to build, etc. You trust the Government, you voted for them, you and your friends have nothing to hide with regards to your sexuality. But! Shock…
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You should visit Bletchley Park. Seriously. It's the most amazing museum - dedicated to the wartime effort to crack Enigma; the Nazi cryptographic machines. The tour guides of Bletchley Park are full of fascinating stories. They can tell you how all the primitive computers work, about the history of each building, they know all the curious little facts which make visiting the park an absolute joy. There's one story in particular that I never tire of hearing. By 1945, Turing's computers…
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There's a popular meme which resurfaces every so often. Politicians who have accepted campaign contributions should be required to to wear those "sponsor's" logos names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. This is often called the Nascar proposal - after the sponsored uniforms that the racing drivers wear. They'd look something like this The clever folk at mySociety are looking for new and interesting…
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David Cameron wants to block certain "pornographic" search terms. He joins a long list of MPs who simply don't understand what they're talking about - like Claire Perry, Andy Burnham, and Helen Goodman. I've talked before about my time working as an "Adult Material Classifier" for Vodafone UK. In short, my team and I used to watch pornographic videos and classify whether they were suitable for inclusion on Vodafone live. There were the usual limitations (no more than two participants, all…
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There's an ethical conundrum which is often posed to military strategists and philosophers alike. In 1940, the Nazi's communications encryption had been broken by the British. Military Intelligence were able to decrypt a signal which indicated that the city of Coventry was to be bombed. The military chiefs took this information to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. If he ordered the evacuation of the city, he would save hundreds of thousands of lives - but the enemy would know that their …
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I don't usually get involved in legal blogging. I am not a lawyer, and I find the finicky details somewhat hard to follow. That said, I do appreciate how (most) judges in the UK write their judgements in a relatively clear and unambiguous manner. Jack of Kent today pointed out the recent judgement on Operation Weeting - which is looking into the alleged illegal interception of voicemail messages. The full text of the judgement is fairly simple to understand - although one curious part…
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Another in my occasional series of blog posts about our solar panels. We used both the Energy Saving Trust Solar Power calculator and the Europa Solar Calculator to estimate a generation capacity of between 2,500 and 2,700 kWh per year. We've just done a reading for 21 November to 21 February. Right in line with expectations, we generated 205kWh - netting us ~£96 from the Feed In Tariff. Over 15 months we've generated a total of 3376kWh. Again, totally in line with the top end of …
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