The German from Nick Ryan on Vimeo.

Future of British semi-governmental agencies:

UKube-1, a teeny-tiny satellite carrying a variety of scientific experiments, is due to launch later this year – providing it can find someone to hitch a lift from.

“We’re still in discussions with potential launch providers for UKube-1, and are working hard to find a launch option for the satellite,” head of communications Matt Goodman told The Register.

Let me add to the narrative:

“Yes, we’re really working hard.  Doreen and Nora are busily phoning up real space agencies and asking if we can piggybank along.  Our gals are never fazed by rejection – they phone everyday, all day.  They’re working hard.”

And the name?

“Well yes, someone did point out that it’s cuboid and not cubic but hey – that’s what the design department selected after an office competition open to the public and as the winner already has her Emin Grant of £576 000, tax free, we can’t very well strip Jenny of that sum as if she were just some Fred the Shred or someone.”

And the future for UKSA?

“Oh, absolutely cutting edge.  We’re hopeful that several new projects will see the light of day – we’re confident in the global attractiveness of British industry – buy Brit and get Indian, French and Polish knowhow to boot.  We’re really going places in our all-inclusive, all-must-have-prizes, committee-decision type way.

We’re confident that just as our nation is ceding contracts to France, Germany and India, so those nations will show the same PC altruism towards UKSA and get behind our global push to “Buy British”.  We’re excited about the future in a sea of funding cuts.”

Chuckles draws our attention to this one:

Start-ups sound the go, seeming to be the lifeblood of the nation, the measure of productivity and progress but is there a nasty secret hiding behind the facade?  Looks good:

Just one $25 million payday from the sale of a startup will more than cover an Angel investor’s loss from a hundred dud $25K investments — which is a loss of just $2.5 million. The risk to reward ratios are off the charts, which is why so many want to be Angels.

And there’s no shortage of startups looking for seed investments. They are told that they must have a business plan, they must address market opportunities of at least $1 billion in revenues; industry sector expertise is important; do the team members have prior experience? Are there enough tech leads in the team?

We are repeatedly told that these, and many other factors, are important to investors.

Anything untoward in that?

The plan is to sell these tiny businesses to larger companies in the shortest time possible.

But in the vast majority of cases, the buyers aren’t interested in the startup’s business, they are acquired for their engineering talent alone.
For example, this morning Seattle-based Geekwire announced an exclusive story:
Amazon buys TeachStreet

Amazon.com has acquired TeachStreet, the 5-year-old online marketplace that matches students and teachers.

It’s an interesting story, does this signal Amazon’s push into educational markets? Will it take TeachStreet’s technology and scale it across its massive cloud infrastructure?

Nope. Geekwire’s John Cook reports:

This is looking very much like a “talent acquisition.”

TeachStreet will be shut down on February 15th. Teachers who use the service will be able to export their class listings, and the company is offering a number of alternative services where teachers can market their classes.

This happens time and time again. Mark Zuckerberg has said it many times, Facebook acquires companies mostly for their talent. Google does it too, all the giants do. They buy the startups and close the business.

As Rowan adds:

Assuming a reasonable fit, purchasing a start-up provides:

1.       The start-up’s pride and joy:  the feature that you were considering / intending implementing in your own product as soon as you could get around to it;

2.       The staff to implement said feature; and

3.       With any kind of luck: some highly-skilled programmers that you could use elsewhere …

All-in-all: cheaper than a recruitment agency …

Makes sense?

This might seem like an expensive way to recruit engineers but there are many benefits such as removing potential competitors, which helps maintain the status quo. The giant companies have a lot invested in the status quo because they collectively have the most to lose from its disruption.

Plus, they have agreements not to poach staff from each other. So where else can go? Startups are by far the best hunting ground for new talent.

So, do we really have a startup boom? Or is it a masquerade, a proxy for a battle between the Internet giants for top quality engineers?

The predator asset/talent stripper is no new phenomenon so what’s the right strategy?

1.  Business is business, let it be;

2.  Let’s put in protection for the small to medium business to stop the sharks stripping them;

3.  Let’s get all socialist and regulate the c*** out of any start-up, moving on to established businesses – any business is vetted by your lovable State.

Your call.

Many bloggers/readers have been scathing about how Google seems to have lost the plot of late. I’ve read and heard what these bloggers/readers have been saying but haven’t had any personal issues since 2008 when a nutter decided to flag my Blogger site for inappropriate content and Blogger’s reaction was to shut it down immediately.

The logic therefore was that anyone could go to any site he didn’t like, flag it and Blogger would summarily shut it down, with some sort of investigation following some weeks later. This was precisely why I began the new site you’re now on – to stop this sort of insanity.

Now there’s another real doozy from Google.  Get this – they are disabling ad-sense at my new site because of a supposed offence at my old site.  The offence?  Inappropriate content for advertisers in that the youtube breaches some sort of sex/violence code.  Clearly youtube still see it as all right, plus it’s in Indonesian – are Google experts in the Indonesian language?  It was the American Google home which wrote to me.

You might like to put up with as much of the song as you can:

… and compare it to the offerings, say, on good sites such as this.  Offensive?  Gross sexual content?  Moi?

And the way they put it. This quoted post was “an example” of the type of offence I was committing. It wasn’t the offence, just an example of it.  If they want offensive, I can do far better than that, chums.

Some might say it was because of the inclusion of key words, e.g.

Then Inul swaggers on stage, packed in tight red jeans and a glittering crimson tank top. She turns her back to the audience. The guitars crunch, Inul’s hips swing low and hard.

There’s far raunchier stuff than that in my book, quite graphic in point of fact, in a serial way.  Let’s test it out here – titty, bum, erotic, sex, penis, vagina.  Let’s see what that drags down on me in the next day or two.

Curious why people are targetting my old site and leaving the new alone, despite Google’s obvious misdirection.  It’s the third incident now re the original site and in both previous cases, in 2011, concerning posts from 2007 and 2006, I complied.  Also, who’d be remotely interested?

Tell you one thing which has been happening though and I wonder if it has anything to do with it.  Some weeks back, I changed the theme/template at the old site, which had been a private template, with one of Google’s own, called Awesome.

The site had been relatively dormant for spam but suddenly now it was attracting 20 or 30 Anonymous would-be comments a day, increasing daily.  These were being anti-spammed by Google/Blogger itself – i.e. they were not appearing onsite but notifications were coming to my email thick and fast.

My mate couldn’t see what the spammers were getting out of it if they were never posted.  I thought it might have been something in the process of the anti-spamming which made it worthwhile for them – maybe it became a click for them.

Now I’m beginning to think that Google itself has been trawling, as they’ve said they have, but putting out Anonymous comments to test it out.  Hell, I don’t know.

What I don’t like is this “we’re punishing you summarily for an imagined offence”, they investigate and find me not-guilty but instead of an abject apology for maligning my blogs, they issue a “don’t do it again” and I’m on the record for a “prior offence”.  There’s a nannying, bullying, infantilizing element to this I don’t appreciate.

I’ve given Google the use of part of my sites for their advertising, which pays virtually zero.  I haven’t gone on the offensive about them since 2008 and comply as best I can.  I’ve been a good little Googlette.  And they give me this c*** in response?

My answer to Google is Arkell v Pressdram but naturally, it is a non-reply email – no redress.

Oh beat me, whip me, put your tongue there, sex, sex, sex

The Ouse busy ‘oozing’ – part of the daily constitutional and dog exercise routine – admire the view on the way past:

As the odd splash of colour shows:

If anyone would know what his lot have planned, G. Soros would.  Gleefully, he laid it out some time back:

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” Soros said.  As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil,” writes the Beasts’ John Arlidge. “Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America [Soros] predicts riots in the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties . The global economic system could even collapse altogether.”

I’m sure it could, George – at least your lot can give it a try – the Robert the Bruce principle.

Sí has leído bien, una isla increíble construida en un hermoso yate. Creado en el Reino Unido por la empresa de diseño Island Yacht.

El diseño como puedes ver se inspira en las islas tropicales, con cabañas, una piscina y un volcán que seguro no entrará en erupción. Se trata de un yate, con salas especiales para VIP, salones, gimnasio, spas y hasta un helipuerto. El volcán añade belleza al conjunto de la embarcación, ademas el agua que sale de él va a la piscina completando el aspecto tropical.

La parte posterior de la embarcación tiene una cubierta retráctil de playa donde las estructuras flotan en el mar haciendo que el mar sea accesible para nadar y, por supuesto, acceder a varias actividades acuáticas como el wake board y motos acuáticas. Todo el conjunto es genial y su uso es aún mejor.

Que tengas un buen día y no permitas que nada, ni nadie te lo estropee.

For openers, the sexism charge against these posters [right].

P-u-u-r-r-r-lease!

If she wants to lie with her legs in the air, what’s that to the feminazis? It’s a perfectly normal position for that which she is designed for. I’d take him to task though – have you been held at that point of your lower legs, in that way? Most uncomfortable. He could have at least let her rest her ankles on his shoulders and supported her below the start of the thighs, slightly on the outside – just saying like.

As for the infidelity it promotes and celebrates – not the poster but the film – that’s a different matter and that’s the issue which we should be opposing. Which brings us to Jean Shrimpton.

Jean Shrimpton was a fool.

Well maybe that’s a bit harsh when all she was doing was following the natural instinct of so many of her sex to self-destruct. It was paralleled nicely in Casino Royale by Solange:

Solange: [they are kissing on the floor of his beachfront suite] You like married women… don’t you, James?
James Bond: It keeps things simple.
Solange: [laughs] What is it about bad men? You… my husband. I had so many chances to be happy, so many nice guys. Why can’t nice guys be more like you?
James Bond: Because then they’d be bad.
Solange: [kissing him some more] Mmmmm, yeah…!

Intelligent.

Ditto Jean Shrimpton, when the slightest amount of logic would have told her not to. She went with a married man, knowing him to be married. Therefore he had form, confirmed later by his boast that he was laying four women at the same time – quantity, not quality. Therefore he was always going to cheat on her too and finally spit her out.

And then came the tears and it was held to be a tragedy.  A tragedy is where the odds were that nothing terrible would happen and then something terrible happened.  With Jean Shrimpton, there was an inevitability to it all.  I have sympathy for victims of real tragedies but sorry – not for such as her.

Now this classic:

Who would want me now? A woman who unwittingly had unprotected sex with an HIV-infected man after a drunken night out at a pub felt “violated to the core”, a court heard today.

Unwittingly, eh?  Intelligent.  Violated to the core?  “Take me, all of you.  Oh, I feel so violated.”

Now, lest we forget to mention the men, there’s also not a lot of sympathy for a man who goes with precisely the type who will take him to the cleaners, e.g. older man, very young woman.  A man like me.  Or a man who will grovel before a woman – the very worst thing he could do.  Only ever did it once and learnt fast.

I mean – surely a bit of common sense has to come into this somewhere along the line?  Surely there’s an element of night follows day?

Infidelity

It’s all about ego, notches on belts, weakness in character, inability to take responsibility, being human flotsam and I include myself in that.  It is so destructive and ultimately unsatisfying – with the emphasis on “ultimately” because of all the issues which eventually come into it – even in the very subtle shift in relations between two people who were once into one another exclusively – it’s being sold short.  It’s bad.

I don’t think you can bleat about how it was “inevitable”, that he/she was just so hot and so on – can’t you keep your pecker in your boxers?  Can’t you keep your legs together, dear?  What was that, Ms Giggs?  And the potential for disease!

There is, however, a quite legitimate question – just what is infidelity these days?  What does it constitute?  If there’s a continuum from texting to nooky, at what point does it constitute infidelity?

I came across [I know, I know] an interesting article, the thesis which was that the definition of infidelity has expanded well beyond what it was decades ago and she raises some good points about definitions. On a sliding scale from what most would label “being good friends” through to the real full-on thing, it made interesting reading.  She listed the stages this way:

1. A 2003 article in USA Today, for example, examined “the new infidelity” in the form of emotional affairs. [No actual physical]. The legal definition and the underlying harm of adultery have changed considerably over time, from a narrow concern of illegitimate offspring to a much broader violation of marital emotional intimacy.

Shirley Glass argued that affairs need not include sex at all. “Sometimes the greatest betrayals happen without touching. Infidelity is any emotional or sexual intimacy that violates trust.”

As Glass explains, “the new infidelity is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realizing that they’ve crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love.”

In her view, the transgression comes from the fact that they are sharing more of their “inner self, frustrations and triumphs [with their transgressors] than with their spouses.”

As another infidelity commentator observed in Salon, “Affairs do not begin with kisses; they begin with lunch.”

This seems the real battleground to me, although N4 seems to be for many of you. I’m used to taking women for lunch and am not interested in shallow talk – I want to get down to the real issues. The only reason she’s going to lunch with me in the first place, in my eyes, is because we seemed to hit it off in the first place.

During that lunch, we’d soon define how it was going to be.

I was once hauled over the coals for it by my stepfather. He said it was appalling how I was “keeping that woman from her husband and family” and what would they say if they knew? That had me thinking whether I’d done wrong with someone else’s woman – we’d been discussing business matters and our long term friendship.

2. Yet others have spun “the new infidelity” as workplace romance, with the Wall Street Journal describing the office as “the new home wrecker.” The rising number of women in traditionally male-dominated workplaces has resulted in situations where women and men work in close proximity, which has allegedly resulted in a new epidemic of infidelity.

The issue here is what the two of them in the marriage/relationship see as the Rubicon. Is it the lunch, the hand-touching, the peck on the cheek, the tentative kiss or is the cutoff point further down the track?

3. A similar shift is apparent in emerging public debates about another “new infidelity,” namely, whether viewing Internet pornography and participating in cybersex constitutes adultery. Glass specifically connects these two debates, using Internet affairs as an example of infidelity in the absence of sex: “[t]here can be an affair without any kind of touching at all. People have affairs on the Internet.”

I’ve had two bouts of cybersex – one where there was talk of marriage and the other was an affair with neither of us in another relationship. In both cases it was quite graphic at times and emotionally nice at all times. With one of the relationships, I don’t remember but it went for three days almost non-stop using google chat, with eating and the occasional four or five hour break for sleep. If I’d had a RL partner at that time, I can’t see how it would not have been cheating. It was pretty full-on. Neither was planned – it just happened.

4. In 1987, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals of Louisiana held that a wife had committed adultery even though she had not had sexual intercourse. The wife admitted that she had slept “in the same bed with another man, that she had touched the other man’s sexual organ and that he had touched hers and that they laid on top of each other.” The court concluded that “these repeated acts of marital infidelity constitute adultery.”

I bet not many men have been in this situation. It’s dead easy for me not to cross the line but still sleep with someone – it happened with my boss in Norway when I took her away for the weekend. Stupid me fell for her though and she immediately booked another room for next night.

5. With each of these new types of identified infidelities, the category expands. No longer restricted to heterosexual intercourse, infidelity now includes many types of sexual encounters. In 1992, a New Jersey court considered whether lesbian sex amounts to adultery.

The court held that, when viewed from the perspective of the injured spouse, an extramarital relationship is “just as devastating to the spouse irrespective of the specific sexual act performed by the promiscuous spouse or the sex of the new paramour. The homosexual violation of marital vows could be well construed as the ultimate in rejection.”

The Court concluded that adultery exists when one spouse rejects the other by entering into a personal intimate sexual relationship with any other person, irrespective of the specific sexual acts performed, the marital status, or the gender of the third party.

I personally have no issue with a wife getting more intimate with another woman, as women have always had a more girly way with other women and would touch as two men never would, not if they wished to stay in one piece. If she was going to the other woman for emotional fulfilment though – remembering that women can talk with other women about things which they can’t speak with men about – then that would be a worry. It would need to be played by ear. I can’t even get upset if it got sexual between them, although I probably should be upset by it. Completely different if it was another man, of course – there’d be a good chance of cracked skulls in that case.

6. Consider, for example, the film Unfaithful, in which Connie Sumner (Diane Lane) is a beautiful, seemingly happily married suburban housewife and mother, who, after a chance encounter on a windy day in New York City, commences an affair with an exotic rare book dealer named Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez). Like the wind that blows Connie off her feet and into the arms of Paul in their first encounter, so too does the affair knock Connie off her moral center. The affair becomes increasingly sexual and emotionally intense as Connie succumbs to her desires.

That one’s full on-cheating, whatever romantic spin she tries to put on it. By her own definition – emotional affair – and by his – sexual penetration by another man – it’s cheating. And yet there is the saying by a mate of mine some time back – once might be a mistake, twice is a system. This leads to the next category, not covered by the author.

7. This category is the cynical system, from the lower end where occasional sex is had and as long as he doesn’t know [or she], then all is well … through to the self-justification infidelity. I’m not referring to the skank here – that’s asking for trouble in the first place – but to the seemingly nice woman with a good moral compass. There was that case of the woman who was faithful to her husband for 51 weeks a year, the dutiful mother and wife but once a year she went away for a week, ostensibly to an aunt’s place and she’d have an affair with a man there. It had apparently gone on for decades.

For me, if I found out about the N6 situation above, there might be a way back – possibly. However, if I found out about Mrs. 51 Weeks though, that would be the end there and then. The next time she went to work or went shopping, I’d simply gather my things and disappear forever. She could have the house. Doesn’t matter how many decades I’d been with her. That is the ultimate betrayal because of the ongoing dishonesty and twisted moral compass.

How could I ever look into those calm eyes again at the dining table, knowing she knew she’d been doing that to me? There are limits to what a man can accept.

8. In Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s classic 1944 film noir, for example, Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate adulterous femme fatale. She seduces her insurance salesman into helping her kill her husband for the insurance money. She is both heartless and lustful, a deadly combination, for which she and her paramour must ultimately be punished. Adultery and murder again go hand in hand in the 1946 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Lana Turner plays Cora, a sexually unsatisfied married woman whose affair leads her and her paramour to kill her husband.

That one’s so clearcut it needs no further explanation.

Without complexes

Well aware of the modern rationalization that we’ve never had it so good, that with women finally making themselves freely available, everyone can just do it with whomever he or she wants with no complexes, no guilt and no strings.

Pull the other one – there are always strings.  It’s inevitable that if it goes on, feelings become involved unless you’re so addicted to toad in the hole that that’s the only satisfaction for you and in that case, you’re really sad.  Yes, feelings become involved and that’s where you either give up the lover, give up the wife and family or continue, through your weakness, to live in this twilight land of never quite having this, never quite having that.

This is exactly what I did in Russia, meeting this dark-haired girl in the shadows of dark yards in the evenings, meeting in bars we’d both descend on and then disappear from, alone, until my mate caught us near his place – it’s in my book. Exciting? For the first few weeks. Good for the self-esteem? For the first few weeks. Wrong? Yep. Miss her like hell, even today? Of course. Ultimately fulfilling? What do you think? Of course not.

You start to see it as all right, some sort of affirmation of masculinity and it’s nothing of the kind. It’s weakness, if anything. There are also political implications – the state is trying to divide and rule – that much we probably agree on. They can only do that if the building block of society is decimated.

In the end though, it’s breaking a promise and what happens inside your soul when you continue that as a system. If we break promises, are we any better than the politicians we vilify?

Unter Donner und Blitz
Where I love
Tartini
Concerto Grosso

Of course the Christian hymns/songs are also good but I’ve just included general music above.  Well worth keeping an eye on – Calum.

In 1993, the Club published The First Global Revolution.^[5] According to this book, divided nations require common enemies to unite them, “either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.”^[6] Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, “new enemies must be identified.”^[6] “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”^[7]

… to immediately know what you’re dealing with.  Is there anyone left still not au fait with the antecedents of the EU’s early form?

Continues at Orphans.

With the UK cold snap just around the corner and the country about to be plunged into thick snowfalls, it’s wise to sort out your cleats.  Unnar Þórisson reports from Iceland on the efficacy of these items.  The Icelanders leave nothing to chance as she warns: “Ice is Slippery”:

The news stations have sent out cameramen seemingly with the express aim of watching the roads to see if someone slips so they can use the footage in their reports on the (apparently numerous) incidents across the country of people neglecting to bring their cleats and ending up with broken bones.

Sadly this is all too easy to believe; I myself have had to use ice cleats to walk 20 feet with a bag of trash so I wouldn’t break my neck. Chore day really shouldn’t be that hazardous in a first-world country.

First world country?  Let’s move on.  In that part of Russia where I was, no one used cleats and I wonder why.  In Iceland they seem ubiquitous.

For a start, the Russian city is much flatter than Reykjavik although there are some hilly parts and I recall trying to walk down some of the more notorious ones with a lady.  I had great clod-hopper boots with serrated rubber soles and she had my arm.  Then there is the ability of the Russian to simply stay upright on ice.  Kids would deliberately kick back the snow on paths to expose the ice to shoot across in their ordinary shoes, many kids used mini-skis strapped to their shoes and I learnt, the hard way, to adopt a semi-sliding motion when walking, knees bent, upper body almost upright, slightly forward – not unlike the cross-country skiers.

That does tend to keep you upright.

So, remembering Reykjavik and the steepness of some of those hills, it still doesn’t explain the need for cleats.  Unless you attribute a lot of it to PCism.  First world country-PCism.  Yes.  Russia second world-no PCism, finding their own way to stay up.

On top of that, there is this:

During a winter such as the one we’ve been having, where snow, rain and some very temporary increases in temperature have conspired to create vast fields of wet, slippery ice, it should come as no surprise that ice cleats are in high demand.

That’s probably it – Russia is more of a snow country, whereas Iceland is more of an ice country.

Having spent a fair bit of time in the UK and with their military – some thoughts from a friendly outsider.  When you are in Scotland – you see a lot more Scottish flags than you do English flags in England. You see very few Union Jacks.

Scots are much more nationalistic than the English. So much so, that the last time I was there (visiting the family Clan’s castle, natch) the Edinburgh paper was talking about how the “Muslim terrorist problem” was mostly and English issue as the vast majority of British Muslims were in England – and very few in Scotland. Not something you would see on the front page of the self-hating English press.

Way to go or mickey mouse?

Rising wealth in Asia and fishing subsidies are among factors driving overexploitation of the world’s fish resources, while fish habitat is being destroyed by pollution and climate change, U.N. marine experts said Tuesday.

India’s caste system protected from the bottom up:

Only dalits, whose caste impels them to do this work, are willing to do it, something that both stigmatizes them and gives them a stranglehold on the market. And they have transformed this stranglehold into an ironclad cartel that closes the door on all alternatives for their customers.

On the Haditha killings:

It all starts with the US undermanning its armed forces and, in any event, sending too few troops to clear and hold or to stay living among the people to create security. This is the root and unpardonable error in the US conduct of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The educational blight:

Education professors drum into students that they should not “drill and kill” or be the “sage on the stage” but instead be the “guide on the side” who “facilitates student discovery.”  This kind of harebrained thinking, coupled with multicultural nonsense, explains today’s education.

On the Beeb:

How the Daily Mail stormed the US

And the rationalizations begin:

A spokeswoman for the US paper suggested the Mail won by including visitors to a sister site.

Meanwhile, good ole British knowhow:

Royal Mail’s Price Finder website hits glitch

Royal Mail’s web glitch persists

C’est une découverte sensationnelle : le seul et unique enregistrement de la voix de Otto von Bismarck, chancelier allemand à la fin du XIXème siècle. Avec une surprise de taille pour l’auditeur, quand le vainqueur de Sedan se met à réciter l’hymne français …

Who’dathunkit?

1 This was the first American car to employ what technology in its design?
2 Make and model?
3 Year of production?

Answers later as usual.

Mr. Justice Robert Maranger of Superior Court was unmoved.  Their crimes stemmed from “a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society,” he told the packed courtroom.

“You have each been convicted of the planned and deliberate murder of four members of your family,” the trial judge said, citing a verdict that was “clearly supported by the evidence presented at this trial.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime. The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour, a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women.”

[H/T Chuckles]

They were caught in the act of committing criminal damage and also assault, and they cost the force £100,000, but according to top brass these thugs met the highest standards of professional behaviour.

And who can forget the delightful banter between G “underarm” Chappell and T “players’ comfort zone” Greig?

1

Leverett used the SHODAN search engine developed by John Matherly, which allows users to find internet-connected devices using simple search terms. He then matched that data to information from vulnerability databases to find known security holes and exploits that could be used to hijack the systems or crash them. He used Timemap to chart the information on Google maps, along with red markers noting brand devices that are known to have security holes in them. He described his methodology in a paper (.pdf) about the project.

2

Of course, in China and Russia, teams of hackers are paid well to find ways of exploiting security weaknesses in government and industrial infrastructure. The US NSA is on that like buzzing insects on excreta.

3

“Vendors say they don’t need to do security testing because the systems are never connected to the internet; it’s a very dangerous claim,” Leverett said last week at the S4 conference, which focuses on the security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) that are used for everything from controlling critical functions at power plants and water treatment facilities to operating the assembly lines at food processing and automobile assembly plants.

4

This is just the tip of the iceberg.