The Bastard Academic

This is not a post about transhumanism or integrated tech. This is about my horrible time management. And it is horrible. I've been doing my annual email cleanout, and found some dark neglected corners. A couple of years ago, I decided it might be a Good Thing to create some email rules to help keep my Inbox a bit tidier, and infinitely more readable. It turns out that this has worked, at least to make my Inbox workable. Unfortunately, it means that I have neglected some 350+ newsletters I actually enjoy reading. Because the email rules put them directly into subfolders (and in some cases, subfolders of subfolders (because I like to be organised)), and also I primarily use a mobile app, I tend to glance over these in favour of the ridiculous (100+) amounts of mail that still comes through the Inbox. I am not pleased with myself for this. I am also grateful that my current job does afford me multiple hours of time on a Monday to be able to contend with this backlog. I will be

I've not written about this disaster here before, mostly because trying to make sense of it has been ludicrously difficult. But here it goes, my tuppence worth: What a fucking calamity. I don't care what side of this debate you fall on, unless you are deliberately ignorant of reality, or stand to make an absolute fortune, there's no way you can be happy with the way things have gone. No deal will please anyone, not entirely. The current, and only deal on offer, pleases people less than no deal at all, which has also been rejected. This leaves extension or not leaving. Now, leaving aside my preference (remaining) for now, I think we can all agree that this whole project has been a complete catastrophe from the beginning. A move made solely to sort internal Tory party issues, the referendum (which was a non-binding advisory vote, essentially and opinion poll) ended up with that failing miserably, and "Call Me Dave" Cameron doing a runner (despite promising oth

No, I’m not talking about Taylor Swift’s birthday, I’m referring to the 30 th anniversary of the World Wide Web. I know, it seems like only yesterday Tim Berners-Lee’s creation was first introduced to the world, and forever changed the way we shared and organised information. Forget waiting for the promised ASI Singularity, this was the last one, and anyone who claims they could see how this would change the face of human society is a liar. In March 1989 at CERN in Switzerland, Berners-Lee wrote and submitted this proposal for a new way of managing the huge amount of information the research facility generated. He was concerned with the lack of comprehensive documentation for projects, as well as the lack of information retention as people came and left when projects concluded. With the LHC project looming large in their immediate future, keeping track of all the data was becoming a concern. The idea of hypertext and hypermedia had been floating around for a while, but no-one

Well, well, isn't this one for the books: the NSA have released GHIDRA, their reverse engineering tool. Yes, you read that correctly, the NSA have released something. Not The Shadow Brokers or any other APT, it hasn't been leaked or nabbed and let into the wild, this is a deliberate sharing of technology by the Puzzle Palace. Not what you'd expect, is it? Announced at this years RSA conference (already controversial this year as Adi Shamir, the 'S' in RSA, was unable to obtain a visa to attend), this reverse engineering tool seems primed to shake things up a bit, as many RE tools cost a fair bit of money. It also seems to be free of backdoors, and although one bug has been found , it can be remedied was reasonable ease. I've not really done much RE myself, but with a powerful, military-grade tool such as this, it might be a whole lot easier to get into. I'll let you know more when I've had a chance to play around with it. If you are interested

I'm not a one for resolutions or anything, I prefer to at least try to be a bit more practical than that. Instead, now that I've had time to consider what I want to do this year, here my list of upcoming projects. Let me know what yours are: 1) Re-evaluate the website and blog, and actually keep to a posting schedule. Might help if I started using artwork/photos. 2) Social Media application for my desktop: I'm getting a bit sick of having and average of 20 browser tabs open at a time, so lets see if I can't design an app, even if it's just a fixed browser thing, I can use to track my SM activity in one place so it's not clogging up my precious browser memory. 3) Stop wasting time with my writing projects: My biggest issue here is that while I can write some flowery prose or engage in worldbuilding like I'm Slartibartfast, I don't actually have a tale to tell. I need to adjust my focus here, and maybe I'll get something out of it. 4) Top Secre

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” Groucho Marx Much of the past 17 years has been dedicated to fighting fundamentalist extremism, largely of the religious persuasion. This is understandable, as the religious mindset, certainly in those areas of the globe where faith is a majority holding, affects and informs the cultural values of society, and certainly in the West we have found ourselves at odds with extremist Islamic groups. Fundies of the Muslim persuasion have been at the forefront f these combative efforts, although we have also seen the dangers of the looming Christian theocratic state. It is fair to say while this will be an ongoing struggle, it is one we are coming to understand very well and are able to combat. But what of other types of fundamentalist creeds? What of political fundamentalism? This is, I fear, something we are neglecting to talk about, instead preferring to remain steadfastly tribalised to the point where discuss

It has been a while since I last posted, and I apologise for that. The posts I was working on have turned into some writhing epic mess, exceeding even Wait But Why?  (you should most certainly take a look if you are unfamiliar with the site) standards in length, so I'm currently re-writing them into some semblance of readability. Until then, I've a little game for you to try, to help exercise the little grey cells. I call it the Blind Debate, it only takes an hour, and it goes like this: you and a friend, or two groups if you prefer, have a topic chosen at random for a debate. You both get 15 minutes to do some research and form your side of the debate. Then, 10 minutes a piece for opening statements, 5 minutes each for rebuttal and counterpoint, then 5 minutes each for closing arguments. Naturally, you'll want to take some time afterwards to talk it over a bit more and see where everyone stands, but for the most part it can be done in 60 minutes, which is a great way t

I came across a wonderful poster image by a talented artist, Michele Rosenthal , which depicts a robot debate: Granted, these aren't all the logical fallacies that exist, but it covers the most obvious, and most abused ones. But why are they important? We currently live in an age where we have access to more information that at any other point in history, and yet somehow we still think that arguing from emotion, or with our cognitive dissonance blinders on, is both right and acceptable: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. Postmodernism may have a place, but not here. Yes, you absolutely are allowed to feel they way you want to, but debates are places for facts and ideas that need to be scrutinised rigorously, not with playground threats and character assassinations. "I feel" is not an argument that belongs in a debate - your feelings are valid for you, yes, but you can not simply refute the evidence-based assertion of vaccinations work with the st

As we know, there are ~235 billion emails sent per day, a number that keeps growing year-on-year. A staggering 48% of that traffic is spam of one description or another, a figure that has actually come down 21% in the past 4 years alone. Despite varying scams and spam being prevalent and well-known, still people fall for them and shell out hundreds of thousands of pounds to cyber criminals each year. Today, I’m going to take a look at an interesting blackmail spam email I received and break down how to identify this as something obviously a scam, and why it is also a phishing expedition as opposed to real blackmail. I’ve taken out my email details, but the rest is exactly how I got it: A Fun Blackmail Scam attempt The first to check, with every email you get not just the ones you suspect of being dodgy, is the sender name and email address. Now even a neo-luddite can spot that something is fishy here: 986@501.416 is clearly not a real email address. If you aren’t sur