Category: Uncategorised

This is a pretty impressive success for Anonymous, taking down a

very

prominent site.

In an attack it is calling “Operation: Payback”, a group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous appear to have orchestrated a DDOS (“distributed denial of service”) attack on the site, bringing its service to a halt for many users. Attempts to load www.mastercard.com are currently unsuccessful.

Interestingly, this is sandwiched half-way between being a mass action, and being merely the work of a small, elite group of hackers. I’m not sure what system they’re using, but the ‘distributed’ element of the DDoS almost certainly comes from thousands of /b/tards running some code on their own machines. For that matter, it could well be that a bunch of them are sitting on mastercard.com and hitting refresh.

Mastercard statement: “

MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service

“

The Goggles Do Nothing — Crooked Timber

The ancestry of modern SF lies as much in the 19th century “condition of England” novel as it does in more obvious ancestors like

Frankenstein.

That is to say – one of the skeins one can trace back through modern SF is a vein of sociological rather than scientific speculation, in which events happening to individual characters serve as a means to capture arguments about what is happening to society as a whole. In the nineteenth century, there was clearly a tension between the novel-as-fleshing-out-of-individual-experience and the novel-as-depiction-of-our-social-state (

Middlemarch

is one of the few novels I’ve read from this period that really manages these tensions successfully). Science fiction took one of these routes (an awful lot of early

SF

– e.g. H.G. Wells

is

primarily sociological speculation). Returning to the long nineteenth century is nothing more and nothing less than SF coming back to its roots.

Now that fee-paying is part of the culture, government has taken the opportunity to expand the principle. Whereas we might once have hoped that, as society became wealthier, ever wider access to the goods of higher education (and many other cultural goods) would be possible, now it seems that “we can’t afford it”. What was once an essential component of the good society—remember Harold Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Open University?—becomes an expensive luxury whose only acceptable public justification is economic benefit. So much for John Stuart Mill.

Post mainly to see if ScribeFire is going to help me at all. Probably not

[

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. [source]

Sad news for French multiculturalism, as the only (!) politician who dared wear an islamic headscarf* has left the Nouvea Parti Anti-Capitaliste. Brent Whelan:

Moussaïd gave the party its most widespread–though least welcome–burst of publicity last February when she appeared on the list of local candidates in the regional election wearing the Islamic headscarf she favors. Squeezed between the strident criticisms of feminists and secularists, she held her ground–and insisted on her qualifications as a long-time social and party activist–with grace and poise that belied her 21 years. (See my previous post, “Veiled Threat,” 2/15/10) After a storm of polemics, mostly hostile, both inside the party and in highly visible venues such as the Idées pages of Le Monde, Ilham and her local supporters had hoped the delicate issues of tolerance and diversity she raised could be fully aired in a party congress. But as that public debate receded in time–originally scheduled for November, then December, now February–she apparently lost confidence in the party’s openness to her situation, and now her chapter is closed.

* We’re not even talking about a hijab here, by the looks of it — just a hair covering. i.e. something that wouldn’t be the faintest bit controversial in any halfway-sane political climate.

oddly decent article by John Naughton in the Guardian:

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had “defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.” Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

Bitchy Jones, of course:

My point is this. Femdom is broken. It’s not even there. In a way you can’t blame mandoms for thinking there are no actual dominant women. Real femdom based on the desires of dominant women and submissive men coming together to find places of intersection is gone or never was. All there is a male-desire based economy so pervasive that even people doing stuff for themselves think the women needs to be dressed like and advert for herself as if she needs the business. And it isn’t really surprising that this popular idea of femdom fake out doesn’t have the visceral power of the popular idea of mandom. Because it isn’t real.

Just unearthed an old email I wrote about the relationship between sex and sexuality. Figure I may as well put it up here, since I’m not likely to do anything more with it otherwise.

The basic idea is that many elements of sexuality aren’t usually considered in terms of space — but they could be. A cluster of intimate practices are based around the restriction of space (and the associated physical sensations of pressure, darkness, the touch of whatever boundary is limiting the space). I’m thinking of hugs, bondage, the wearing of corsets and latex, perhaps with vacuum-beds as an extreme case. These tend to also be ‘about’ the complete control and presence in that restrained space and sensations of security (think of people who feel safe when a partner is sitting or lying on them). Often they’re described in the language of restricted freedom; thinking about them instead in terms of space maybe leads you to more psychoanalytic interpretations of the practices; i.e. connecting them to being in the womb. [I have no background in the area, but it certainly seems a possibility]

But you’d need, somehow, to connect that to the sensations of DISembodiment and DISplacement during sex — orgasm, in particular, seems often described in terms of being away from the surrounding environment, in a space which has shrunk to just the two(?) partners. If you cease to be separate bodies, can you still be separate bodies

in space

? To put it another way, ‘staring at the ceiling’ is a common idiomatic description of being bored during sex. If you’re aware of where you are, the sex isn’t good enough.

[based on reactions to a talk at Salon Populaire 6 months ago]

It is hard to exaggerate Mr Erdös’s passion. For 19 hours a day, seven days a week, stimulated by coffee, and later by amphetamines, he worked on mathematics. He might start a game of chess, but would probably doze off until the conversation returned to maths. To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr Erdös gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it. “Private property is a nuisance,” he would say. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr Erdös simply constructed his life to extract from his magnificent obsession the maximum amount of happiness.

Source; there’s much else on the site.

Also here are personal reminiscences. Fun to think how, in 60 years time or so, we’ll be seeing the deaths of the last mathematicians who worked with him directly. The last people who really knew (i.e. who worked with) the man himself.

Counter-view here

Why /are/ there ‘y’s in the English name of Kyrgyzstan? Almost everywhere else the country is ‘Kirgistan’, ‘Kirgisia’, or something similarly y-free. Going through wikipedia, the only other non-cyrillic languages* to use y are Aceh, Cebuano (Philippines), Min, Turkmen, Vietnamese, and others whose names I don’t recognize.