Chris Baldwin’s Bruno was my first great webcomic love. The eponymous Bruno was a depressive twenty-something struggling to find the plot of her life. For eleven years the strip followed its protagonist’s ups and downs, with a wordy style that gave Baldwin space to get under the skin of his introspective heroine.

But the internet moves on fast. Bruno wound up 7 years ago, and has now dropped silently down the memory-hole. I thought it was worth flagging up this appreciation of Bruno, along with the rest of Baldwin’s work:

A typical Bruno strip consists of a single long panel of characters talking over coffee, sprouting a half-dozen word balloons crammed with conversations about philosophy, sex, wine, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Beyond Bruno’s circular quest for fulfillment, there’s virtually no plot to speak of, to the point that in one sequence Bruno climbs out of the strip, demands that Baldwin make something happen, then hangs out in his apartment for several weeks. In the mid-1990s, an era of webcomics based on Star Trek and anime references, Bruno stood apart, the cutting-prone hipster in a crowd of AV club geeks.

Last year’s annual report of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee doesn’t mention Edward Snowden. It does, though, offer a few hints about the relationship between the NSA and its UK counterparts — a relationship which has always been extremely close, and which the leaks suggest may have involved GCHQ helping the NSA sidestep some of the legal restrictions it faced.

While the USA is not mentioned directly, it’s clear that Britain’s intelligence services are coming to accept the UK’s role as a secondary partner, specialising in particular roles, but unable to cover its entire function without American help. According to the head of SIS:

countries will play to their strengths and the joy of partnership, as we all know, is that two people or two organisations bring different strengths to a partnership and the total is more than the sum of its parts and that is what we are trying to create…

Intelligence priorites, also, are very much dictated by US priorities. Significant effort is being spent chasing Islamists without any real links to the UK. This, of course, fits snugly with American proccupations:

The trend that we noted last year for an increasing amount of counter-terrorism work to feature an ‘upstream’ element has continued (‘upstream’ refers to aspects of an investigation such as attack planning, preparation or direction occurring outside the UK, and terrorist groups with little or no presence in the UK). In the first three months of 2012/13, a significant proportion of the Security Service’s ICT investigations “ were focussed on upstream threats which did not have a substantial UK footprint”. This has driven closer working with SIS and GCHQ, who are able to collect intelligence and pursue disruptions overseas in support of these investigations.

When corporations have their computers hacked, they generally don’t talk about it. It’s awful publicity, and in most cases there is no legal requirement to disclose attacks. So sweeping it all under the carpet generally looks like the best response.

That means we have

no idea

how much sensitive data is being stolen from companies, or how many websites are paying protection money to avoid DDoS. The issue is somewhere on a spectrum between “significant worry” and “undiagnised catastrophe” — but, short of more mandatory disclosure laws, we can only speculate precisely where.

We can get a few hints, though, from the annual report of a committee overseeing the UK intelligence services. Perhaps through hosting “information exchanges” of companies involved in critical infrastructure, they have gathered some knowledge of the problem.

[One company] concluded that they had lost at least £800 million as a result of *** cyber attacks, and that’s quite a lot of money, even for a major company. But it’s very helpful, because otherwise you are just saying, ‘Well, some information has gone. So what?’

They also note a trend to getting sensitive information indirectly by hacking the “soft targets” represented by lawyers, accountants and other professional service firms.

A few months ago, I helped Hurriyet’s Tolga Tanis

demonstrate

that Turkey had exported weapons to Syria. The government had been furiously denying this, but our report finally backed them into admitting that they had allowed the sale of “non-military” weapons.

With a few months’ more trade data now available, we can see that the reality was worse than even this admission. In December, even as the politicians reluctantly confessed selling “sports guns” to Syria, their clerks were recording unambiguously military sales. Turkey-Syria export figures for that month include “munitions, components, and parts of bombs, torpedoes, mines, missiles”

This all comes with the usual disclaimer that trade data is rarely 100% accurate, and that in military terms these amounts of weaponry are pretty insignificant.

The Annual reports of the Swiss Money Laundering Reporting Office (MROS) are slightly more entertainig than you might imagine. In particular, they have a section full of vignettes from the past year’s prosecutions.

the foreign client had indicated that incoming funds transferred

to the account would come from the sale of protective vests. However, it turned out that the payments related to the sale of tanks and high-calibre weapons

….

Particularly suspicious were undated contracts signed with the Ministry of Defence of an African country as well as other documents. The bank could not exclude the possibility that these contracts had been falsified and, given the close ties that the client maintained with African government officials, that the client was also involved in corruption

….

[MROS] concluded that the beneficial owner of the account was involved in extensive deliveries of weapons to Africa

They have plenty more — the 2012 report includes everything from “Brothel in the Caribbean”, to “Graft and cronyism in the South American energy sector”

Khipu, or Quipu, are a method of recording information in knots, which was used in South America during the Inka empire in the 15th century. Ancient Scripts explains:

The main content of quipus are numbers, which are expressed by knots on a section of rope. Unlike our “Arabic” numbers which uses ten different symbols for each digit (0 to 9), quipu makers tied multiple knots in a tight sequence represent a “digit”. Digits can range from no knots (empty space) representing zero, to nine knots representing nine. For example, seven knots in a sequence equals the digit 7.

Multiple sequences of knots represent “digits” that make up a number larger than ten.

You have to admire the chutzpah of Hong Kong billionnaire Steven Lo Kit-Sing.

He has just been sentenced to 5 years in jail in Macau for bribery and money-laundering. According to the verdict, which he is appealing, Lo was involved in securing land opposite Macau International Airport.

But while Lo was on trial for bribing a government official in a real-estate deal, he was seemingly busy negotiating with other government officials to set up another real-estate deal. This time in Bulgaria, where he is investing in a €50 million project to build a satellite city near Sofia, with luxury hotels, apartments, and an “indoor sea”.

Incidentally it’s unlikely that Lo will ever serve his 5 years in the slammer, regardless of whether his conviction is upheld. Macau has no extradition treaty with Lo’s native Hong Kong, despite occasional mutterings about the possibility. And if Hong Kong does arrange an extradition deal, I’m sure Lo would be able to move to Bulgaria.

We all understand the reasons to hate

50 shades of grey

, right? It idolizes a relationship that is abusive to a mind-blowing extent, both physically and emotionally, and does so under cover of BDSM. The fact that Christian Grey’s behaviour can be seen as socially acceptable, even romantic, deeply unsettles both the kinkster and the feminist in me.

Many people have said the same, more eloquently, and at greater length. My favourite is by Cliff of

Pervocracy

, whose on-blog readthrough began with humour, but turned into sheer horror as she realised the depth of abuse in 50 shades.

Abigail Barnett has taken a different tack. Her novel

The Boss

is, among other things, a riposte to the nightmare that is 50 shades. She has taken the same setup: a young woman starts a kinky relationship with an older man, powerful and unimaginably rich. But in Barnett’s hands this is a sane, consensual relationship. They talk. They negotiate. They deal with the power imbalance in their lives, with their commitments to other people, with their plans for the future. And — anathema to EL James — they actually

enjoy

each other’s company, joking and chatting and generally having fun. It’s a rare romance — let alone a kinky romance — that you can read without constantly running up against misogynist assumptions.

The Boss

manages it, though, and it’s a joy to sink into comfort reading without the constant need to mentally rewrite the rapey bits.

One of the big beasts of Python has left the building. Ian Bicking created pip (an installer), virtualenv (an environment manager) and WebOb (an HTTP library at the core of Pyramid and several other web frameworks). Besides that, he’s been a major community presence. I, like many others, have long looked to his code as an example of solid principles combined with a focus on getting stuff built.

But now he has announced something that has been coming for a while: he has moved away from python, and will be focusing on Javascript from now on.

The announcement is full of the kind of incidental insight you would expect from Ian. Some of it is about personal process — and this is a pattern I can certainly identify with:

Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly excited about an idea, like really excited, I have to take a break. I need to calm down. Try to wrap my head around the ideas, because I know if I push forward directly that I’ll just muddle things up and feel disappointed. No, I don’t know that is true: maybe I don’t want to have to confront, in that moment, that the idea is not as cool as I think it is, or as possible as I think it is. But often I do step back into the problem, with ideas that are more mature for having thought more deeply about them.

He also talks about the development of libraries, from avant-garde to mainstream. You start with a groundbreaking idea. Nobody quite understands it, even the creator, so the thing ends up not quite working. It is only when another developer builds a second generation that the idea can bloom and reach wide acceptance. So pip was the second generation for easy_install and eggs, which, and SQLObject laid the ground for SQLAlchemy:

SQLObject explored a lot of metaprogramming concepts that were quite novel in the Python world at that time. At the same time maintaining it felt like a terrible burden. It took me far too long to resolve that, and only once interest had died down (in no small part due to my lack of attention) did I hand it over to Oleg who has been a far more steady hand. This would be a pattern I would unfortunately repeat. But if SQLObject helped the next generation be better that’s good enough for me.

Bicking is now at Mozilla, working with Javascript. He’s building togetherjs, a real-time collaboration library that’s one of the most exciting things happening at Mozilla. I know I’m itching for a chance to try it out, and my faith in the library is doubled by the knowledge that Ian Bicking’s wisdom is going into it.

Scalzi’s

Star Trek

spoof is a superficial romp, but a very enjoyable one. The crew of the starship

Intrepid

have come to realise that something is seriously wrong on their vessel. Crew assigned to expeditions alongside senior officers are liable to die in unexpected ways, while the Captain manages some risky and implausible escape. Officer Kerensky is hideously injured every other week, only to find himself fully recovered a few days later. On-ship technicians rely on a device called “The Box”, miraculously able to almost-solve a problem in the nick of time, but always requiring some obscure detail to be put right by the

Intrepid

‘s chief scientist. Officers have a tendency to speak rousing monologues while staring into the middle distance, and suffer strange compulsions to indulge in stupid — but dramatic — behaviour.

Rumours and wild theories abound on board, and everybody has some plan to make somebody else serve as the captain’s expendable sidekick. But a few raw recruits have the smarts to go further, and delve into the mystery of what is really happening on the

Intrepid

.

It’s a pitch-perfect take on the Space Opera. It’s entertaining enough even for a reader like me, who is far from steeped in the genre. The plot is fairly predictable, but that doesn’t stop the journey being great fun, and it’s short enough that you don’t mind.