I have very few memories from early childhood, to the perpetual surprise and occasional exasperation of those around me. I’m an extreme case of what is usual: a 5-year-old will have good memories of what they did at age 3, but a 9-year-old will have mostly forgotten. This study tries to pin down the time and nature of “childhood amnesia”, and suggests it happens around age 7:

at ages 5 to 7, the children remembered over 60 per cent of the events they’d chatted about at age 3. However, their recall for these events was immature in the sense of containing few evaluative comments and few mentions of time and place. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 recalled fewer than 40 per cent of the events they’d discussed at age 3, but those memories they did recall were more adult-like in their content. Bauer and Larkina said this suggests that adult-like remembering and forgetting develops at around age 7 or soon after. They also speculated that the immature form of recall seen at ages 5 to 7 could actually contribute to the forgetting of autobiographical memories – a process known as “retrieval-induced forgetting”.

Who says the Britain doesn’t have global influence? In the 80s we managed to hobble cellphone encryption so that our spies could listen in on calls. That’s according to Norway’s Aftenposten newsletter, which talked to 4 people involved in developing mobile communications systems in the 1980s.

A European working group designed the encryption system. They had to choose how long to make the keys — the more bits, the more secure it would be. The experts proposed a reasonably-strong 128 bits, but encountered unexpected opposition:

The British were not very interested in having a strong encryption. And after a few years, they protested against the high security level that was proposed. They wanted a key length of 48 bit. We were very surprised.

Why would Britain want a

less

secure system? To spy on Asia, it seems. According to two sources, “

the British secret services wanted to weaken the security so they could eavesdrop more easily

“:

The British argued that the key length had to be reduced. Among other things they wanted to make sure that a specified Asian country should not have the opportunity to escape surveillance.

This fits with the understanding which has been put together by security experts, often baffled by the weakness of GSM encryption. Cambridge academic Ross Anderson wrote in 1994:

Indeed, my spies inform me that there was a terrific row between the NATO signals agencies in the mid 1980’s over whether GSM encryption should be strong or not. The Germans said it should be, as they shared a long border with the Evil Empire; but the other countries didn’t feel this way. and the algorithm as now fielded is a French design.

Incidentally, Anderson also gets in the kind of anti-Murdoch swipe which was as relevant then as now, suggesting that somebody might “

break the Royal Family’s keys for sale to News International

“

Tim Bray attempts a high-level survey of the development landscape in 2014. Server-side development is solid and improving. But the client-side is a mess — a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of different tools appearing, mutating and vanishing month by month. We’re dealing with the weaknesses of JS and CSS, the annoyances of the DOM, and the need to develop in triplicate for Android, iOS and the web. Eventually we’ll converge on some streamlined solution(s) for client-side development, but it’s anybody’s guess what that will be:

Historical periods featuring rococo engineering outbursts of colorful duplicative complexity usually end up converging on something simpler that hits the right 80/20 points. But if that’s what’s coming, it’s not coming from any direction I’m looking, so color me baffled. Maybe we’re stuck with clients-in-triplicate for the long haul.

I’ve read a fair few blogposts on how to pack a suitcase. This guide from Cameo, though, must be one of the most thorough and impressive.

Syrian refugees are selling their organs in Lebanon, according to Der Spiegel:

Abu Hussein said that in the last few months he has driven 15 or 16 kidney donors – all of them Syrians aged between 14 and 30 – to the secret clinic masquerading as a residential building. The clinic has the most modern medical equipment and doesn’t want to limit itself to kidneys. “I’m currently looking for someone who has an eye for sale.”

Der Spiegel

claims the going rate for a kidney is $7,000; according to Middle East Monitor it is just $670. The latter also cites a WHO guesstimate on the size of the market:

There is no exact information on the size of this business, but the WHO estimates that there is at least 10,000 kidneys sold worldwide, a large proportion of which originate in Lebanon; around 10 per cent of organ transplants around the world are such commercial transactions.

Bruce Sterling, quoting Victorian essayist William Dean Howells, explains the appeal of pictures of ruins:

The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one’s vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner’s rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.

Seems spot-on to me, and I say that as a committed addict of Urban Decay and the like.

LOL My Thesis gives those who have accomplished a PhD a greater challenge: describe it in a sentence. Some favourite attempts:

• The ancient Romans had a pretty large army, all things considered. (Ancient History, Oxford)
• If you watch gay people on TV you are more likely to want them to get married. (Political Science, Oklahoma State University)
• The government hiring people is a good way to bring down unemployment; we stopped doing it because we are stupid. (Policy History, UCSB)
• Turns out that if you want people to like you during a war, you probably shouldn’t blow up their house. (Political Science & History, Fairmont State University)

Something is seriously wrong when Russian courts are more protective of civil liberties than those in the USA. But that’s the case with metadata collection, at least on paper. Obama excused blanket phone surveillance because it only collected “so-called metadata”, so spooks did not need to “go back to a federal judge”. Andrei Soldatov, surely the best-informed journalist covering the Russian intelligence services, reports that they are more limited:

When Russia’s intelligence agencies collect metadata without a court order, it violates Russian laws. In September 2012, the country’s Supreme Court issued an interpretation stating that both a subscriber’s phone number and the connections between subscribers are confidential elements of phone conversations. The court ruled that “obtaining such information is an invasion of privacy and abridges citizens’ constitutional right to confidential telephone conversations” and that “agencies performing operational and search activities must obtain a court order to gain access to such information.”

Russian spooks doubtless dodge such legal bounds with the same fluidity as their American counterparts. Still, it is striking that the US government has sunk so low as to be seriously comparable to Russia.

First the UN and now the EU have banned exporting weapons to the Central African Republic.

So I thought I’d take a quick look at where the weapons are coming from. This is going to come in two parts. First I’ll cover what is in official documentation. Then I’ll go back and take a peek at journalistic and NGO reports, which in this case turn out to contain far more useful information.

Step one is trade database Comtrade. According to that, Spain has consistently send small quantities of guns and ammunition in, month by month. A bit further back we see Slovakia, with a $1.5m shipment in May 2011. France, the former colonial power which still considers itself peacemaker in the region, has chipped in smaller chunks.

These are just total amounts sold, in fairly broad categories. To see some detail of specific transfers we can turn to

Then you can look at the UN Register of Conventional Arms. This shows international sales of weapons systems, as reported to the UN. It only contains heavy weaponry — in the self-description, “

seven categories of arms, which are deemed the most lethal ones

“. There’s also a smattering of information on small arms, which gets submitted even though it isn’t quite required.

The official database is less useful than the version by SIPRI, which combines it with other data sources.

Here we can see a separate transfer from Slovakia in 2008 for 3 armored vehicles. There are a couple of helicopters from Ukraine in 2011, and a plane from the USA back in 2006.

It’s slim pickings, though. Even for a small country (CAR’s population is about 4.5 million), this is clearly not enough to supply a war. The weapons come from elsewhere: old stocks, imports from neighboring countries, or transfers kept off the books.

In a day or two I’ll come back and take a look through the less official sources of information, and see what arms transfer routes we can infer.

Here’s the latest graph of killings in Iraq from Iraq Body Count. We’re back up to death rates comparable to 2003-4, certainly worse than things have been for a few years.

IBC summarizes the events of the year:

The year started with protests and rising discontent. The Sunnis demanded reforms, while the government of Nouri al-Maliki abandoned any efforts to be cross sectarian, targeting Sunni politicians, arresting and interrogating and forcing some into exile. After the April 23 protest turned violent and the Iraqi Security Forces attacked protesters, killing 49 of them, the retaliation resulted in the number of civilian deaths tripling in the next 6 months. While 1,900 civilians were killed between October 2012 and March 2013, 6,300 were killed between April and October 2013.

I’d just add that the current rise is particularly worrying, in that it comes in winter. Iraq’s heaviest violence has tended to take place in summer. So if things are this bad even in winter, we can expect them to get much worse come summer.