Hackers paradise

A quick suggestion for anyone heading to Las Vegas this weekend - what ever you do, turn off your mobile phone. This weekend Vegas hosts the notorious hacker conference Defcon. It is apparently the high point of the hacker calender and if there's something they can mess with, they will mess with it.

I have just been talking to a hacker about this and he says it's all in the spirit of fun and these guys are getting together to break into things just to show the manufacturers where their weaknesses are....

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Libertarian Paternalism

Guido steps away from his gossip monger routine for a moment to make a substantial point. The Tories really aren't liberals, in the sense of those interested in liberty, whatever the current rhetoric. Rather, just a different group of people telling you of the different things you must do.

Libertarian paternalism, government "nudging", is increasingly beginning to seem like a modernised version of old fashioned authoritarian conservativism.

Quite. However popular the book "Nudge" is, libertarian paternalism is still something of an oxymoron. Sure, nudging people towards doing good things sounds wonderful, but it still requires that someone, somewhere, decide...

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But what are spies for?

One of these really mind boggling ideas turns up in the newspapers today.
MI5 and MI6 could be forced to share their intelligence with the rest of Europe under new proposals from the EU.

The piece goes on to explain at least some of the reasons why this might not be all that wise. We already share a lot with the Yanks, who would be less than pleased to see what they collect being shared with certain other EU states. There have also been times when material collected has been shared with people we really don't want...

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Rates held at 5%

No surprise but the Bank of England’s MPC has kept UK interest rates at 5 per cent.