Aw man. I got hacked (or something) and an obviously spam message got posted in my twitter feed. Of course, I’ve had my account suspended, pending investigation. I should be back up within a month, according to twitter. I don’t know whether the error is twitter’s or mine, but needless to say every place where I used the same password as for twitter has been changed, just in case. All in all, not as painful as it might have been, I guess!

Well, I figured it out, so I thought I’d post it. More after the fold.

Read more…

Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result. Obnoxious! There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.

Read more…

I now have a home page over at the University of Bath, where I’m doing my PhD. It’s just for academic things and lists of publications. Find it here: cs.bath.ac.uk/~cajw20.

Read this old, unsurprising report in New Scientist. From the article:

Automated trading ...has come to account for more than half of trades in many markets around the globe. ...Because of the finite speed of light, trading speed depends on where you are sitting. ...“The basic insight,” says Wissner-Gross, “is that the optimal location lets the trader exploit fluctuations equally on both exchanges.” ...“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

If this is how money and the free markets work now, I’m pretty sure we no longer know what words mean.

So the GCHQ and the NSA are apparently teaming up to do a whole lot of extremely legal warrantless mass surveillance.

I am not against spying or surveillance per se. Anyone who lives in the UK and says “if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear” doesn’t understand the purpose of judicial oversight and probably doesn’t speak arabic. I believe in judicial oversight. An amoral-nerd-handler is not a judge. And political bias, false-positives and chilling self-censorship are the only outcomes of the GCHQ program I can see on the horizon.

So, if you’re emailing me, please feel free to encrypt your message with my PGP public key.

I’m currently running GPGtools, which is a very user-friendly free implementation of PGP and interfaces nicely with Mac OS and Mail.app for Mac OS in particular.

It’s been a pretty horrifying couple of weeks on Twitter, hasn’t it? At least it has on my timeline. Two unrelated, awful events in particular came right on top of each other, each whipping up a social media storm. First the violent incursion of militarised police into peaceful democratic protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Second the eruption of sickening misogyny and violent threats directed at female game makers and games journalists, in particular Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

Read more…

A commenter on an old post recently asked if I’d share my copies of Ed Brayton’s old podcasts. I’ve put them up here. I’ve mentioned before how much of a fan I am of these shows.

The list is an awful mess right now as I just copied the file names and regexp’d a page together, but it’s better than nothing.