Daily-Column

In 2010, GCHQ and the NSA hacked a company responsible for producing a huge number of mobile SIMs and stole all the security keys: With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. ...

Every Frame a Painting examines Jackie Chan’s Action Comedy direction and why it’s so successful: http://vimeo.com/tonyzhou/jackiechan See also How Edgar Wright Does Visual Comedy - almost a study in Simon Pegg, but also why there needs to be way more Wright films.

2014 is the hottest average temperature on Earth since records began. It’s only half a degree (Celsius) up on the 20th Century average, but that’s still half a degree in a human lifetime. This is no longer a geological-scale process of warming. To bring this back home quite succinctly, this animation demonstrates the process of rising temperatures very well. Two points to make a note on - the 1944 record stood for 36 years, until 1980; note also the massive jump between 1997 (a record year) and 1998 (another record year) - and it’s not as though that record stood for years, it was surpassed not very long after at all. ...

The Guardian has a fascinating article on the increasing number of detective agencies in India, particularly staffed with ladies investigating possible affairs: The boy and the girl met each other, Paliwal says, and became very close in no time. “But just before the wedding, the boy began to feel a little doubt: ‘Why is this person marrying me? I am shorter than her and earn nothing in comparison.’ He called me.” It took Paliwal a month of work, which included tracing the girl’s history and having her followed. “What do I find – the business actually belongs to the girl’s boyfriend, a married man. He can’t leave his wife because her family has stakes in his business, so he has taken a house for the girlfriend and put her up there. Now the girl’s family in her village had come to know of all this and were very upset, therefore she needed to get married in order to keep her arrangement going.” ...

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia When you think about how many sites around the web are entirely powered off the back of advertising rather than direct money, it’s kind of astonishing something as frequently and widely used as Wikipedia runs without any advertising and serves up dynamic pages as quickly as you can imagine. There’s media and text and an ever-growing reference and resource that has proven invaluable over the years. ...