Which part of Assistant Director of MI5 was unclear?
Well, yeah, he did that, alright. I read an interesting book a while back about him though. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called, but it had a very different take on him and his CIA pal.
Fancy joining the SAS’s secret hacker squad in Hereford as an electronics engineer for £33k?
A job ad blunder by the UK’s Ministry of Defence has accidentally revealed the existence of a secret SAS mobile hacker squad.
The secretive Computer Network Operations (CNO) Exploitation Unit had its cover blown on the MoD’s external job ad website, as spotted by the ever eagle-eyed Alan Turnbull of Secret Bases.
[…]
Palantir abandons any attempt at curating nice-guy image with ‘Global Information Dominance Experiments’
For an AI biz associated with the CIA and the much-criticised US immigration agency ICE, whose founder helped finance impeached ex-president and alleged insurrectionist Donald Trump, it might be fair to assume Palantir would endevour to avoid giving the wrong impression.
For example, publicising a project under the title “Global Information Dominance Experiments”, run by the US Airforce, might not be first on the list to create a friendlier image. But that’s not for Palantir.
As if inviting comparison with Bond villains only a Bacofoil bodysuit and height-challenged sidekick would add to, the project “was designed to enable cross-combatant command collaboration to generate globally-integrated effects using artificial intelligence-enabled information,” according to the US military description.
[…}
That just came out of nowhere, didn’t it… 
Keeping up with the Joneses Erdogans.
I thought the whole thing with Palantir was “We’re evil and we help you do evil shit.” Aside from that, my impression was that it isn’t much more than Hadoop, UIMA and Solr packaged together with support or thereabouts. It’s a Dogbert consultancy setup with Catbert aesthetics. Or am I wrong?
33K?
Definitely not going for the best and brightest.
Yesterday, a man claiming to be a Russian citizen swam the twenty kilometers from Kunashir to Hokkaido seeking asylum in Japan. That’s all they seem to know now. He is in the custody of immigration authorities in Sapporo, where they have placed him under temporary protective custody until they decide what to do with him.
Update on this developing story.
Yesterday, the Russian Consulate General in Sapporo tweeted that they had not been in contact with the man who crossed over from Kunashir. However, they also tweeted that he had not swam, but instead used a rubber boat to cover the 25km distance.
The press has also learned that the man was in possession of Japanese yen, which he used to buy clothing and beverages in the Town of Shibetsu after landing.
Hey @KathyPartdeux I just thought of a great spy film which I think must be quite realistic: Army of Shadows by Jean Pierre Melville.
I mean it’s a war movie, possibly, but it’s the resistance under Nazi rule so it’s all undercover creeping. I suspect it’s realistic for several reasons. It’s from a book by a resistance fighter, the director was a residence fighter, it’s incredibly unglamorous. The good guys aren’t very good really, they’re all complete misanthropes unsuited for decent life. The action in it is incredibly unglamorous. People keep on getting captured by the Nazis and the best spycraft can do is get them killed, hopefully before they betray everyone. Because everybody betrays. Always.
I know it’s grim but it’s also a really good functional thriller, exciting and with caper elements. Just instead of getting the diamond and the girl/boy you get to kill your friends.
Thanks! I’ll have to give that a look.
Update on the man who claimed to have swum to Japan from Kunashir.
The Japanese immigration authorities have ruled that the man is not a refugee and are planning to deport him to Sakhalin on September 2 at the earliest.
there’s a trailer and stuff here
