Search results for: “microsoft”

  • Book Depository + more things

    Book Depository Online bookseller Book Depository is closing down with some three weeks notice. It wasn’t a topic at work and barely made a ripple amongst British friends. The Hong Kong part of my social media bubble shared the news and were sad about it. The company had been owned by Amazon since 2011. I…

  • NORA

    Last week I heard the acronym NORA mentioned with regards the kind of problems that Microsoft’s algorithm could solve. NORA stands for no one real answer. Search is already pretty good at answering questions like ‘what time is it in Osaka’ or ‘what is the capital of Kazakhstan’. In the mid-2000s NORA would have been…

  • Illicit finance + more stuff

    Illicit finance RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to…

  • Patagonia vest recession

    The Patagonia vest recession was a phrase that I first heard touted by Scott Galloway to encapsulate the economy in 2022. In most recessions, the first sectors to go under are construction, retailing and manufacturing – blue and pink collar working class people suffer the blunt of lay-offs and site closures due to recession. The…

  • Nepotism + more things

    Nepotism in the creative industries Is nepotism really that bad? | LinkedIn – Jed Hallam wrote an essay on nepotism and the effects that he perceives it as having on inequality. Jed tries to steer a line on nepotism somewhere between recognising that the people may have an interest and talent, whilst pointing out inequality related…

  • CES 2023

    25 years thinking about tech and CES 2023 CES 2023 marks the 25th year since I first started working in agency life. Back then I was working in what was the exciting world of technology. I had nascent internet clients, networking / telecoms clients and Palm, who were leaders in the personal digital assistant market.…

  • Ukraine beta test + more things

    Ukraine beta test I subscribe to all kinds of weird and wonderful newsletters to get content for these posts, the idea of a Ukraine beta test was inspired by this post on SOFREP: Combat Sandbox: Ukraine’s ‘MacGyver Army’Tests Western Weaponry | SOFREP. SOFREP is written a self-described team of a team of former military, intelligence…

  • Group B + more things

    Group B rallying Group B rallying was the stuff of my childhood. Its history was complex. In the 1970s the motorsport governing body FIA was in dispute with formula one team owners. As a result the FIA reformed one of its own committees related to formula one called CSI, in 1978, into the autonomous Fédération…

  • Cracking the RSA algorithm + more things

    Cracking the RSA algorithm I guess before we go into cracking the RSA algorithm, we need to discuss what the RSA algorithm is. The RSA algorithm is the mathematical equation behinds the RSA crypto-system. The RSA in question are Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman who publicly described back in 1977. Ron Rivest literally…