The tech details will be lost on most of you, but in brief: if an attacker can get your card cloned, then they can also pretend to know your PIN – fraudulent transactions they make will be reported to the bank as "Verified by PIN". This is bad, because if a transaction is reported as "Verfiied by PIN" then as far as the bank is concerned it's legit, and not disputable. Chip and PIN is, and always was, design to protect the banks, and not the consumers. Just y'know, saying. You might want to write angry letters to your banks, and suchlike.

Well, what did you expect when you all voted for the fuck? Someone who might be good for public services in London? I know Ken was a weasel too, but he was at least London's weasel, with the interests in London in his weaselly little heart (possibly some distance behind his own interests, but they were *there*), and every time I read a story about Boris, my blood pressure spikes something dreadful.

This, I feel rather neatly sums up some key differences between the UK and the US. Just occasionally, I'm happy to live in the country I do.

And this is why google buzz is poorly implemented, badly designed, and generally a massive fuck you to all google's users. I'm still trying to work out how to switch it off completely.

Not sure if this is available to people in the UK yet, but if and when it is, this is could make life a lot easier.

Interesting set of metrics for judging the game-ness of something.

All true Londoners have a south London past. There they experienced their first flat, their first date, their first taste of city life, with nothing too exotic. They dallied in Clapham, flirted with Dulwich, tested their mortgage muscle on Stockwell. (I lived awhile in Upper Norwood.) South London is the kind of place, as was said of George Bush, that “reminds every woman of her first husband”.

Makes CSS easier to work with.

"This app makes working with LESS a snap by turning it into a graphical interface." Allegedly, anyway. Might be useful if I go down the LESS route for future projects.

Handy set of version control scripts to handle simple SVN tasks.

I've just dropped this on my work PC, and need to drop it on my home PCs, and then I'll have some completely joined up note taking tools – iphone, laptop, desktops, and, indeed, once I've hammered a quick script together, automated versioned backups of same.

Bugger. Eating at ElBulli was pretty much the top spot on the "things to do before I die" list, and yeah, he's going to re-open, but it's still an experience I'm unlikely to ever get to have, in it's current form. I shall revise it to "Eat Ferran Adria's food", but it's still saddening.

Excellent article on the place for an iPad in the history of computing, and the generation shift that is occurring. For myself, I am having to keep reminding myself that I don't need one as a priority, that version 2.0 will be much better, and so on and so forth. I really do want a decent ebook/magazine reader…

I found today's XKCD near-heartbreaking on a number of levels. Why aren't we trying to get it home, for fuck's sake? I know it's not alive, but it's out there, and we're not even trying to go after it…

Well worth a look. I'm a little disturbed to discover that in over 100,000 people, my browser is unique. Not sure what I can do about that…

God, has it really been going that long? (Yes, I know, the print edition has been going longer.)

"what’s the next era that’ll capture people’s imaginations in that way, as a point of change, a shadow looming over what comes after, the image still burned in our culture’s retinas?"

Trying this out at work. Initial stuff seem positive.

This is very tempting. Certainly, if the DEB bill passes in it's present form, I'll be switching to this, or something very like it. (I tried TOR for basic web browsing, but it's sufficiently slow and fucked that I stopped again.)

Ever wondered what it would be like to perform surgery on yourself? No? Why not? Well, anyway: here's a description of what it's like to have to give yourself an appendectomy. In the Antarctic. With next to no help.

Clay Shirky opens up a serious can of worms, noting that women do not push themselves forward in the way men do. Part of me wants to say "well, *duh*". Shirky suggests that if women behaved in a more self-aggrandising manner, they'd get more equal treatment. I'm just not sure that I want to encourage any more people to behave like some of the self-promoting male pricks I've met.

Tom Coates identifies some of the problems with what Shirky is suggesting – the problem isn't just that women don't push themselves forward, but often that the wrong people do, and what we should be focusing on is ensuring that everyone correctly advertises their own level of experience and ability – that those that *do* self-promote heavily while they can be useful, can just as often be a total pain.

Danah Boyd's repose to Shirky and Coates is excellent reading.

Trafalgar Square at noon on Saturday. Anyone interested?