At year’s middle, I’ve read 20 books, four shy of my goal of four books per month—but much closer to that total than I had expected after some long periods of minimal reading. While I’m happy to be reading more often again, there are only a couple of books I’ve read so far this year that are really good.
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From the UK, evidence that there’s a markedly higher tolerance among law enforcement for certain types of hackers. “The other hacking scandal: Suppressed report reveals that law firms, telecoms giants and insurance companies routinely hire criminals to steal rivals’ information”. You know, “the right people”.

I’m vaguely surprised that so far, we haven’t seen any hard evidence of data going from government sources to business entities for this kind of thing. Money clearly gets you access to police files and the like, but I’m curious about the extent to which “blue-chip companies” have been able to get their hands on state surveillance data such as that being collected by GCHQ.

That’s the thought I’ll leave you with this week; hopefully I’ll put together a longer post for next week. Take care out there.

It appears that the NSA has been collecting both phone call metadata and actual phone call content from an unknown, but very likely vast, number of American citizens, and that this likely extends to other forms of communication such as email and text messaging. They may have been doing this in violation of the US Constitution while avoiding getting that issue before the courts, but they may also have been doing this in violation of the guidelines that the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act court has laid down—i.e. illegally.
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By beating David Ferrer 6–3, 6–2, 6–3, Rafael Nadal became the first man in tennis history to win one of the four Grand Slam events eight times. Since his debut in 2005, Nadal has won eight of nine possible titles at Roland Garros, missing out only in 2009. His record there is an astonishing 59–1. He now has 12 Grand Slam titles overall, putting him behind only Federer (17) and Sampras (14).
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I’ve failed in my duty to produce written words in sufficient quantity and quality for your edification and entertainment this week, and instead can only offer a link to the recent Flash version of ROM Check Fail, a retro-gaming mashup.