Freyburg

Things took a turn for the psychedelic this week, as the Three Who Rule recorded a commentary for “The Claws of Axos”, a story best described as a product of its time. And what a time it was, with nasty video effects, UNIT mayhem, and the inimitable Bill Filer, Yankee Unit Operative and suave man of action. Filer!!

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This one’s about the iPhone Underground.

Turns out all the hooey about “OMG HACKZ0RZ!” has at least a grain of truth to it. According to the New York Times, weeks before the “haha the Olympics are on and noone will notice” mini-war Russia just sprang on Georgia, the breakaway republic’s servers were being pelted by Cossack nerds aiming to humiliate them and take down their internet infrastructure. Besides the psychological benefits, cyberwar is also exceedingly cheap, costing much less than a tank full of soldiers to implement and maintain. Whether these cyberattacks are the work of the Russian government, intelligence agencies or criminal organizations (or all three) is unclear, but in a larger sense these incidents point to the way wars might be waged in future conflicts. Of course, the people with the most to lose aren’t the Third World powers but Western and Asian countries, where more infrastructure and economic muscle is tied into net connectivity. JUst like terrorism, cyberwarfare is essentially asymmetrical.

News was sparse this week, but all the better for us to leap into commentary on “The Five Doctors,” one of the most pleasurable bits of fanwank to grace the British small screen, at least until “The Stolen Earth.” Next week, the adventures of the intrepid Bill Filer in “Claws of Axos.” Whee!

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After 100 years of the affluent rushing to the suburbs, many major cities are experiencing a reversing trend, where young urban professionals opt for smaller living quarters, more densely packed living areas, and mixed-use communities. The New Republic has a decent article about this trend of “trading places” in their newest issue. Vancouver, where I live, has been on the forefront of this for a while now. Of course, what rarely gets mentioned is how damned expensive all this is….Vancouver is one example, but the best one would be Manhattan, where it’s virtually impossible to live or own a place without being a millionaire. Still, it’s an interesting read.

Digg, along with its scrappy competitor Reddit, is an interesting idea that has one fundamental flaw; it’s driven by idiots. The whole idea behind Digg is that the users vote on what news is important. That’s fine in theory, but in practice you get a lot of dumb links to dumb things, such as the endless Ron Paul links that festooned Digg’s front page months ago, despite Paul not having a chance in hell of securing the Republican nomination.

Polymeme aims to avoid that trap. The service tracks buzz, but shapes the result into something somewhat more intellectually pleasing than Digg. I’m intrigued, and I’ll keep checking it out for now.

A titanic torrent of news was only the beginning of this mammoth episode of Radio Free Skaro, which featured almost an hour’s worth of banter even before we got around to commentary on “Robot”, Tom Baker’s debut story. Much as the crew has a certain fondness for this tale of fascistic scientists, errant droids and wonky regenerative antics, they were unsparing in their criticism of the silliness on screen…and Warren said “MADOC!” a lot. Enjoy!

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First water on Mars, and now the brainy folks at MIT have figured out a way to make solar energy much more efficient and practical. I generally regard the words “solar” and “revolution” with some skepticism, since most of the time there’s more hope than facts being put on the table. But MIT isn’t known for either grandiose statements or stupidity, so I’m holding out some hope in this case.