Interesting Links for 18-05-2021

[andrewducker]

Want To Know Whether A Movie Or Book Will Be A Hit? Look At How Emotional The Reviews Are

(tags:emotion reviews psychology movies books advertising )

Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate

(tags:russia language hacking )

Fungi are more interesting than you'd think (and better at finding their way out of IKEA)

(tags:fungus )

The U.S. Military Has an Extremism Problem

(tags:USA military racism )

FactCheck: Video which purports to show Israeli policeman strangling Palestinian boy is false

(tags:videos misinformation Israel Palestine )

Don't time the stock market

(tags:stocks time )

Comments

[calimac]

To the authors of #1: Examples, please?

[cmcmck]

I've got old Icelandic on mine.

Wonder if that would fox them? :o)

[danieldwilliam]

I have punted over the ransomware article to our cyber guys. Thanks for the link.

[andrewducker]

Be interested to hear their thoughts (if they are repeatable)

[danieldwilliam]

Some general musing on the cat and mouse and red queen nature of this sort of thing.

[andrewducker]

That makes sense.
I wonder what the next move is - "is the *current* keyboard Russian?"

[hairyears]

The extremism problem in the US military echoes an unpleasant discovery in the Paratroop Regiment a few years ago.

To cut a long story short, there had been an unofficial policy of tolerating racism, and support for what are politely referred to as 'Nationalist' political movements, in certain parts of the Army.

That's interesting - and also difficult to police in terms of 'proscribed' groups - because the National Front and its successors were never really a unified movement: they varied from street-level skinhead thugs who'd commit organised assaults and arson, to semi-respectable political parties who'd put up candidates in local and national elections, and everything in between.

Lots of egotists, lots of in-fighting, but also lots of common-cause and turning up for marches and the occasional show of force.

Some of those had links to overseas far-right groups, in America, and Germany, and...

...Russia.

Oops.

There was 'A Bit Of A Flap' when the Ministry of Defence noticed that Russian-funded extremists had cells in elite combat regiments in the Army.

Nobody talks about it now *at all* and we can only suppose that everything is now perfectly, perfectly fine.

I'll believe it when the Army - and some of the security regiments attached to the other forces - look a lot more like the population in the economically-depressed areas where the Armed Forces do the bulk of their recruitment.

And that's a Hot Tip for people in other countries, too: all regiments and military formations, everywhere (except for the special forces) have a public face of parades and memorial services in which you get to see the whole force.

Beware of the ones that are completely white, or have just one not-so-white soldier who is very, very careful in his movements and his facial expressions.

I don't think they've dealt with the problem at all, and extremist networks still hoover-up people leaving the servicesfor a life of unemployment and untreated mental health problems.

...Hoovering-up, or maybe changing their membership status to 'overt' or paying their dues and turning up to meetings more often now that no-one's looking so closely.

[andrewducker]

That's rather worrying. I believe the police departments in some parts of the USA have had similar issues.

Do you have a decent link on the subject of the British army?

A late reply...

[hairyears]

Sorty, but that unreferenced comment is all you're getting, because the Guardian's article on it was taken down when I looked, last year; and the people I asked informally about it, at the time, have clearly been told that this never happened and we wouldn't discuss it if it ever did, which it definitely didn't.

I haven't Googled (or DuckDucked) for it yet - I can't run a firewall here - but I would expect that there are now a lot of 'muddying the water' articles out there.

So: formulate your own opinions on the matter, which is (as of last year) an unsubstantiated rumour.