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Britain's MI6 Opens Its First Website

An anonymous reader wites "Britain's spy agency the Secret Intelligence Service, known popularly as MI6, has opened its first website. While much about the agency is still not public, the website has information on service history and career opportunities for would-be spies. This rare peek at the real group popularized by the James Bond series brought over 3.5 million visits in its first few opening hours on Wednesday."

10 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. /. = News for Nerds.... five days late by MBraynard · · Score: 4, Informative
    October 12.

    Slow news day?

  2. Re:Old news! by FidelCatsro · · Score: 2, Informative

    Naturally , Hubbard was an acolyte of Crowleys . Something of which most Scientologists are unaware .
    He was apparently not that good and a bit of a disappointment to the Thelamic order .
    Talking about that , Crowley did in fact work for MI6 and the American Intelligence agencies during WW2 helping with discovering some of the Nazi occult activities.

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  3. Re:Nice website by LnxAddct · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well in defense of the FBI & CIA, both of their sites provide a lot more information. The SIS site provides minimal information so its easier to keep it clean. Regardless, the SIS site is not as cool as the NSA's :) (In particular the flash based one, its one of the few flash sites that are done well).
    Regards,
    Steve

  4. I dunno, the CIA's website is pretty nice by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    After all it has the World Factbook. Probably the best resource I've ever seen for getting basic information on countries. For every country it has a map, gorgraphic and demographic information, information on the government, the military, communications, etc. If you hear a country mentioned, it's a great place to go to get basic background on that country. One would assume it's fairly accurate as well.

  5. Ian Fleming and James Bond by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Whilst I can't comment about Ian Fleming being "fired from spy school", which sounds like a good yarn, I do know that Fleming served for some considerable time in the British Intelligence Service during WWII and held (as Bond did) the rank of Commander RN.

    Flemings experience of black ops in wartime directly influenced his concept of what an intelligence agent gets up to and his role in thinking up such ops exposed him to the "funny" sort of kit dreamed up by Q in the Bond books.

    Another connection with Bond is that Fleming had a considerable reputation as a womaniser.

    1. Re:Ian Fleming and James Bond by Quirk · · Score: 2, Informative

      As noted, I related schoolboy gossip, but, curious to see if there's anything to substantiate my yarn, I ran a search and came up with a story from Camp X, a spy school run in Canada during WWII. The anecdotal evidence is that Ian Fleming couldn't go through with an order to kill a man in cold blood.

      --
      "Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
      Cohen
  6. Re:SIS is their name - but URL is mi6 by Lurk3r · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe its because MI6.gov.uk really isnt their main site, just a simple redirect. http://www.sis.gov.uk/ Is actually their homepage.

  7. Languages by Geoffreyerffoeg · · Score: 3, Informative

    The language choices are interesting: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, and Chinese. My guess as to the reasons: English because it's Britain, Spanish because it's spoken by the non-anglophone Americas, Russian because the USSR was the Cold War enemy, French because it was the international language of diplomacy, Arabic because it's the language of the Middle East (the major intelligence interest today), and Chinese because it's the most common language per capita.

    Notable omissions are other European languages and Japanese. Arabic is a very notable inclusion.

  8. Re:Nice website by LnxAddct · · Score: 2, Informative

    It isn't a distro, they are kernel patches to increase the security of the kernel. The NSA worked closely with Red Hat to get them integrated, and now SELinux is supported in the mainline 2.6 kernel. Now they offer patches to bring your kernel more up to date.
    Regards,
    Steve

  9. Re:Languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Those are also the 6 official languages of the United Nations. Maybe that is the reason?