It's unlikely that the US government can force them to do it, especially if Skype retains a non-US development presence (ideally a separate company that's owned by eBay rather than just a bunch of eBay employees in Europe.)
The big problem with Skype's crypto, though, is that it's closed-source and hasn't been seriously evaluated by experts - protocol design and key handling are *difficult* to do well, and it's unlikely that 128-bit vs 256-bit AES would be the weak link. For instance, some of the reverse engineering that's been done indicates that they're probably not using Diffie-Hellman for key exchange, just RSA, so they don't have perfect forward secrecy. Who knows what else they're doing wrong.
The supernode NAT avoidance system, which is what makes Skype cool and successful, is the biggest worry - too easy to get man-in-the-middle attacks there if you're not careful. A classic secure-telephony problem is that breaking crypto on wiretapped links is usually much harder than convincing the system to make a three-way conference call with the spooks.
Actually most of the keys are generated and held by the end-users (or sometimes supernodes, depending on the NAT situations), and Skype mainly holds authentication keys. That doesn't mean that there aren't major problems - you simply can't trust closed-source crypto not to leak information, typically by bad design of key-handling protocols, and it's tough enough to trust open source.
The US Export Laws that we mostly got rid of in the 90s were originally there to keep Commies from getting critical technology. Didn't matter that the Soviet Empire had already collapsed, or that important cryptographic stuff had been invented and/or rediscovered out in the public world (academic mathematicians, mainly), the FBI kept trying to claim they should be able to prevent the public from using it because that might let Commies get it. The Cypherpunks movement was a major player in getting the laws mostly overturned or scaled back, with people like John Gilmore funding lawsuits against the government and lots of people inventing and publishing critical technology and cracking government-approved technology to show how inadequately weak it was, Phil Zimmermann publishing PGP for free so everybody could use it, university FTP sites in Finland publishing implementations of DES and similar code. Netscape made a major major difference by including crypto in their web browser, and the commercial pressure for credit-card transactions on the Internet made it impossible to herd the cats back into the bag.
The technology export laws aren't entirely gone - we recently saw them interfering with the Spaceship One crowd trying to work with Virgin Galactic, who are Suspicious Foreigners from Great Britain.
Building VPN tunnels back to your ISP or some other tunnel server makes huge amounts of sense, both for the end client who wants a trustable system and also for the wireless node operator,because it protects the operator from malicious users - if you require users or guests to use VPN tunnels, then you don't have to care what they're running because it's the tunnel server that's the responsible endpoint, so all you're providing is bandwidth and maybe some DNS. As an end user, you could build a similar service that tunnels back to your home desktop, but of course you'd need to manage it when you're not home...
But concentrating all the tunnel endpoints at one service point is Unavoidably Evil, and is especially dangerous for tunnel endpoints in the US. There are two main attackers to worry about - Google, and the Feds. Google's currently promising not to divulge your information to third-parties just for commercial profit, but they will divulge it "if required by law". Not only does this mean that the Feds or state can get a court to issue a search-warrant following Constitutional standards, but it also means that the Feds can issue a demand for records under FISA or the PATRIOT act with less legal proof than a normal warrant and a gag-order forbidding Google from telling anybody they're being ordered to divulge the information. It probably also means that anybody who's doing a lawsuit can get a subpoena ordering Google to divulge any records they're keeping, though there's no gag order, and Google can probably restrict this to subpoenas for specific information justified by some evidence, as opposed to the kinds of wide-range fishing trips the MPAA, RIAA, and Scientologists like to try.
Also, the software and protocols don't appear to be Open Source. So while it's likely that Google has done Something Technically Reasonable, that doesn't tell us whether they're using SSL or IPSEC VPNs, or whether they're using ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange to get Perfect Forward Secrecy on the keys as opposed to using RSA or El-Gamal keys which can be decrypted in the future if you get the recipient's private keys.
I agree that if we can create enough unobtainium to build an elevator at a reasonable cost, then it should be much cheaper than anything rocket-based, and certainly the energy economics make the elevator a win. However, there are other kinds of solutions - electric railguns and similar things - that don't require lifting an engine and fuel up the gravity well, and it may be possible to design some that are technically and economically viable.
They're not likely to be useful for launching humans or fragile hardware, but if you're trying to get bulk materials into orbit, they may do just fine. Some of the obvious materials you might want to launch include rocket fuel, food&water for space station crews, building materials to build space stations and other rockets with, etc.
In particular, if you're trying to build an elevator and need something to anchor it to, the choices are either to lasso an asteroid or else haul lots of dead weight up into geosynch orbit, both of which are fairly extreme concepts right now; railguns might be able to do the dead-weight job for you.
Bluetooth Headsets won't do music, + slow for data
on
The Future of the iPod
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· Score: 1
Bluetooth headsets are great for cellphones, and it would be nice to have not to have headset cords (though the iPod Shuffle is sufficiently lightweight that it's not as much trouble as with a bigger iPod...) But Bluetooth headsets are mono, not stereo, and they normally have only enough audio bandwidth to handle telephony, so 64kbps (4KHz analog) or maybe compressed audio. It would be possible to make a music-quality Bluetooth headphone set, but at that point you might as well build an iPod Shuffle into the headset and either skip the Bluetooth or use it for syncing.
One of the followup posts compares Bluetooth speed to USB1.1 - it's actually 721kbps throughput, so it's really much more like Appletalk (aka Localtalk) or typical IR than like USB. Maybe Bluetooth version N+1 will be better. Zigbee is another low-speed-low-power radio solution, and it's got similar speed limits. Perhaps one of the UWB standards can deal with it.
Yeah, I know, you were primarily trying to joke about the name (and there's also the potential for an iPod Mega or an iPod Giga, which could also be a name for the Shuffle as opposed to a big machine...)
Yes, radio and TV are much different experiences. If I want to watch TV, I want a screen that I can actually see; those little handheld 2" screen PCs don't do anything for me. It's too small to see a baseball or a hockey puck or read news-channel-scrolling-text, and talking heads look almost as good on radio as on small TV (some of them look a lot better on radio...) There's a fairly small set of programs that look much better on small TVs than on radio unless they're formatted for it (which podcasts could be, admittedly, while broadcast TV won't be.)
The Shuffle doesn't have a color screen, though of course it doesn't have a B&W screen either. If your music already doesn't fit on your iPod, you'll need a GUI on your PC anyway. So use iTunes....
Sigh. There are lots of different ISPs in the world, and some of them are much lamer and more annoying than others; in most places there's some option to avoid them, but in some places it's difficult. The two worst offenders in the developed world appear to be Telstra in Australia and most of the cable-modem companies in the US (treated as one entity, because they hang around together way too much), and in both cases it was largely for reasons that are now obsolete but is pursued and promoted to other companies with great fanaticism. Telstra are the big promoters of the monthly-bandwidth-cap cult, which made a slight amount of sense back when bandwidth to Oz was scarce and expensive - though they sometimes had different rates for connections within Australia and connections to the outside world, which was really just fine for Bittorrent and similar applications. The US cablecos have been big promoters of the "Cable Service is for consumer couch potatoes only, not for anything resembling a server, and the End-to-End design that makes the Internet work is a threat to our bandwidth and precious bodily fluids."
Here in the US, it's annoying that my cable modem company offers about twice the downstream bandwidth I get with ADSL, for about 1/2 - 2/3 the cost of decent static-IP open internet. I might be able to get faster service now that my telco has added 3 Mbps ADSL that my ISP could resell, but I'm far enough from the telco wire center that it may not really pay off, and even at 1.5 Mbps I'm usually not saturating my downstream connection except during occasional good Bittorrent sessions.
There are worse ISPs - VSNL in India, a variety of government-monopoly PTTs, almost anything in Africa. China's duopoly are difficult to deal with, but getting better, and many of their problems are driven by the censorship issues. Of course, China's also got diverse enough service that it not only has spammer-friendly hosting but also zombie-compromised broadband services.
No, it's not really Mutually Assured Destruction. The world put up with 40+ years of nuclear terrorism with the US and Russians threatening to blow up half the world and poison the rest, and after the fall of Communism, the world was finally starting to look halfway civilized. Not *really* civilized of course - we still had statist wars in Iraq and genocidal tribal wars in Africa and colonialist wars in East Timor and such - but it was a lot better than it had been in decades. And then bin Laden had to pull a much bigger terrorist atrocity than his previous ones, which gave the Bush Administration all the excuse it needed to do anything their twisted little minds could imagine. Sigh.
I don't know how many of you grew up with the Cuban Missile Crisis and neighbors digging bomb shelters in their back yards; most of you probably just had scary TV specials instead. But we really don't need to put up with this kind of crap from an Administration that says it's doing it to make us *safer*.
There are some cellphone companies that provide high-speed data service (as opposed to relatively low-speed, which has been out for a while.) I don't know if they're in your part of PA, and I don't know if they meet your definition of "affordable" (they're usually ~$80/month for real data service, as opposed to ~$20-30 "unlimited" service that's only unlimited for use on your cellular handset, not your PC.)
The standards for fixed service are pretty much baked, but there are still compatibility concerns, and not everybody's really running compatible standards-based equipment yet. There's also lots of hype about the various roaming-type WiMax services, but don't hold your breath for another year or two on that stuff.
Also, of course, you still need to have an ISP within earshot who's running the stuff. Some ISPs are planning to do licensed spectrum only, and some are planning to do unlicensed, and of course the distance they get depends a lot on geography, and BFE PA is pretty hilly; your luck getting service may depend on whether there's a good mountain-top you can see that some ISP can also see.
Wimax is designed to work in several different frequency bands, including the unlicensed bands everybody else uses and also some licensed bands. Some ISPs I know are leaning toward only using licensed service - it takes longer to get approval, but you don't have to worry about interference from everybody's home wifi networks; others are going full-blast with unlicensed-band pre-standard equipment so they can get fast rollouts.
Sure, that butterfly wing can trigger the hurricane or push it in a different direction or make it radically bigger or smaller, but unless you've got models that are "much, much better" than what we've got today, there's no way to tell if your icebergs or cloud-seeding or nuclear wessels are going to make the hurricane do what you want, or do something you don't want, or make this hurricane shrink but leave a bunch of undissipated thermal energy hanging around in the Caribbean so hurricane N+1 is 50% larger than it would have been.
Also, one of the likely effects you might have if you messed with the hurricane is that instead of hitting land in one place, it hits somewhere farther east or west of its original track. The people who got missed might thank you for it, but the people whose homes you've just destroyed will sue you, and either you're responsible because you knew what you were doing well enough to predict the results and *decided* to send a hurricane to trash their houses, or else you *didn't* know what you were doing well enough to predict the results and were grossly negligent and therefore still responsible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grog says it was originally a rum&water mixture, which was replaced the previous beer and brandy rations that were used to preserve water. Eventually it got citrus and spices and such added to it. It really served two purposes - adding rum to the water to keep the water from getting scummy, and watering down the rum so the sailors didn't get quite as drunk on their daily rum ration...
It's also possible to make over-strength alcohols (beyond what you can get from fermentation, which kills the yeast at some point) by taking fermented products like cider, freezing them, skimming off the ice (which is mostly water and low in alcohol, so the stuff that's left is higher in alcohol), and repeating until you've got applejack.
Various Google-ized sources indicate that Iraq usually only gets freezing temperatures in the mountains or colder-than-usual winters, so they probably didn't make that much of it either, but it's a possible trade product to find there.
It does appear that there were multiple varietied of alcoholic beverages used back then, all within the same culture, and even all within the same piece of pottery. That doesn't *mean* they were mixed - they could have used the crock for wine, gotten it stained, made some beer, drank the beer, used it to store other fruit drinks, left it out in the sun, whatever. Or they could have poured all the hooch they could ferment into the same jar and called it "punch". Really hard to tell.
Modern liquors are often aged in barrels that were first used for other things - Scotch whiskies aged in used port or sherry wine barrels, for instance. Today it's done to make subtle changes in the flavor and justify charging outrageous prices for exquisite-tasting liquor. Maybe 5000 years ago it was the same thing, or maybe they just found that their beer fermented faster if they made it in used wine-jugs, or tasted better with a bit of apple-core added, or maybe they were just slobs who didn't clean the barrels after they'd drunk the contents...
TFA said $200,000. The article you're quoting sounds like $200,000,000. The latter sounds *much* more believable, for a couple of reasons:
$200K to provide electricity for a 200K-resident city is $1/person, capital cost, which is an astounding bargain and makes a figure of 5-6 cents/kwh seem highly unlikely. $200M would be $1000/person, and which would be $3/day to pay off in a year, or $10/month at some reasonable amortization, and even that's a bargain, but besides capital cost, there's fuel cost, operations, 10% for graft&corruption, etc.; it's within the range of reasonableness.
$200K for an engineering job that takes 3-4 years to deploy is highly unlikely - that's the amount of money you'd spend on a very small software startup where the capital costs include a couple of PCs, a ping-pong table, and an espresso machine.
$200K *might* be the cost of an engineering study for where you should locate the $200M nuclear reactor, assuming you've got Russian standards for Environmental Impact Reports and not US standards. Or it's the cost for some other up-front study work, or the cost of the electrical lines to link the floating station to the local power grid. It's not the cost of the nuclear reactor itself.
A decade or so ago, they dropped three 0s off the ruble. Perhaps the article's author just got confused...
They may be airplane-proof, but they're still claiming that the things won't cause any pollution when the reactor is decommissioned. That's bogus, unless they've got a definition of "pollution" that doesn't include either nuclear waste material sticking around, or nuclear waste generated in the preparation of the original fuel material. In either case, that means they're lying, which means there's reason to suspect they're lying about other things as well (perhaps not, but it means they're not trustable.)
While the "Baltic Sea" does translate to "White Sea", this is a different "White Sea" - Here's a Map. It's east of Karelia, which is east of Finland and Norway, and it's south of Murmansk. So by the time any radioactive water gets to any part of Europe other than northern Russia (if that's still Europe) and the Finnmark area of northern Scandinavia, it's going to be far too diluted to make a difference. Not to say that that's a Good Thing, of course, but it's basically the Russians and Siberians who get hit with it.
And while the word "safety" isn't explicitly in the article, it does talk about preventing terrorist threats and airplane crashes, and about causing entirely no pollution when decommissioned (of course, the term "obviously bogus lie" isn't in there either....)
Also, there are designs that are susceptible to meltdowns, and there are designs that simply don't have that failure mode. That doesn't mean that they don't leak plutonium into the water or do other Bad Things, but those Bad Things don't include nuclear explosions or the China Syndrome (er, Argentina or Pitcairn or whatever syndrome in this case...)
Sure. But because Muslims are viewed as different, it ought to be *easier* to find Muslims who are allegedly acting like terrorists than to find Irish who are allegedly acting like terrorists, so there's less need to do things to find them like wiretap the entire British internet infrastructure, cover the entire island with closed-circuit TV cameras, or make everybody carry National ID cards.
You can't totally equate the two problems, because during most of the conflict with the IRA, there either wasn't an Internet, or it was restricted to a few universities, and closed-circuit TV was only developing, so there are things they might try against the Irish if they were doing it today that they didn't do during the last nine decades. Looking for Muslim suspects in pubs is probably less productive than looking for Irish suspects there, though I'm not sure how effective looking for Irish in curry shops was.
Back in the early 70s, a neighbor of mine was over in England on a high school soccer tour, and got arrested for walking down the street singing the John Lennon song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", which was banned at the time. Since he was an American kid, they didn't do anything other than tell the adults running the tour to keep better control of their kids...
I've been appalled, but not surprised, that the British Government has been calling for radically reducing civil rights to deal with Muslim terrorism, given that the current levels of civil rights are what they had left after dealing with Irish terrorism for decades. It's not like this is a brand new threat they've never had before.
Admittedly there are differences - most of the struggle against the IRA was carried out in Northern Ireland and occasionally the Republic, and they did things there like death squads and imprisonment in inhuman conditions that they didn't do much of in England, whereas now the threat is dispersed around the world in places that are no longer British colonies, so they're doing more in England itself. But it's still appalling dishonesty on the part of the politicians.
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The big problem with Skype's crypto, though, is that it's closed-source and hasn't been seriously evaluated by experts - protocol design and key handling are *difficult* to do well, and it's unlikely that 128-bit vs 256-bit AES would be the weak link. For instance, some of the reverse engineering that's been done indicates that they're probably not using Diffie-Hellman for key exchange, just RSA, so they don't have perfect forward secrecy. Who knows what else they're doing wrong.
The supernode NAT avoidance system, which is what makes Skype cool and successful, is the biggest worry - too easy to get man-in-the-middle attacks there if you're not careful. A classic secure-telephony problem is that breaking crypto on wiretapped links is usually much harder than convincing the system to make a three-way conference call with the spooks.
Actually most of the keys are generated and held by the end-users (or sometimes supernodes, depending on the NAT situations), and Skype mainly holds authentication keys. That doesn't mean that there aren't major problems - you simply can't trust closed-source crypto not to leak information, typically by bad design of key-handling protocols, and it's tough enough to trust open source.
The technology export laws aren't entirely gone - we recently saw them interfering with the Spaceship One crowd trying to work with Virgin Galactic, who are Suspicious Foreigners from Great Britain.
But concentrating all the tunnel endpoints at one service point is Unavoidably Evil, and is especially dangerous for tunnel endpoints in the US. There are two main attackers to worry about - Google, and the Feds. Google's currently promising not to divulge your information to third-parties just for commercial profit, but they will divulge it "if required by law". Not only does this mean that the Feds or state can get a court to issue a search-warrant following Constitutional standards, but it also means that the Feds can issue a demand for records under FISA or the PATRIOT act with less legal proof than a normal warrant and a gag-order forbidding Google from telling anybody they're being ordered to divulge the information. It probably also means that anybody who's doing a lawsuit can get a subpoena ordering Google to divulge any records they're keeping, though there's no gag order, and Google can probably restrict this to subpoenas for specific information justified by some evidence, as opposed to the kinds of wide-range fishing trips the MPAA, RIAA, and Scientologists like to try.
Also, the software and protocols don't appear to be Open Source. So while it's likely that Google has done Something Technically Reasonable, that doesn't tell us whether they're using SSL or IPSEC VPNs, or whether they're using ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange to get Perfect Forward Secrecy on the keys as opposed to using RSA or El-Gamal keys which can be decrypted in the future if you get the recipient's private keys.
They're not likely to be useful for launching humans or fragile hardware, but if you're trying to get bulk materials into orbit, they may do just fine. Some of the obvious materials you might want to launch include rocket fuel, food&water for space station crews, building materials to build space stations and other rockets with, etc.
In particular, if you're trying to build an elevator and need something to anchor it to, the choices are either to lasso an asteroid or else haul lots of dead weight up into geosynch orbit, both of which are fairly extreme concepts right now; railguns might be able to do the dead-weight job for you.
One of the followup posts compares Bluetooth speed to USB1.1 - it's actually 721kbps throughput, so it's really much more like Appletalk (aka Localtalk) or typical IR than like USB. Maybe Bluetooth version N+1 will be better. Zigbee is another low-speed-low-power radio solution, and it's got similar speed limits. Perhaps one of the UWB standards can deal with it.
Yeah, I know, you were primarily trying to joke about the name (and there's also the potential for an iPod Mega or an iPod Giga, which could also be a name for the Shuffle as opposed to a big machine...)
Yes, radio and TV are much different experiences. If I want to watch TV, I want a screen that I can actually see; those little handheld 2" screen PCs don't do anything for me. It's too small to see a baseball or a hockey puck or read news-channel-scrolling-text, and talking heads look almost as good on radio as on small TV (some of them look a lot better on radio...) There's a fairly small set of programs that look much better on small TVs than on radio unless they're formatted for it (which podcasts could be, admittedly, while broadcast TV won't be.)
The Shuffle doesn't have a color screen, though of course it doesn't have a B&W screen either. If your music already doesn't fit on your iPod, you'll need a GUI on your PC anyway. So use iTunes....
Here in the US, it's annoying that my cable modem company offers about twice the downstream bandwidth I get with ADSL, for about 1/2 - 2/3 the cost of decent static-IP open internet. I might be able to get faster service now that my telco has added 3 Mbps ADSL that my ISP could resell, but I'm far enough from the telco wire center that it may not really pay off, and even at 1.5 Mbps I'm usually not saturating my downstream connection except during occasional good Bittorrent sessions.
There are worse ISPs - VSNL in India, a variety of government-monopoly PTTs, almost anything in Africa. China's duopoly are difficult to deal with, but getting better, and many of their problems are driven by the censorship issues. Of course, China's also got diverse enough service that it not only has spammer-friendly hosting but also zombie-compromised broadband services.
I don't know how many of you grew up with the Cuban Missile Crisis and neighbors digging bomb shelters in their back yards; most of you probably just had scary TV specials instead. But we really don't need to put up with this kind of crap from an Administration that says it's doing it to make us *safer*.
There are some cellphone companies that provide high-speed data service (as opposed to relatively low-speed, which has been out for a while.) I don't know if they're in your part of PA, and I don't know if they meet your definition of "affordable" (they're usually ~$80/month for real data service, as opposed to ~$20-30 "unlimited" service that's only unlimited for use on your cellular handset, not your PC.)
Also, of course, you still need to have an ISP within earshot who's running the stuff. Some ISPs are planning to do licensed spectrum only, and some are planning to do unlicensed, and of course the distance they get depends a lot on geography, and BFE PA is pretty hilly; your luck getting service may depend on whether there's a good mountain-top you can see that some ISP can also see.
Wimax is designed to work in several different frequency bands, including the unlicensed bands everybody else uses and also some licensed bands. Some ISPs I know are leaning toward only using licensed service - it takes longer to get approval, but you don't have to worry about interference from everybody's home wifi networks; others are going full-blast with unlicensed-band pre-standard equipment so they can get fast rollouts.
Also, one of the likely effects you might have if you messed with the hurricane is that instead of hitting land in one place, it hits somewhere farther east or west of its original track. The people who got missed might thank you for it, but the people whose homes you've just destroyed will sue you, and either you're responsible because you knew what you were doing well enough to predict the results and *decided* to send a hurricane to trash their houses, or else you *didn't* know what you were doing well enough to predict the results and were grossly negligent and therefore still responsible.
Tehama California used to have a super-volcano. Things like Mt. Lassen are leftovers from its explosion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grog says it was originally a rum&water mixture, which was replaced the previous beer and brandy rations that were used to preserve water. Eventually it got citrus and spices and such added to it. It really served two purposes - adding rum to the water to keep the water from getting scummy, and watering down the rum so the sailors didn't get quite as drunk on their daily rum ration...
Various Google-ized sources indicate that Iraq usually only gets freezing temperatures in the mountains or colder-than-usual winters, so they probably didn't make that much of it either, but it's a possible trade product to find there.
Modern liquors are often aged in barrels that were first used for other things - Scotch whiskies aged in used port or sherry wine barrels, for instance. Today it's done to make subtle changes in the flavor and justify charging outrageous prices for exquisite-tasting liquor. Maybe 5000 years ago it was the same thing, or maybe they just found that their beer fermented faster if they made it in used wine-jugs, or tasted better with a bit of apple-core added, or maybe they were just slobs who didn't clean the barrels after they'd drunk the contents...
They may be airplane-proof, but they're still claiming that the things won't cause any pollution when the reactor is decommissioned. That's bogus, unless they've got a definition of "pollution" that doesn't include either nuclear waste material sticking around, or nuclear waste generated in the preparation of the original fuel material. In either case, that means they're lying, which means there's reason to suspect they're lying about other things as well (perhaps not, but it means they're not trustable.)
And while the word "safety" isn't explicitly in the article, it does talk about preventing terrorist threats and airplane crashes, and about causing entirely no pollution when decommissioned (of course, the term "obviously bogus lie" isn't in there either....)
Also, there are designs that are susceptible to meltdowns, and there are designs that simply don't have that failure mode. That doesn't mean that they don't leak plutonium into the water or do other Bad Things, but those Bad Things don't include nuclear explosions or the China Syndrome (er, Argentina or Pitcairn or whatever syndrome in this case...)
You can't totally equate the two problems, because during most of the conflict with the IRA, there either wasn't an Internet, or it was restricted to a few universities, and closed-circuit TV was only developing, so there are things they might try against the Irish if they were doing it today that they didn't do during the last nine decades. Looking for Muslim suspects in pubs is probably less productive than looking for Irish suspects there, though I'm not sure how effective looking for Irish in curry shops was.
Back in the early 70s, a neighbor of mine was over in England on a high school soccer tour, and got arrested for walking down the street singing the John Lennon song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", which was banned at the time. Since he was an American kid, they didn't do anything other than tell the adults running the tour to keep better control of their kids...
Are there patches yet for 1.0x, and are there patches yet for 1.5x.x betas?
Admittedly there are differences - most of the struggle against the IRA was carried out in Northern Ireland and occasionally the Republic, and they did things there like death squads and imprisonment in inhuman conditions that they didn't do much of in England, whereas now the threat is dispersed around the world in places that are no longer British colonies, so they're doing more in England itself. But it's still appalling dishonesty on the part of the politicians.