May 19, 2022

May 19

Another indictment of Chinese covert operations.

U.S. Citizen and Four Chinese Intelligence Officers Charged with Spying on Prominent Dissidents, Human Rights Leaders and Pro-Democracy Activists | OPA | Department of Justice justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citi…

John Bull @garius

"The difference between us and the SAS is we don't write a tell-all autobiography every time we blow up a penguin colony" - SBS Veteran to me

The Spectator @spectator

Want to know the difference between the SBS and the SAS? The Marines and the Paras? Here you get it. ✍️ Melanie McDonagh https://t.co/vEwoYAiASH

Well, that’s rather interesting

𝕊onja Drimmer @Sonja_Drimmer

People typically associate apps with smartphones (in definition apps are just programs designed to execute tasks that don't run the computer itself). But apps are common in premodern books. A 🧵 on app technology in this book from 16th-century England!/1

A photo of my left hand holding the book. I am a 5'4 woman with small hands, and it fits comfortably in my hand and is roughly the length from my wrist to the tip of my middle finger. What we can see of the book here is the leather upper binding, which has been blind tooled with a centerpiece in the shape of a long lozenge. For information on the technique known as "blind tooling" [I'm conscious of the awkwardness of writing that here], consult this link: https://library.princeton.edu/visual_materials/hb/cases/blindtooling/index.html

PSYOPS are getting good.

Behavioural Conflict 🇺🇦 @BehaviouralC

I’m told it says ‘we know where you are; Kherson is Ukranian’ Excellent PsyOps; creating fear in an enemy is a powerful behavioural motivator.

Expat in Kyiv @expatua

It's an increasingly rough business being a Russian occupier in Ukraine where the locals want them dead. Kherson partisans have taken out around 300 Russians, mostly at night with small arms, knives and poison. https://t.co/dT1Q4FXyhI

If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, you’re familiar with the DPRK job applicants. Well, it seems the FBI have been reading this Substack too! ;)

Matthijs R. Koot @mrkoot

U.S. Treasury, State Dept. and DOJ warn of attempts by DPRK (North Korea) IT workers to obtain employment while posing as non-North Korean nationals (.pdf, May 2022, 16 pages) home.treasury.gov/system/files/1… /c @thegrugq @Elsine_van_Os #DPRK #intelligence

Ok, fine, the dates don’t match up, nor do the specific threats, but it is definitely probably maybe part of the same phenomenon.

I was talking with a friend about military manuals and readability (don’t ask), and I mentioned the Nazi Tiger tank manuals with their bawdy cartoons. He’d never seen them, so a quick Google later, I ended up with the operational manual for the V2 rocket. As one does.

You don’t even have to Google.

https://stephentaylorhistorian.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/a4-fibel-v2-rocket.pdf

And here is the sexist Nazi Tiger tank manual too. Another historical curiosity.

https://stephentaylorhistorian.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/die-tigerfibel-1943-tiger-tank.pdf

And, if after all that, you want to know more about the readability of Army manuals, here’s a paper I found from the Vietnam era (when the Army transitioned to all volunteer, requiring them to rewrite all the manuals).

Kniffin, J. D. “The New Readability Requirements For Military Technical Manuals.” Technical Communication 26, no. 3 (1979): 16–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43086724.

If you read only one retired Russian Colonel’s assessment of a war in Ukraine published in early February 2022, read this one. (Extremely readable with Google translate. He is a very good writer.)

https://nvo.ng.ru/realty/2022-02-03/3_1175_donbass.