..coding samples. They are jealous of the NSA capability, and want some (lots) of their own.

...why BTW beat Felix Baumgartner. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10275552/Teddy-bear-falls-from-space-and-beats-Felix-Baumgartners-skydiving-record.html

and no successes either....it seems the NSA is an expensive boondoggle (insert link to pics of Keith Alexander's Star Trek Bridge) and should therefore be culled to 10% of the current size.

After the recent persecution/attempted then failed cull, stealth badgers equipped with low-light video systems in their backpacks will be infiltrating the controlled areas to report on suspicious police activity. They are quietly confident, being as how they can't be arrested for shitting in the controlled area, since they aren't dogs.

+we are naturally suspicious of BT, even if they are not part of the spying+

Oh yes they are part of the spying. BT have always been and still are totally interlaced with the UK government, the UK military, and GCHQ. This is one of the times that "natural suspicion" is totally justified.

You require to work remotely? Most managers cannot stand that - if you aren't there in the office so they can see that you are working, you must be goofing off, you cannot possibly be working. Judge you by your results? They wouldn't know how to do that, and they are far too harrassed/unimaginative/untrained to work out a method of doing it.

I've been in IT for more than 40 years, a contractor for the last twenty. In all that time, I have once had one contract that allowed me to work from home, and then it was just one day a week - and even then, in the middle of the contract, they tried to change it to all five days a week.

Dear GCHQ employees, do NOT ever tell me that you work for GCHQ. An incident amounting to a Breach of Public Order may result (varying from me pouring my pint over your head) to me smashing a glass in your smug little face.

Now fuck off and get yourself a Proper Job (TM).

I'm delighted.
Pity they couldn't ban GCHQ from reading any of it.

Not a surprise that a piece about dgging a storm-proof hole is written by someone called Emily Badger.

"designed specifically with nuclear decommission in mind, specifically chopping up huge pieces of metal infrastructure into bite-sized bits", which it vaporizes and then throws all over the operator (photo in TFA).

Note to self: do not apply for that kind of work, no matter what the rate.

Obviously they've got money to burn, the fools.

For their "total annual per unit lease cost of $214" they could buy 5 Raspberry Pis at Adafruit, and OWN THEM OUTRIGHT instead of the devices still being on lease so they have to pay $214 every year till the supplier is fat and happy.

My brother is an old BT customer (in both senses). He has had a BT email account since Adam was a lad, and a broadband account since broadband became available on his street (getting on for 10 years).

He just forwarded an email to me which purported to come from BT offering to "connect his email address to his broadband account", Click Here to keep your email address. It looked very very real, but the link targets did not correspond to the text.

It is possible his email account was marked as dial-up because of how long it has existed with no changes that would have recreated it - but still, the links aren't right. So I said "PHISHING" and told him to forward the headers to abuse@bt.com.
It's getting more and more difficult to tell phishing from real messages that are just incompetently designed.

Postscript: I forwarded the email to abuse@bt.com - where it bounced. Way to go, BT - advertise an address that doesn't work. Perhaps you are too busy letting the NSA burrow into the Transatlantic Cable.http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq

Let's spread the news of how to beat polygraphs as widely as possible. Now we have the government banning it, that makes it desirable knowledge, OK?

From TFA: "Charles Honts, a psychology professor at Boise State University, said laboratory studies he’d conducted showed that countermeasures could be taught in one-on-one sessions to about 25 percent of the people who were tested. Polygraphers have no reliable way to detect someone who’s using the techniques, he said. In fact, he concluded that a significant number of people are wrongfully accused."
Mirror these sites and anything else you feel relevant
http://www.wikihow.com/Cheat-a-Polygraph-Test-(Lie-Detector)
https://antipolygraph.org/articles/article-034.shtml

NSA and GCHQ are also siphoning off data from the telcos (BT and others) at the telecoms servers, at which point who your email provider is becomes irrelevant. [You can assume that anything GCHQ knows, the NSA also knows]. It has also come out that BT has allowed GCHQ to tap the Transatlantic cables at the shore station in Bude, Cornwall without the knowledge or consent of several telcos that are not otherwise co-operating. So AFAIK you need either (1) a non-US non-UK telco and ISP with a routing that does not go through UK, or (2) encrypt everything.

"careful to limit the use ... for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans' privacy rights."

Nonsense. The NSA restrict access for exactly the same reason as access to Ultra was restricted in Wrld War II. "If the enemy [the US public] knew we are reading their signals, they would take steps to prevent us continuing".