Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Where were you on the evening of Thursday September 21st 1989, at the hour of 10pm? That’s a tad over 26 year ago now. Some readers may not have been born, or were too young to remember. For the rest of you – please stop shouting out your answers at the screen! I can’t hear you! … it was only ever a rhetorical device! Davy Carton Me? I was making my way through the doors of the Warwick Hotel in Galway’s Salthill district to see the wonderful Saw Doctors. I was on the guest list, which made me West of Ireland Rock & Roll Royalty. I kinda knew some of the band – A couple of them lived together in some Monkees-esque madcap house with their manager and a few of the members of The Stunning (another quality band of 1980s Galway). They were round the corner from me and their place was always a good bet for anyone searching for interesting conversation, a cuppa, or even a bowl of pasta. On that night I was armed with a borrowed camera and had all of two (yes TWO!) rolls of 24 s...

< Appendix In February 2014 I published a rather lengthy piece on the recent financial history of commercial archaeology in Northern Ireland. The paper took each of the major companies and proceeded to look at their highs and lows over the period for which ‘Key Financials’ were publicly available. It then sought to average the data to provide an overall impression of the ‘health’ of the commercial archaeology scene here. For the most part, it illustrated a pattern of decay from highs up to 2008, and plunging Net Worth in the years following. At that point, only one company (incorporated in 2005) had posted results for 2013, but it was sufficient to suggest a modest recovery across the sector. By the time the 2013 results for two further companies were made public , it was clear that this one bonanza year couldn’t mask the poor performance of the other two outfits. While there was still an overall uptick in results, it was nowhere near as pronounced as it had previously seemed...

< Back to main post Based on the legal advice given to me, I have taken the decision to explicitly link the anonymised companies discussed in the main text to their actual names and data. The reason for this is to provide full transparency in where my data is coming from and so that it may be checked for accuracy and inconsistencies. I have also chosen to place it at a slight remove from the main text, so that anyone not wishing to know the details of any individual company does not have to be confronted with it. The companies are listed in the main text by a randomised three letter acronym (TLA) and that format is preserved here: AJM        [Last accessed August 24 2015] LYG         [Last accessed  August  24  2015] RTI           [Last accessed  August  24  2015] LCO         [Last accessed ...

Introduction In July 2015 a large amount of data was stolen from Ashley Madison , an online business dedicated to facilitating people who sought to have extramarital affairs. The hackers who stole the data, calling themselves ‘The Impact Team’, attempted to use it for blackmail, insisting that Ashley Madison and fellow Avid Life Media site EstablishedMen.com be permanently shut down. On June 22nd, when the company failed to comply, a sample of the data was released publicly. Obviously, negotiations didn’t go as well as might have been hoped and in August the full dataset was made available on the internet. Late in the same month a further data dump was made available that included a number of corporate emails, including a substantial number from CEO Noel Biderman. Since that time, it is believed that a number of enterprising petty criminals have attempted to use the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to blackmail alleged account holders. Let me be clear. There are tangles ...