In recent years, though, some chains have tried to revitalise the image of your local bookmaker. Paddy Power is one of them – with clear, clean shop designs and branding, they scream, “come and have a quick flutter, it’ll be a laugh” rather than, “bring your Racing Post and a coffin, just in case”.

Not my scene, but good on them. Gambling can be a laugh in strict moderation, and if people want to lay a few quid on a horse or a game then I don’t have a problem with that. My problem comes when one of these allegedly progressive betting shop operators uses exclusion and hatred of a vulnerable group to get a cheap laugh for more business.

Paddy Power, j’accuse.

This is made a million times worse because it pretends to be inclusive at the beginning – “beautiful transgendered ladies” is a cracking start. Then, in the same sentence – “spot the stallions from the mares”. It’s funny because they’re really MEN! Ha! Oh, my organs.

“Woman!” “Woman!” Transwoman appears and the tone gets a little reticent, maybe disgusted. “Maaaan”. Woman with a dog – “woman!” Then another transwoman, coming out of a male toilet (because they’re really men, right, guys? Right?) and the announcer ‘accidentally’ calls her a dog! Because of the dog in the previous shot! That makes it okay!

And then it tops off with a fairly masculine-looking transwoman, and the mocking is even more blatant. “Oooh, good luck with that one Ian”.

I’ve mirrored it here in case it gets removed from YouTube, but let’s see what the tags on the YouTube video are, shall we?

Brilliant. Nice work, Paddy Power; you managed to get “trannies” in there. And a misspelling of “transvestites”, which speaks volumes to the kind of gifted intelligentsia that this advert is aimed at.

Transphobia: because you’re less likely to get sued for it than homophobia. Disgusting.

banter(n): the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks.

banter(v): exchange remarks in a good-humoured teasing way.

Seems fairly reasonable. British interaction between established friends is quite commonly peppered with the gentle exchange of insults and teasing, with the expectation of the exchange being mutual.

The thing is, ‘banter’ (a word that I despise every time I type it) has become less and less good-humoured. Outright misogyny and threats of violence, when called out by those inclined to do so, are dismissed as ‘banter’, which apparently now makes them okay. Jeremy Clarkson’s frequent tirades of bullshit are a perfect example. The number of times that I’ve been told, “oh, it’s just banter”, in the sense that classifying it as such renders it exempt from a critical eye, are numerous and just as infuriating each time.

Here are a few choice examples of Clarkson’s ‘banter’. Watch as he has a pop at some easy, vulnerable targets…

The poor -

“I don’t understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?”

Cyclists -

Clarkson’s highway code on cyclists: “Trespassers in the motorcars domain, they do not pay road tax and therefore have no right to be on the road, some of them even believe they are going fast enough to not be an obstruction. Run them down to prove them wrong.”

The disabled -

“Britain’s nuclear submarines have been deemed unsafe…probably because they don’t have wheel-chair access.”

Victims of domestic abuse (maybe women with cosmetic surgery) -

“There are footballers wives that would be happy with this quality of stitching… on their face.”

Women in general -

“Much more of a hoot to drive than you might imagine. Think of it if you like, as a librarian with a G-string under her tweed pants. I do, and it helps.”

Teachers on strike -

“I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”

Playful and friendly? Good-natured teasing? Let’s try a quick Gedankenexperiment (that’s Pretentious German-Speaking Blogger for ‘thought experiment’). Imagine that someone else had said it, maybe someone you don’t find entertaining to watch on the tellybox. Maybe that PE teacher who was a dick to you back at school, or the traffic warden that gave you a ticket the other day. Failing that, try Michael Gove, he’s always a good go-to for an awful human being.

Now put yourself in the shoes of the target of Clarkson’s ‘banter’. You’re unemployed, or a woman, or disabled, or old, or a cyclist. You already get a lot of shit from the world just because of who you are or how you get around. Now, all those people who respect Clarkson, because he can occasionally be a bit funny about cars, are rationalising a little bit of extra hatred toward you.

Suddenly, it’s a lot less good-natured.

What it comes down to is this: your speech is not protected because you think that what you’re saying is funny – especially if you have a voice that’s heard by many. By having an audience, you have a responsibility to work toward equality, not sow more seeds of discrimination and hate.

And for those of you who think that I’m sat here calling for the end of sarcasm and irony, watch an episode of QI. Go on, I’ll wait. There you go, witty use of both – without resorting to picking on the vulnerable.

Just remember this. When Clarkson, or any of these pissant purveyors of the opposite of wit – has a go at women, they’re having a go at your mum. At your mum.

And they’ve got their cock out.

STOP THE PRESSES

Though I’m fully aware that it makes me a tragic human being, I play EVE Online, having moved to it from World of Warcraft after hitting the level cap there and finding nothing else to do – unless, of course, I started talking, interacting, and then raiding with people I didn’t know to start with. Because I’m an antisocial bastard sometimes, this didn’t appeal.

Fortunately, a few years ago, a friend of mine told me about EVE. She told me that it was an MMORPG for grown-ups, with a far more open world, an older playerbase that managed to keep the clarity that it was essentially a game about internet spaceships, and generally a more interesting and rewarding experience. I gave CCP, the EVE developers, a bit of money, and created my character. I then proceeded to get hopelessly hooked on a game that was playable in any mood, whether you just wanted to do some sedate mining and chatting, explore and learn about the backstory the sights to be seen, or run around space blowing stuff up.

She was absolutely right about the majority of the playerbase. This isn’t a game for teenagers with ADHD. It’s fast-paced in the microcosm but slow-paced in the grand scheme of things, unforgiving of short-term failure, and exceptionally deep. People were pleasant. Even when combative, in a world where the loss of a ship has significant consequences, you’ll almost always see “GF” in local chat, from both sides, when a player vs. player battle finishes – meaning “good fight”. It’s a game about internet spaceships. Everyone remembers that.

What EVE does have in common with WoW, however, is unremitting chauvinism.

If you have a female avatar, you can expect nonstop trash talk about your menstrual cycle. If you demonstrate that you are in fact female outside of a combat situation, you will be unable to interact as a player for all the clunkily catapulted flirting that is launched in your general direction.

Great example: I listen to EVE Radio, and pay a premium subscription, because it’s genuinely brilliant. Fantastic range of DJs playing a fantastic range of music, with intelligent discussion about stuff both in-game and in the real world, and organised events.

Tonight, a female DJ came on, and the in-game EVE Radio channel devolved into a disgusting mess of testosterone and pseudo-adolescent lust. Let’s look at some of the ‘intelligent discourse’ that DJ Violent Cupcake ended up getting. Player names are redacted because it feels like the right thing to do.

And my personal favourite -

Stay classy, EVE Online. Now, I know that this is just one situation, but I’ve seen stuff like this happening in local chat all over the EVE universe, and the same holds true for my time playing World of Warcraft. Gendered comments are used to smack talk or flirt when someone believes a player to be female, but there’s no gendered language between males.

Female players can be one of two things: the false stereotype of the unskilled female player, or ‘hot’, ‘sexy’ or ‘fit’ because they play a mostly male-dominated game. What it seems that they can’t be is skilled players in their own right, where gender is an irrelevance.

I know that I’m sounding humourless about this, but I genuinely think there’s nothing funny about pushing someone out of a group that they want to contribute to and be part of simply because of their gender.

Am I on the money here? Do you play WoW, EVE or another MMORPG and see or experience what I’m talking about, or am I just frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time and oversensitive to gender inequality? I’d love to hear from you, lovely readership. Pop a comment in below if you’ve got opinions on this one.

Click the image for the original at DeviantART. Slightly NSFW for tiny drawn nipples, if you care.

I discovered the fantastic image to the right, by ‘shiniez’ on DeviantART, while trawling for artists the other day. His work is amazing. The guy’s playful, imaginative and – let’s be honest here, it’s important and surprisingly rare in fetish art – can actually draw.

Topping is an extremely rewarding activity, but it takes a lot out of you. Sure, you can improvise what you have planned for your willing bottom on the spot, but more often than not it ends up being disconnected and cliché, and you run the risk of missing something from a safety perspective. I’m a great proponent of thinking what you’re going to do through before you do it.

It lets you address safety concerns while still maintaining the illusion of danger or peril – and if your scene isn’t heavily based around illusion, you need to think very carefully about how you’re playing.

Anyway, enjoy the image, check out the rest of the guy’s work, and don’t be on fire.

This is my shiny new Gallente Thorax cruiser. The design is…clearly inspired by something else. Have a look for yourself:

SCHLONG IN SPAAAAAAAAACE.

You can do something about this, regardless of whether you live in the United States or not. Hit http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa for a prettier video with more technical detail, and details on how to contact your representative with your thoughts about SOPA and PROTECT-IP. If you’re a US citizen, get in touch with them. If you’re not, spread the word. SOPA and PROTECT-IP will affect all of us – for the worse – sooner or later.

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy…”

As such, I have removed the photo that was previously included in this article, altered my pronouns and removed all mention of Manning’s name at birth where possible (unfortunately, the permalink can’t be changed). If this turns out to be untrue, I hope people realise that I don’t believe that accusing someone of being transgender is in any way a smear. One can be a saint or an arsehole, and one’s gender has nothing to do with it.

Thanks for reading, it’s important. Anyway, here’s what you came for.

Private Manning, as you’re probably aware, is currently on trial, charged with about fifteen bazillion counts of generalised ‘being inconvenient’. What it comes down to is the fact that the US military believes that while a Private in the US Army, she passed information to WikiLeaks which was subsequently made available to the public. This information allegedly includes a video of a US Apache helicopter attacking civilians, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables ranging from non-classified to top secret status.

I want to make one thing clear: this article is not about Manning’s guilt or innocence, or the rights or wrongs of what she is accused of doing. That’s been covered elsewhere by people more informed than I am; you can form your own opinion on the matter. This article is about some didactically valuable flaws in her attempts to maintain privacy and security, regardless of whether those attempts were in favour of the US military in her role as an analyst, or to cover her tracks as a whistleblower.

Manning made a few crucial errors that allowed the court access to a fairly large base of evidence that would otherwise have been inaccessible, as it would have been encrypted or obliterated. Unlike the UK, the United States has no mandatory key disclosure law, since the Fifth Amendment allows citizens the right to refrain from acting in a manner that might stand to incriminate themselves. As such, if you encrypt something and you choose not to reveal the key, US law provides no mechanism to coerce you into handing it over.

Other than waterboarding and the bore-worms, anyway.

This is about more than just how one person screwed up, though. Look at the Arab Spring – the Internet, and technology in general, was key to those uprisings. The credit goes to the people, of course, rather than Twitter – but without today’s communication technologies, it would have been much more difficult for them to achieve the numbers and degree of organisation required to make a difference.

I’ve taken a lot of this information from the excellent write-ups of the court sessions posted by bradleymanning.org. You can read them yourself if you’re interested in how the case is going – Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

Alright, I’ll stop wittering and get down to it. After the jump are a few things Manning got wrong, and how to avoid them if you ever need to do something on the quiet.

1. Control your media

The investigation into Manning uncovered a few optical discs, an external hard drive and, crucially, a flash storage card. The investigators found cables on a CD marked ‘secret’, and on the flash storage card an archive of combat events, a self-portrait photograph of Manning taken in a mirror, and a README file that bradleymanning.org describes as -

a text file that described the other files as being from two wars of historical significance. The note specifically stated that steps had been taken to sanitize certain sensitive data, and that there should be a 90-100 day wait before releasing data to best assess how to distribute the information and protect the source. It ended with:

“This is possibly one of the more significant document of our time, removing the fog of war, revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”

Doesn’t look good. The problem here is that Manning had more media than she could reliably take care of. The data shouldn’t have been left around like that when the consequences of losing control of it stood to be so enormous.

Chances are you have a whole bunch of old CDs and DVDs that you burned months or even years ago hanging around. Maybe even a few external hard disks that you haven’t used for a while. Do you know, are you completely sure, that there’s nothing on them that you wouldn’t want someone to get at?

Yeah, thought not. Shred those optical discs as soon as you can. Consolidate your usage of those external hard disks and properly erase everything on the unused one. At the very least, encrypt them – ideally deniably, especially if you live in a country with a legal power to demand keys. Actually, for that matter…

2. Retain deniability

Let’s go back to that memory card with classified data on it. Putting a self-taken photo of yourself on the same card was a pretty horrendous idea, and while it’s still circumstantial, that evidence is going to be a pain in the arse to refute.

If you’re dealing with something that you don’t want to be connected with by a certain group, don’t put your name to it. Don’t get smart and leave a ‘clever’ signature. Don’t use a pseudonym. Don’t use any identifier that recurs. Set ego aside and stay anonymous, because people like myself know how to look for anything you use to identify or authenticate yourself.

While we’re talking about deniability, this is particularly important in countries like the UK where the powers that be can demand your encryption key, with a significant custodial sentence should you refuse to hand it over. A good way to get around that is TrueCrypt’s deniable containers. These are out of scope for this article, but you can get more detail at the TrueCrypt site. With care, if you use TrueCrypt the right way, there is no way to prove whether you’ve handed over the key for the outer, unimportant layer or the inner, deniable, truly private layer of your encrypted container.

One other interesting fact that came up during the investigation was that Manning 35-pass erased her hard disk (see 5. ‘Deleted’ doesn’t mean ‘gone’) but OS X kept a log of that erase taking place. Circumstantial, but not helpful to her case. Don’t get caught out by the logs of your privacy-enhancing tools themselves!

3. Pluralise your passphrases

You’d think this was an obvious one, but it’s not. I don’t care how strong the encryption you use is, if the passphrase is guessable then you’re wasting your time using it.

In recovering Manning’s laptop, Johnson was also able to gain access to Manning’s private key for decrypting his [sic] PGP emails. However, Johnson did not have the password. In an effort to come up with the password, Johnson tried using the password that they had forensically scraped that allowed a user to log onto [her laptop]. The password for logging onto the computer turned out to be the same as the one for decrypting emails.

Use a passphrase, not a password. Make it a good one. Use a different passphrase everywhere. When not possible, at least use a different passphrase for each resource that could truly compromise you. Don’t save those passphrases anywhere, even what you would otherwise consider protected storage, unless the place you save them is encrypted deniably.

4. Don’t underestimate your ISP

The investigation into Manning’s online activities included tracking connections on a stupidly granular level. You’d expect that from the military, but you might be surprised to hear that the UK government has legal powers to compel an ISP to keep equally granular logs without your knowledge or permission.

Even if you encrypt your communications, you’d be surprised how detailed a picture of your activities can be built up by simple traffic analysis – building patterns of which machines your machine communicates with, and what you’re talking to it.

There are ways around it, of course. Tor is extremely effective if sometimes slow, and a consumer VPN is a good step too (and a much faster and more reliable option than Tor). Hell, use both. Just don’t forget that using these methods of traffic anonymisation don’t remove the need for end-to-end encryption at the same time.

A reminder – I wrote a guide to consumer VPN tunnels, and you also need to watch out for IPv6 talking outside the VPN tunnel.

5. ‘Deleted’ doesn’t mean ‘gone’

Phew. You managed to delete that file with the secret plans to overthrow the Taliban seconds before the secret police broke your door down.

Guess what? You’re still hosed.

When you delete a file, nothing actually gets wiped. There’s a ‘map’ of your hard disk, and when you issue that deletion command all that happens is the space that the file previously lived in is marked as available for use. The data’s still there, and it can be recovered, in full, usually in about an hour. Even if some of it has been overwritten by newly saved data, sometimes traces of the original file are enough to reconstruct parts of it. Your swap file is also a haven for fragments of stuff you’re working on – even stuff you haven’t intentionally saved to disk – as is the Prefetch directory in Windows.

There are tools out there to wipe the free space on your hard disk. You should use them on a regular basis to be safe. That said, if you need to completely kill a file, it’s easier to use a secure erase tool to overwrite the file contents rather than an entire free space wipe after deletion.

35-pass erase with variant data is generally held to be the best out there, but will take a long time to wipe large files and an age to wipe free space. 7-pass erase with variant data is usually what I opt for, because it provides a reasonable amount of security and takes a reasonable amount of time. One pass of zeros, strictly speaking, should be enough at a push – unless your adversaries have access to an electron microscope.

6. Don’t trust terminology

Just because it says that it’s secure and private does not mean that it is. This is especially true for closed-source software, for example Microsoft’s integrated NTFS file encryption. There is a persistent rumour that there’s a law enforcement backdoor key that can decrypt anything encrypted by it, and there’s no way to disprove it.

Opt for open-source tools with a large user community and you’ll generally be safe. It’s not always true, though, so be careful.

An example is Adium, which – you guessed it – caught Manning out. It’s an open-source instant messaging client that supports the widely-used ‘OTR’ (Off The Record) standard for secure conversation. OTR is extremely effective. Trouble is, Adium saves chat logs by default – including OTR chats. If your computer is seized and the hard disk is accessible, all your conversations are ripe for the plucking.

If you use Adium, pop into the logging preferences and either disable it entirely or set the relevant checkbox to avoid logging OTR-enabled chats.

7. ‘Security through obscurity’ is an oxymoron

Manning obfuscated an archive of cables by Base64 encoding it. Now, this would have defeated the casual observer sifting through remnants of deleted files searching for keywords, but more technical tools can detect Base64 encoding and once found, it’s trivial to convert it back into its original form.

Encrypt, don’t hide. Computer forensics are very, very good at what they do – assume your data will be found, and rely on strong encryption rather than a cosy hiding place.

It’s not easy

Proper security and privacy is far from trivial. In fact, it’s downright hard, and the playing field is changing all the time. If you’ve got something that you need to keep very secret, do your research on the best ways to do that before you start working on it. And then research how to clean up after your research.

Best of luck. You’ll probably need it.