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Digital economy bill passed - file-sharing will carry on regardless

2010-04-08T09:54:00.001+01:00

The Digital economy bill has been passed and now just awaits the Royal Assent.

I think that the bill will spectacularly fail to prevent file-sharing instead it will be a boon for the companies that offer virtual private networking services and teenagers will start file-sharing offline by exchanging DVD-ROMs full of MP3s.

I'm torn with regard to the Liberal Democrats as my local MP is Don Foster who not only voted against the bill, but was present at the barely attended second reading of the bill and argued against it in the debate. I'm displeased with the party as a whole though as they didn't oppose the bill and it was Lib Dem peers Lords Razzall and Clement Jones who sought to amend the Digital Economy Bill to allow site blocking for copyright infringement, although in the end that clause was dropped.

Tags: computer security, copyright, liberty

Review: Kick-Ass

2010-04-07T11:50:00.003+01:00

Kick-Ass

Mark Millar's comic book attracted some interest but the story was not controversial until it became adapted for the big screen. The idea of a 12 year old girl calling gangsters cunts and then slaughtering them was considered by many people who hadn't even seen the film to be beyond the pale.

But that is kind of the point. It firmly establishes early on that this is set in the real world where the bad guys can win and innocent people can be killed or gravely injured, but then it throws at the viewers the traditional tropes of the superhero action movie. It messes with how the viewer is supposed to watch and enjoy the film, it dares people to enjoy stuff that they see as immoral.

You are supposed to be unnerved by the violence performed by Hit Girl and see Big Daddy as being as monstrous as the mob boss Frank D'Amico.

Tags: movies, review

Removing administrator rights fixes 90 percent of Windows 7 vulnerabilities

2010-03-31T16:34:00.002+01:00

Ars Technica reports that 90 percent of Windows 7 flaws fixed by removing admin rights

After tabulating all the vulnerabilities published in Microsoft's 2009 Security Bulletins, it turns out 90 percent of the vulnerabilities can be mitigated by configuring users to operate without administrator rights, according to a report by BeyondTrust.

Ars Technica describes this as being good news for IT departments who can reduce security breaches by mandating the use of the 'Standard User' account, but it is still not common practice for home users to do the same.

Tags: computer security

The fundamental problem with the PDF format

2010-03-31T15:22:00.002+01:00

Mikko of F-Secure argues that the ongoing security problems with Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is now the primary vector for malware having overtaken Microsoft Word sometime in 2009, is to do with fundamental issues with the PDF format itself.

Looking at the 756 page specification document (PDF format naturally) one finds details about how to embed all kinds of things from multimedia to executable JavaScript into PDF files.

So using an alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader such as the Foxit Reader is not the solution as it is just as vulnerable due to including the same functionality as Adobe Acrobat Reader. There might be alternative PDF readers that simply render the documents without the additional functions but another secure workaround is to open them up in Google Docs.

Tags: computer security

Kentucky election fraudsters found guilty

2010-03-25T23:04:00.001Z

What might be just another run of the mill vote-buying scandal is made all the more interesting by the fact that some of the corrupting of the electoral process was down to exploiting a flaw in electronic voting machines.

The exploit was far more low-tech than those uncovered by the likes of Ed Felten as it exploited the poorly designed user interface which required voters to confirm their vote after they had pressed the button to make their voting selection. [via]

Edit: Bruce Schneier has of course covered the same story and has links to much deeper analyses of the situation.

Tags: computer security, politics

Frenchman hacked President Obama's Twitter account

2010-03-25T17:01:00.002Z

BBC News reports that an unemployed man has been arrested by French police for hacking the Twitter accounts of US President Barack Obama and celebrities.

The unemployed 25-year-old was arrested on Tuesday after an operation lasting several months, conducted by French police with agents from the FBI.

He gained access to Twitter accounts by simply working out the answers to password reminder questions on targets' e-mail accounts, according to investigators.

This is the same method that was famously used to hack into Sarah Palin's Yahoo! webmail account and is yet another real world example of the failure of the typical password reminder function that the study by the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory showed.

As I wrote previously that until such time as the companies that use password reminder questions as a security method change the system they use I recommend that people give a nonsense answer to the question. Particularly people such as President Obama where such information is easily researched.

Tags: computer_security, passwords

The Enchantress of Numbers

2010-03-24T16:32:00.000Z

Today the 24th March is Ada Lovelace day whereby blogger around the world celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science by choosing one to profile and write about. This year I'm cheating a little and am linking to an excellent animation produced by Brainpop about the life of the lady herself who was called "The Enchantress of Numbers" by Charles Babbage.

Tags: science, technology, women

Twitter phishing attack via Direct Messages

2010-03-21T17:24:00.002Z

The F-Secure blog reports on a clever little phishing attack which uses Twitter's own Direct Message service and URL shortening services.

Unsuspecting users will click the link provided in the message which comes from somebody they know as Direct Messages can only come from people you follow on Twitter. However the message is likely coming from a hijacked account and points to a URL which hosts a phishing page that looks like Twitter and is asking you to sign in.

Once they have your credentials they then send messages to all your contacts and their web of hijacked accounts grows exponentially.

The good news is that Twitter has reacted quickly to this attack and are closing down the avenues of attack.

Tags: computer security

Playboy TV content played on children's television

2010-03-17T13:33:00.002Z

BBC News reports that adult content from Playboy was accidentally played out on children's TV.

TV bosses in the US have apologised after preview clips of the Playboy channel were accidentally played out on two children's channels.

"We're very, very sorry it happened - we know parents are concerned," spokesman Keith Poston told local news station WRAL.

"It took about an hour or so once we were notified of the problem to actually get it fixed.

"It was a technical glitch and unfortunately it hit at the worst possible time on the worst possible channels," he added.

The error occurred on the Kids On Demand and Kids Preschool On Demand channels where clips from Playboy TV appeared in the top right hand corner.

I suppose it could have been a glitch, but if it was then it was by accident the worst possible mix up of TV programming possible.

Alos it seems to have taken quite a while for it to have been fixed once they had been notified. Could they not have simply taken the entire channel off the air?

It seems more likely to me that this was a deliberate and malicious act by somebody, perhaps a disgruntled former employee, that has access to the computer system used to automate the process of putting content on air.

Tags: computer security, TV

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-03-13T22:19:00.002Z

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The original Swedish title Män som hatar kvinnor translates to Men Who Hate Women, which is I think is a little literal. I prefer the enigmatic English title, but I think that this is typical of what I believe is a fundamental difference between Swedes and Brits.

Tags: movies, review

Lost: Which dead people are really the man in black

2010-03-10T18:24:00.006Z

It has been established that the Man in Black is the Smoke Monster and has now taken the form of Locke.

Illana says that since Jacob is now dead that the Smoke Monster cannot taken any other form other than that of Locke. http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Substitute

Back in episode http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Man_Behind_the_Curtain Ben follows his mother into the jungle and then has a meeting with Richard who asks whether his mum died on the island?

We now know that the Man in Black can take the form of dead people whose corpses are on the island

But what about people who died elsewhere?

Can Jacob perform that feat but the Man in Black cannot? Was the vision of Emily Linus a manifestation of Jacob?

Tags: Lost, TV

James Dyson's report Ingenious Britain

2010-03-10T16:29:00.001Z

BBC News: Conservative-endorsed report calls for science boost

Entrepreneur Sir James Dyson has produced a report titled Ingenious Britain for the Conservative Party urging a raising of the profile of science in the UK to help diversify the economy and boost growth. The pdf of Ingenious Britain can be downloaded here.

James Dyson makes the same argument that he made in 2004 when he gave the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, that the British economy cannot be sustained as merely a service economy. Manufacturing is the key to future success and it should lie in high tech goods where we have a competitive advantage. In fact things are now worse since his 2004 lecture as Design and Technology has been phased out of the curriculum at many schools since it was made non-statutory.

The part of Dyson's report title Education: Getting young people excited about science and engineering made me think about James May's Toy Stories which showed that although children initially thought stuff like Airfix and Meccano was boring that given the chance to play with it they really changed their minds. I think that if each class of maybe Year Six in schools were given a Meccano set then we'd end up with a lot more people going into engineering. Ironically Meccano is a British engineering success story that due to lessening interest in engineering in this country ended up becoming a foreign success story. Meccano is the only French manufacturer of toys that are internationally recognized, manufacturing part of its line in France.

Dyson believes that his company represents a good model for future British economic growth whereby the assembly of the products is done overseas but all the important engineering research and design is done in the UK. If this is to be the case for future success for British companies then we need to produce more engineers in our universities. In fact our universities are producing many excellent engineers unfortunately rather than being homegrown a large proportion of these are from overseas and many then return home to work.

Analysts of the current British economic crisis argue that the pound needs to remain low in order to boost are exports. But I believe that this does not need to be the case if the products we are exporting are competitive in ways more than just price. The Dyson vacuum cleaner is an excellent example, it is more expensive than rival vacuums but the benefits are worth the premium and it sells extremely well overseas even when the strong pound created an even greater premium in price than seen in the UK. Truly innovative products which are protected by patents can sell well and command a premium overseas.

Much of the British economic growth of the last few decades has been due to greater consumerism but the recession has brought that to a head and we are unlikely to see growth in the same way. We need to be more than just a nation of shopkeepers and because engineers are generally paid better than people in the service sector then a move to a greater proportion of the workforce being comprised of engineers is a good thing in many ways.

As well as the encouragement of engineering as a career choice Dyson recommends that tax breaks should be given in order to encourage investment into the development of innovations which do not necessarily produce a quick return on investment but do represent good long term growth.

Tags: Dyson, economics, politics

Power 2010's Power Pledge

2010-03-07T21:48:00.002Z

Power 2010 have decided on the five key issues for their Power Pledge.

- Introduce a proportional voting system.
- Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.
- Replace the house of Lords with an elected chamber.
- Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws.
- Draw up a written constitution.

I am a strong supporter of the reforms to introduce proportional representation and to scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.

I believe that the current first past the post system causes many people to feel disenfranchised because they live in a constituency which has strong leanings one way or another and their vote has no effect. This system all leads to negative voting where people vote for candidates for parties they don't particularly support but which represents the best hope of defeating the party they'd least like to win.

The ID card and National Identity Register should be opposed because of the principle that citizens in a free democracy should be allowed to go about their lives without government intrusion. The project is also so technically flawed that it will inevitably either have to be scrapped because it is unworkable in practice or because it causes one of the very problems than it is designed to combat namely an increase in identity theft.

The House of Lords should be replaced with an elected second chamber but the form of the second chamber needs to debated intelligently before it is implemented. Replacing the Lords is a major undertaking and there will not be an easy transition from the present house to a new wholly elected chamber.

Tags: ID cards, politics

Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop

2010-03-06T22:19:00.002Z

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a fascinating documentary about filmmaker Thierry Guetta who in his failed attempt to make a documentary of Banksy became himself a street/pop artist and subject of this documentary film made by Banksy.

Thierry Guetta is a fascinating character who through his cousin became an unofficial documentarist of the street art world. It was all based on a lie though as he was never really making a documentary as all the footage just got stored away never to see the light of day until Banksy got his hands on it.

Having failed to make a coherent film out of his footage Guetta hands the task over to Banksy who casually suggests to him that he should try his hand at being an artist. Banksy later comes to regret having done so when he realises to what extreme Guetta has taken the comment as Guetta launches his career as Mr. Brainwash.

However I think that all is not as it seems and that the film has been produced by Banksy in order to quell the criticism that he has sold out. Once we get into the part of the film that chronicles Guetta's insane art exhibition as Mr. Brainwash it becomes an attack on the art scene and the bogus nature of the people that buy into it.

There is literally no originality to any of Mr Brainwash's work it is a mess of extremely derivative work that lacks a connecting theme other than it is derived from the work of artists that Guetta admires such as Warhol, Banksy and Shepard Fairey. He is however extremely successful as the show attracts huge crowds and he sells hundreds of thousands of dollars 'worth' of work.

Critics praise his work as being commentary on the work of other artists, but I believe that it isn't and that the fact that it is entirely lacking in substance is deliberate. I think that both his name and his work are a joke/scam being pulled on the art world and are a fabrication created by Banksy. That they will buy any old shit if there is the smallest connection to the name of Banksy

However now the illusion has become reality in a world where anything can be called a work of art if it is produced by and called such by a person that a number of people believe to be an artist.

Tags: movies, review

Review: The Girl who Played with Fire

2010-03-06T10:06:00.003Z

The Girl who Played with Fire

The second book in the Millennium trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson is as good as There Girl with the dragon Tattoo. Dark secrets from Lisbeth Salander's past cause her to be implicated in the murder of a young couple. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is also connected to the case and in trying to prove Salander's innocence uncovers things that powerful people do not wish brought to light.

Larsson has created in Lisbeth Salander a truly remarkable character and in this book has crafted yet another intelligent and gripping thriller around her.

Tags: books, review

What is your mother's maiden name and other insecure security questions

2010-03-05T21:29:00.003Z

Security Researchers at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory have produced a whitepaper titled Evaluating statistical attacks on personal knowledge questions.

Aside from the fact that the answers to these questions are readily findable for celebrities and increasingly easy to uncover through social networking sites for the average individual the researchers found that even guessing is good enough to render the system insecure if carried out on a wide scale.

There is a strong result that anything named by humans is dangerous to use as a secret. Sociologists have known this for years. Most human names follow a power-law distribution fairly close to Zipfian, which we confirmed in our study. This means every name distribution has a few disproportionately common names—"Gonzalez" amongst Chilean surnames, "Guðrún" amongst Icelandic forenames, "Buddy" amongst pets—for attackers to latch on to. Combined with previous results on other attack methods, there should be no doubt that personal knowledge questions are no longer viable for email, which has come to play too critical a role in web security.

I think that until such time as the companies that use password reminder questions as a security method change the system they use I recommend that people give a nonsense answer to the question. If you are sure that you'd never need to use the password reminder facility then you could just use a completely unguessable random alphanumeric string as the answer. Otherwise it would be a good idea to choose something memorable as your nonsense answer that you consistently use e.g. Throatwobbler Mangrove unless inexplicably that does happen to be your mother's maiden name.

There has been other research in the last few years into this subject.

Microsoft researchers wrote Measuring the security and reliability of authentication via 'secret' questions

Tags: computer security, passwords

Time travel on Lost - the science bit

2010-03-04T15:41:00.002Z

A post on Metafilter reveals that Caltech physicist Sean Carroll recently tweeted that he was meeting up with Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. This was posted to the forums at Lostpedia, prompting immediate spoiler complaints ... so Carroll signs up and drops in to the thread to clear up the confusion, also offering some of his thoughts on the use of time travel in the show and referencing a longer blog post he wrote shortly before the start of the final season.

Qvantamon in a reply to the thread on Metafilter gives a rather homicidal theory of time-travel which addresses the notion of paradoxes.

Painquale, depends on how much you want to split hairs. You cannot alter your past (in the broadest sense - all the history of the universe as it played to cause your current state). Or, alternately, you cannot alter your past (same broad sense).

For example, let's say 50-years-in-the future Painquale is just about to enter a machine that will, in fact, just disintegrate him at the sub-atomic level into pure entropy (his existence is not really a necessary condition). There's a non-null chance (never mind the amount of decimal places) of, right now, 2010, zillions of sub-atomic particles just tunneling all at the same time into the exact same configuration as 50-years-in-the-future painquale (supposing memory/thought process/sentience is a physical phenomenon). With a strong many-worlds interpretation, since that's possible (no matter how infinitesimally improbable), that's necessarily one component of the universe's wave function (that is, one "parallel universe"), so, there's definitely one branch where it just happened. If you ask that particular "time-traveling" Painquale, he'll tell you that he sure is a time traveller, he disappeared from the future and appeared here. Never mind that there's no causal relation between new-Painquale showing up and old Painquale disappearing, in his mind it's solid. He can of course, go ahead and kill present day Painquale, and it won't do shit, as there is no actual causal relation (as I said, that future where he thinks he came from may even have absolute zero chance of existing). Of course, he can decide to disintegrate himself again, and THIS pretericide-Painquale configuration can again also just show up randomly 50 years later, in another infinitesimally improbable branch of this same branch of the universe (again, no causality violation here). Again, no time travel, just particles tunneling around. But 2060 pretericide-Painquale of course has the whole causal relation in his mind. And no one around him will have any idea who he is (aside from being the guy who said he came from the future and killed Painquale), which is exactly his expected outcome of a time travel. Success, for all he cares, and no actual causality laws broken.

This is pretty much how I believe time travel would work if it were more than merely theoretically possible.

I was never happy with the solution for the grandfather paradox that some physicist put forth (I want to say Stephen Hawking because I'm surely I'm vaguely recalling a passage from A Brief History of Time) that somehow the Universe would conspire to prevent you from killing your own grandfather so as to maintain causality.

The discovery of the theory of parallel worlds suggested to me a better solution that you could indeed kill your grandfather (if that was your bag) because the man you'd be taking the life of would be from an alternate reality to the one you'd left.

I think that the notion of 'whatever happened, happened' can be preserved at the same time as that of being able to change one's past like Back to the Future's Marty McFly.

Tags: Lost, science, time travel

Our schools are failing our children

2010-03-04T14:49:00.004Z

In the US and the UK it is becoming the norm that children emerge from school ill taught and ill prepared for the world at large.

In the New York Times article Building a Better Teacher an argument is made that there needs to be a new understanding of teaching and be able to distinguish between techniques that really work and those that don't.

But I think there also needs to be discussions about what we need as nations from our schools.

Seth Godin believes school is a scam it is about brainwashing.

It may be that it is not the quality of the teaching at all but the diet of the pupils. Jamie Oliver in his campaign to improve school dinners found that with a healthy nutritious meal at lunchtime that there were improvements in the children's mood, behaviour, and even their ability to concentrate.

Tags: children, school

The hype of cyberwarfare used to control the internet

2010-03-02T14:57:00.000Z

Ryan Singel writing for Threat Level believes that the Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

With the rise of the internet nation states have begun to lose control of their citizens and have introduced ever more draconian laws to try and claw some of that control back.

The War on Terror was framed as a Cold War for the 21st Century and a fog of fear was spread over the population but that fog gradually lifted as people realised that they were not at risk from Al Qaeda. Even when a nutcase tried to ignite explosives in his underpants on an aircraft and politicians and the news media spewed rhetoric about this dangerous new tactic of the terrorists and how something had to be done most people soon went back to their lives as if nothing happened.

The powers that be needed a new threat with which to control the people and the Chinese hacking of Google and others provided them the framing to do it.

Western civilisation is now under the peril of being destroyed by China in the form of computer hackers.

Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is "losing" the cyberwar, according to McConnell.

But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.

We do not need as Mike McConnell to 'reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result -- more manageable.'

The 'Google hacking situation' was first and foremost the infiltration of the servers of private industry not an attack on the United States itself. The IT security of American companies is an issue where the US government can be of assistance by offering advice or notifying of specific threats that they've become aware of, but not through monitoring and controlling the internet.

Tags: computer security, liberty, security

Seth Godin on the nature of genius

2010-03-02T14:52:00.006Z

Genius is misunderstood as a bolt of lighting

Genius is the act of solving a problem in a way no one has solved it before. It has nothing to do with winning a Nobel prize in physics or certain levels of schooling. It's about using human insight and initiative to find original solutions that matter.

Genius is actually the eventual public recognition of dozens (or hundreds) of failed attempts at solving a problem. Sometimes we fail in public, often we fail in private, but people who are doing creative work are constantly failing.

When the lizard brain kicks in and the resistance slows you down, the only correct response is to push back again and again and again with one failure after another. Sooner or later, the lizard will get bored and give up.

Genius is the creation of 5126 prototypes before producing a viable bagless vacuum cleaner. Or to quote Thomas Edison "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Tags: Dyson, Edison, genius, Seth Godin

How did Hurley get out of his car?

2010-03-02T10:55:00.003Z

With all the mysteries that are confounding people in Lost it seems that for many people that THE most important question of Season 6 is:

How did Hurley get out of his car after parking so close to Locke's van?!

To my mind that's an easy one, he got out on the passenger side.

In this parallel timeline his best friend Johnny instead of deserting Hurley when he found out about the lottery win and running off with Starla, the girl Hurley was in love with, instead remains his best friend and becomes his driver.

Hurley is such a nice bloke that he gave his arsehole former boss Randy a job - of course he's going to have given Johnny a job too. And what better job than getting to hang out with your best friend and drive him around all day. Johnny is Turtle to Hurley's Vincent Chase. And Johnny is a pretty skinny guy so would easily be able to get out of the driver side after having parked so close to Locke's car.

When Hurley meets Locke in the car park Johnny had probably just gone off to get some fried chicken or something so the scene looks a little incongruous.

Tags: Lost, TV

Review: The Crazies

2010-02-28T22:17:00.000Z

The Crazies

Tags: movies, review

Review: DVDs of the week

2010-02-26T19:54:00.001Z

Hero

Incendiary

Red Eye

Zardoz

Tags: movies, review

I aspire to be...

2010-02-22T22:14:00.002Z

Tags: humour, security

We have become Richard Nixon

2010-02-11T17:11:00.003Z

Adam Curtis - A Film about how all of us have become Richard Nixon.

It Felt Like a Kiss, his previous work is available to view online once more.

Tags: Adam Curtis, politics, video