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Apple employee attempts to explain Twitter to a buffoon | BitterWallet

2011-04-25T15:32:10Z

London Maze

2011-04-17T06:00:00Z

The London Maze is a local history fair for London. It doesn't come round very often, roughly every 2½ years by my calculations, and it came round yesterday for the first time since 2008. Did you go?

For one day the City of London opens up the whole of the Guildhall complex to host displays by community history groups, local societies, museums, archives and libraries; talks; guided walks; tours of the Guildhall Art Gallery and the Roman Amphitheatre; film shows from the City’s archives and performances from youth and adult groups.

There's something rather brilliant about holding a local history fair in the Guildhall. No musty church hall for these stallholders, but instead a medieval Grade-I listed Great Hall, one of the oldest surviving buildings in the City. Here they set up their display stands on the ancient floor and laid out their wares beneath the stern gaze of Gog and Magog. You might think it'd be tricky to flog books about minor suburban history under such overwhelmingly diverting circumstances, but by golly they did.

I enjoyed wandering around and being courted by local history groups from various different parts of London. No, sorry, I don't live in Wandsworth. I only nearly live in Hackney, but give me your leaflet anyway. Oh go on, you've put a lot of effort into that booklet on Wanstead Flats, I'll buy one. Top marks to Barking & Dagenham council who'd not only brought along a lady in period costume but were also handing out envelopes stuffed full of information on the borough's Heritage Sites. I've filed that particular package away as a lifesaver when my jamjar finally delivers. One of the inner London history societies sold me a booklet I'm tempted to use as the basis for this blog's local history month in 2013. And, following an animated conversation with one of their volunteers, maybe I really should join up with the East London History Society to take advantage of all their excellent research into my home patch.

If you didn't make it to the Guildhall, and local history's your thing, then here are the local London groups you missed out on.
North: Camden History Society, Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, Enfield Society, Hornsey Historical Society, Islington Archaeology & History Society
East: East London History Society, East of London Family History Society, Eastside Community Heritage, Jewish East End Celebration Society, Walthamstow Historical Society
South: Clapham Society, Streatham Society, Wandsworth Heritage
West: West Middlesex Family History Society
City: City of London Archaeological Society, Friends of the City Churches
General: London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, London Topographical Society, The London Society, London Metropolitan Archives
And if your local London local history society isn't there, it might be here. Great list, David, thanks.

As well as advice and selling stuff, there was plenty of other Maze-y stuff going on at the Guildhall yesterday. Guided walks, lectures and poetry readings, for a start. The chance to dress up as an ancient Roman, especially if you were little. Down in the Livery Hall I sat entranced by an hour-long documentary about Thamesmead, in which today's residents were shown two over-optimistic public information films from 40 years ago, and invited to pass comment with the benefit of hindsight. Now there's social history for you. Alas one particular "medical history" event had to be cancelled due to illness, but the poster apologising for this quite made my day.

And never let the opportunity to explore the Guildhall slip you by. The crypt has vaulting to die for. The Old Library boasts several portraits of royal banquets. And the Guildhall Art Gallery, which recently scrapped its admission fee, has a lot more than several rooms of old paintings. A marble statue of Margaret Thatcher, for example, which has to be displayed behind toughened glass in case anyone else pops in and attempts to decapitate it. A temporary exhibition of 'Marf' financial cartoons. And, greatest of all, the remains of Londinium's Roman Amphitheatre in its basement. Gets me every time, that does. So if you can't wait until autumn 2013 for the next London Maze, rest assured that there's enough amazing around here to fill the gap.

AF 447... Part 3

2011-02-21T19:25:15Z

Shared by David
My favourite blogger has some (scary) thoughts on what happened to AF447.

This post is (or was) written on the fly, literally... Between legs spanning the vast American Empire. No lap-tops were used in flight... I viewed a PBS production, Nova, the evening before this trip. It was about Air France 447, the A330 that disapp...

King of the Underworld: Building The Thames Tunnel

2011-02-21T00:27:00Z

On the 2nd of March 1825 the Thames Tunnel Company began construction of what they hoped would be the first tunnel beneath the Thames. On the banks of the river at Rotherhithe, bricklayers and labourers began their work as the curious watched on. The project had been garnering a certain amount of attention ever since it had been granted royal Assent the year before, and its goal was an ambitious one – the construction of a tunnel beneath the river large enough for both people and horse-drawn traffic to use. It was a goal that many thought was impossible.

Over the next few months, London watched as the company's workforce went about their business under the supervision of the energetic Frenchman who had been appointed to be the Company's Chief Engineer.

He was, the papers said, an engineering genius. During the Napoleonic wars he had invented the first ever automated manufacturing process for making rigging blocks and thus the Navy, who got through a staggering 100,000 blocks a year, loved him (although apparently not enough to pay his invoices). He had also invented the first true production line process, which he put to use making cheap, quality, mass-produced boots for the army.

True, the Navy's apparent inability to locate their chequebook and the fact that the sole had fallen out of the boot market after the war had seen him confined to debtors prison, but whilst there he had designed an impressive bridge for the Neva at St Petersburg on behalf of the Tsar, and the British Government had become so worried about the possibility that he might leave the country that they ultimately paid off all his debts from the national purse.

If anyone seemed likely to build the Tunnel, therefore, it was he. But as the weeks wore on and a fifty foot wide circular brick tower began to loom larger and larger on the Rotherhithe skyline, people began to wonder whether maybe someone should have a polite word with this celebrated figure because...

Well...

...Wasn't he meant to be going down not up?

Contrary to perception, however, the chief engineer knew what he was doing. In order to dig, he knew, you needed a shaft. For a project like this it also needed to be a big one - a deep, wide shaft lined with solid walls to hold the earth back. The digging and shoring of this would have been a dangerous and expensive enough task in solid ground, let alone in the soft earth by the Thames.

But this engineer had an idea.

As the tower got taller it also got heavier and, inch by inch, with scientific inevitability, it began to sink into the soft riverside earth. In fact, by June 6th 1825 the 40ft tower had, with a little bit of help (and with men digging out the inside as it went), sunk completely into the ground.

Marc Brunel, Chief Engineer to the Thames Tunnel Company, had just invented the Caisson.

When most people hear the name "Brunel" today it is Isambard Kingdom who springs to their mind. Isambard's legacy is huge, and he is rightly considered one of the Greatest Britons ever to have lived. Yet many do not realise that it is to his father, Marc that Londoners (and indeed the world) arguably owe the greater debt. Marc's work on the Thames Tunnel – which, remarkably, is still in use today – would be the seed from which all London's major subterranean railways would grow. Although it would ultimately take more than fifteen years to complete and extract a brutal cost in both money and men, the construction of the tunnel would see Brunel face, and largely conquer, all the problems that had until then prevented large-scale subterranean tunnelling.

Marc Brunel by James Northcote

That a tunnel was required at all was a consequence of the massive increase in traffic to London's ports that had occurred at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, London was the shipping capital of the world – the Thames packed with tall ships waiting to load and unload at all hours of the day. As London increased in size, and as more and more shipping unloaded on the south side of the river, the Capital's existing river crossings to the heart of the City (London Bridge and Blackfriars) became increasingly overwhelmed.

By Brunel's time the need for a way to reduce pressure on these bottlenecks was acute, but building a new bridge simply wasn't an option. Ironically, the very vessels that made a new bridge necessary also meant it was impossible to build one. Any bridge would have to be large enough to allow tall ships to pass underneath - an engineering and financial nightmare. Other cities had addressed the problem by building bascule bridges that could be raised, but the size of the Thames meant that it would be some time before a bridge of this style would be technically possible in London (Tower Bridge, built almost 50 years after the Thames Tunnel was completed).

Given the above constraints, it is perhaps not surprising that Brunel was not the first to think of a crossing that ran below the river rather than above. In 1708 Ralf Dodd, who had been responsible for the Grand Surrey Canal, sank a test shaft at Rotherhithe but declared the geology unworkable. Then in 1805 the Thames Archway Company – the brainchild of Cornish Tin Mine engineer Robert Vazie – attempted to dig a 5ft high tunnel beneath the river.

In both cases, it was the ground that ultimately foiled the projects. The earth beneath the Thames was soft and thus prone to collapse. Worse, the presence of the river above meant that any large space excavated soon fell in and flooded under the pressure of the water above. This prevented the use of traditional mining techniques and the only man so far who had seemed to have a solution to this problem was Richard Trevithick, who had been brought in to try and finish Vazie's tunnel after repeated collapses. Trevithick's solution was an expensive one, however – to use a series of coffer dams to remove water from the immediate area and then drop in iron tunnel sections from above. This was too risky (and costly) for the Thames Archway Company's directors and the tunnel was thus abandoned (although Trevithick's idea was sound – it was later used in San Francisco with some success).

Brunel, however, thought he had a better solution. Tunnelling had been on Brunel's mind for a while. He had originally considered a tunnel for his river Neva project, and had watched Trevithick's efforts with interest. His nautical experience – both from his work with the British Navy and from his time as a young officer in the French Navy before the revolution – had also fixed in his mind an image from nature – the humble shipworm. He had observed that the shipworm dug into a ship's timbers by using shell-like projections either side of its head to do the cutting, and then eating and excreting the pulped wood.

It was this approach that Brunel initially sought to emulate – he would design a device that would cut through the earth and funnel the detritus through itself. Its own weight and presence would thus provide the tunnel with support while bricklayers following behind built the tunnel lining. Sadly, however, Brunel soon discovered that this would prove impossible – neither manpower nor the steam engines then available proved sufficient to be able to power such a machine.

Undaunted, Brunel modified his plans. Instead of a machine, it was people that Brunel decided to place at the cutting face. He designed an iron and wooden frame which he called a "shield." Assembled at the bottom of the Rotherhithe shaft in November 1825, this was a frame of thirty-six small chambers, each large enough to hold a single man. Each chamber was fronted by a number of six inch horizontal boards, which could be removed by the chamber's occupant allowing the small section of earth behind them to be excavated. Once this was done, the board could be replaced and jacked forward, keeping the rest of the earth back.

Brunel's Tunnelling Shield

When each of the thirty six miners had excavated all their boards, the whole apparatus could be jacked forward, with the frame itself supporting the weight of the roof and bricklayers following on behind to fill in a more permanent lining. This lining would be brick, at least 2ft 6in thick and held together with a new type of Roman cement that Brunel himself had helped create.

It was slow progress, but it worked. Marc Brunel had invented the Tunnelling Shield.

For two years, inch by inch, the tunnel crept forward. It was brutal work beset by constant difficulties. London Clay would become gravel with little warning, and even with the shield acting as a support, flooding was a constant worry. As it was, the tunnel leaked constantly and this was a major problem for the health of all involved. It is worth remembering that the Thames Tunnel pre-dates Bazalgette's own engineering feats and thus Brunel's Thames was not just a river. It was also an open sewer and repository for industrial waste.

The Tunnel under construction

As early as 1826, Marc Brunel had been forced to leave much of the day to day running in the hands of his senior engineers. Ill-health and stress also wrought havoc on their ranks, however, not to mention on the miners, labourers and bricklayers who worked for eight hour shifts amidst the seaping sewage and oppresive air.

Luckily for Brunel, engineering ran in the blood. As his own health faltered, he found that he could increasingly rely on his son to take up the daily management of the project – not yet twenty, Isambard Kingdom Brunel became his father's presence on the front line of construction. It was on the Thames Tunnel that Isambard effectively learnt his craft, and here that he demonstrated his strength and talent for driving forward large projects.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, pictured later in life

By February 1827, the Tunnel had been driven forward about 300ft. This was a major achievement given the conditions of earth, water and air, but it was far slower than Brunel or anyone else had forecast. The project was already now well over budget and behind schedule. In an effort to do something to quell rising costs, the company's directors ordered the workers wages reduced. This did more harm than good, and though later resolved, resulted in a strike that brought all work to a halt for a time.

The directors also decided, against Brunel's advice, to open the works to public viewing at the price of a shilling a time. Brunel's major objection to this was one of safety – the risk of flooding was still there, he insisted, and would only grow as the tunnel's length increased. Brunel knew that the tunnel would soon be perilously close to the riverbed's lowest point and by May workers were beginning to find debris such as coal and china in the leaks – suggesting that the tunnel was possibly even closer to the riverbed than they had planned. On the 18th May Marc was leading Lady Raffles and her party on one of the directors' paid tours when he felt a feeling of real foreboding.

"[I was] most uneasy all the while," he would later say, "as if I had a presentiment."

That evening, as the tide in the Thames rose, the tunnel roof above the tunnelling shield broke. Water poured in, and the workers (and Isambard who was supervising them at the time) were forced to beat a hasty retreat to the Rotherhithe shaft.

With work now halted, Isambard went down in a borrowed Diving Bell to survey the damage. It soon became clear what had happened – gravel dredgers operating in the Thames had, contrary to the law, been dredging too deep. The tunnel had indeed ended up closer to the riverbed than expected, and this had led to the roof's collapse.

Worse soon came for Marc. The damage was repairable and, under Isambard's careful supervision, Marc had men lay iron roads across the breech and bags of clay dumped on top. When this had been completed, the tunnel was pumped dry and work began again (although the flood water left the air in the incomplete tunnel section even worse than before). All this put even more pressure on Marc's health, however, and in August 1827 he suffered a paralytic stroke.

As he slowly recovered, with Isambard continuing to supervise the work, it soon became clear that the flooding had caused public confidence in the project to waver – potentially disastrous given the perilous state of the company's finances. In an effort to restore faith, therefore, a rather effective public relations stunt was staged – in November 1827 a sumptuous banquet was held in the tunnel for the project's backers.

George Jones' famous painting of the banquet is the only picture featuring both Marc and Isambard together. Doubly impressive given that Marc didn't actually attend.

The stunt worked. With the Coldstream Guards playing heartily in the background, and many notable guests in place (including the Duke of Wellington – who was a lifelong supporter of Brunel thanks to the Frenchman's boot-making efforts) confidence was restored and work continued.

That confidence would not last long. On the 12th January 1828, as Isambard was supervising work in the tunnel, he noticed that two miners – Collins and Ball – were struggling with some shoring on the Tunnelling Shield. A hands on manager throughout his life, Isambard headed forward to help them out. Suddenly, as they worked, the three men were engulfed in a torrent of water.

The pressure threw the men back off the frame and shattered the wooden scaffolding behind on which the bricklayers worked. As water poured through the now-broken tunnel ceiling, men and material were thrown about like ragdolls. As the water sheeted down, Isambard found himself pinned beneath the remains of the broken scaffolding. Somehow, with the water-level in the tunnel rising quickly, he managed to free himself and crawled into one of the brick arches that ran down the centre of the tunnel bore. Sheltered briefly from the full force of the water, Isambard was able to pull himself up and survey for the first time the damage – he quickly realised that a major breach had happened. The tunnel was flooding - and fast.

Isambard ran.

As Isambard and the rest of the tunnel's workforce raced towards the safety of the Rotherhithe shaft, the breach worsened. As the young engineer reached the shaft he realised the worker's steps were crammed with those trying to escape. He turned and sprinted for the visitors' stairs, but was suddenly swept off his feet by a vast wave of water that surged down the tunnel with such force that it pushed Isambard and several others who had not yet have reached the surface right up the shaft itself. Some – including a battered and broken Isambard – were lucky enough to be swept over the lip to safety. The unlucky ones were sucked back down to their deaths as the wave lost its force.

Six men died, including Collins and Ball. Unlike Isambard, they had been unable to free themselves from the wreckage of the scaffolding.

The flood had disastrous consequences for the tunnel. Not only was the damage greater than before, but it also robbed Marc of one of his most valuable resources – Isambard. His knee torn, his body bruised and (although he didn't know it at the time) bleeding internally, Isambard had insisted on staying on site in the immediate aftermath and supervising the assessment of the damage by Diving Bell. Even Isambard's capacity for feats of endurance had limits though, and he was soon forcefully packed off to Brighton to recover (he'd pass his time designing a bridge or two).

Deprived of his right hand, Marc went into overdrive. His days were spent supervising the repair efforts and speaking publicly in support of the project's continuation. His nights were spent pouring over the days' work results and writing reports to the now-frantic company directors detailing the state of play.

Eventually the breaches were sealed, but just as work was about to begin on restoring the badly damaged tunnelling frames, the project's finances finally reached critical point. The company needed an investment of funds to survive but despite the efforts of Marc and his ever-present supporter, the Duke of Wellington, who once again put his public reputation on the line and vocally supported Brunel, a subscription drive failed.

On August 9th 1828, the tunnel face, with the remains of the frames still in place, was bricked up. The Tunnel seemed finished.

Marc Brunel, however, wasn't.

As soon as tunnelling ceased, Brunel began a relentless offensive aimed at securing the funds necessary to complete it - £250,000 all told. He lobbied financiers and businessmen, but soon realised that the only source of likely funding was the Government itself. Shockingly, in 1830 Brunel discovered that the Government itself had actually reached this same conclusion some time before, and had offered a loan to the company only to see it rejected out of hand by the Company's then Chairman – a man who it now seemed had been almost willing the company to fail by the end.

By 1831 Brunel had, despite suffering a heart attack, managed to undo this damage and the Government now agreed that Brunel could seek to draw on the Treasury's Loan scheme. At the Company's AGM, Brunel had also seen the Chairman deposed.

Getting the Treasury to actually agree to a loan, however, proved incredibly difficult. The first proposal was rejected but Brunel continued to campaign, even lobbying the King himself. The second was approved only, heartbreakingly, for Brunel to see the Treasury Loan Scheme's funding cut rendering the approval useless.

In 1834, after a third application had been rejected, a number of Fellows from the Royal Society decided to throw a dinner in Brunel's honour. At the Spreadeagle & Crown Pub at Rotherhithe (now the Mayflower), they toasted the Engineer's health and formed the "Tunnel Club" - a lobbying group determined to help Brunel bring his funding plans to fruition.

Finally, in June of that year, Parliament signed off on a £270,000 loan.

Work on the tunnel began again in 1835. The old, now rusted, shield was removed and a new one, its design improved by Brunel, installed in its place. The work of digging the tunnel proved to be even more brutal than before. Brunel had planned to transfer a significant amount of the effort to the Wapping side of the river, not least to allow ventilation to be taken over from there. The Treasury, however, refused to sign off the expense. The wording on the loan was very specific, they insisted – it was to complete construction that was already started and they would consider this new work.

As a result, conditions below ground became positively horrific. The air was putrid, not helped by the fact that over 100 gallons of Thames filth was now seeping through the tunnel head every day, and gas was increasingly building up in the tunnel as well. This would lead to the occasional outbreak of explosions and small fires which would burn for days, rendering the tunnel even hotter to work in and leaving the iron-framed tunnelling shield sometimes scolding to the touch.

The government also rejected a plan by Brunel to buy his own Diving Bell. This, he'd determined, would have been the solution to the flooding problem – by having a Diving Bell above the tunnel head at all times Brunel hoped to be able to catch likely flood points in advance and reinforce them with clay bags before they broke. Brunel got his ship from which to distribute the clay, but not the Diving Bell and thus was largely reduced to throwing clay overboard blind in the hope that it would help.

Despite all this, the tunnel slowly progressed. Burned by flame, sickened by the water, vomiting and blinded by the gas, the cost to the workers was horrific. Lessons would be learnt for the future from the pains suffered by Brunel's workers but that was little help to them now. Brunel repeatedly petitioned to be allowed his Wapping ventilation shaft, but was repeatedly turned down. Inch by inch, the tunnel crept forward and more and more the miners found themselves digging through mud rather than earth.

Then, on the morning of the 23rd August, the seemingly inevitable happened once again.

There had been some concern about the water levels in the tunnel since the night before, although nothing had come of it. Brunel himself had been at the site since 4am but left in the middle morning when nothing had developed. At lunchtime Thomas Page, Marc's primary engineer now that Isambard had major projects of his own, was about to depart for a meeting with the company directors, but when he heard that the flow of water had increased slightly above one of the cutting frames something at the back of his mind told him not to go.

Instead Page headed down to the shield. All appeared under control but, still wary, Page ordered that a raft, clay and other breach-blocking supplies be readied. He also ordered the tunnel cleared of visitors and unnecessary personnel and that a note be dispatched to Brunel warning him that a breach may come at high-tide.

Page was correct – but it didn't take until high-tide. By the afternoon water was rushing in and the workers, under the calm and controlled oversight of Page, were pumping out water and strengthening the tunnel to try and stem the flow. Ultimately it proved unsuccessful and Page was forced to order the evacuation, but his management of the situation meant that the breach was far less serious than it could have been. After the normal process of Diving Bell and Clay Bagging, work resumed on the 11th of September.

The Tunnel would flood three more times, the first of which happened whilst both Brunel and Page were ill and sadly cost a life. By now, however, the process of sealing breaches and cleaning the tunnel had become almost routine. Even during the third, when the water managed to take out all the lighting in the tunnel, the workforce remained composed and were able to minimise the damage. In all cases, work resumed with little delay.

Progress, however, was still painfully slow – just nine-tenths of an inch a day in some months – because the conditions below ground continued to worsen. Brunel, who turned 70 in 1839, was repeatedly bedridden. His condition was not helped by the fact that he would visit the site every two hours at all times of the day to check for potential breaches. Page too suffered.

Ultimately, however, it was the workforce who continued to suffer worst. Again and again Brunel lobbied the Treasury to allow him to build his Wapping ventilation shaft, but he was continually refused. As one newspaper at the time noted with morbid humour, the Government's policy seemed rather "one-sided."

On the 22nd August 1839 the tunnel reached the low-water mark on the Wapping bank. Work continued and on the 11th June 1840, work began on the main shaft at Wapping, to be constructed in the same way as the first at Rotherhithe. In May, as the Wapping shaft slowly sank and the main tunnel neared its final destination, a small drainage shaft was dug between the two. That June, Marc Brunel's 3 year old grandson became the first person ever to fully pass under the river from shore to shore.

Finally, on November 16th 1841, Thomas Page climbed out of the Rotherhithe shaft and knocked on the door of Brunel's house just a few metres down the road. On being ushered in, he presented the 72 year old engineer with a clod of earth. Brunel looked at it and smiled at Page, who smiled right back.

The clod was covered in red brick dust. The tunnel had finally reached the shaft. Brunel had successfully built a tunnel beneath the Thames.

The work did not finish there, of course, and it would not be until March 1843 that the Tunnel admitted its first paying customer. Even then, it was ultimately a financial failure. The money the Government had loaned the company proved enough to complete the tunnel, but not enough to build the huge descent ramps necessary for horse-drawn traffic to access the tunnel.

As a result, it could take foot traffic only. The tunnel was rightly recognised as an engineering marvel and became one of London's biggest tourist attractions – 2 million people used it in that first year alone, but it had ultimately cost almost £500,000 to build. Without road traffic it could never repay that, and despite the company's efforts to turn it into a bustling subterranean market and Christmas fair, it ultimately ended up as a refuge for the seedier side of London life.

The Tunnel shortly after its completion

In 1865, however, the tunnel finally found its use – it was purchased by the East London Railway and became a railway tunnel beneath the Thames. Since then the Tunnel has seen passengers, goods, armaments and even runaway sheep travel through its confines.

Indeed it is still at the heart of London's railway network today – if you find yourself on the East London Line then look carefully as you pass through Wapping or Rotherhithe and you'll see it.

The Tunnel in 1996 - before the massive renovation efforts that took place during the ELL rebuild. Courtesy English Heritage.

The Tunnel shortly before the revamped East London Line opened. Courtesy Caroline's Miscellany

Almost two hundred years ago, Marc Brunel set out to do the impossible. At great cost in money, time and men he managed to accomplish something that no-one had ever done before, creating a tunnel that many then genuinely regarded as the eighth wonder of the world. In doing so he laid down the foundations for every major subterranean railway that would follow. Others would take the inventions he had created and the lessons he had learnt and improve on them, but to Marc Brunel goes the honour of proving that it could be done at all.

The Historian Peter Ackroyd once described Marc Brunel as "a lord of the underworld." It is probably fair to say, however, that he is incorrect.

For both the engineering legacy he left behind, and the cost to both himself and others that it required, Marc Brunel wasn't a lord of the Underworld.

He was its King.

Island Set to Have Two MPs

2011-02-15T09:15:04Z

Two MPs after next election, vote to take place later today

Boris’s Broken Transport Promises – “Diminishes trust in politics”

2011-01-04T23:36:51Z

Neither the Mayor nor his Advisor for Transport, Kulveer Ranger, were available for comment today – the day Londoners started back at work after the Christmas holidays to find that their fares had risen and their transport services were as unreliable as ever.

In the absence of Boris Johnson and Kulveer Ranger, Sir Simon Milton (Deputy Mayor for Policy & Planning) was asked by BBC London to comment on the fact that TfL would surely have avoided the massive fares hike by retaining the Western Extension of the Congestion Charging zone. Milton replied:

Well, I think when you make a promise to the electorate and you then scrap that promise as soon as you’re elected, then that actually diminishes trust in politics.

The one thing that we can say is that when Boris says that he will set out to do something, he will do his level best to achieve it.

The daily Congestion Charge rose today, from £8 to £10, yet in an ITV London Tonight debate on 17 April 2008, Boris Johnson clearly said, were he elected Mayor of London:

I would certainly not allow the Congestion Charge to go up above £8

Hmm. What was that Sir Simon said about breaking promises? During Boris Johnson’s 2008 Mayoral election campaign he issued a leaflet entitled London transport is a mess [PDF]:

London transport is a mess. How come you pay more every year yet things just seem to get worse? Rush hour should be re-named crush hour. It’s time for some fresh thinking. Let’s have new orbital bus routes for the outer boroughs and a free bike hire scheme in central London. Let’s have a real-time GPS bus mapping service. Let’s have a flexible Congestion Charge zone and let’s scrap the proposed £25 fee. Let’s support river services and demand better rail services. Let’s get going to get Londoners moving. Log on to backboris.com to read a new manifesto for transport -and Back Boris on May 1st to make a change for the better in London.

London transport is a mess – it certainly is now.

How come you pay more every year yet things just seem to get worse? - indeed. Bus fares up 44% since Boris Johnson became Mayor, for instance.

Let’s have new orbital bus routes for the outer boroughs - Boris Johnson’s reply to London Assembly Member Val Shawcross when questioned about the promised new orbital bus routes, 17 March 2010:

I have to say, I must be frank with you, Val, there are arguments to be had – and I am sure that there is further detailed discussion that you and I could have about this – about whether the creation of many more orbital bus routes actually delivers some of the improvements that possibly I thought before the election. I would have to be honest with you about that and say that I have seen plenty of good studies now which suggest to me that the big investment in orbital bus routes does not actually deliver the improvements that are sometimes claimed. So, I am reluctant to be negative about this, but all I can say is I have not seen a huge amount of positive evidence so far.

free bike hire scheme for central London – Boris Johnson’s transport manifesto claimed his cycle hire scheme would be at no cost to taxpayers (commercial firms are happy to shoulder the costs of this type of scheme) yet it is costing £140m minus a £25m contribution from Barclays which is being split between sponsorship of cycle hire and the Cycle Superhighways.

Let’s have a real-time GPS bus mapping service – apparently due to start this year, unless it’s been cancelled.

Let’s have a flexible Congestion Charge zone and let’s scrap the proposed £25 fee – Petrol-head appeasement duly achieved. Remember who’ll be paying the EU fines for breaching air quality regulations.

Let’s support river services and demand better rail services – river services have recently been cut and has anyone heard Boris Johnson doing any demanding?

Let’s get going to get Londoners moving – have you started, yet, Boris? How’s that War On Roadworks going?

Spurs or Hammers for Olympic stadium? Boris won't be drawn

2010-12-15T22:07:50Z

We should remember, by the way, that the Olympic Park Legacy Company retains the option of turning down both football clubs, reducing the capacity to 25,000 and keeping it primarily for athletics use. That was the original plan as set out last February. But such a course would almost certainly require public subsidy, and there's not an awful lot of that about. I've a hunch Andrew Boff had such matters in mind this morning when - unless I'm very much mistaken - stealthily inviting the Mayor to hint that Tottenham's is the best offer on the table. I quote:

Boff: Can you ensure that the financial viability of the stadium is the deciding factor when choosing a tenant?
Boris: Of course, all those issue will be very important, yes.
Boff: And would you agree that there should be no more public subsidy for the Olympic Stadium?
Boris: I don't want to get dragged into the implications of this or that bid.
Boff: Are you actually stating that there being an athletics track at the stadium is not a deal-breaker?
Boris: It's very kind of you to invite me to go down this track - as it were - but I'm not going to. It would fetter any discretion I might have in the planning process.

Nice try, Andrew...

One big difference between the two Premier League clubs' bids is that Tottenham would remove the athletics track (and have promised to build another one elsewhere) and West Ham would not. This point has not been lost on a galaxy of British Olympic stars who've penned a plea for the track to be retained. The bottom line is that Spurs already have more money than West Ham and that financial gap could only increase if the East Enders meet what looks to be their grim destiny of relegation at the end of this season. The Hammers's bid is a combined effort with Newham Council, which does not, I detect, increase Boff's confidence in its viability.

Spurs also have advanced plans to redevelop their present ground as part of Haringey's Northumberland Park regeneration project. The Council, Boris and now Slasher Pickles have given these proposals the green light. But they would cost more and the stadium would have a smaller capacity than the Stratford one, prompting sceptics to suggest that the club will take the Olympic stadium if they can a) get it, and b) get away with it, given that many fans would regard the idea of relocating from North to East London as a foul betrayal.

West Ham look by far the more natural tenant, though they too would have problems convincing some of their fans. An account of an interview with their stadium bid manager shows that the club recognises this and that they might not fill what would become a 60,000-seater ground for every match, though he also says that their bid allows for the possibility of the club doing the yo-yo thing between leagues.

Don't expect any decision very soon. The Legacy Company will settle on a preferred bidder, but not for a month or so (this will not be announced but it will leak). Realistically, the final decision will be taken towards the end of this financial year - probably March. The way it works is that the Company board will make a recommendation to the government and the Mayor, and they will decide whether or not to accept it. Let's hope they don't disagree.

Dave Hill

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

WikiLeaks: Moving Target

2010-12-07T22:20:00Z

This has been an exciting month for those of us who study the Internet's infrastructure and think about ways to keep it running (and growing). Did I say exciting? Maybe "exhausting" would be more accurate. From China, to Iran, to the US Congress, everyone seems to be wondering how best to control the Internet and bring it in line with local law.

And then came the latest iteration of the WikiLeaks drama.

Love them or hate them, you have to admit that these folks are effective at creating and sustaining an audience for their content. Their glacially slow release of secret information, a few tastes each day, is calculated to feed a media storm that could easily last for months.

If nothing else, the massive amounts of traffic they are attracting, and the efforts of actors unknown to shut them down, have created a unique laboratory for studying Internet resilience.

Consider their primary website: wikileaks.org. They lost their Web hosting, their payment services, and ultimately the use of the domain name itself, all while coming under withering DDoS attacks and intermittent nation-level blacklisting. And yet, WikiLeaks stays up, taunting their adversaries with their jaunty hourglass and hourly tweets of coming attractions.

How are they staying on the Internet? Why haven't their adversaries shut them down already?

I guess the short answer is that the harder you hit them, the bigger they get.

For the long answer, you need to examine their DNS and BGP configurations: the mapping from domain names (like wikileaks.ch) to IP addresses (like 178.21.20.8), and from IP addresses to the providers who host them. These are the protocols that make the Internet survivable, and after a somewhat shaky start, it's clear that WikiLeaks is exploiting them very effectively to stay alive.

Termination of Service

In recent months, wikileaks.org's content had lived happily in just a few IP address blocks, hosted by Bahnhof and PRQ (two Swedish ISPs with ... let's say ... liberal policies for the content they host), and French provider Cursys. Then, when the cables were first released at the end of November, WikiLeaks added additional hosting in Amazon's EC2 cloud (presumably to cope with the tremendous volumes of traffic being generated in the first days of the release).

It was not to last — Amazon evicted them on December 1st for terms of service violations. In response, they diversified by hosting the wikileaks.org domain in two different IP blocks: one in France, hosted by OVH, and another in Sweden, hosted by Bahnhof.

A couple days later, on December 3rd, EveryDNS (their DNS provider) shut them off, refusing to supply a valid IP address to queries for wikileaks.org. Today, if you ask the .org root for the authoritative DNS servers for wikileaks.org, you still get back the same four EveryDNS servers ... but they won't answer.

Why didn't WikiLeaks just change DNS providers for the .org site? That's a bit of a mystery — we'd note only that the sponsoring registrar is a California company, Dynadot, who apparently doesn't know what to do with the hot potato.

Thus endeth the first phase of WikiLeaks' "rustication."

Respawning Globally

Remember, when EveryDNS made their call to turn off DNS for the wikileaks.org domain on December 3rd, the WikiLeaks IP address space was still routed and their servers were still alive (though intermittently unavailable due to tremendous inbound DDoS attacks). When the wikileaks.org domain stopped resolving, WikiLeaks simply diversified into alternative ccTLDs (country code top level domains) and pointed those names towards existing IP addresses, or added new hosting.

The country-level domain for Germany (wikileaks.de) has Swedish hosting from PRQ in Sweden and 1&1 in Germany; the European Union (wikileaks.eu), Finland (wikileaks.fi), the Netherlands (wikileaks.nl), Poland (wikileaks.pl), Sweden (wikileaks.se), and Tonga (wikileaks.to) have been pointed at the existing 88.80.0.0/19 block, hosted by Bahnhof in Sweden. But just to make good and sure, additional country-level domains for Austria (wikileaks.at), the Cocos Islands (wikileaks.cc), and Switzerland (wikileaks.ch, held by the Swiss Pirate Party) came up on Bahnhof's 88.80.0.0/19 block over the weekend. Norwegian wikileaks.no has hosting from French OVH and Swedish Bahnhof, and Luxembourg (wikileaks.lu) marches to its own drum, getting hosting from local provider Root SA. (There are probably some I'm missing, and the set continues to mutate daily, adding additional hosting in different countries to continuously reduce vulnerability to takedown.)

To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversification. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, you'll find no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia. And if you ask any of those 14 servers where to find wikileaks.ch, they'll point you to one of three differently routed IP blocks, containing web server IP addresses with diverse geolocation: 78.21.16.0/21 (originated by Serverius, in the Netherlands), 46.59.0.0/17 (originated by Bahnhof, in Sweden), and 213.251.128.0/18 (originated by OVH in France).

Are you getting the picture yet?

Taking away WikiLeaks' hosting, their DNS service, even their primary domain name, has had the net effect of increasing WikiLeaks' effective use of Internet diversity to stay connected. And it just keeps going. As long as you can still reach any one copy of WikiLeaks, you can read their mirror page, which lists over 1,000 additional volunteer sites (including several dozen on the alternative IPv6 Internet). None of those is going to be as hardened as wikileaks.ch against DNS takedown or local court order — but they don't need to be.

Within a couple days' time, the WikiLeaks web content has been spread across enough independent parts of the Internet's DNS and routing space that they are, for all intents and purposes, now immune to takedown by any single legal authority. If pressure were applied, one imagines that the geographic diversity would simply double, and double again.

And we're only considering the website itself, not the torrented data files, which ensure that cryptographically signed copies of the website and its backing data are dispersed beyond all attempts to recall or suppress the information they contain. That's an Internet infrastructure subject for another day.

Diversification: Not Without Its Problems

If you think for a moment, you'll realize that this rapid growth does create some potential problems with trust — when you click through to one of the myriad wikileak-look-alike sites out there, which ones are "real?" They all look pretty familiar, and share the same content at first glance. But there's no mechanism in place to allow you to know that you're looking at an unaltered, reasonably real-time mirroring of the official wikileaks.org website (which is, of course, no longer available for comparison). Is that incredible cable about the existence of alien bodies in New Mexico real, or is it a joke?

The torrents don't suffer from this problem, because they are signed, and the WikiLeaks public key was distributed long ago. But when I visit, to pick a random example from the WikiLeaks mirror page, http://nepaliwikileaks.org/, am I really reading the Real Deal? For that matter, which of the dozens of official WikiLeaks sites are the Real Deal?

We can already see that enterprising souls who care more about ad revenue than Internet freedom have 'parked' other WikiLeaks ccTLD domains. I'm looking at you, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, India, Spain, Japan, Russia, Slovakia, and Niue (.nu). The Wikia Inc folks are hanging onto wikileaks.us, wikileaks.com, and wikileaks.net.

My favorite example here would be wikileaks.ru, which looks like this:

Summary

This is a volatile conflict, with people who feel strongly about freedom on both sides, and who aren't hesitant to talk about this as a cyberwar. I'm not going to go there. From a more dispassionate infrastructure standpoint, though, we can make a few observations.

First, even without considering the possibility of alternatives to the current DNS infrastructure, it's evident that the country-level distribution of authority inherent in the ccTLD system has provided enough political cover to keep an extremely controversial site running. Everyone has laws that make certain kinds of content illegal, but there is no global agreement across jurisdictions about the definition of illegal content.

Second, it's apparent that search and social infrastructure (Google and Twitter) now play a key role in re-spawning content that gets blocked in any one place, and drawing even more attention to the surviving copies. If suppressed content automatically goes viral, the Internet's construction basically guarantees that that content will have a home for the rest of time. If you attack DNS support, people will tweet raw IP addresses. If you take down the BGP routes to web content, people will put up more mirrors, or switch to overlay networks to distribute the data. You can't burn down the Library of Alexandria any more— it will respawn in someone's basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Finally, we can predict that in the future, enforcement of local laws will take place almost exclusively at the consumer edge of the Internet. Providers of content can change jurisdictions, but consumers generally cannot — and this asymmetry drives the creation of national domain blacklists and monitoring of access to illegal content within access networks. The day isn't far off, if it isn't here already, when your ISP will be set to work making lists of the naughty and nice. Get your proxies ready!

Update: An earlier version of this blog incorrectly identified the owners of the wikileaks.us, wikileaks.com, and wikileaks.net domains. We regret the error.

Tech Support

2010-10-15T04:00:00Z

Tube Lines: "it's worse than we thought"

2010-07-21T06:55:52Z

Transport for London's board meets this morning to consider a short agenda with a single, weighty item near its end. Item 4 is headed Status of the Jubilee Line Upgrade and has been compiled in the roughly three-week period since TfL completed its effective takeover of Tube Lines Limited, the PPP company responsible for improving the Jubilee's track, trains and, most significantly, its signaling system. The result will be a 33 percent increase in passenger capacity and journey times reduced by nearly a quarter. This was meant to have been achieved by the end of last year. It wasn't. The board paper provides an account of why.

It's a technical read, but stick with it if you can. TfL says it is informed by proper, person-to-person conversations with Thales Signalling, the company contracted to install the new system (such engagement had not been possible prior to the recent shares buy-out.). The text contains various references to computer bugs, reliability problems and timescale slippage. It's pretty damning and paints a picture that is, in the words of a TfL spokesperson, "worse than we thought."

The paper's "sponsor" (to use the jargon) is Mike Brown, London Underground's managing director. He told the BBC yesterday that the Tube network could "fall apart" if the upgrade budget is not protected by the government. Today's elucidation of the Jubilee Line situation will surely form a part of his, TfL's and the Mayor's wider case.

Dave Hill

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

New Romance [Comics]

2010-06-25T16:20:00Z

This simple iPhone 4 comic made me laugh this morning. I guess, to some extent, it explains why we're all here. [explosm via TNW] More »

The Incredibly Slow, Incredibly Hot Soho iPhone 4 Line [Iphone 4 Launch]

2010-06-24T18:00:00Z

I got to the line at the NYC Soho Apple Store at about 6:40 this morning, 20 minutes before they opened the doors. I knew I'd be far back, but I figured it would move relatively quickly. I was wrong! More »

Boris Johnson: the Con-Lib common foe

2010-05-20T20:57:24Z

Shared by David
Boris might surprise us all yet. Strong words from him on protecting London's transport projects against government cuts.

Victoria Wood used to joke about putting on her comedy breasts. What might Mayor's Johnson's equivalent preparation be? His comedy voice? Comedy hair? Comedy gonads? Whichever is the case his wit and humour were at their disarming best for most of th...

How To Increase Your Ratings In One Easy Step...

2010-05-13T11:20:00Z

I’ve cracked it. The thing we’ve all be searching for, for all this time. It’s called “How to increase your ratings in one easy step!”

Here is the step.

1. Announce that the station may be closing
2. Err... that’s it!

There will be outcry that the much beloved ‘jewel on the radio dial’ would be sorely missed. Campaigns will be started, Facebook groups and Twitter hashtags will be in surplus and all the kerfuffle will cause a massive surge of interest in your station.

Economic theory shows us that often when something is in short supply, then demand increases. So, more and more people will then tune in to see what they’re about to lose, and hey presto... ratings increase by 50%!!

‘Surely some sort of drug fuelled fantasy caused by an overload of rolling news and too many late nights Nik’... I hear you say? Well – no... not really. Look at the following graph I borrowed from the lovely Media UK.

Those of you not familiar with BBC 6 Music, it’s a national DAB station playing an eclectic mix of new music and cooler classics. The BBC have threatened to close it as I’ve talked about it on this blog before. And hey presto... after the announcement, the latest figures out this week, show a huge rise is both listening share and reach. The ratings have rocketed!

So there we go. How to increase your ratings in one easy step!

**Disclaimer – Do NOT try this at your radio station. Your radio station may be at risk if you do not keep up investment in content or fail to apply appropriate levers to generate audience.

David Cameron's phantom police savings

2010-04-16T16:10:00Z

David Cameron said at last night's debate that "we're not seeing enough police on the streets."

Gordon Brown challenged him on how he would pay for this:

GORDON BROWN: Will you match our funding on the police? The answer is no from your manifesto. This is not Question Time.

ALASTAIR STEWART: Let Mr Cameron answer your point.

GORDON BROWN: It's answer time, David.

DAVID CAMERON: What matters is what comes out. I went to a Hull police station the other day. They had five different police cars, and they were just about to buy a £73,000 Lexus. There's money that could be saved to get the police on the frontline. The Metropolitan Police have 400 uniformed officers in their human resources department. Our police officers should be crime fighters, not form-fillers, and that's what needs to change.

The argument is clear. By cutting "form filling" we can reduce police spending and still get more police out on the street.

All we need to do is cut back on a couple of ~~Lexuses~~ Lexi. Just not his own.

However, as Sunder points out the Lexus claims are not all that they seem and the claims about the Met are even dodgier.

Now the first thing to point out about the Met is that it is currently being tillered by Boris Johnson.

And if uniformed police officers really are stuck doing pointless "form filling" then surely Boris should have done something about it by now?

But then perhaps the reason he hasn't, is because those officers are already doing the jobs that they're meant to do.

According to a statement put out by the Met today:

In the Election TV debate televised last evening (15 April), David Cameron commented that there were 400 uniformed police officers in the Met's Human Resources department.

In HR, in 2009-10, we have;

208 police officers teaching new police officer recruits, specials and probationers
26 police officers training new PCSO's
63 police officers in the Driver Training School teaching and assessing advanced and response driver training
55 police officers in various other training roles
30 police officers undertaking Sergeant and Inspector assessments and other work in the Career Management Unit
8 police officers in the Police Federation, Superintendents' Association and Staff Support Associations
8 police officers in Positive Action, recruitment, Community Engagement, Duties and other areas of HR work

Total - 398

In 2010-11, this number reduces to 370.

So that's mostly training rather than form filling.

Of course it may be that some of this work could be done by police staff rather than uniformed officers.

But considering that Boris is also cutting police staff in some areas and Human resources funding generally, then it is hard to see how this could be the case.

And considering that Boris is also taking 455 police officers off the street then it is difficult to understand just who Cameron thinks will do this work.

Isn't the truth simply that if you spend less, you get less, and Cameron and Boris should not keep trying to pretend otherwise.

But then perhaps their policy of getting parents to run schools could be extended to the Met.

Anyone fancy training a few police officers in their spare time?

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David Cameron may scrap Crossrail: Greening

2010-04-15T11:00:00Z

The Conservatives may scrap Crossrail if they win the election, their Shadow London Minister admitted today:

Speaking this morning, Justine Greening said that it was "possible" the project would be canned before adding that she "can’t give a guarantee that it will continue."

The comments came during an LBC debate between the London representatives of the three main parties:

LBC Debate: Thursday, April 15th 2010 09.25

Speakers: Nick Ferrari, Justine Greening

NF: Let’s go the Conservatives first. Your stance on Crossrail? Justine Greening.

JG: We’ve always been very supportive of Crossrail. We recognise how important it is for London as well but what we can’t do before the election is finished is write a budget when we’re not in government. And so we, we can, we’ve said that we know it’s important, we know that the tube infrastructure and investing in, that’s important, but we can’t do a line by line budget because we are in such a parlous state with public finances.

NF: So Crossrail will continue but you don’t know how?

JG: What, all I….

NF: So it won’t continue?

JG: We, we can’t, we can’t give a line by line budget on projects across government, including Crossrail. Everything’s up for review but we think it’s important.

NF: I’m sure this is my stupidity. Will it continue or won’t it continue?

JG: I can’t give a guarantee that it will continue.

NF: So it might not, it can go the other way? The Conservatives could scrap Crossrail?

JG: It’s possible but at the end of the day we’ve always said that we think it’s important project and, and actually the reason this is important is we, we want to be responsible so we can’t pretend that we can write an entire budget outside of government. We’ve said we’ll do one within 50 days of getting into government if we get elected and we will then provide some clarity and certainty.

Greening's comments come within two days of a Tory manifesto commitment to "support" the project.

Labour's London Minister Tessa Jowell who took part in the debate with Justine said today:

"It is now clear that Conservatives will not commit to the construction of Crossrail, which is vital for business, jobs and economic growth in London. This in stark contrast to Labour's clear and unequivocal commitment to Crossrail which will add ten per cent to London's transport capacity, create 14,000 jobs in the construction period alone and add an estimated £20billion to London's economy."

Liberal Democrat London Transport spokesperson Caroline Pidgeon said:

"The Conservatives are all over the place when it comes to Crossrail. The Conservative Mayor of London never tires of boasting about his support for the project and Conservative run Kensington and Chelsea Council are even demanding a further new station which will add to the cost of the project. Yet at the same time a London Conservative MP, speaking on behalf of the national party, is simply unable to provide a clear assurance that this much needed project will be completed."

Boris Johnson has repeatedly failed to get Cameron to commit to the project, even pushing Cameron live on air last week.

Until recently I had assumed that there was no way they would can it, not least because of the huge embarrassment it would cause Boris.

However, it now seems more and more likely that they will at the very least scale back the size of the project.

David Cameron should now spell out exactly where he stands before London goes to the polls.

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OS 4.0 event April 8, three OS 4.0 flavors, Cypress iPhone dev kit

2010-04-06T12:03:26Z

Apple has announced that a special event for the launch of the iPhone OS 4.0 will be held on April 8. We don’t know right now exactly what new features the update will add, but one of the big ones expected is multitasking.

Three versions of the iPhone OS 4.0 are turning up in stats collected by PixelCUBE Studios. The company has recorded entries for OS 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.1.

Cypress has unveiled a new iPhone and iPod touch dev kit for making hardware accessories. The kit is designed to let manufacturers create new devices like speaker docks and other gear quickly and easily. The dev kit is available for about $250.

Work set to start on Island Waitrose

2010-03-31T10:35:00Z

SUPERMARKET chain Waitrose has announced the construction of its first store on the Island will begin on Tuesday.

New blow for Ryde gateway

2010-03-05T23:19:06Z

Shared by David
Isle of Wight Council in incompetence shocker!

BOMBSHELL news has been dropped on Ryde that £1.5 million thought to have been promised for Esplanade improvements has been cut by the Isle of Wight Council from its budget....

WTFJeans Have Specially-Fitted Pockets For USB Sticks and iPhones [Apparel]

2010-03-05T13:20:08Z

HTC may think the Nexus One shouldn't go in pockets, but WTFJeans has enough pockets for every gadget you own. Except your laptop. Or your fax machine.

Of course, regular jeans with regular pockets haven't yet been proven to be deficient in carrying either USB sticks or iWhatevers, but these do have a catch. iPhones and iPod Touches can be safely contained in the micro-fiber insulated pocket, which has been measured and cut just right so it doesn't move about, bumping up against your set of keys like it's a buxom girl at an R&B night. There's also a special hidden pocket for a USB stick—though as I usually carry around at least five in my handbag, along with a micro and miniUSB cable, I think I'd need a few more pockets added.

Both men and women are catered for by WTFJeans, and they'll be on sale the 2nd of May for 59 Euros, or $80 dollars. [WTFJeans via Recombu via Mashable]