I'm increasingly annoyed by official-media consensus that young people will suffer more than anyone else from the recession. Not that I especially doubt this; I doubt the reasoning, which appears to be that they've all gone soft and they're not like we were in my day. As a general principle, I believe this is usually wrong, being unfalsifiable and all, and also being a projection of one's own fear of death.
But on the specific case, I dispute the facts. It wasn't a great time to be young; by definition, when you're young your only source of income is wages, and the labour share of national income has been flat for years. Indeed, real wages have been flat for donkey's years. A personal example; I was offered a job at Euromoney Institutional Investor on a salary of £16,000 per year, but on a six-month contract. Even at Mobile Comms International, it was a while before I was earning more an hour than I had been Pritt-Sticking the flaps of substandard envelopes whilst waiting for Bradford City's second season in the Premier League. However, it improved, and I'm well aware I learnt a hell of a lot there. I spent around 20% of my post-tax income on my railway season ticket.
At the same time, both rents and house prices shot through the roof. This was crucial; the whole idea that home-owners got rich from the rise in the value of their property was dependent on someone buying it from them. People retiring and trading-down was a factor that had to match people trading-up; at bottom, there had to be first-time buyers, who are generally young. The net effect of right-to-buy and the great property bull run was to transfer wealth from first-time buyers to sellers; in the aggregate, the Bank of Mum and Dad was borrowing from the kids.
And, of course, there were tuition fees, top-up fees, and for a cohort including me, both the fees and no student grants. Meanwhile, we were told we ought to consume and keep the economy going, take part in the creative industries and volunteer, but do this while joining the job market, to borrow heavily to pay for further and higher education, to accumulate savings on deposit, to save for retirement (or in other words, to pay others' pensions), that we were a bunch of unserious greenies, that we were politically apathetic, that we would face the consequences of climate change (after it became respectable to worry), that we were all drug fiends and music characterised by repetitive beats was against the law, that we weren't getting on the housing ladder, that we were borrowing too much money (this from the people who brought you Citigroup) and that people who were slightly younger ought to be punished for playing hooky in order to demonstrate against the Iraq war. To cap the lot, we were told we were drinking too much. If we were, who could guess why?
Actually, if I was younger, I think I'd be delighted by the crisis. I've got plenty of schadenfreude and indeed klammheimliche Freude as it is. Things I need (somewhere to live, somewhere to do interesting things) are likely to get cheap, and me minus five years doesn't care about the cost of huge cars or Vertu mobile phones because he doesn't have any money but does have more sense. The strength of ideological drivel is reduced; there has been a catastrophe in the intellectual environment, a meteorite has plunged into the credibility of the market monkeys, and as usual, this is followed by an adaptive radiation, a blossoming of new species into new or newly unoccupied niches.
Even when me minus five years starts working for the clampdown, at least he or she gets to save for their retirement in a low asset price world, and to bore me minus ten years with tales about how they staged bio-hacking parties in abandoned bank C-level offices, and how this gets them off inevitably joining the Conservative Party, or functional equivalent. Which is, after all, the claim to intellectual legitimacy of most of the people who spent all that time ordering me to simultaneously save, work, borrow, volunteer, spend, rebel, invest, and obey.
I suppose they must have meant one of those.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
surrounded by wankers
As usual, the Daily Mash catches the zeitgeist. Clubbers ditch ketamine for elephant tranquillisers - "it makes you feel really elephanty".
In North London, meanwhile, they're wanking on the streets. Seriously. So far this weekend, I was standing in a toilet in the Sir Richard Steeles* when I heard groaning. I cancelled the maniac. But it kept polling the urban maniac API; I noticed Mr Red Goretex thrapping like a lab-chimp at the other end of the urinal. I'd just been arguing about French education policy and enlarging the zone of sanity by pushing the works of Stafford Beer; I wasn't prepared for this. And with that, he was gone. By the time I next used the toilet, someone had already updated the graffiti; now that's what I call social media.
Then, outside my local Budgens, I almost tripped over some character passed out with his trousers round his ankles and, yes, an obvious erection. Daniel Davies will no doubt point out that this is an example of simple probability theory, like Richard Feynman's joke about the chances of seeing just that particular registration number. Bah, it felt like the world spirit to me. We are all wanking for coins now. I assessed the situation; breathing, obvious risks - cold or violence, funny eyes, weird behaviour (trousers), drooling (seriously - I thought it was a classic symptom of an opiate overdose, but actually it's stimulants that do that). I donned a tone of command and tried to communicate - frothing, drivel, funny eyes. Skin; coldsoaked. Not a good sign.
Obviously I took out my adrenaline injector and rammed it into his sternum. Yeah, right. They sent for the ambulance, and one was sent. Nobody got lucky, to the best of my knowledge. They were on the scene quick enough; I briefed the Rapid Response medic on the situation. He was both deeply cockney (a rarity round our way) and deeply polite, impressive given that I'd give odds of a pound to a pinch of shit that downer boy puked all over him at some point. As I left he slurred "Youurat zha poison finger!" at me; the patient, I mean.
Happy New Year, Tom, and watch that laughing gas.
* I should stop going there, it's the wrong crowd. On New Year's Eve, I ran into David Aaronovitch.
In North London, meanwhile, they're wanking on the streets. Seriously. So far this weekend, I was standing in a toilet in the Sir Richard Steeles* when I heard groaning. I cancelled the maniac. But it kept polling the urban maniac API; I noticed Mr Red Goretex thrapping like a lab-chimp at the other end of the urinal. I'd just been arguing about French education policy and enlarging the zone of sanity by pushing the works of Stafford Beer; I wasn't prepared for this. And with that, he was gone. By the time I next used the toilet, someone had already updated the graffiti; now that's what I call social media.
Then, outside my local Budgens, I almost tripped over some character passed out with his trousers round his ankles and, yes, an obvious erection. Daniel Davies will no doubt point out that this is an example of simple probability theory, like Richard Feynman's joke about the chances of seeing just that particular registration number. Bah, it felt like the world spirit to me. We are all wanking for coins now. I assessed the situation; breathing, obvious risks - cold or violence, funny eyes, weird behaviour (trousers), drooling (seriously - I thought it was a classic symptom of an opiate overdose, but actually it's stimulants that do that). I donned a tone of command and tried to communicate - frothing, drivel, funny eyes. Skin; coldsoaked. Not a good sign.
Obviously I took out my adrenaline injector and rammed it into his sternum. Yeah, right. They sent for the ambulance, and one was sent. Nobody got lucky, to the best of my knowledge. They were on the scene quick enough; I briefed the Rapid Response medic on the situation. He was both deeply cockney (a rarity round our way) and deeply polite, impressive given that I'd give odds of a pound to a pinch of shit that downer boy puked all over him at some point. As I left he slurred "Youurat zha poison finger!" at me; the patient, I mean.
Happy New Year, Tom, and watch that laughing gas.
* I should stop going there, it's the wrong crowd. On New Year's Eve, I ran into David Aaronovitch.
Friday, January 16, 2009
fly or die
It seems the UAE's Antonov-12 ban is real. The shortage of inbound flights in the Viktorfeed continues; out of 57 overnight movements, in itself an unusual low, there were 10 inbounds after cleaning up the odd false positive. Here is a list:
There were also two positioning flights by AVE/Phoenix Aviation 737s between Dubai and Sharjah. The significant thing here is that probably no An-12s were involved. South-Airlines has three, but it also has three Il-76, six An-24s and -26s, and an An-74. TXC has five aircraft, all Il-76s. Safi has one 767 and one 737. Sakavia has two Il-76, one An-26 and one An-12. Beibars and Russian Sky own 2 and 4 Il-76s respectively, and Ababeel has only one aircraft known to be active, an An-24RV.
So, the Antonov-12s have been run out of town. However, there is an interesting paradox here. What about our old friends from British Gulf International? They started all this back in the day, and they operate nothing but An-12s, six of them. At some point there was also an An-26 but this hasn't been seen for some years.
And somehow, they are still sending off flights. Doing a quick
That's 8.85 movements a day, which is achievable if half the aircraft made more than one trip a day - as long as they came back, of course. But they haven't come back; there has been no BGIA inward flight since Friday. So where are the aeroplanes coming from?
It's possible that BGIA has been sending other An-12 operators' aircraft out of the UAE using its call sign. But it's still quite a lot. I put together a chart to visualise the whole strange phenomenon...
As always, click on it to interrogate the data. Meanwhile, reader Ajay, who desperately needs his own blog, has a suggestion for where the scene might reconvene - Guinea, where the longstanding French-sponsored dictator died over Christmas, leading immediately to a military coup, and where there is a huge airfield with a 10,826 foot runway (that's longer than Heathrow), which the Soviet air force used in the 70s and 80s as a staging post and a base for Tu-95 maritime patrol planes.
It's an idea; but West Africa is not quite as crazy as it was ten years ago. There's the option of getting into the cocaine trade, but if Viktor Bout can get in trouble dealing with FARC, you have to wonder if the small fry will be up for it.
| South-Airlines | STH7002 | Erbil | Sharjah | scheduled 1600Z |
| Transaviaexport | TXC1722 | Kabul | Sharjah | scheduled 1500Z |
| Safi | SFW205 | Kabul | Sharjah | scheduled 1500Z |
| Sakavia | AZG1115 | Kandahar | Sharjah | arrived 0830Z |
| Beibars | BBS1810 | Kabul | Sharjah | arrived 0800Z |
| Russian Sky | ESL9456 | Kabul | Sharjah | arrived 0700Z |
| South-Airlines | STH7006 | Baghdad Intl. | Sharjah | 0300Z |
| Ababeel Avn | BBE200 | Riyadh | Sharjah | yesterday 2115Z |
There were also two positioning flights by AVE/Phoenix Aviation 737s between Dubai and Sharjah. The significant thing here is that probably no An-12s were involved. South-Airlines has three, but it also has three Il-76, six An-24s and -26s, and an An-74. TXC has five aircraft, all Il-76s. Safi has one 767 and one 737. Sakavia has two Il-76, one An-26 and one An-12. Beibars and Russian Sky own 2 and 4 Il-76s respectively, and Ababeel has only one aircraft known to be active, an An-24RV.
So, the Antonov-12s have been run out of town. However, there is an interesting paradox here. What about our old friends from British Gulf International? They started all this back in the day, and they operate nothing but An-12s, six of them. At some point there was also an An-26 but this hasn't been seen for some years.
And somehow, they are still sending off flights. Doing a quick
SELECT COUNT(notes), flightno, destination FROM flights WHERE flightno LIKE "%BGI%" AND notes > '1231518600' GROUP BY destination; on the database, I find there have been 68 BGIA movements since 1630 last Friday, of which 62 were outbound, and 6 inbound, all to Sharjah. This is weird. That's 8.85 movements a day, which is achievable if half the aircraft made more than one trip a day - as long as they came back, of course. But they haven't come back; there has been no BGIA inward flight since Friday. So where are the aeroplanes coming from?
It's possible that BGIA has been sending other An-12 operators' aircraft out of the UAE using its call sign. But it's still quite a lot. I put together a chart to visualise the whole strange phenomenon...
As always, click on it to interrogate the data. Meanwhile, reader Ajay, who desperately needs his own blog, has a suggestion for where the scene might reconvene - Guinea, where the longstanding French-sponsored dictator died over Christmas, leading immediately to a military coup, and where there is a huge airfield with a 10,826 foot runway (that's longer than Heathrow), which the Soviet air force used in the 70s and 80s as a staging post and a base for Tu-95 maritime patrol planes.
It's an idea; but West Africa is not quite as crazy as it was ten years ago. There's the option of getting into the cocaine trade, but if Viktor Bout can get in trouble dealing with FARC, you have to wonder if the small fry will be up for it.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
reasons to be cheerful, part 3
So Shriti Vadera thinks there are signs of improvement in the economy. The Tories have messed themselves, predictably. Hey, she rationalised the railways.
But there are good reasons to think this: there are indicators. Notably, the spread - the difference in interest rates - between blue-chip and risky commercial paper is narrowing sharply. Similarly, the interbank interest rate is falling. And the corporate lending market just had its best week in 12 months.
Now, the credit crunch kicked off in late August, 2007; the signs had been there for years, and if you wanted a short-term alert, HSBC's property write-off that spring was it. I recall going on holiday and wondering if Barclays would be there when I got back. There was a guy who came back from hols and resigned, if you recall. The commodity bubble cracked in the spring of 2008, and all the other indicators crashed a few months later, many of them retrospectively.
So, there are reasons for optimism; if you base your judgments on data, that is. If the lag times are at all comparable, maybe the Treasury view isn't entirely stupid. Which is a problem if you believe, like John Redwood, that all economic problems are caused by uppity workers getting above themselves (this is politely called "inflationary expectations"), and a good smack of firm unemployment will make us all harder.
But there are good reasons to think this: there are indicators. Notably, the spread - the difference in interest rates - between blue-chip and risky commercial paper is narrowing sharply. Similarly, the interbank interest rate is falling. And the corporate lending market just had its best week in 12 months.
Now, the credit crunch kicked off in late August, 2007; the signs had been there for years, and if you wanted a short-term alert, HSBC's property write-off that spring was it. I recall going on holiday and wondering if Barclays would be there when I got back. There was a guy who came back from hols and resigned, if you recall. The commodity bubble cracked in the spring of 2008, and all the other indicators crashed a few months later, many of them retrospectively.
So, there are reasons for optimism; if you base your judgments on data, that is. If the lag times are at all comparable, maybe the Treasury view isn't entirely stupid. Which is a problem if you believe, like John Redwood, that all economic problems are caused by uppity workers getting above themselves (this is politely called "inflationary expectations"), and a good smack of firm unemployment will make us all harder.
Stability
Bruce Sterling quotes a study into state failure which - counter-intuitively - puts Iceland and Canada at the top of the list of stable polities. It's worse than that, though; they reckon Hungary is superstable , and they're in the middle of an epic bank-currency-credit-mortgage crisis which has metastatised into a panic call to the IMF.
But perhaps it makes more sense than that. Despite Iceland's spectacular financial panic and sovereign bankruptcy, despite Canada's critical segmentation fault on the distributed queenship node, nothing very terrible has happened. The social fabric holds. Rival mortar teams do not exchange fire over Parliament Hill, the citizens of Reyjavik are not fighting with sharpened CDs over the last can of dog meat.
Perhaps that phrase, the social fabric, ought to be thought of differently. It implies threads straining over some sort of appalling national gut, bulging with the blows of irreconcilable interests, or rotting in the depths of a public crotch out of pure sin. What if it was the wind that tries the social fabric? When it's just on the point of flapping you know you're sailing to windward at optimal efficiency, thrashing forward under the gusts.
After all, what does the word stability mean? Stability isn't immobility or size or mass; it's an active, agile thing. A stable ship is one that rolls back onto an even keel after being knocked down; a stable aircraft will tend to trim correctly if you take your hands off the stick. A stable operating system will catch and handle errors rather than crash. A stable personality is someone who is capable of recovery from trauma, not someone who is incapable of emotion.
And usually, stability is actually in opposition to authority; try to design a ship that never rolls, and you usually have one that will be a floating hell in a real storm. Try to design such an OS, and you have... Everyone who thought that the best army would be the most obedient has lost since the Napoleonic wars.
Upshot; we need fewer Stability Pacts and more stable control loops.
But perhaps it makes more sense than that. Despite Iceland's spectacular financial panic and sovereign bankruptcy, despite Canada's critical segmentation fault on the distributed queenship node, nothing very terrible has happened. The social fabric holds. Rival mortar teams do not exchange fire over Parliament Hill, the citizens of Reyjavik are not fighting with sharpened CDs over the last can of dog meat.
Perhaps that phrase, the social fabric, ought to be thought of differently. It implies threads straining over some sort of appalling national gut, bulging with the blows of irreconcilable interests, or rotting in the depths of a public crotch out of pure sin. What if it was the wind that tries the social fabric? When it's just on the point of flapping you know you're sailing to windward at optimal efficiency, thrashing forward under the gusts.
After all, what does the word stability mean? Stability isn't immobility or size or mass; it's an active, agile thing. A stable ship is one that rolls back onto an even keel after being knocked down; a stable aircraft will tend to trim correctly if you take your hands off the stick. A stable operating system will catch and handle errors rather than crash. A stable personality is someone who is capable of recovery from trauma, not someone who is incapable of emotion.
And usually, stability is actually in opposition to authority; try to design a ship that never rolls, and you usually have one that will be a floating hell in a real storm. Try to design such an OS, and you have... Everyone who thought that the best army would be the most obedient has lost since the Napoleonic wars.
Upshot; we need fewer Stability Pacts and more stable control loops.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
when you feel the heat you've got to move your fleet (2)
I'm getting reports that the UAE authorities have revoked permission to fly for all Antonov-12s, and the substantial fleet based on Dubai and Sharjah has been given notice to quit last night. Apparently the proximate cause was a spate of embarrassing and perilous runway excursions, as well as the recent loss of an Antonov-12 with BGIA in Iraq, working for DHL.
Of course I'm monitoring all movements through the Viktorfeed. So far, I've noticed a spike of activity overnight followed by a very quiet day; which is roughly what you'd expect if all the Antonovs just left, like the dolphins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Last night saw over 150 movements, and tellingly they were almost all outward bound. But so far I've not detected any pattern in their destinations; they seem to have flown their usual routes and not returned, so the total fleet has scattered across South-Western Asia.
If this is so, a lot will be in Afghanistan (Kabul, Bagram, Herat and Kandahar) and Djibouti tonight, with a few in Kurdistan. This is going to be a serious problem for quite a few people, notably the coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much passenger activity is now carried in old 737s by AVE/Phoenix Aviation and KAMAir, but with the exception of the Ilyushin 76s, every significant airfield in Afghanistan gets several An-12 runs a day.
It's going to be interesting to see where they end up, especially the BGIA Boyz, what with being an all-Antonov 12 operation and all. Back to Ostend? Surely not. West Africa gets kinda slow these days, and it's a long slow haul to Colombia for an An-12. Moldova cleaned up its act. Perhaps Beirut, or somewhere in the Caucasus - which would be off the trade routes a bit. Or maybe they'll set up a completely new operation somewhere with a long runway and no government, a pirate state?
Remind me to have a look at the airfields of Somalia. However, a search of the logs shows something I hadn't spotted; "Star Air Aviation" has sent off a whole string of flights from Dubai since Thursday, some eleven, all of them to Karachi. And none have come back. Needless to say, the nearest operator in the UAE to that name doesn't officially have any Antonovs and has a radically different ICAO call sign...
But if anyone's wondering where all the old Russian crates came from, get in touch. You can consider this an Operation Firedump alert.
Of course I'm monitoring all movements through the Viktorfeed. So far, I've noticed a spike of activity overnight followed by a very quiet day; which is roughly what you'd expect if all the Antonovs just left, like the dolphins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Last night saw over 150 movements, and tellingly they were almost all outward bound. But so far I've not detected any pattern in their destinations; they seem to have flown their usual routes and not returned, so the total fleet has scattered across South-Western Asia.
If this is so, a lot will be in Afghanistan (Kabul, Bagram, Herat and Kandahar) and Djibouti tonight, with a few in Kurdistan. This is going to be a serious problem for quite a few people, notably the coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much passenger activity is now carried in old 737s by AVE/Phoenix Aviation and KAMAir, but with the exception of the Ilyushin 76s, every significant airfield in Afghanistan gets several An-12 runs a day.
It's going to be interesting to see where they end up, especially the BGIA Boyz, what with being an all-Antonov 12 operation and all. Back to Ostend? Surely not. West Africa gets kinda slow these days, and it's a long slow haul to Colombia for an An-12. Moldova cleaned up its act. Perhaps Beirut, or somewhere in the Caucasus - which would be off the trade routes a bit. Or maybe they'll set up a completely new operation somewhere with a long runway and no government, a pirate state?
Remind me to have a look at the airfields of Somalia. However, a search of the logs shows something I hadn't spotted; "Star Air Aviation" has sent off a whole string of flights from Dubai since Thursday, some eleven, all of them to Karachi. And none have come back. Needless to say, the nearest operator in the UAE to that name doesn't officially have any Antonovs and has a radically different ICAO call sign...
But if anyone's wondering where all the old Russian crates came from, get in touch. You can consider this an Operation Firedump alert.
Monday, January 12, 2009
blog awards, still dire
Blog awards, eh? What a gaggle of crap that is. It's not just the staid and ossified elite who are always in these things (haven't we had enough chances to vote for BoingBoing or Andrew "Overrated" Sullivan?), it's the volume of egregious turdmerchants who still get in. 17,000 votes for Hot Air? I'm expecting Vint Cerf to say it was all a terrible mistake, and this Internet lark has got to stop. There's probably something clever to say about how if your blog attracts the fat end of the social-authoritarianism distribution you're bound to do well. If you think I'm taking the piss about a staid and ossified elite, by the way, look at the "Best Liberal Blog" nominees; I couldn't say sight unseen which year that list came from. 2004? 2008? 2010? "The Confluence" is a clue, but then there's always one you never read.
So I'm not going to offer endorsements, but what I will do is call on the readership to do what I usually do, which is to vote for anyone who looks like beating the most egregious arse in the race. This policy stood Britain in good stead for the last 500 or so years so there must be something to be said for it. As far as "Best Conservative Blog" goes, well, I suppose voting for Victor Davis Hanson can be considered an existential acte gratuit, and anyway the other nominees achieve the rare and impressive feat of actually pushing him into the role of the lesser evil. After all, at least VDH doesn't post videos of people actually killing an Arab.
Whilst we're playing philosophy, however, arguably you're required by the greatest good of the greatest number *and* the categorical imperative, and the fact I tell you to, to go and vote for Army of Dude for Best Military Blog. And you could try to stop a bunch of atmospheric physics dodgers winning the Science category. The Fistful is in the Business category, btw. And, of course, there's this. Don't let it happen.
So I'm not going to offer endorsements, but what I will do is call on the readership to do what I usually do, which is to vote for anyone who looks like beating the most egregious arse in the race. This policy stood Britain in good stead for the last 500 or so years so there must be something to be said for it. As far as "Best Conservative Blog" goes, well, I suppose voting for Victor Davis Hanson can be considered an existential acte gratuit, and anyway the other nominees achieve the rare and impressive feat of actually pushing him into the role of the lesser evil. After all, at least VDH doesn't post videos of people actually killing an Arab.
Whilst we're playing philosophy, however, arguably you're required by the greatest good of the greatest number *and* the categorical imperative, and the fact I tell you to, to go and vote for Army of Dude for Best Military Blog. And you could try to stop a bunch of atmospheric physics dodgers winning the Science category. The Fistful is in the Business category, btw. And, of course, there's this. Don't let it happen.
no-one ever gets the truth from plastic man
Reduced blog; I've been working on a version of FixMyStreet for Symbian S60 devices.
If you want snark, how about this? I always thought that the BMW not-minis were telling in themselves. Objects are an ideology made manifest.
The original Mini was a minimal car, one designed to be even cheaper than the ones sold to the workers in the factories that made them. Beyond Ford. As a side effect, it was also light, beautiful, and efficient in space and energy.
The "New Mini" is absurdly large, by comparison - it's not that much smaller than a 3-door Land Rover Freelander, which is reasonably sensible despite being aesthetically an SUV. The Freelander was, after all, reasonably sized, space planned to carry a load, engineered to work off-road, and driven by a highly efficient turbo-diesel engine. Perhaps not coincidentally, it wasn't pretty. The BMW Mini, however, is a mass of gratuitous placky bits. Over the last ten years, we have lived in the era of gratuitous auto design; I grew up with cars that were advertised on their drag coefficient and their fuel consumption, but not long after I was legally allowed to drive, there was this weird rococo decadence of trucks without ground clearance.
At the same time there was a binge on property, which swelled outwards where there was land enough, and inwards in crappy construction and natural gas-guzzling, and which swelled even more in price where the land wasn't available. Foxtons' fake-neat cars were part of the performance of the property binge; speculating in property was meant to feel subversive and young. You doubt? Look at the arse-awful fake graffiti sprayed on them. Fake art on fake coachwork on a fake economy for fake people.
What would fit? Perhaps, if they go down, there may be a supply of "New Minis" going cheap. Maybe I should apply for an Arts Council grant to stack up 20 or so of them in Trafalgar Square and topple them, using a Chinese-made bulldozer. We could beat them with our shoes and torch them with gallons of bioethanol, or maybe homebrew high-test peroxide.
If you want snark, how about this? I always thought that the BMW not-minis were telling in themselves. Objects are an ideology made manifest.
The original Mini was a minimal car, one designed to be even cheaper than the ones sold to the workers in the factories that made them. Beyond Ford. As a side effect, it was also light, beautiful, and efficient in space and energy.
The "New Mini" is absurdly large, by comparison - it's not that much smaller than a 3-door Land Rover Freelander, which is reasonably sensible despite being aesthetically an SUV. The Freelander was, after all, reasonably sized, space planned to carry a load, engineered to work off-road, and driven by a highly efficient turbo-diesel engine. Perhaps not coincidentally, it wasn't pretty. The BMW Mini, however, is a mass of gratuitous placky bits. Over the last ten years, we have lived in the era of gratuitous auto design; I grew up with cars that were advertised on their drag coefficient and their fuel consumption, but not long after I was legally allowed to drive, there was this weird rococo decadence of trucks without ground clearance.
At the same time there was a binge on property, which swelled outwards where there was land enough, and inwards in crappy construction and natural gas-guzzling, and which swelled even more in price where the land wasn't available. Foxtons' fake-neat cars were part of the performance of the property binge; speculating in property was meant to feel subversive and young. You doubt? Look at the arse-awful fake graffiti sprayed on them. Fake art on fake coachwork on a fake economy for fake people.
What would fit? Perhaps, if they go down, there may be a supply of "New Minis" going cheap. Maybe I should apply for an Arts Council grant to stack up 20 or so of them in Trafalgar Square and topple them, using a Chinese-made bulldozer. We could beat them with our shoes and torch them with gallons of bioethanol, or maybe homebrew high-test peroxide.
the time has come to shoot you down
OK, the last post wasn't totally serious.
But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He's been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil service-run mixed cabinet committee that super-sets the outsiders, some cabinet members, and some officials.
And the Conservative line is becoming increasingly clear. They believe the rate of interest is too low; this means they want to put it up. So much for independent central banking, the guarantor of sound money. The justification is that they want to encourage saving. They also want to cut or hold public spending. And they vaguely suggest that they want to fix the exchange rate, or at least intervene upwards in it.
These are all deflationary and demand-reducing steps. If you're a monetarist, they want to increase the price of money by reducing its supply; if you're a pragmatist, they want to push up sterling and keep imports cheap, which implies pressing down the level of prices generally; if you're a Keynesian, they want to pull money out of the circular flow into a storage tank, whether private or public. If you're a 1980s New Classicist, they want to make cash scarce compared to goods, so that the price of labour eventually falls far enough so that the price of goods and services clears the market.
Bing! That's it. They are still obsessed by the idea of hammering down wages, as they were in 1985, and 1995, until we get to...what? Where can it go, in a world that includes Bangladesh, and overheads? For them, that is the solution. Strangely, no-one ever suggests that the price of enterpreneurship ought to fall; haven't we had enough bad ideas for a while? The only answer is what it was back then; we've got to make good stuff, or good services, and the best way to do this is not by bidding up the price of houses in the suburbs of Middlesbrough.
Yes, there's the idea of guaranteeing loans to small businesses. But here's a question for you. Not so long ago, it appeared that the Government guarantee of wholesale interbank lending would result in a monster liability on the public balance sheet - but only if the Government charged a fee for this service. Weirdly, if the Government did it for free, the liability vanished out of the moneysphere. Either way, certain pol.....no. Fuck him. George Osborne used the liability to back his own version of the numbers.
Now, George wants to guarantee £50bn worth of loans to small businesses, and charge a fee; but for him, the wholesale guarantee is "Labour bankrupting the country again". I know I'm a sad, twisted bastard, but I still remember when lying in the House of Commons was a resigning matter. Perhaps I should have learned something when Jack Straw and Hoon back in 2003-2004....no. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, said Havel.
Maintain your rage, said Gough Whitlam. I happen to know that some really serious donors to the Tories think Osborne ought to be sacked, moved to Communities and Local Government, /dev/null, Siberia or wherever. Most of all, they want him nixed. Step away from the controls.
But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He's been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil service-run mixed cabinet committee that super-sets the outsiders, some cabinet members, and some officials.
And the Conservative line is becoming increasingly clear. They believe the rate of interest is too low; this means they want to put it up. So much for independent central banking, the guarantor of sound money. The justification is that they want to encourage saving. They also want to cut or hold public spending. And they vaguely suggest that they want to fix the exchange rate, or at least intervene upwards in it.
These are all deflationary and demand-reducing steps. If you're a monetarist, they want to increase the price of money by reducing its supply; if you're a pragmatist, they want to push up sterling and keep imports cheap, which implies pressing down the level of prices generally; if you're a Keynesian, they want to pull money out of the circular flow into a storage tank, whether private or public. If you're a 1980s New Classicist, they want to make cash scarce compared to goods, so that the price of labour eventually falls far enough so that the price of goods and services clears the market.
Bing! That's it. They are still obsessed by the idea of hammering down wages, as they were in 1985, and 1995, until we get to...what? Where can it go, in a world that includes Bangladesh, and overheads? For them, that is the solution. Strangely, no-one ever suggests that the price of enterpreneurship ought to fall; haven't we had enough bad ideas for a while? The only answer is what it was back then; we've got to make good stuff, or good services, and the best way to do this is not by bidding up the price of houses in the suburbs of Middlesbrough.
Yes, there's the idea of guaranteeing loans to small businesses. But here's a question for you. Not so long ago, it appeared that the Government guarantee of wholesale interbank lending would result in a monster liability on the public balance sheet - but only if the Government charged a fee for this service. Weirdly, if the Government did it for free, the liability vanished out of the moneysphere. Either way, certain pol.....no. Fuck him. George Osborne used the liability to back his own version of the numbers.
Now, George wants to guarantee £50bn worth of loans to small businesses, and charge a fee; but for him, the wholesale guarantee is "Labour bankrupting the country again". I know I'm a sad, twisted bastard, but I still remember when lying in the House of Commons was a resigning matter. Perhaps I should have learned something when Jack Straw and Hoon back in 2003-2004....no. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, said Havel.
Maintain your rage, said Gough Whitlam. I happen to know that some really serious donors to the Tories think Osborne ought to be sacked, moved to Communities and Local Government, /dev/null, Siberia or wherever. Most of all, they want him nixed. Step away from the controls.
The Perfect Conservative
The perfect Tory would be:
There are some Conservatives who are not included in this joke. They are left as an exercise for the reader.
- As competent as George Osborne
- As Eurosceptic as Kenneth Clarke
- As relevant as Norman Tebbit
- As normal as John Redwood
- As experienced as David Cameron
- As intellectually brilliant as Francis Maude
- As close to export industries as Stuart Wheeler
- As credible with the City as George Osborne
- As committed to public service as William Hague
- Or Alan Duncan, come to think of it
- As much a countryman as Michael Portillo
- As good a big-city mayor as Boris Johnson
- Or Eric Pickles, come to think of it
- As libertarian as Michael Howard
- As sound on foreign affairs as Bernard Jenkin
- As anti-racist as Patrick Mercer
- As resistant to state fear-mongering as Patrick Mercer
- As resistant to state fear-mongering as Andrew Pelling
- As tough on the real-estate lobby as Philip Hammond
- As useful as Philip Hammond
- As noteworthy as Chris Grayling
- Or Caroline Spelman
- Or that other one - you know
- Yeah, Ms Thingy
- Or Mr Who? No idea, me
- I know. As accountable as Simon Milton
- As honest as Anthony Browne
- And as handsome as William Hague!
There are some Conservatives who are not included in this joke. They are left as an exercise for the reader.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation
So, we looked into the fake phone call to Mr 10%'s office. We even did a little HOWTO. If you recall, we concluded that you needed a bulk SIP carrier sufficiently unscrupulous or clue-light that they didn't verify the CLI string you passed them, but who hadn't yet offended at least one major telco in good standing. That, and a copy of Asterisk.
Here's something really interesting. The Indian government has just issued a dossier. (Yeah, one of them.) What purports to be a copy is here. In it, it is claimed that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai received calls from a telephone number assigned by a small US SIP provider, which among other things offers a virtual-number service. This essentially forwards calls to that number to any user-defined number, SIP id, or what have you.
According to the Indian side, the person who bought the number stated that they were in India, but the bill was paid in advance with a wire transfer originating in Pakistan. The company in question, interestingly enough, offers numbers in Pakistan; but we know that the call to the Pakistani presidency identified as coming from a number in India. There is more information in this article; apparently they also registered inbound numbers (DIDs) in Austria at the same time.
This looks a lot like a reasonable set up to obfuscate the other parties to the calls, whoever they were. It's also interesting to see that the terrorists made at least one serious mistake; they left a satellite phone on the trawler they used to launch the attack. This is likely to be an important source of information that somebody really should have thrown in the sea.
Here's something really interesting. The Indian government has just issued a dossier. (Yeah, one of them.) What purports to be a copy is here. In it, it is claimed that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai received calls from a telephone number assigned by a small US SIP provider, which among other things offers a virtual-number service. This essentially forwards calls to that number to any user-defined number, SIP id, or what have you.
According to the Indian side, the person who bought the number stated that they were in India, but the bill was paid in advance with a wire transfer originating in Pakistan. The company in question, interestingly enough, offers numbers in Pakistan; but we know that the call to the Pakistani presidency identified as coming from a number in India. There is more information in this article; apparently they also registered inbound numbers (DIDs) in Austria at the same time.
This looks a lot like a reasonable set up to obfuscate the other parties to the calls, whoever they were. It's also interesting to see that the terrorists made at least one serious mistake; they left a satellite phone on the trawler they used to launch the attack. This is likely to be an important source of information that somebody really should have thrown in the sea.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
I don't need you, I can't buy you, I can't hurt you...
Here's an interesting scientific paper about Palestinians and Israeli settlers. The experiments asked each group questions intended to judge how willing they were to compromise. Then, they asked the questions again, but threw in a side-offer, for example of economic aid or third-power security guarantees.
Interestingly, all the groups split into two identifiable types; some weren't happy to compromise but thought they could do so, some rejected any compromise outright. The really significant result, however, is that the no-compromise group responded very badly to the offer of a side payment - it just made them angrier and more intransigent. Only a dramatic sacrifice of symbols by the other side would induce them to change - exactly, as it happens, the sort of thing the compromise group wouldn't think of doing for fear of what the non-compromisers would say.
I wonder if it would be possible to re-analyse the results using Robert Altemeyer's tests of social authoritarianism and dominance? It feels intuitively right; more formally, an intense concern with symbols and symbolic norms would seem to be very similar with the obsession with the preservation of hierarchical norms Altemeyer identified among his authoritarian subjects.
It also fits with a lot of the language of extreme conservatism through history; the idea of the corrupting nature of compromise and of democracy, especially of parliaments, and its opposite, the cult of the decision embodied in the leader, has been around since the counter-enlightenment.
This does, of course, point out a deep ambiguity - we admire principle but also reasonableness, which must mean the ability to ignore it.
This does, of course, point out a deep ambiguity - we admire principle but also reasonableness, which must mean the ability to ignore it.
Further question; remember Chris Lightfoot's analysis of the Political Survey results? Chris selected the statements from a survey which maximised the variance in the population's answers to them and used these to summarise the results on two axes. This is one of the axes:
The people surveyed broke by vote into two well-specified groups on this axis; one encompassed the Labour, Liberal, Welsh and Scottish Nationalist, RESPECT, and Green voters, the other the Conservatives, BNPers, 'kippers and Veritas voters (if any measure of them can be considered statistically significant). Now, I would suggest that for a lot of the latter group, the last but one question isn't really a stereotype-rationalist one about negotiating costs and risks but an identitarian one about not being a *refined shudder* greenie, which means that only the tax one can be considered as a question of compromise.
Interestingly, all the groups split into two identifiable types; some weren't happy to compromise but thought they could do so, some rejected any compromise outright. The really significant result, however, is that the no-compromise group responded very badly to the offer of a side payment - it just made them angrier and more intransigent. Only a dramatic sacrifice of symbols by the other side would induce them to change - exactly, as it happens, the sort of thing the compromise group wouldn't think of doing for fear of what the non-compromisers would say.
I wonder if it would be possible to re-analyse the results using Robert Altemeyer's tests of social authoritarianism and dominance? It feels intuitively right; more formally, an intense concern with symbols and symbolic norms would seem to be very similar with the obsession with the preservation of hierarchical norms Altemeyer identified among his authoritarian subjects.
It also fits with a lot of the language of extreme conservatism through history; the idea of the corrupting nature of compromise and of democracy, especially of parliaments, and its opposite, the cult of the decision embodied in the leader, has been around since the counter-enlightenment.
This does, of course, point out a deep ambiguity - we admire principle but also reasonableness, which must mean the ability to ignore it.
This does, of course, point out a deep ambiguity - we admire principle but also reasonableness, which must mean the ability to ignore it.
Further question; remember Chris Lightfoot's analysis of the Political Survey results? Chris selected the statements from a survey which maximised the variance in the population's answers to them and used these to summarise the results on two axes. This is one of the axes:
- Sense Statement
- agree Prisons are too soft on criminals
- agree The UK should withdraw from the European Union
- disagree Most immigrants are beneficial to the UK
- agree Some crimes are so serious that the only proper punishment is the death penalty
- disagree It's more important to rehabilitate criminals than to punish them
- disagree The government should give more aid to poor countries
agree National law should always override international agreements and European directives- agree Working people pay too much tax
- disagree The cost of living in the UK should be allowed to rise in order to fight global warming
- agree The government is mostly interested in helping itself, not ordinary people
The people surveyed broke by vote into two well-specified groups on this axis; one encompassed the Labour, Liberal, Welsh and Scottish Nationalist, RESPECT, and Green voters, the other the Conservatives, BNPers, 'kippers and Veritas voters (if any measure of them can be considered statistically significant). Now, I would suggest that for a lot of the latter group, the last but one question isn't really a stereotype-rationalist one about negotiating costs and risks but an identitarian one about not being a *refined shudder* greenie, which means that only the tax one can be considered as a question of compromise.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
predictions are difficult, except about Martin Kettle
The Grauniad asked 21 of its opinion writers to make predictions for 2009. As a service, and to force Daniel Davies' hand into starting his planned Predictions-L mailing list, I've shorterised each one and reflected briefly on it. The full texts are here.
1) Jackie Ashley thinks the Lib Dems may be powerbrokers in a hung parliament.
Comment: not so much a prediction as a statement that the polls currently look like that. But at least it's based on data.
2) Michael Tomasky thinks e-books will be a major hit, but nobody wants to read 80,000 words cos of wikipedia and google an stuff.
Comment: This is one of those issues that kills forecasters. The dawn of e-books has been repeatedly predicted and repredicted without happening. Tomasky makes the good point that the Amazon Kindle is selling well...but then his New Yorker/smartass kulturpessimismus conwis kicks in and he ends up predicting that e-books will sell hugely but nobody will buy them. Quack, quack, oops.
3) Gary Younge thinks industrial relations in the US will be troubled as the recession takes hold.
Comment: Fair enough.
4) Oh Jesus, here we go. Madeleine Bunting thinks the recession will teach us all a lesson about the Virtues of Thrift.
Comment: Mr Keynes, call your office. More specifically, this is so woolly that it's impossible to think of criteria that would let us determine the success or failure of the prediction. In fact, she explictly backs out of it by suggesting there will be a "confusion of values". Yellow.
5) Peter Preston thinks we will see better satire on TV, and a UK network will recruit John Oliver from the Daily Show.
Comment: Is/Ought confusion - not clear whether Preston thinks this *will* happen or whether he's hoping to encourage it. Hard to define "better", but if better satire on TV does happen there will probably be a degree of consensus that it has happened.
6) George Monbiot thinks some mate of his will have a big success with this fillum they made.
Comment: Well, it'll be either a hit or a turkey. Nobody knows anything (and the kid stays in the picture). It's a prediction, even if the film about climate change is characterised by "a Nigerian fisherwoman who has to wash her catch with Omo"; climate change does not cause oil spills, nor vice versa. Not in Nigeria, at least. I know about that pipeline in Alaska.
7) Polly Toynbee thinks environmental issues will lose salience unless there's a major disaster.
Comment: There's a bit of hedge in how you define "the agenda" here, but it's fair enough. And she's based it on data. Tim Worstall probably already has accused her of hoping for the flooding of New York City, and is now probably guiltily masturbating over her byline photo. And that's a prediction!
8) Jonathan Freedland thinks there could be a hung parliament, and a Lib-Lab coalition, or maybe a Lib-Con coalition. Or it might not happen.
Comment: Coward - three mutually exclusive predictions in one.
9) Simon Jenkins thinks genetic and embryological research will conquer disease. Seriously.
Comment: I am not joking. Perhaps a drop too much of the Old Tory's Arse 76-year old malt this Christmas. But we could treat this as a forecast that there will be at least one major medical achievement in this line in 2009, and that way it is fair enough.
10) John Harris thinks there will or should be a national debate that's something to do with sub-post offices.
Comment: Jesus wept, what a bunch of wank. I remember when he was good; he was especially good mocking the Big Conversation, strange to relate. This sounds like his balls just dropped off. Absolutely no testable claims. FAIL.
11) Jonathan Steele thinks Russian influence will increase in Georgia and the Ukraine. And there will probably be a change of government in Thailand, but it won't matter.
Comment: I was tempted to say Jonathan Steele thinks...whatever the Russians tell him to. Note that back in 2004 he thought the Ukrainian revolution was an evil fascist plot because Yulia Timoshenko made a pile in the gas business. Now she's "a figure to watch in 2009, a controversial and vastly rich entrepreneur who takes a more respectful line towards Moscow". Prediction: Steele will continue to follow the Party line and will continue to be invited on all-expenses trips to Moscow (indispensable pdf). And he's hedging about Thailand like Capability Brown with a Black & Decker and a liberal dose of amphetamine sulphate. However, at least he made a testable prediction.
12) Jenni Russell thinks there may be something wrong with race relations in South Africa.
Comment: No shit, Sherlock.
13) Hugh Muir thinks various European politicians will do something or maybe not, and some UKIP MEPs may be re-elected. Or then again they may not. Who knows?
Comment: Hugh Muir may make a testable prediction he could be held responsible for. Or perhaps he won't.
14) Tim Garton Ash thinks there will be a youth protest wave, driven by graduate unemployment.
Comment: A testable, nonobvious prediction based on a quantitative model. Score one for Agent Romeo.
15) Julian Glover thinks "the age of depoliticised power will come to an end".
Comment: I think he means things like independent central banks. It's not at all clear though. Still, chalk it up; if the ECB gives up monetarism by December, he's right.
16) Libby Brooks thinks "the gardener who knows how to grow their own carrots" will be valued more than a hedge fund manager, and the success of Mamma Mia! is an example of a profound change in our views of status.
Comment: I think there is more than a little contradiction here, and not just because nobody ever liked hedgies anyway. Again, vague puffology about abstract nouns.
17) Seamus Milne thinks the "the neoliberal model is collapsing around our ears, but what is going to replace it is still up for grabs".
Comment: Not a prediction, and unfalsifiable. If you read on, it turns out the old tankie really means "maybe this crisis is the one! world revolution is here!" but he's wily enough to realise everyone will laugh if he says that.
18) Mark Lawson thinks William Golding's books will come back into fashion.
Comment: God, I hope not. But at least it's a prediction.
19) Scraping the barrel. Zoe Williams thinks that the idea of prime-time TV is obsolete, and that TV will be dominated by crowd-pleasing repeats.
Comment: Slightly contradictory. And whingeing about repeats? Radical.
20) Martin Kettle, for it is he, thinks the extreme Right in Europe will win more seats at the European Parliamentary elections. He doesn't think this means a third world war is imminent, but he does not have "high confidence" of this.
Comment: Kettle, Kettle. The boy's so prone, Ron. Trust him to make a fool of himself. I would think anything less than very high confidence that the radical right will not start a world war from Europe would be front-page news, but he actually buries this behind the shattering suggestion that the BNP might pick up an MEP or two.
Of course, that's actually quite unlikely because the method of election favours parties with a small but widespread support base like the Greens, rather than ones with sporadic, concentrated support like the BNP.
21) Marina Hyde thinks the Russian state will continue to take control over more of the Russian economy, but will re-privatise in the future, only to re-expropriate a new set of temporary oligarchs when the next crisis arrives. And the Government will fail to get newly state-owned bank branches to open on Saturday mornings.
Comment: That's actually a very good point. Two very good points, in fact. We have a winner!
1) Jackie Ashley thinks the Lib Dems may be powerbrokers in a hung parliament.
Comment: not so much a prediction as a statement that the polls currently look like that. But at least it's based on data.
2) Michael Tomasky thinks e-books will be a major hit, but nobody wants to read 80,000 words cos of wikipedia and google an stuff.
Comment: This is one of those issues that kills forecasters. The dawn of e-books has been repeatedly predicted and repredicted without happening. Tomasky makes the good point that the Amazon Kindle is selling well...but then his New Yorker/smartass kulturpessimismus conwis kicks in and he ends up predicting that e-books will sell hugely but nobody will buy them. Quack, quack, oops.
3) Gary Younge thinks industrial relations in the US will be troubled as the recession takes hold.
Comment: Fair enough.
4) Oh Jesus, here we go. Madeleine Bunting thinks the recession will teach us all a lesson about the Virtues of Thrift.
Comment: Mr Keynes, call your office. More specifically, this is so woolly that it's impossible to think of criteria that would let us determine the success or failure of the prediction. In fact, she explictly backs out of it by suggesting there will be a "confusion of values". Yellow.
5) Peter Preston thinks we will see better satire on TV, and a UK network will recruit John Oliver from the Daily Show.
Comment: Is/Ought confusion - not clear whether Preston thinks this *will* happen or whether he's hoping to encourage it. Hard to define "better", but if better satire on TV does happen there will probably be a degree of consensus that it has happened.
6) George Monbiot thinks some mate of his will have a big success with this fillum they made.
Comment: Well, it'll be either a hit or a turkey. Nobody knows anything (and the kid stays in the picture). It's a prediction, even if the film about climate change is characterised by "a Nigerian fisherwoman who has to wash her catch with Omo"; climate change does not cause oil spills, nor vice versa. Not in Nigeria, at least. I know about that pipeline in Alaska.
7) Polly Toynbee thinks environmental issues will lose salience unless there's a major disaster.
Comment: There's a bit of hedge in how you define "the agenda" here, but it's fair enough. And she's based it on data. Tim Worstall probably already has accused her of hoping for the flooding of New York City, and is now probably guiltily masturbating over her byline photo. And that's a prediction!
8) Jonathan Freedland thinks there could be a hung parliament, and a Lib-Lab coalition, or maybe a Lib-Con coalition. Or it might not happen.
Comment: Coward - three mutually exclusive predictions in one.
9) Simon Jenkins thinks genetic and embryological research will conquer disease. Seriously.
Comment: I am not joking. Perhaps a drop too much of the Old Tory's Arse 76-year old malt this Christmas. But we could treat this as a forecast that there will be at least one major medical achievement in this line in 2009, and that way it is fair enough.
10) John Harris thinks there will or should be a national debate that's something to do with sub-post offices.
Comment: Jesus wept, what a bunch of wank. I remember when he was good; he was especially good mocking the Big Conversation, strange to relate. This sounds like his balls just dropped off. Absolutely no testable claims. FAIL.
11) Jonathan Steele thinks Russian influence will increase in Georgia and the Ukraine. And there will probably be a change of government in Thailand, but it won't matter.
Comment: I was tempted to say Jonathan Steele thinks...whatever the Russians tell him to. Note that back in 2004 he thought the Ukrainian revolution was an evil fascist plot because Yulia Timoshenko made a pile in the gas business. Now she's "a figure to watch in 2009, a controversial and vastly rich entrepreneur who takes a more respectful line towards Moscow". Prediction: Steele will continue to follow the Party line and will continue to be invited on all-expenses trips to Moscow (indispensable pdf). And he's hedging about Thailand like Capability Brown with a Black & Decker and a liberal dose of amphetamine sulphate. However, at least he made a testable prediction.
12) Jenni Russell thinks there may be something wrong with race relations in South Africa.
Comment: No shit, Sherlock.
13) Hugh Muir thinks various European politicians will do something or maybe not, and some UKIP MEPs may be re-elected. Or then again they may not. Who knows?
Comment: Hugh Muir may make a testable prediction he could be held responsible for. Or perhaps he won't.
14) Tim Garton Ash thinks there will be a youth protest wave, driven by graduate unemployment.
Comment: A testable, nonobvious prediction based on a quantitative model. Score one for Agent Romeo.
15) Julian Glover thinks "the age of depoliticised power will come to an end".
Comment: I think he means things like independent central banks. It's not at all clear though. Still, chalk it up; if the ECB gives up monetarism by December, he's right.
16) Libby Brooks thinks "the gardener who knows how to grow their own carrots" will be valued more than a hedge fund manager, and the success of Mamma Mia! is an example of a profound change in our views of status.
Comment: I think there is more than a little contradiction here, and not just because nobody ever liked hedgies anyway. Again, vague puffology about abstract nouns.
17) Seamus Milne thinks the "the neoliberal model is collapsing around our ears, but what is going to replace it is still up for grabs".
Comment: Not a prediction, and unfalsifiable. If you read on, it turns out the old tankie really means "maybe this crisis is the one! world revolution is here!" but he's wily enough to realise everyone will laugh if he says that.
18) Mark Lawson thinks William Golding's books will come back into fashion.
Comment: God, I hope not. But at least it's a prediction.
19) Scraping the barrel. Zoe Williams thinks that the idea of prime-time TV is obsolete, and that TV will be dominated by crowd-pleasing repeats.
Comment: Slightly contradictory. And whingeing about repeats? Radical.
20) Martin Kettle, for it is he, thinks the extreme Right in Europe will win more seats at the European Parliamentary elections. He doesn't think this means a third world war is imminent, but he does not have "high confidence" of this.
Comment: Kettle, Kettle. The boy's so prone, Ron. Trust him to make a fool of himself. I would think anything less than very high confidence that the radical right will not start a world war from Europe would be front-page news, but he actually buries this behind the shattering suggestion that the BNP might pick up an MEP or two.
Of course, that's actually quite unlikely because the method of election favours parties with a small but widespread support base like the Greens, rather than ones with sporadic, concentrated support like the BNP.
21) Marina Hyde thinks the Russian state will continue to take control over more of the Russian economy, but will re-privatise in the future, only to re-expropriate a new set of temporary oligarchs when the next crisis arrives. And the Government will fail to get newly state-owned bank branches to open on Saturday mornings.
Comment: That's actually a very good point. Two very good points, in fact. We have a winner!
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Nokia Software Distribution FAIL
OK, so I was feeling sufficiently foolish to try and install the all-new version of Python for Symbian S60 phones. Not least because of rumours that things like the Location API (i.e. "all the interesting or useful stuff") have been liberated from the finger-waggy signing process...
Unfortunately, Nokia has shipped it without completing the same finger-waggy signing process it imposes on everyone else, so it fails on install with "Certificate error - contact the application supplier". Nokia FAIL. So I have to explicitly disable the fancy security system in order to install software supplied by the system's manufacturer. Not just that, but software which is open-source, so I can read the damn thing myself. Why can't they get it right already? GAH.
So, turn off the certificate check, and it installs. Great. Time for a quick hello world from the interactive interpreter. But no..."Python runtime missing!" We've just installed the sodding thing.
So no, until someone gets a grip I won't be the one to do the S60 version of FixMyStreet:-)
Unfortunately, Nokia has shipped it without completing the same finger-waggy signing process it imposes on everyone else, so it fails on install with "Certificate error - contact the application supplier". Nokia FAIL. So I have to explicitly disable the fancy security system in order to install software supplied by the system's manufacturer. Not just that, but software which is open-source, so I can read the damn thing myself. Why can't they get it right already? GAH.
So, turn off the certificate check, and it installs. Great. Time for a quick hello world from the interactive interpreter. But no..."Python runtime missing!" We've just installed the sodding thing.
So no, until someone gets a grip I won't be the one to do the S60 version of FixMyStreet:-)
The New St Pancras, 12 Months On
So I reviewed the rebuilt St Pancras Station about this time last year. So, in the best Stewart Brand tradition, let's revisit it; this time of year tends to give you opportunities to revisit major railway stations.
The first good news; the square footage of blue plywood and Tyvek has fallen, and is now close to zero. However, blue plywood extermination is still not quite complete - there is a little patch of the stuff behind Betjeman's Bar on the upper deck. Perhaps they should keep it, as a shrine to the temporary, flexible and living nature of all buildings.
Further, the station is now functioning without needing to secrete too much temporary signage; overall, the signage has improved, although there was no way anyone was going to read the waist-high portable sign holding an amended timetable for the Thameslink service, forlornly placed between two streams of people, at 90 degrees to their eyeline. But, if you visit Betjeman's to check out that plywood, you'd better be careful you don't miss your train - there are no indicator boards in this part of the station, and the nearest is the one outside Eurostar arrivals. (However, their selection of real ales has increased.)
Out the back, where the path from the car park leads into the station, it's still necessary to have perma-temporary railings marking the accessible ramp; the signs haven't quite caught up. The Tube station is improving, slowly and painfully, and the ticket hall isn't as poorly signed as it was last year. Further, the exit from Eurostar arrivals is as bad as ever; presumably, hordes of disoriented travellers packed into the shopping centre are a feature not a bug for someone.
The grand front entrances are still bunged by construction work on the hotel; until this is finished a lot of things will remain temporary, as the original architecture makes the whole thing a single unit. And, of course, there's a lot of other stuff going on with the tube station, the Great Northern Hotel, changes to King's Cross station and the like. But it's running-in reasonably well, and how many building projects of its scale can say that?
However, occasionally you run into something terrible. Check out the Midland (sorry, "East Midlands Trains") ticket hall, which has the odd property of looking painfully bare but not austerely functional, and also has this horrible image:
.jpg)
It's the combination of the on-the-cheap shiny, the motivational-speaker bollocks, and the CCTV cam the size of God pointing at...what? that does it for me...
The first good news; the square footage of blue plywood and Tyvek has fallen, and is now close to zero. However, blue plywood extermination is still not quite complete - there is a little patch of the stuff behind Betjeman's Bar on the upper deck. Perhaps they should keep it, as a shrine to the temporary, flexible and living nature of all buildings.
Further, the station is now functioning without needing to secrete too much temporary signage; overall, the signage has improved, although there was no way anyone was going to read the waist-high portable sign holding an amended timetable for the Thameslink service, forlornly placed between two streams of people, at 90 degrees to their eyeline. But, if you visit Betjeman's to check out that plywood, you'd better be careful you don't miss your train - there are no indicator boards in this part of the station, and the nearest is the one outside Eurostar arrivals. (However, their selection of real ales has increased.)
Out the back, where the path from the car park leads into the station, it's still necessary to have perma-temporary railings marking the accessible ramp; the signs haven't quite caught up. The Tube station is improving, slowly and painfully, and the ticket hall isn't as poorly signed as it was last year. Further, the exit from Eurostar arrivals is as bad as ever; presumably, hordes of disoriented travellers packed into the shopping centre are a feature not a bug for someone.
The grand front entrances are still bunged by construction work on the hotel; until this is finished a lot of things will remain temporary, as the original architecture makes the whole thing a single unit. And, of course, there's a lot of other stuff going on with the tube station, the Great Northern Hotel, changes to King's Cross station and the like. But it's running-in reasonably well, and how many building projects of its scale can say that?
However, occasionally you run into something terrible. Check out the Midland (sorry, "East Midlands Trains") ticket hall, which has the odd property of looking painfully bare but not austerely functional, and also has this horrible image:
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It's the combination of the on-the-cheap shiny, the motivational-speaker bollocks, and the CCTV cam the size of God pointing at...what? that does it for me...
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
covering the story: a glimpse of the press in action
Ah yes, the summer and autumn of 2004. The beaux jours of rightwing horseshit, back when an actual neocon disinformation job was targeting a short who's who of blogging. It seems to be time for some of those years' shit to float up to the surface. Here's Dan Rather, suing CBS.
I had an interesting experience with CBS after that, which may bear repeating. Quite suddenly, some time in the early summer of 2005, I was contacted by a CBS Correspondent, regarding the Viktor Bout-to-Iraq issue. We discussed it by e-mail; they read huge quantities of the blog from a wide range of locations that presumably mapped onto the organisation chart of the CBS journo-octopus.
Could they see primary documents? Surely they could. I shot over a gaggle of DESC fuel contracts. CBS e-mail didn't eat more than 500KB at a go; we did it again. We conspired in pubs. They were delighted to learn I was....an actual journalist, not some anarchist drug-chimp off the interwebs. Better, a trade journalist, so not someone on the nationals... Credit and cash were offered. Lunch was called at Villandry, conveniently not far from my office.
A top CBS was summoned; I hauled in a box of docs on the train and the tube and my desk, as well as all the digital. Unlike MI6, I didn't lose them. He came supposedly direct from Iraq, with photos of various aircraft at Baghdad Airport. I identified them, wondering what the point was - there were plenty of VB jets photographed there?
There was a brief period of expectancy, before the correspondent eventually called back to say that after the Rather/Kerning Krisis they couldn't do anything like it, for political reasons. Perhaps they needed a signed statement from Viktor? I had a similar experience with the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal, without the lunch. Now, it all makes much more sense.
Rather contends not only that his report was true - "What the documents stated has never been denied, by the president or anyone around him," he says - but that CBS succumbed to political pressure from conservatives to get the report discredited and to have him fired. He also claims that a panel set up by CBS to investigate the story was packed with conservatives in an effort to placate the White House. Part of the reason for that, he suggests, was that Viacom, a sister company of CBS, knew that it would have important broadcasting regulatory issues to deal with during Bush's second term.
Among those CBS considered for the panel to investigate Rather's report were far-right broadcasters Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.
I had an interesting experience with CBS after that, which may bear repeating. Quite suddenly, some time in the early summer of 2005, I was contacted by a CBS Correspondent, regarding the Viktor Bout-to-Iraq issue. We discussed it by e-mail; they read huge quantities of the blog from a wide range of locations that presumably mapped onto the organisation chart of the CBS journo-octopus.
Could they see primary documents? Surely they could. I shot over a gaggle of DESC fuel contracts. CBS e-mail didn't eat more than 500KB at a go; we did it again. We conspired in pubs. They were delighted to learn I was....an actual journalist, not some anarchist drug-chimp off the interwebs. Better, a trade journalist, so not someone on the nationals... Credit and cash were offered. Lunch was called at Villandry, conveniently not far from my office.
A top CBS was summoned; I hauled in a box of docs on the train and the tube and my desk, as well as all the digital. Unlike MI6, I didn't lose them. He came supposedly direct from Iraq, with photos of various aircraft at Baghdad Airport. I identified them, wondering what the point was - there were plenty of VB jets photographed there?
There was a brief period of expectancy, before the correspondent eventually called back to say that after the Rather/Kerning Krisis they couldn't do anything like it, for political reasons. Perhaps they needed a signed statement from Viktor? I had a similar experience with the pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal, without the lunch. Now, it all makes much more sense.
we're history, there ain't nothing left to say
The U.S. Army's top historian has a paper out on the war between Israel and Hezbollah (and most of Lebanon) in 2006. It was worth reading when I read it before Christmas, and it's even more so now.
Specifically, Dr Biddle's view of Hezbollah strategy is interesting; in his opinion, they adapted to the fact that really long-range rockets would be easy for the Israelis to spot from the air by changing their tactics so as to keep the smaller and more mobile rockets in range of northern Israel, while not over-committing the core army they needed to remain a power in Lebanese politics. In practice, this meant moving from a guerrilla war to a mobile defence in depth, rolling with the punches rather than getting out of the way.
This is roughly what this blog said at the time about NATO reconnaissance screen tactics, the self-declared insecurity zone, and the fleet-in-being inside Lebanon. There's a lot of interesting stuff about their surprisingly good command and control, the use of anti-tank missiles, and much else. I'm slightly surprised that Biddle thinks that the incident where Hezbollah fired a volley of 13 guided missiles at a group of 15 Israeli tanks and destroyed three of them was a failure, but then, this is an American way of seeing. Targets, probabilities, and the like.
In today's context, it's clear that many of the same points apply to Hamas. Their top priorities are to stay in charge in Gaza, which is achievable with a thin layer of supporters with access to aid and rifles, and to maintain their insecurity zone, which they are able to do with very primitive rockets that can probably be made under occupation conditions. Sten guns were made in thousands in clandestine workshops in occupied Europe in the second world war, and those had quite precise mechanical workings.
Specifically, Dr Biddle's view of Hezbollah strategy is interesting; in his opinion, they adapted to the fact that really long-range rockets would be easy for the Israelis to spot from the air by changing their tactics so as to keep the smaller and more mobile rockets in range of northern Israel, while not over-committing the core army they needed to remain a power in Lebanese politics. In practice, this meant moving from a guerrilla war to a mobile defence in depth, rolling with the punches rather than getting out of the way.
This is roughly what this blog said at the time about NATO reconnaissance screen tactics, the self-declared insecurity zone, and the fleet-in-being inside Lebanon. There's a lot of interesting stuff about their surprisingly good command and control, the use of anti-tank missiles, and much else. I'm slightly surprised that Biddle thinks that the incident where Hezbollah fired a volley of 13 guided missiles at a group of 15 Israeli tanks and destroyed three of them was a failure, but then, this is an American way of seeing. Targets, probabilities, and the like.
In today's context, it's clear that many of the same points apply to Hamas. Their top priorities are to stay in charge in Gaza, which is achievable with a thin layer of supporters with access to aid and rifles, and to maintain their insecurity zone, which they are able to do with very primitive rockets that can probably be made under occupation conditions. Sten guns were made in thousands in clandestine workshops in occupied Europe in the second world war, and those had quite precise mechanical workings.
Monday, December 29, 2008
food
While I'm randomly abusing the government, what about this?
The horror. Food should be an unpleasant necessity shoved down because authority says so. Everyone knows that - it's how it works in the most expensive private schools, and in the most expensive state institutions as well. And they can't be wrong - they're too expensive.
Of course, later in life it can be an opportunity to display merit through consumption, as long as you make amends by reading the Thoughts of Madeleine Bunting. But an expression of love? That's like those perverted Arabs and their erotic desire for women.
The document classes 1.6 million families with children aged between two and 11 as "high risk". It states: "Food has become an expression of love in 'at risk' families.
The horror. Food should be an unpleasant necessity shoved down because authority says so. Everyone knows that - it's how it works in the most expensive private schools, and in the most expensive state institutions as well. And they can't be wrong - they're too expensive.
Of course, later in life it can be an opportunity to display merit through consumption, as long as you make amends by reading the Thoughts of Madeleine Bunting. But an expression of love? That's like those perverted Arabs and their erotic desire for women.
Burn, Hollywood, Burnham!
It is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture:
Shouldn't he be the voice for culture in the Cabinet, like the Chancellor is for finance, or the secretary of defence is for the military? The Home Office will always demand more surveillance and more control, but shouldn't the Department of Culture demand culture?
Further, there's the crappy idea of special "packages" of the Internet with bits missing. There is a clear reason why this is crappy: if it is so desirable, why isn't anyone selling it? Isn't there a gap in the market? Of course, one of the problems is that it would be expensive - who will go through all the websites censoring them? But then, they say you can't buck the market, and if you can't do that to build a national fibre network or keep Amersham's DNA sequencer business in the UK, you can't do that for censorship.
It's also crappy because it does nothing about peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging, VoIP, USENET, e-mail (remember that?), but it's worse than that - it's based on a set of fundamentally stupid and discriminatory assumptions.
First of all, there's the idea that sin can leap out and grab you, to quote Holden Caulfield. Paedophiles can make vapours rise up from the keyboard. But secondly, there's the idea that this only applies to some very specific and rather puny kinds of sin. There is surely plenty of stuff in an average edition of several national newspapers that, if we looked at it clearly, we would all agree is highly unsuitable for children; and it has little or nothing to do with the usual tropes of rude words and naked flesh.
Third, there's a weird discrimination of means. Not only is a punch in the mouth worse on this scale of values (violence!) than the delivery of a 1,000 pound bomb (this is called "action"), pretty much anything is OK if it is delivered in print or in the theatre. Nobody seems to want to censor the printing press or reintroduce theatrical censorship. The explanation is in part that the National Theatre's seating capacity is less than the peak daily traffic of this weblog and heavily London-focused. But that's not enough.
If the buggers are reading books, this is in a sense enough - they look more middle-class, dammit, and who cares about the content. And if you've got them into a theatre for something of their choice, it's unlikely they are the ones you're worrying about.
But I am even more furious about the reference to the "English-language Internet". For a start, this betrays deep ignorance. There is no such thing; the Internet has no notion of English language, and it's damn right. It's because of this that it can work in every language. And Burnham seems to think he owns the English language, that he can impose his will on anyone who chooses to write in it. What if an Indian does so, on a website hosted in Holland, operated by a Chinese company? Who is this Burnham?
It's worse than that, though; he is trying to push his quack nonsense on the Americans, which means he doesn't think he can get it through Parliament and he also doesn't think he can get it through the European Parliament, so he wants a nice little unpublished understanding with the Americans that the prime minister can sign and instantly ratify under the prerogative power, and then place in the Commons library, or perhaps not. Rather like the whole wealth of other understandings that have to do with electronic surveillance of one form or another.
The good news, however, is that his proposals might contravene the US constitution (we can't expect too much from our own). If they can have secret transatlantic understandings, then I intend to have one of my own.
Meanwhile, Brazil's top five cities get fibre to the home.
The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for "child safe" websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.Oh shitty fuck. I thought it was bad enough when a colleague of mine mentioned that Burnham wanted to make YouTube put warnings next to everything it carried that included rude words. But no, it's worse. This is dire in so many ways; for a start, this is our Secretary of Culture yelling for censorship. Not the Home Secretary, or the Minister for Promoting Virtue and Punishing Vice, or the Lord Chamberlain.
He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to provide packages restricting access to websites without an age rating.
Shouldn't he be the voice for culture in the Cabinet, like the Chancellor is for finance, or the secretary of defence is for the military? The Home Office will always demand more surveillance and more control, but shouldn't the Department of Culture demand culture?
Further, there's the crappy idea of special "packages" of the Internet with bits missing. There is a clear reason why this is crappy: if it is so desirable, why isn't anyone selling it? Isn't there a gap in the market? Of course, one of the problems is that it would be expensive - who will go through all the websites censoring them? But then, they say you can't buck the market, and if you can't do that to build a national fibre network or keep Amersham's DNA sequencer business in the UK, you can't do that for censorship.
It's also crappy because it does nothing about peer-to-peer networks, instant messaging, VoIP, USENET, e-mail (remember that?), but it's worse than that - it's based on a set of fundamentally stupid and discriminatory assumptions.
First of all, there's the idea that sin can leap out and grab you, to quote Holden Caulfield. Paedophiles can make vapours rise up from the keyboard. But secondly, there's the idea that this only applies to some very specific and rather puny kinds of sin. There is surely plenty of stuff in an average edition of several national newspapers that, if we looked at it clearly, we would all agree is highly unsuitable for children; and it has little or nothing to do with the usual tropes of rude words and naked flesh.
Third, there's a weird discrimination of means. Not only is a punch in the mouth worse on this scale of values (violence!) than the delivery of a 1,000 pound bomb (this is called "action"), pretty much anything is OK if it is delivered in print or in the theatre. Nobody seems to want to censor the printing press or reintroduce theatrical censorship. The explanation is in part that the National Theatre's seating capacity is less than the peak daily traffic of this weblog and heavily London-focused. But that's not enough.
If the buggers are reading books, this is in a sense enough - they look more middle-class, dammit, and who cares about the content. And if you've got them into a theatre for something of their choice, it's unlikely they are the ones you're worrying about.
But I am even more furious about the reference to the "English-language Internet". For a start, this betrays deep ignorance. There is no such thing; the Internet has no notion of English language, and it's damn right. It's because of this that it can work in every language. And Burnham seems to think he owns the English language, that he can impose his will on anyone who chooses to write in it. What if an Indian does so, on a website hosted in Holland, operated by a Chinese company? Who is this Burnham?
It's worse than that, though; he is trying to push his quack nonsense on the Americans, which means he doesn't think he can get it through Parliament and he also doesn't think he can get it through the European Parliament, so he wants a nice little unpublished understanding with the Americans that the prime minister can sign and instantly ratify under the prerogative power, and then place in the Commons library, or perhaps not. Rather like the whole wealth of other understandings that have to do with electronic surveillance of one form or another.
The good news, however, is that his proposals might contravene the US constitution (we can't expect too much from our own). If they can have secret transatlantic understandings, then I intend to have one of my own.
Meanwhile, Brazil's top five cities get fibre to the home.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
let's all meet up in the year 2000
And with that, it's time for our traditional Christmas ceasefire, after yet another year of snark, data visualisations, arms smuggling, Tories, Python, and crap. This is post number 2,000, in 1,995 days since the 10th of June, 2003.
can I get a witness? can? I get? a witness?!
So, Viktor Bout's extradition came up in court. Again. And this time the man himself took the stand to say a number of markedly sovok things - apparently the US is only doing this to divert attention from its internal problems and to prevent international peace between Russia and Thailand.
Do you realise that in America they shoot at each other, with pistols? Fraternal greetings!
And then, guess what? His latest lawyer requested that the court adjourn after two of his witnesses failed to show up. They're admirals in the Thai navy! Sure! But they're...sick. Yes, terribly sick. Look! An earthquake! So the hearing was put off until the 6th of March, by which time he will probably have decided he needs to change his legal representation again.
One thing he certainly has changed, going by the AP photos, is the colour of his moustache, which has become significantly darker during his provisional incarceration. I make no comment on this, other than to record it, and to suggest that perhaps he wishes to avoid being mistaken for a rival air-drop operator well known for delivering seasonable gifts to the most remarkable places, Father Christmas.
Do you realise that in America they shoot at each other, with pistols? Fraternal greetings!
And then, guess what? His latest lawyer requested that the court adjourn after two of his witnesses failed to show up. They're admirals in the Thai navy! Sure! But they're...sick. Yes, terribly sick. Look! An earthquake! So the hearing was put off until the 6th of March, by which time he will probably have decided he needs to change his legal representation again.
One thing he certainly has changed, going by the AP photos, is the colour of his moustache, which has become significantly darker during his provisional incarceration. I make no comment on this, other than to record it, and to suggest that perhaps he wishes to avoid being mistaken for a rival air-drop operator well known for delivering seasonable gifts to the most remarkable places, Father Christmas.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
anger is an energy
And then I was fool enough to look at another newspaper. So, with Labour you can at least hope they'll look after us in the recession, right? No, they want to give bailiffs the right to restrain people, and to charge interest on social fund loans. And they're blowing hot and cold on the Jaguar-Land Rover loan. (Did you know their sales are actually ahead of last year's? You think all that stuff about the City not wanting to lend industry any money was true?) Merry Christmas to you, too... It's not just the why - it's the why now? Interest on loans for mattresses for the poorest of the poor, in the depths of The Crash of '08?
On the other side, Michael Portillo devotes his column in the Times to explaining why Britain has lost its stomach for a fight and the US willl not think we're "reliable" because of withdrawing from Iraq. (Although it's their declared policy to, ah, withdraw from Iraq.) Jesus. Portillo talks like he's some sort of ironclad veteran, rather than the defence secretary who allowed someone-or-other to exaggerate the troop requirement for Bosnia by a factor of 10 while his mate Douglas Hurd was collecting fees at NatWest Markets for privatising the other side's telecomms network.
And as Dean Godson scurries back under his stone, Anthony "VDARE" Browne clears the decks for his inevitable safe Tory seat.
On the other side, Michael Portillo devotes his column in the Times to explaining why Britain has lost its stomach for a fight and the US willl not think we're "reliable" because of withdrawing from Iraq. (Although it's their declared policy to, ah, withdraw from Iraq.) Jesus. Portillo talks like he's some sort of ironclad veteran, rather than the defence secretary who allowed someone-or-other to exaggerate the troop requirement for Bosnia by a factor of 10 while his mate Douglas Hurd was collecting fees at NatWest Markets for privatising the other side's telecomms network.
And as Dean Godson scurries back under his stone, Anthony "VDARE" Browne clears the decks for his inevitable safe Tory seat.
I am now surrounded by liars, clowns, fools, drunks, sycophants and the desperate
Shouldn't this story be getting just a little more air? So the editor of the News of the Screws is found by an employment tribunal to have bullied one of his reporters to the point that it seriously affected his health, to have tried to exert influence on his doctor, while both the sports editor and the deputy managing editor lied to the tribunal. Had it been any other kind of tribunal, this would have been the stuff of a perjury conviction.
Yer man is now, of course, the director of communications for the Conservative Party, and Rupert Murdoch's representative on Earth (David Cameron Department). Does the party endorse this sort of conduct? Is he a fit and proper person? It would, as they say, be irresponsible not to speculate.
Also, what kind of a sick internal culture does that rag have? First you have violent binge drinker Rebekah Wade, then school bully Coulson and the pair of liars Dunn and Nicholas. It's astonishing; I always assumed they ran on massive hypocrisy, but in fact the content of the paper exactly represents the way they behave in private. The personal, it seems, certainly is the political at the News of the World.
On the other hand, don't imagine that the story from the Guardian actually ran in the paper. Instead of the wealth of detail given above, the print edition slashed it down to a one-paragraph nib in the depths of the paper; I suppose we should be thankful they didn't say Coulson had been the editor of "a newspaper", as their Robert Napper case coverage did to avoid naming names about the Sun's disgraceful police-sponsored smear campaign against Colin Stagg. Why can't you get a cab outside a newspaper office? Because of the double yellow streaks.
Yer man is now, of course, the director of communications for the Conservative Party, and Rupert Murdoch's representative on Earth (David Cameron Department). Does the party endorse this sort of conduct? Is he a fit and proper person? It would, as they say, be irresponsible not to speculate.
Also, what kind of a sick internal culture does that rag have? First you have violent binge drinker Rebekah Wade, then school bully Coulson and the pair of liars Dunn and Nicholas. It's astonishing; I always assumed they ran on massive hypocrisy, but in fact the content of the paper exactly represents the way they behave in private. The personal, it seems, certainly is the political at the News of the World.
On the other hand, don't imagine that the story from the Guardian actually ran in the paper. Instead of the wealth of detail given above, the print edition slashed it down to a one-paragraph nib in the depths of the paper; I suppose we should be thankful they didn't say Coulson had been the editor of "a newspaper", as their Robert Napper case coverage did to avoid naming names about the Sun's disgraceful police-sponsored smear campaign against Colin Stagg. Why can't you get a cab outside a newspaper office? Because of the double yellow streaks.
premature optimisation, the root of all sins
James Wimberley has a good post regarding changing the electricity grid to support dynamic demand-response, where things like Dutch cold-stores or your fridge over-cool when electricity is plentiful and cut out when the grid is under strain. It's hugely important in adapting the electrical system to use stuff like gigawatt-size wind farms; essentially, it's a way to store large volumes of electricity, with the added feature that you lose no power in the process. Not using the power is always 100 per cent efficient.
Anything that lets you buck entropy has to be good, but there are some serious problems to get over. James dislikes some versions of this as being too Stalinist - the grid reliability controller reaches out and turns everyone down a notch. It's not Stalinism he's thinking of, though, really, but rather Charlie Stross's third great evil of modernity, high technocracy. Stalinists would have planned your energy requirements in advance.
He suggests instead that what we really need is a device that handles all the appliances behind it according to rules you set up, and that receives a feed of data about electricity prices, marginal CO2 emissions, and loads on the grid. Which presupposes a standard for announcing grid data onto the Web; RSS for power stations.
But I'm sceptical on a few things; as far as I can tell, demand response is much more useful for managing the grid than for shaving down demand overall. Which is great, but it falls foul of one of my beefs with much of the official green movement; the macro-micro issue. You can't open a newspaper without being lectured by the lifestyle pages about fairly marginal changes; you rarely see anything about moving big chunks of the energy budget.
And I think the geekosphere is guilty of this; Wattson, AMEE and friends are cool, but it's all about shaving percentages here and there. Consider this post about the huge economic returns on US Federal energy efficiency R&D; it's all about building components, fridge compressors and the like. There's a management consulting piece of quasiwisdom that says that it's always better to remove empty work (muda) from a process than to optimise it. But who wants to discuss lumps of building material?
On the good side, though, I notice that prices for my favourite pet project are coming down gradually. And I like this quote a lot:
Anything that lets you buck entropy has to be good, but there are some serious problems to get over. James dislikes some versions of this as being too Stalinist - the grid reliability controller reaches out and turns everyone down a notch. It's not Stalinism he's thinking of, though, really, but rather Charlie Stross's third great evil of modernity, high technocracy. Stalinists would have planned your energy requirements in advance.
He suggests instead that what we really need is a device that handles all the appliances behind it according to rules you set up, and that receives a feed of data about electricity prices, marginal CO2 emissions, and loads on the grid. Which presupposes a standard for announcing grid data onto the Web; RSS for power stations.
But I'm sceptical on a few things; as far as I can tell, demand response is much more useful for managing the grid than for shaving down demand overall. Which is great, but it falls foul of one of my beefs with much of the official green movement; the macro-micro issue. You can't open a newspaper without being lectured by the lifestyle pages about fairly marginal changes; you rarely see anything about moving big chunks of the energy budget.
And I think the geekosphere is guilty of this; Wattson, AMEE and friends are cool, but it's all about shaving percentages here and there. Consider this post about the huge economic returns on US Federal energy efficiency R&D; it's all about building components, fridge compressors and the like. There's a management consulting piece of quasiwisdom that says that it's always better to remove empty work (muda) from a process than to optimise it. But who wants to discuss lumps of building material?
On the good side, though, I notice that prices for my favourite pet project are coming down gradually. And I like this quote a lot:
The Roadster is faster then anything on the road, including the young guy in a fuel cell SUV who improbably challenged me to a Saturday night race on Hollywood Blvd.
business in great waters
Meanwhile, this is good news. As more and more ships from various parts of the world - like China and Iran - arrive in pirate country, somebody's made vaguely sensible arrangements to put them on trial in Kenya, which is what has been done with the ones captured by Northumberland. This is a much better idea than returning them to the tender mercies of Somali rivals, or alternatively to their home base, or any evil nonsense promoted by tiresome Internet hard men. (You know who you are.)
I'm not sure whether to be pleased, or worried that China and Iran are apparently cooperating in an exercise designed to be more law-abiding than some British courts, and far more so than whole swaths of the US defence establishment. This is incredibly important; I keep saying that a primary reason for the success of some Islamist movements is that they offer some form of legal order, rather than Franz Neumann's Behemoth.
After all, dogs have an innate appreciation of justice, so we should surely accept that it matters for human beings too. As a modest proposal, now the EU has taken over the lead in combating piracy in the Gulf of Aden, could we perhaps give the naval task force a further mission - to compel EU-flag fishing vessels to respect the Somali EEZ? (We wouldn't have legal authority to stop anyone else without a UN resolution, but it's a start.) I agree they have plenty on their plate, which is why I'm going to make a second modest proposal.
Rather than frigates, EU states participating in this could instead deploy some of their sizeable fleet of amphibious assault ships, with a deckload of helicopters, a dock of small craft, and a tankdeck containing a mix of marines for boarding parties, and medics, engineers etc to support the UN's aid activities.
I'm not sure whether to be pleased, or worried that China and Iran are apparently cooperating in an exercise designed to be more law-abiding than some British courts, and far more so than whole swaths of the US defence establishment. This is incredibly important; I keep saying that a primary reason for the success of some Islamist movements is that they offer some form of legal order, rather than Franz Neumann's Behemoth.
After all, dogs have an innate appreciation of justice, so we should surely accept that it matters for human beings too. As a modest proposal, now the EU has taken over the lead in combating piracy in the Gulf of Aden, could we perhaps give the naval task force a further mission - to compel EU-flag fishing vessels to respect the Somali EEZ? (We wouldn't have legal authority to stop anyone else without a UN resolution, but it's a start.) I agree they have plenty on their plate, which is why I'm going to make a second modest proposal.
Rather than frigates, EU states participating in this could instead deploy some of their sizeable fleet of amphibious assault ships, with a deckload of helicopters, a dock of small craft, and a tankdeck containing a mix of marines for boarding parties, and medics, engineers etc to support the UN's aid activities.
fruit of the poisoned tree
This week we've had the Piccadilly bunglebombers' convictions, but more importantly the first conviction for "directing terrorism". This was the case in which the suspect's fingernails were torn out by the Pakistani intelligence service; he claims, and I see no reason whatsoever to doubt this, that he was questioned between bouts of torture by British officials. But this isn't what worries me.
It's that the poison is seeping into the courts. This particular one was willing not only to accept that, as the case didn't strictly rest on information from Pakistan, the torture was inadmissible, it was willing to determine this in secret and issue a ruling which is itself secret, before proceeding to a trial by jury. The secret ruling was of course secret from the jury. I really cannot imagine how this is meant to amount to a fair trial. And then there is the de Menezes inquest, where the coroner simply decided that no verdict that implied the police did anything wrong was acceptable.
In the bunglebombers' case, meanwhile, we had the astonishing conviction of a man for "withholding information" where the information in question was an e-mail message in an account which the Crown accepted had not been accessed since some time before the message arrived. You can now become a terrorist by not checking your e-mail frequently enough.
And I really have no idea how we would go about reversing this. After the long and successful fight over detentions under ATCSA2001, and the partially successful one over control orders, it seems that this is as nothing to the broader deterioration. As someone said in a quite different context,
This is no theoretical question, either. All the data shows that we're heading for an inconclusive election (or rather, one which actually represents the distribution of opinion in the electorate). You can be certain that there will be no help from the Tories on this score. But what terms can the Liberals insist on that would actually achieve something? What legislation could be repealed that would have a clear signalling effect? I'm not optimistic; I fear that if they were to make anything worth arguing for part of the price for coalition or toleration, there would simply be a Labservative government, a "grand coalition of the I'm all right, Jacks" as the Germans say. A club for the self-protection of the parties who corrupted our institutions to this extent in the first place.
It's that the poison is seeping into the courts. This particular one was willing not only to accept that, as the case didn't strictly rest on information from Pakistan, the torture was inadmissible, it was willing to determine this in secret and issue a ruling which is itself secret, before proceeding to a trial by jury. The secret ruling was of course secret from the jury. I really cannot imagine how this is meant to amount to a fair trial. And then there is the de Menezes inquest, where the coroner simply decided that no verdict that implied the police did anything wrong was acceptable.
In the bunglebombers' case, meanwhile, we had the astonishing conviction of a man for "withholding information" where the information in question was an e-mail message in an account which the Crown accepted had not been accessed since some time before the message arrived. You can now become a terrorist by not checking your e-mail frequently enough.
And I really have no idea how we would go about reversing this. After the long and successful fight over detentions under ATCSA2001, and the partially successful one over control orders, it seems that this is as nothing to the broader deterioration. As someone said in a quite different context,
Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town's water system wasn't quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that's basically it.One thing that specifically worries me is that the judiciary's record of opposing the security state in some super-high profile cases conflicts with its opposing, Huttonite tendency of doing quite outrageous things rather than face the prospect of State agents lying. Everyone remembers some of these cases; the risk is that they serve as an institutional alibi.
This is no theoretical question, either. All the data shows that we're heading for an inconclusive election (or rather, one which actually represents the distribution of opinion in the electorate). You can be certain that there will be no help from the Tories on this score. But what terms can the Liberals insist on that would actually achieve something? What legislation could be repealed that would have a clear signalling effect? I'm not optimistic; I fear that if they were to make anything worth arguing for part of the price for coalition or toleration, there would simply be a Labservative government, a "grand coalition of the I'm all right, Jacks" as the Germans say. A club for the self-protection of the parties who corrupted our institutions to this extent in the first place.
why don't you just get a blog?
Ajay takes the cake again. Back in 2007, discussing the Piccadilly bomb plot, he made the important point that the difficult bit in arranging a fuel-air explosion is getting your timing right. You don't want to let the fuel disperse too much, but if you fire it too early there will be too much fuel and not enough air for combustion. So, here we are, from this week's trial.
But the would-be bombers had made a crucial error. The detonators consisted of two mobile phones wired to a light bulb surrounded by match heads. A phone call was supposed to trigger the homemade device igniting the vapours swirling inside the cars. But the mixture of petrol and gas was too thick - police sources say that if the car windows had been opened the bombs could have gone off - but as it was there was not enough oxygen to trigger the devices.Get a blog, already.
wikileaks in a jam
Vexation about the publication on Wikileaks of some US Army documents with details of the counter-IED radio jammers. Well, you can see why they're concerned; but I very much doubt this is particularly important.
Recap: the New-Old Iraqi Army was in the habit of using command-detonated IEDs to blow up Coalition and Iraqi government road convoys. To begin with, the command element was often either a GSM device or else some sort of el cheapo radio device like a garage-door opener, RF thermostat, bits and pieces from an industrial process-control rig or the like. After much spending and much fuss, the US Department of Defense deployed "secret" but much hyped jammers on the lead vehicles in the convoys.
Now, there was almost certainly no reason to spend anywhere as much as they did. This is directly linked to the non-fuss about Wikileaks. The devices we have just mentioned have an internationally-standardised frequency band to chatter away in - the so-called Industrial Scientific Medical band, which is unlicensed spectrum - anyone can use it for anything, so long as they don't use too much power. Among other things, all the world's WLAN access points work in the ISM 2.4GHz band, as do wireless hi-fi speakers, baby monitors, cheap CCTV cams, etc, etc. So right back in 2003, it was blindingly obvious which frequencies were involved and what an upper bound on the power output would be. Which made the problem of jamming it pretty simple - just hammer away in the ISM with noise at a significantly higher Tx wattage.
Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, and therefore their intensity changes with the inverse square of the distance from the source. So you could trivially calculate how much power you need to trigger the device a given distance away from the target. All you need is something that will radiate in the ISM band on command, like...a WLAN card, which now costs about five quid (or, perhaps, a door opener with a better antenna...). I have to say, I suspect that Donald Rumsfeld got played terribly over this. And, of course, nothing radio-frequency stays secret once you start transmitting; everyone can hear you.
There are cleverer things you can do; regarding the GSM ones, you could carry a malicious base station around with you, and therefore blackhole all traffic to and from phones in range. Or you could tap the phones and find out whodunnit (we know the other side do it to us). If I was really serious about this, I'd use one of these, which can be programmed to emulate pretty much anything radio.
So, like so much government secrecy, this is much more to do with security from embarrassment (we spent $billions on technology that would have been cutting edge in 1940!) than security from anything else.
Recap: the New-Old Iraqi Army was in the habit of using command-detonated IEDs to blow up Coalition and Iraqi government road convoys. To begin with, the command element was often either a GSM device or else some sort of el cheapo radio device like a garage-door opener, RF thermostat, bits and pieces from an industrial process-control rig or the like. After much spending and much fuss, the US Department of Defense deployed "secret" but much hyped jammers on the lead vehicles in the convoys.
Now, there was almost certainly no reason to spend anywhere as much as they did. This is directly linked to the non-fuss about Wikileaks. The devices we have just mentioned have an internationally-standardised frequency band to chatter away in - the so-called Industrial Scientific Medical band, which is unlicensed spectrum - anyone can use it for anything, so long as they don't use too much power. Among other things, all the world's WLAN access points work in the ISM 2.4GHz band, as do wireless hi-fi speakers, baby monitors, cheap CCTV cams, etc, etc. So right back in 2003, it was blindingly obvious which frequencies were involved and what an upper bound on the power output would be. Which made the problem of jamming it pretty simple - just hammer away in the ISM with noise at a significantly higher Tx wattage.
Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, and therefore their intensity changes with the inverse square of the distance from the source. So you could trivially calculate how much power you need to trigger the device a given distance away from the target. All you need is something that will radiate in the ISM band on command, like...a WLAN card, which now costs about five quid (or, perhaps, a door opener with a better antenna...). I have to say, I suspect that Donald Rumsfeld got played terribly over this. And, of course, nothing radio-frequency stays secret once you start transmitting; everyone can hear you.
There are cleverer things you can do; regarding the GSM ones, you could carry a malicious base station around with you, and therefore blackhole all traffic to and from phones in range. Or you could tap the phones and find out whodunnit (we know the other side do it to us). If I was really serious about this, I'd use one of these, which can be programmed to emulate pretty much anything radio.
So, like so much government secrecy, this is much more to do with security from embarrassment (we spent $billions on technology that would have been cutting edge in 1940!) than security from anything else.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
target for tonight...
Somebody really ought to make a table cross-referencing the police statements from the IPCC, HSE, and Coroner's investigations in the Menezes case. This should probably be me, but I'll need to consult the documents first.
a cloud of reinforced concrete
Well, very cool. Yahoo has an API that's meant to let you do database-like read operations on anything web - you just pass your SELECT... statement and the URL and a few other arguments, and it chucks back a JSON document with your information. I haven't managed to make it do anything interesting yet, but then, my requirements may be strange. And it doesn't do SELECT COUNT... or GROUP BY... statements, so there are some fairly strict limits on its usefulness. It's true, however, that had it existed a while ago it would have rendered part of the Viktorfeed much easier. But, y'know, it's mine.
I'm tempted, once I manage to make it do something useful, to build a sort of Web 2.0 turducken - after all, the query could be applied to a Google search URL, or better, to the Google archive of USENET.
The new version of IBM Many Eyes lets you provide various kinds of URLs as data sources in a visualisation, and I could embed that in the blog, and if only Wordpress.com would let you do that, the initial request would be initiated by something running on a Wordpress website, using an IBM backend, to slurp data from a Yahoo! URL, that points at an SQL emulator somewhere in there, that gets data from an HTML parser in there, that operates on query results from Google, results which originate from some bored and kinky academic shooting the breeze over an underutilised departmental T-1 in 1992. Perhaps I could work in updates on Twitter, too.
But doesn't this remind you of something - specifically the joke about the convoluted program which involves a document being printed out, placed on a brown table, photographed, and scanned? Think of all those layers of caching servers, app servers, Web frameworks, standard libraries, bureaucracy, operating systems, virtualisation, before you get to an actual computer. No wonder Richard Stallman don't like it.
This tension has always defined the culture of IT; the Big Database, the mainframe, the semiconductor fab on one side, the Lone Hacker and the Garage Startup on the other. Like all good myths, it's highly flexible in practice; a lot of people started off as the second and made the ancient march to the right as they got old and rich and conservative, and the very origins of the second are in huge state-run research labs.
It's also highly ambiguous - people who at least think they are on the side of the second are often the archetypal Internet libertarians and the warbloggers yelling for torture, and doesn't the ordered, white concrete Arthur C. Clarke world of the first sound good now?
In an out of the way corner of Oregon, Amazon is joining Google and Microsoft in building a really enormous data centre, to take advantage of cheap hydroelectricity and water cooling. The power comes from the New Deal. At the end of the 1930s, the US Federal Government built a string of big dams there; their first customer for the power was the aluminium industry as it geared up first to supply the RAF and then to create the USAAF. As a result, Boeing would build the 707, B-47, B-52, 727, 747, 737, 757, 767, and 777 in Seattle.
Today, it's still the Bonneville Power Administration which Amazon will be paying for the electricity and cool water its IT factory needs. You can't get around the infrastructure. Decisions we take now will last as long; will there one day be an IT equivalent of the Lochaber smelter, somewhere with fibre in the ground and wind in the sky?
I'm tempted, once I manage to make it do something useful, to build a sort of Web 2.0 turducken - after all, the query could be applied to a Google search URL, or better, to the Google archive of USENET.
The new version of IBM Many Eyes lets you provide various kinds of URLs as data sources in a visualisation, and I could embed that in the blog, and if only Wordpress.com would let you do that, the initial request would be initiated by something running on a Wordpress website, using an IBM backend, to slurp data from a Yahoo! URL, that points at an SQL emulator somewhere in there, that gets data from an HTML parser in there, that operates on query results from Google, results which originate from some bored and kinky academic shooting the breeze over an underutilised departmental T-1 in 1992. Perhaps I could work in updates on Twitter, too.
But doesn't this remind you of something - specifically the joke about the convoluted program which involves a document being printed out, placed on a brown table, photographed, and scanned? Think of all those layers of caching servers, app servers, Web frameworks, standard libraries, bureaucracy, operating systems, virtualisation, before you get to an actual computer. No wonder Richard Stallman don't like it.
This tension has always defined the culture of IT; the Big Database, the mainframe, the semiconductor fab on one side, the Lone Hacker and the Garage Startup on the other. Like all good myths, it's highly flexible in practice; a lot of people started off as the second and made the ancient march to the right as they got old and rich and conservative, and the very origins of the second are in huge state-run research labs.
It's also highly ambiguous - people who at least think they are on the side of the second are often the archetypal Internet libertarians and the warbloggers yelling for torture, and doesn't the ordered, white concrete Arthur C. Clarke world of the first sound good now?
In an out of the way corner of Oregon, Amazon is joining Google and Microsoft in building a really enormous data centre, to take advantage of cheap hydroelectricity and water cooling. The power comes from the New Deal. At the end of the 1930s, the US Federal Government built a string of big dams there; their first customer for the power was the aluminium industry as it geared up first to supply the RAF and then to create the USAAF. As a result, Boeing would build the 707, B-47, B-52, 727, 747, 737, 757, 767, and 777 in Seattle.
Today, it's still the Bonneville Power Administration which Amazon will be paying for the electricity and cool water its IT factory needs. You can't get around the infrastructure. Decisions we take now will last as long; will there one day be an IT equivalent of the Lochaber smelter, somewhere with fibre in the ground and wind in the sky?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
HOWTO spoof the Pakistani Foreign Ministry
Reader Chris "Chris" Williams recently came up with an interesting idea regarding the unnerving incident during the Mumbai terrorist assault when somebody called Mr 10%'s office and, posing as the Indian foreign minister, threatened war. Chris reckons that not only are the two linked, but the phone call was actually the main effort; in fact, the commando speedboat assault on the city centre was a sort of privilege-escalation attack intended to boost the effectiveness of the fake telephone call.
As Scott Sagan wrote in The Command and Control of Strategic Nuclear Forces, you can't go on alert without reducing the reaction times and increasing the sensitivity of your command system, because that's what the word "alert" means. Going on alert involves system risk as well as mitigating the risk of surprise attack.
That doesn't just work for radars and satellites, or even for organisations; it happens in your head as well. As well as forcing an Indian military alert and, more importantly, a Pakistani alert, the attack on Mumbai forced an emotional, psychological, and biochemical alert on both parties. Among other things, this tends to mean that even peaceful precautions are overlooked; just pick up the phone!
What is really worrying here, though, is that the Pakistanis still apparently believe that the call came from the Indian foreign ministry, because the Caller ID display said so. This is truly frightening; caller-line identification, CLI, is a surprisingly flaky feature of the public-switched telephone network (see the many, many discussions on uk.telecom). It's the kind of thing that Bellheads like to accuse Internet people of, just it's the Bellheads' work. Rather, CLI works quite well within one telephone network; it's when you start interworking that things happen.
And obviously, international calls involve interworking. CLI works like this (there's a nice explanation on the Asterisk developers' list: a message including the e164 telephone number originating the call and two flags is generated either by the subscriber's equipment or by the carrier's local exchange. The first flag has a value of 0, 1, or 2, which correspond to OK, "Not available due to user action", and "Not available due to interworking". If you choose to withhold your number, BT will set a flag of 1 on the CLI, so standards-compliant equipment at the far end will not show it. Note that the number is still sent. 2 is sent if the carrier (or the user) doesn't have a valid CLI for this call, or doesn't send CLI to the terminating network.
The second flag can be 0, 1, 2, or 3. 0 means the CLI was passed by the originator's equipment and this has not been checked. 1 means the CLI was passed by the originator's equipment and the network setting the flag verified the number is correct. 2 means it was checked and found to be incorrect. 3 means that the setting network's local exchange assigned the CLI and therefore it is known to be good.
In the case of calls that are coming in from another network, then, the first flag should be 0 only if the second is 1 or 3, else 2. It's left as a question of policy what you do with the others - for example, if someone is making unwanted calls to subscribers in a network that you provide service to, using the withhold flag and CLI set by their own PBX, do you honour the withhold flag, do you send the dodgy CLIs in case the subscribers want them to find out who's doing it, or do you treat the CLI as probably all lies?
In practice, this is resolved by keeping lists of networks by degrees of trust. After all, if someone is really dodgy, there's probably no point in relying on their own claim that they checked the CLI, so you might as well treat them all as nonsense. Some you can trust. Some you can trust partially, perhaps only the 1s and 3s.
But this, of course, only works if other people can trust you. If you don't care, you might just pass every little thing, or if you're really irresponsible you might set 1 flags on everything. Eventually this sort of behaviour will get you on everyone's Do Not Trust list, but it's always possible that the people you're trying to send dodgy CLIs to aren't great either.
So, first of all, you need an el cheapo phone company. Specifically, what you're after is someone who provides really cheap and flaky bulk SIP interconnection, because what we need is a way of connecting a device that's going to send someone else's CLI into the traditional phone network, and this is much the easiest via the Internet. Of course, our target might be on a VoIP system, but the important bit is that it turns up at the far end with a traditional phone number as the CLI. We might start here, or - why not? - even here, or of course here.
Now, all we need is a copy of Asterisk, the open-source PBX and general phone toolkit; we change the zapata.conf file to set the CLI to our desired number and whatever flags we like, set "usecallingpres=yes", put the details we were given by the dodgy SIP operator in the trunks section, and we're good to go. There's an obvious way to test if they're passing the arbitrary CLI; call your mobile phone and see what comes up on the screen. To finish the job, we tell Asterisk to route incoming calls from the mobile numbers (or VoIP clients) we want to use, according to the dialplan we just specified.
We can now call the president of Pakistan and say whatever we damn well like, from whereever we damn well like. And caller ID will say exactly what we want it to. You may stroke a white cat while you do it; it's not mandatory.
Scared yet? Right, we have learned a couple of things here. First up, interconnected networks imply netizenship. Keep your gear clean and know your customers, and you'll save people downstream a lot of trouble, and if everyone behaves like that, what a wonderful world it would be.
Second, Caller ID is no kind of security for anything vaguely serious. Telcos don't bother with it for really important purposes, like "working out your phone bill" - they use a different and secret billing identifier. It is truly astonishing that there was apparently neither any technical security beyond that, nor any authentication procedures either. (After all, an alternative to this would have been to have someone walk into the Foreign Ministry and just pick up the phone.) No security questions, no pre-arrangement, no passwords, no crypto, no shared secret. Nothing.
As Scott Sagan wrote in The Command and Control of Strategic Nuclear Forces, you can't go on alert without reducing the reaction times and increasing the sensitivity of your command system, because that's what the word "alert" means. Going on alert involves system risk as well as mitigating the risk of surprise attack.
That doesn't just work for radars and satellites, or even for organisations; it happens in your head as well. As well as forcing an Indian military alert and, more importantly, a Pakistani alert, the attack on Mumbai forced an emotional, psychological, and biochemical alert on both parties. Among other things, this tends to mean that even peaceful precautions are overlooked; just pick up the phone!
What is really worrying here, though, is that the Pakistanis still apparently believe that the call came from the Indian foreign ministry, because the Caller ID display said so. This is truly frightening; caller-line identification, CLI, is a surprisingly flaky feature of the public-switched telephone network (see the many, many discussions on uk.telecom). It's the kind of thing that Bellheads like to accuse Internet people of, just it's the Bellheads' work. Rather, CLI works quite well within one telephone network; it's when you start interworking that things happen.
And obviously, international calls involve interworking. CLI works like this (there's a nice explanation on the Asterisk developers' list: a message including the e164 telephone number originating the call and two flags is generated either by the subscriber's equipment or by the carrier's local exchange. The first flag has a value of 0, 1, or 2, which correspond to OK, "Not available due to user action", and "Not available due to interworking". If you choose to withhold your number, BT will set a flag of 1 on the CLI, so standards-compliant equipment at the far end will not show it. Note that the number is still sent. 2 is sent if the carrier (or the user) doesn't have a valid CLI for this call, or doesn't send CLI to the terminating network.
The second flag can be 0, 1, 2, or 3. 0 means the CLI was passed by the originator's equipment and this has not been checked. 1 means the CLI was passed by the originator's equipment and the network setting the flag verified the number is correct. 2 means it was checked and found to be incorrect. 3 means that the setting network's local exchange assigned the CLI and therefore it is known to be good.
In the case of calls that are coming in from another network, then, the first flag should be 0 only if the second is 1 or 3, else 2. It's left as a question of policy what you do with the others - for example, if someone is making unwanted calls to subscribers in a network that you provide service to, using the withhold flag and CLI set by their own PBX, do you honour the withhold flag, do you send the dodgy CLIs in case the subscribers want them to find out who's doing it, or do you treat the CLI as probably all lies?
In practice, this is resolved by keeping lists of networks by degrees of trust. After all, if someone is really dodgy, there's probably no point in relying on their own claim that they checked the CLI, so you might as well treat them all as nonsense. Some you can trust. Some you can trust partially, perhaps only the 1s and 3s.
But this, of course, only works if other people can trust you. If you don't care, you might just pass every little thing, or if you're really irresponsible you might set 1 flags on everything. Eventually this sort of behaviour will get you on everyone's Do Not Trust list, but it's always possible that the people you're trying to send dodgy CLIs to aren't great either.
So, first of all, you need an el cheapo phone company. Specifically, what you're after is someone who provides really cheap and flaky bulk SIP interconnection, because what we need is a way of connecting a device that's going to send someone else's CLI into the traditional phone network, and this is much the easiest via the Internet. Of course, our target might be on a VoIP system, but the important bit is that it turns up at the far end with a traditional phone number as the CLI. We might start here, or - why not? - even here, or of course here.
Now, all we need is a copy of Asterisk, the open-source PBX and general phone toolkit; we change the zapata.conf file to set the CLI to our desired number and whatever flags we like, set "usecallingpres=yes", put the details we were given by the dodgy SIP operator in the trunks section, and we're good to go. There's an obvious way to test if they're passing the arbitrary CLI; call your mobile phone and see what comes up on the screen. To finish the job, we tell Asterisk to route incoming calls from the mobile numbers (or VoIP clients) we want to use, according to the dialplan we just specified.
We can now call the president of Pakistan and say whatever we damn well like, from whereever we damn well like. And caller ID will say exactly what we want it to. You may stroke a white cat while you do it; it's not mandatory.
Scared yet? Right, we have learned a couple of things here. First up, interconnected networks imply netizenship. Keep your gear clean and know your customers, and you'll save people downstream a lot of trouble, and if everyone behaves like that, what a wonderful world it would be.
Second, Caller ID is no kind of security for anything vaguely serious. Telcos don't bother with it for really important purposes, like "working out your phone bill" - they use a different and secret billing identifier. It is truly astonishing that there was apparently neither any technical security beyond that, nor any authentication procedures either. (After all, an alternative to this would have been to have someone walk into the Foreign Ministry and just pick up the phone.) No security questions, no pre-arrangement, no passwords, no crypto, no shared secret. Nothing.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
voice stress clarity
OK, so yer lie detector. It's been something of a blogosphere hit. And in the comments, we have Nigel, who appears to know something about acoustic signal processing - in the sense of "makes speech recognition systems for Eurofighters".
It seems that rather than being a signal at a frequency between 8 and 12Hz, the signal you're interested in is a signal, of that frequency, modulated onto the main signal. So in fact, you could theoretically detect it through a telephone call. I was wrong.
However, that isn't what Nemesysco's patent claims, and they vigorously deny that what they are doing is voice stress analysis. It's not the pitch of any such signal that is discussed in the patent, either; it's the change in the numbers of thorns and plateaus.
Our acoustic expert says that this could be a way of measuring the signals required for classical VSA, just not a very good one; and anyway, he argues that VSA itself is useless, even if it was VSA they were promising to conduct. And, of course, they deny that this is their methodology. Further, VSA gives only one measurement, one of vaguely-defined stress - not the nine or so Nemesysco claim to get out of this.
Meanwhile, someone who makes the same spelling mistakes as Amir Liberman does showed up in comments to claim there was more, secret technology involved that they hadn't actually patented. Interestingly, he showed up from the same network as Nemesysco's Web site. The same network was also the source of a Wikipedia article which got deleted for advertising, in which Nemesysco claimed that their method uses 129 different measurements and isn't anything like VSA. No, sir. And there weren't 129 different metrics in their patent...
It seems that rather than being a signal at a frequency between 8 and 12Hz, the signal you're interested in is a signal, of that frequency, modulated onto the main signal. So in fact, you could theoretically detect it through a telephone call. I was wrong.
However, that isn't what Nemesysco's patent claims, and they vigorously deny that what they are doing is voice stress analysis. It's not the pitch of any such signal that is discussed in the patent, either; it's the change in the numbers of thorns and plateaus.
Our acoustic expert says that this could be a way of measuring the signals required for classical VSA, just not a very good one; and anyway, he argues that VSA itself is useless, even if it was VSA they were promising to conduct. And, of course, they deny that this is their methodology. Further, VSA gives only one measurement, one of vaguely-defined stress - not the nine or so Nemesysco claim to get out of this.
Meanwhile, someone who makes the same spelling mistakes as Amir Liberman does showed up in comments to claim there was more, secret technology involved that they hadn't actually patented. Interestingly, he showed up from the same network as Nemesysco's Web site. The same network was also the source of a Wikipedia article which got deleted for advertising, in which Nemesysco claimed that their method uses 129 different measurements and isn't anything like VSA. No, sir. And there weren't 129 different metrics in their patent...
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Dr. Benway strikes again, with Venture Capital
OK. So we looked into voice stress analysis and the world telecoms infrastructure. And we concluded that proper VSA - the sort with the peer-reviewed scientific papers an stuff - was technically impossible. Recap; the original VSA research is based on a change in a signal in your voice between 8 and 12Hz, but even the highest-quality voice codecs used for public telephony filter out everything below 50Hz, so a VSA system based on - well - science couldn't possibly work.
But there was always the possibility that "Nemesysco" had hit on some kind of roaring king-hell breakthrough. Minitrue couldn't find a copy of the patent that covers their product; you might wonder why there wasn't a US patent if it's so great, or why every call-centre workflow system and high-end mobile phone in the world doesn't have it as a much-valued standard feature, or why Amir Liberman, the CEO of Nemesysco, isn't incredibly rich.
After all, he's been hawking it since at least 1998. His company was formed in early 2000, just a tad late for the joy of the .com boom; at the time they were marketing towards consumers and businesses. But, as the venture capital dried up, the stock exchange cursed everything to do with computers, and it looked like a whole world of vaguely technical young sheisters would have to get a job...something happened, and suddenly his product became "Israeli intelligence service technology" that would save you from terrorists.
There is no evidence that Tsahal or the intelligence services ever made use of it, but as reader Chris "Chris" Williams points, there is a certain mana attached to the Israeli military - link your product to them, and it gets just that bit badder. I tell you, it's the sunglasses.
So, let's cut to the chase. The patent is here, thanks to the Canadian government. The "claims" section described how it is meant to work - there's even an example implementation in Microsoft Visual Basic (you bastards). Here's how: it takes samples of speech and identifies "plateaus" - flat bits - and "thorns". Thorns are defined as:
Now, all speech is roughly speaking a succession of sine waves; by definition it's going to fit this. Anyway, they take a control sample of speech, count the plateaus and thorns and compute the standard errors, then they ask the questions they want to test, and do the same thing. They then look at the difference between the values and compare them to reference values to tell if you're lying.
Where do these reference values come from? It is appreciated that all of the numerical values are merely examples and are typically application-dependent. So basically, the all-crucial message on the screen depends entirely on the sensitivity values you punch in to the thing; perhaps great if you're trying to bully some random Palestinian, but not so good if you need real information.
Hey, if they only knew Visual Basic and were willing to commit Software Crime, Harrow council could crank the reference values down to zero and deny EVERYBODY their housing benefit.
From this, he reckons he can determine:
I have collected these claims across his Web site; I wonder if Harrow council is aware that exactly the same technology is being marketed as a "Love Detector"? Or that another company has ripped off the patent, and he warns buyers that theirs won't produce the advertised 85% accuracy, even though it's the same patent? This is scienciness, not science. But then, the point is to scare the poor.
Update: See here
But there was always the possibility that "Nemesysco" had hit on some kind of roaring king-hell breakthrough. Minitrue couldn't find a copy of the patent that covers their product; you might wonder why there wasn't a US patent if it's so great, or why every call-centre workflow system and high-end mobile phone in the world doesn't have it as a much-valued standard feature, or why Amir Liberman, the CEO of Nemesysco, isn't incredibly rich.
After all, he's been hawking it since at least 1998. His company was formed in early 2000, just a tad late for the joy of the .com boom; at the time they were marketing towards consumers and businesses. But, as the venture capital dried up, the stock exchange cursed everything to do with computers, and it looked like a whole world of vaguely technical young sheisters would have to get a job...something happened, and suddenly his product became "Israeli intelligence service technology" that would save you from terrorists.
There is no evidence that Tsahal or the intelligence services ever made use of it, but as reader Chris "Chris" Williams points, there is a certain mana attached to the Israeli military - link your product to them, and it gets just that bit badder. I tell you, it's the sunglasses.
So, let's cut to the chase. The patent is here, thanks to the Canadian government. The "claims" section described how it is meant to work - there's even an example implementation in Microsoft Visual Basic (you bastards). Here's how: it takes samples of speech and identifies "plateaus" - flat bits - and "thorns". Thorns are defined as:
A thorn is a notch-shaped feature. For example the term thorn may be defined as:
a) a sequence of 3 adjacent samples in which the first and third samples are both higher than the middle samples
b) a sequence of 3 adjacent samples in which the first and third are both lower than the middle samples
Now, all speech is roughly speaking a succession of sine waves; by definition it's going to fit this. Anyway, they take a control sample of speech, count the plateaus and thorns and compute the standard errors, then they ask the questions they want to test, and do the same thing. They then look at the difference between the values and compare them to reference values to tell if you're lying.
Where do these reference values come from? It is appreciated that all of the numerical values are merely examples and are typically application-dependent. So basically, the all-crucial message on the screen depends entirely on the sensitivity values you punch in to the thing; perhaps great if you're trying to bully some random Palestinian, but not so good if you need real information.
Hey, if they only knew Visual Basic and were willing to commit Software Crime, Harrow council could crank the reference values down to zero and deny EVERYBODY their housing benefit.
From this, he reckons he can determine:
Excitement Level: Each of us becomes excited (or depressed) from time to time. SENSE compares the presence of the Micro-High-frequencies of each sample to the basic profile to measure the excitement level in each vocal segment.He can apparently detect that all from a total of two measurements. Note also that there is no mention of Micro-High Frequencies in his patent claims; if they were particularly high, they would probably vanish in the band-pass filters above 3.4kHz....
Confusion Level: Is your subject sure about what he or she is saying? SENSE technology measures and compares the tiny delays in your subject's voice to assess how certain he or she is.
Stress Level: Stress is physiologically defined as the body's reaction to a threat, either by fighting the threat, or by fleeing. However, during a spoken conversation neither option may be available. The conflict caused by this dissonance affects the micro-low-frequencies in the voice during speech.
Thinking Level: How much is your subject trying to find answers? Might he or she be "inventing" stories?
S.O.S: (Say Or Stop) - Is your subject hesitating to tell you something?
Concentration Level: Extreme concentration might indicate deception.
Anticipation Level: Is your subject anticipating your responses according to what he or she is telling you?
Embarrassment Level: Is your subject feeling comfortable, or does he feel some level of embarrassment regarding what he or she is saying?
Arousal Level: What triggers arousal in the subject? Is he or she interested in you? Aroused by certain visuals? This new detection can be used both for personal use for issues of romance, or professionally for therapy relating to sex-offenders.
Deep Emotions: What long-standing emotions does your subject experience? Is he or she "excited" or "uncertain" in general?
SENSE's "Deep" Technology: Is your subject thinking about a single topic when speaking, or are there several layers (i.e., background issues, something that may be bothering him or her, planning, etc.) SENSE technology can detect brain activity operating at a pre-conscious level.
I have collected these claims across his Web site; I wonder if Harrow council is aware that exactly the same technology is being marketed as a "Love Detector"? Or that another company has ripped off the patent, and he warns buyers that theirs won't produce the advertised 85% accuracy, even though it's the same patent? This is scienciness, not science. But then, the point is to scare the poor.
Update: See here
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Register: pathetic tabloid hackery
The Register is all squashy on censorship - when it suits one of the million or so bees buzzing around their bonnet. So the Internet Watch Foundation (funded by News Corp) gets its knickers in a twist about a Wikipedia page and accidentally makes Wikipedia verboten for much of the UK.
And what do they have to say?
And what do they have to say?
Wikipedia isn't a user-generated utopia. It's a cultish self-contradiction that can't help but undermine its own idealsI've not quoted the links, but suffice it to say that they're to a pair of silly-clever "contrarian" opinion pieces that must once have pulled some traffic through the ads, just like their "contrarian" climate change denial turdery.
here, robot!
Very experienced soldiers don't like robots. I suppose you could ascribe this to conservatism, but then, the last eight years have been a global crash course in how people who tell you that this war will be different to what the old sergeants think are wrong.
Meanwhile, at Canon's main factory in Japan, the workers on the production line are served by robots. Rather, they don't have a production line - the robots bring printer parts to groups of workers who build them, working according to their own internal organisation, and then the robots take the finished printers away.
Did anyone foresee this? Being automated out of a job has been a reality for quite a lot of people, and a reliable demon in science fiction. But you what? Actual proletarians, line workers in light engineering, being served by menial robots? It's an idea which seems to include both an outdated vision of the future, the paleo-future as the twittertwits call it, and the future itself, at once.
I remember hearing someone say that there was a major difference between German and English in that in German, you bedienen a machine - you serve it. In English, you operate it. Of course, for the last 200 years we've all got used to work being a process in which people either serve machines or work on machines - whether they are power looms or spreadsheets.
But machines acting as teenage apprentices to people? Surely this is science fiction, but perhaps it fits with a world in which more production technology - RepRap, solar panels, many computer things - wanders back towards individuals while at the same time, consumption becomes industrialised. Rather than the traditional and wildly oil-piggish drive to the supermarket, they increasingly stack many loads in an electric van, turning the temples of consumption into picking centres, or perhaps in future, genuine markets?
Similarly, the barrage of advertising nonsense has reached the level at which people are thinking about automating their response to it through things like vendor-relations management and other means of bullshit filtration.
Meanwhile, US workers occupy a factory hit by credit crisis. What happens in a plant like Canon's, in a few years' time - if the robots want to keep going, or to stop?
Meanwhile, at Canon's main factory in Japan, the workers on the production line are served by robots. Rather, they don't have a production line - the robots bring printer parts to groups of workers who build them, working according to their own internal organisation, and then the robots take the finished printers away.
Did anyone foresee this? Being automated out of a job has been a reality for quite a lot of people, and a reliable demon in science fiction. But you what? Actual proletarians, line workers in light engineering, being served by menial robots? It's an idea which seems to include both an outdated vision of the future, the paleo-future as the twittertwits call it, and the future itself, at once.
I remember hearing someone say that there was a major difference between German and English in that in German, you bedienen a machine - you serve it. In English, you operate it. Of course, for the last 200 years we've all got used to work being a process in which people either serve machines or work on machines - whether they are power looms or spreadsheets.
But machines acting as teenage apprentices to people? Surely this is science fiction, but perhaps it fits with a world in which more production technology - RepRap, solar panels, many computer things - wanders back towards individuals while at the same time, consumption becomes industrialised. Rather than the traditional and wildly oil-piggish drive to the supermarket, they increasingly stack many loads in an electric van, turning the temples of consumption into picking centres, or perhaps in future, genuine markets?
Similarly, the barrage of advertising nonsense has reached the level at which people are thinking about automating their response to it through things like vendor-relations management and other means of bullshit filtration.
Meanwhile, US workers occupy a factory hit by credit crisis. What happens in a plant like Canon's, in a few years' time - if the robots want to keep going, or to stop?
G.729 and the welfare state
I was going to fisk the Government's depressing sudden love affair with the discredited nonsense of "lie detectors", but I see the Ministry has already done it. Go and read; it's an instant classic. And as a bonus, there's a great comment from the Great Simpleton, who you occasionally find in comments here, about some effects of telecoms infrastructure on the welfare state.
It's certainly all nonsense - the 3G voice codec, AMR Narrowband, includes a band-pass filter between 200Hz and 3.4KHz, as do G711 and G729, so the markers VSA relies on, which are to be found between 8 and 12Hz, will be undetectable on any current mobile or fixed phone. Even the AMR Wideband high-quality voice standard will pass nothing - the band-pass for that one is 50Hz-7KHz. Any sound that does turn up at the VSA, therefore, is an artefact of some kind - a stray cosmic ray, or the acoustic echo cancellation at the local exchange going out of kilter when it produces the synthetic network noise to reassure you the line isn't dead. (You might be advised not to Skype the benefits office - they're considerably wider band when they are comprehensible at all.)
To expand on my comment over there, though, someone already markets a voice-stress analyser application for Windows Mobile smartphones. It's probably mostly witchcraft and social engineering, but it's very likely easier to do the opposite; either filter out the frequency band that is meant to be the marker, which could maybe sound weird or be too obvious if you could hear it at all, inject noise into that channel, or create a synthetic signal. That would be the hardest of the three to implement, but it would provide some interesting affordances - you could choose to sound more untrustworthy. If you could hear it, that is.
The only thing this achieves, then, is to deny some people their bennies entirely at random. Which is, of course, a highly political act.
Update: See here.
It's certainly all nonsense - the 3G voice codec, AMR Narrowband, includes a band-pass filter between 200Hz and 3.4KHz, as do G711 and G729, so the markers VSA relies on, which are to be found between 8 and 12Hz, will be undetectable on any current mobile or fixed phone. Even the AMR Wideband high-quality voice standard will pass nothing - the band-pass for that one is 50Hz-7KHz. Any sound that does turn up at the VSA, therefore, is an artefact of some kind - a stray cosmic ray, or the acoustic echo cancellation at the local exchange going out of kilter when it produces the synthetic network noise to reassure you the line isn't dead. (You might be advised not to Skype the benefits office - they're considerably wider band when they are comprehensible at all.)
To expand on my comment over there, though, someone already markets a voice-stress analyser application for Windows Mobile smartphones. It's probably mostly witchcraft and social engineering, but it's very likely easier to do the opposite; either filter out the frequency band that is meant to be the marker, which could maybe sound weird or be too obvious if you could hear it at all, inject noise into that channel, or create a synthetic signal. That would be the hardest of the three to implement, but it would provide some interesting affordances - you could choose to sound more untrustworthy. If you could hear it, that is.
The only thing this achieves, then, is to deny some people their bennies entirely at random. Which is, of course, a highly political act.
Update: See here.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
bleg
Does anyone subscribe to this publication? I'd really like to see their story on Tomislav Damjanovic.
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