FEB 04
bugged ? yeah, so ?
( regarding the revelation that UN offices may have been bugged )
“Ah yes, it’s your first day here isn’t it?”
“That’s right, I came fro . . . “
“Very good , now listen. There’s something you ought to know before you start work.”
“Oh? What’s that ?”
“The office is bugged.“
“Bugged ?“
“That’s right, hidden mikes, phonetaps, e-mail and fax interception , the works.“
“But that – that – that’s terrible ! Have you complained ?“
“Good Lord no ! What would be the point ? Look, I could pick up the phone and have the office swept of devices - no problem – but they’d all be back by Monday morning ! Like trying to get rid of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.“
“But, That’s appalling! Does anyone know about this ?“
“Anyone know ? E v e r y o n e knows about it ! Well, everyone except ‘The Public’ of course . . .“
“So who’s doing it ?“
“Oh, you know, the usual suspects. The US, UK, Russia and a few paranoid little countries with oversized intelligence budgets.“
“But why ? Our work is made public anyway ! Why don’t they just pick up the phone and ask us what we really think !“
“Oh ! Ha ! They’re not interested in that ! They’re interested in the other stuff !“
“What other stuff ?“
“Personal stuff dear chap. Juicy stuff. Extra-curricula activities - and intra-curricula too come to think of it . . .“
“Errr ? . . .“
“It’s like this. We are a powerful organisation. Very powerful. Worldwide respect and credibility blah-de-blah. They don’t like us. We can block their policies if we see fit. But, if they know a few choice details about one or two of our more ‘imaginative’ senior colleagues, they’ve got us over a barrel haven’t they ?“
“Oh, err . . , I . . . see . . .“
“Yes. So, like I said old chap, bugged - don’t forget.“
“Er, just one thing . . where do we go if we really do need to have a private chat ? You know . . . “
“Well, personally, I always use the canteen, next to the espresso machine.“
“How d’you know that’s not bugged ?“
“Ha! Very drôle. I can see you’re going to fit in here ! Fancy a coffee ?“
“Cybercrime costing the UK billions”
– a headline from a technews mag recently proclaimed. The article wasn’t talking about direct financial rip-offs – but about the losses caused by downtime and system disruption due to v1ru5es. There’s always an enormous amount of exaggeration in the damage figures. After all, bigger numbers make bigger headlines, and also *more money for the companies who supply anti v1ru5 software.*
So, if you were given the task of calculating the actual financial damage done , how would you go about it ? It would be a bit like trying to calculate the damage done by traffic congestion in a busy city . . . You could make a guess, but since ‘that’s how things are, and that’s how they are going to stay’ what’s the point ? Without a radical re-design, the traffic congestion is always going to be there.
To spotlight the sillyness even more, why not also calculate the damage done to industry by badly designed software – operating systems in particular . . . I’d estimate that the damage done in terms of downtime, inefficiency, and plain old-fashioned computer rage, would be incalculably high.
As Tim Berners-Lee, the ‘father’ of the internet pointed out in a recent down to earth interview, v1ru5 infection could all but be eradicated with a few simple ‘low-tech’ steps. The vast majority of ‘infections’ are caused when employees double-click on programmes attached to e-mails. Why does the average office worker need to be able to run a programme which arrives as an attachment ?
They don’t. They need to be able to download and read docs, and look at data and images – but normally *they don’t need to be able to run downloaded executable files*. A simple fix to the e-mail reader software would stop most of the problems straight away. ( Obv. Tech employees / administrators could override the protection when needed )
Then you could easily find yourself reading the following headline . . .
“Simple fix which stops e-mail progs from running executable files saves the UK billions”
Only in your dreams.
P.S.
Hint for operating system designers . . .
Perhaps it might be a good idea if the average computer-user could *easily see if a file is an executable programme or not ?* Maybe? Don’t you think ? If the OS is deliberately designed to hide the file extension so that you can’t even see when a .exe file arrives, wouldn’t that be a little, you know, DUMB ?
To be filed under : You’re not going to believe this but . . .
Internet café’s are illegal in Greece. At least they are if anyone boots-up a computer game. A law introduced only two years ago banned public gaming in an attempt to stop gambling activities. Unfortunately, the boneheaded law-drafters ‘overlooked’ the fact that you can play games on a computer – so now internet café’s are caught in the net.
Dozens of arrests have been made, and café’s closed for months at a time.
It gets stranger still.
All the cases ( more than 50 ) which have come before the courts have, quite rightly, been thrown out. The police, however, continue to make arrests, saying that the café’s are often a ‘front’ for other illegal games dens.
The words ‘get’ and ‘real’ spring to mind. From one end of Europe to the other there is a seemingly unstoppable tide of corporate corruption, political corruption, and organised crime - but the Greek police decide to spend their costly time busting internet café’s. Purleese.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/
grey ( gray )
I wasn’t going to mention the ‘Grey Album’ , as it’s been well and truly covered just about everywhere. But the story has degenerated into such a farce I can’t resist it. To recap, here’s the timeline :
________________________
DJ Dangermouse creates a new album by sampling bits of the ‘Beatles White Album’ – and rapping over it.
Capitol Records ( EMI ) get annoyed because ‘he didn’t
ask permission’
( guess what they would have said if he had ? )
EMI tell him to stop
DJ Dangermouse apologises, and stops all activity
In the meantime, the tracks have ‘leaked’ onto the internet.
EMI’s lawyers send out ‘Cease and Desist’ letters to any websites they find offering the mp3’s
That creates a massive counter-action, there are now hundreds of protest sites carrying the tracks, ( and amusing copies of the legal docs ).
DJ Dangermouse and his tracks become famous.
_____________________
During the search-engine trawl for details, I accidentally rolled-over a hyperlink, and, guess what, before I knew what was happening, an mp3 had downloaded itself and went into autoplay. I found myself listening to ‘12_my_first_song.mp3’ . . .
With all due respect to DJ Dangermouse, I think it’s fair to say that the chances of his ‘Grey Album’ becoming a hit – without EMI’s help – would have been close to zero. He himself has said that he only produced it as an exercise for himself, family and friends.
Poor Dangermouse. As if all that weren’t enough, his name of course is also copyrighted as a 1981 UK cartoon character. Worse still, there’s *another* ‘Grey Album’ from 1999, this time with all original tracks, by a Beatles sound-alike band called ‘Backpack’
Anyway, many thanks to EMI’s Legal and Business Affairs dept for giving us all such amusement, and turning DJ Dangermouse into a hit producer.
Now I’ve got a dilemma though, I’m really not sure which I’d prefer to listen to this weekend :
Dangermouse, the ‘Grey Album’ (mp3’s )
‘Anne Widdecombe, in conversation’ (CD)
or ‘Hearing Mud Dry’ by GX Jupitter-Larsen & The Haters. (vinyl)
The first (?) Grey Album
http://www.landrock.com/grey/music.html
http://www.dangermouse.org/what.html
Widdecombe’s greatest hits.
http://www.politicos.co.uk/item.jsp?ID=3286
you chews
It’s raining today, and I’ve noticed, like many other such days, that there are less people in the street who are whistling a happy tune. I’ve taken records, and have found there is an undeniable positive correlation between the two factors. I therefore conclude that whistling clears away the clouds.
There have been a couple of ‘syuntific’ studies published recently
that are not far short of the foregoing in terms of cause / effect mis-logic.
Take for instance a recent study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden
which ‘shows an association’ between coronary heart disease and
oral health in women.
They found, for example, that in their group of patients with heart problems , 26% had dentures, whereas, in the healthy control group only 6% did. So it’s very clear isn’t it ? Dentures cause heart problems.
I ( obviously) haven’t read the report in full, but the website overview ( link below ) gives no clue as to the age of the individuals in each group, their lifestyles, their other habits ( smoking, drinking, high altitude rock-climbing etc ) so, it may be just a touch tenuous to claim that ‘there is an association’.
There could be of course, or there could not be. We don’t know. It could be that mouth-living bacteria somehow contribute towards damaging heart function – or not.
There was a similar study published a couple of weeks back which had ‘found an association’ between men who didn’t shave, and their risk of having a stroke. They found that men with beards are a staggering four times more likely to suffer - the implication being that gentlemen had jolly well better shave regularly if they want to stay healthy.
Or . . .
Scenario ‘B’ : Some individuals, who’s penchant is to sit
on a couch all day watching daytime TV, eating take-out pizzas and drinking
Chemo-Beer from a tin - oh, and forgetting to shave - are more likely to suffer
from circulatory problems . . .
I can’t really believe that the competent scientists who carry out this kind of study don’t realise that maybe, just maybe, although two things may tend to happen at the same time in the same circumstances, one doesn’t necessarily ‘cause’ the other.
I guess they have their mortgages to pay.
http://info.ki.se/article_en.html?ID=789
ouch !
The US national debt currently stands at $7,078,257,721,070.
Put colloquially, that’s $7Trillion . . . Ouch.
That figure won’t even fit into my calculator . . .
The numbers, as ever, are misleading though, because around 40% of the debt is owed by one part of the government to another part ( the federal reserve ). The *real* debt, i.e. the money owed to private banks and individuals , is *only* around $4.25Trillion.
At a very rough calculation, this means that every man, woman and child now owes around $14,000. Unfortunately though, not every man, woman and child earns money to pay back the debt. Let’s guess that only around half the total population earns; these individuals will, sooner or later, one way or another, have to find around $28K which has been borrowed on their behalf – that’s after they’ve paid all their living expenses, and, of course, their taxes.
This debt is real money, owed to real banks, and they really want to be paid back, one way or another, sooner or later. As far as I can see, there’s only three ways this debt will ‘go away’. One is if it’s paid back ( with interest of course). The second is if the economy collapses. And the third is for the government to borrow the same again from another source so they can pay back the first bunch. (as in “I’ve put all my credit-card debt onto one card “ ) . Know anyone willing to lend $7Trillion ?
Daily figures.
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm
yeah, right . . .
Maybe it’s a good time to buy, or build, a boat – Oh, and some skis. Here’s what yesterday’s Observer newspaper said : ( my quotes )
‘ As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.’
Now, I don’t normally indulge in wagers of any kind, but I’m willing to bet that the preceding statement is wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Daft, silly, alarmist and dopey. The sea level will not rise dramatically and cause major upheaval for millions as early as next year. Perhaps the journalists who wrote the piece forgot to include quote marks – the article is about a leaked US climate report – or perhaps they are living in cuckoo land ( where, as we all know, the sea goes up and down like shares in Paramlat )
The important factor in the equation is TIME. The sea-levels on the planet will undoubtedly go up, and they will undoubtedly go down, as they always have. But one thing is certain, the levels are not going to increase dramatically in a year or so. Maybe in a thousand years, or even in a hundred years – but 1 year ? Nah.
The same OTT report claims that :
‘European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020 ’
Well, at least *part* of that sentence is certainly possible, because the Gulf Stream, which helps to prevent the UK from having the same climate as southern Alaska ( which at the same latitude ), can switch off at any time. If it does, Europe will become very, very much colder – possibly even Siberian. *If* that were to happen, however, vast quantities of ice would cover northern Europe ( again) – but the water which forms the ice has to come from somewhere – where would it come from? It comes from the sea guys. Duh!
During the last ice-age the sea-level was an astonishing 130 Metres lower than it is today. The authors seem to think that we can be plunged into an ice age *and* have a huge sea-level rise.
Oh, I get it ! My clock’s stopped again, it’s really April the 1st isn’t it ?
very small waves
The debate about whether or not mobile phones and their associated transmission masts are dangerous rolls on – and on - and on.
Now MTHR ( Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research ) , which
is a UK governmentally-organised scheme, has just announced a ‘new’ study
into any medical effects caused by transmissions ( if there are any ) . Oddly,
they announced something pretty similar in March 2003, so presumably this ‘new’ study’ is
reinforcing the ‘old’ study - which is apparently not finished
yet.
There are now around 50Million mobile phones in the UK, and 35,000 base-stations – like, for instance, the ones on top of the Middlesex Hospital in central London. Each of these base stations costs a minimum of £50K, so we are talking big money here, £Billions in fact. If there was ever any scientific proof that they caused any health risks a lot of large telecom companies would stand to lose a lot of large money.
The MTHR is funded by central government – and industry – to the tune of £7M or so. Oddly though, their website appears to give no specific details of who the ‘industrial’ sponsors are, and how much they are contributing, ( perhaps I missed it ).
I did manage to find an insight into the ethos of the organisation though. The MTHR’s full title is the ‘LINK- MTHR’ ‘ LINK’ being the governmental dept which provides a bridge mechanism for industry to hook up with relevant research opportunities. Their website says :
“ LINK encourages innovative research . . . with good potential for eventual commercial exploitation”
rrr- - - ight.
Looking for further clues, I searched their ‘ Benefits to Researchers’ section, but no dice.
I searched their ‘ Benefits to Industry’ section ,ditto
I searched their ‘ Benefits to the Public’ section, er – no sorry, I didn’t – because there isn’t one.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see the MTHR report when it ( finally ) comes out – I wonder what the results will be ?
p.s. I’ve e-mailed the MTHR to ask them who’s funding the research : I’ll post the results when they reply . . .
UPDATE Feb 25th:
Guess what ? they didn’t reply to my e-mails, what a surprise . . . .
see:
http://www.ost.gov.uk/link
p.p.s The UK government runs a special website which allows concerned members of the public to check whether there are any ‘operational’ base stations in their area. The site is :
http://www.sitefinder.radio.gov.uk/
not gm
We’ve had blue ones, we’ve had fluorescent ones, er , what colour shall we try next ? How about purple ones ?
We are of course, talking tomatoes. Oregan State University have succeeded in producing a new tomato which contains high quantities of the chemical anthocyanin , the flavour-of-the-year purple chemical abundant in red wine – which is said to have huge health benefits. OSU’s Professor of Vegetable Breeding, Jim Myers, says that “Tomatoes are second only to the potato in terms of the top vegetable consumed in the world. . . "
Er . . . sorry professor, but strictly speaking, isn’t a tomato a fruit ? No matter, what’s refreshing is that this particular work was done by traditional cross-breeding rather than GM – so there are no ‘foreign’ genes ( or leftover bacterial ones ) in the new variety.
I haven’t checked the origins of the research about the benefits of anthocyanins, which are alleged to act as powerful antioxidents, protecting humans against heart disease, cancer, and aging. When I say ‘check’ I mean *find out who paid for* the research to be done . . . Just this once though , I’ll take the findings at face value, and will reluctantly follow the advice to drink more wine. Might even have a purple tomato with it.
p.s. The Oxford Dictionary says that a ‘vegetable’ is any plant, or part of a plant, which is used for food. So that means a grape is a vegetable too.
who cares ?
I was once present at a voice-over recording session ( don’t ask ) where a very well respected elderly lady actress from the UK – famous for her genteel, tongue-in-cheek, light-comedy rôles – was challenged on some point of pronunciation by the oh-so-keen session producer. Her reply was . . .
“ Oh, er, sorry dear, but I think you may be mistaking me for someone who gives a ***k ”
Perhaps the link is a bit tenuous, but it seems to strike a chord with yesterday’s entry about Green(er) cars. The point is, who cares ? If you happen to live in the US, not all that many apparently. The sales of gargantuan V8 powered SUV’s and similar vehicles has been *going up* now for three years in a row – according to Motown dealers. US automakers now incorporate V8 engines in an astonishing 30% of the passenger vehicles they make.
The V8’s, like the Dodge Hemi™ Magnum™’ tend
to be around 5,700 cc , and give you about 13 mpg in town, 18 mpg on those
wide open prairie roads. Here’s what Dodge’s website banners
say –
( presumably they were concocted by their ad.agency ‘Organic’.
. . )
‘Intimidation – It’s what happens to “toy” truck drivers when they see a 345 hp Hemi™ Ram 1500 in their mirror’
‘Hardened by years on the street. With it’s nasty reputation, nothing stands up to the 345hp Hemi™ powered 2004 Dodge Ram 1500. Nothing’
Well, there you are. They said it. It’s ‘nasty’. It’s unusual to see such refreshing honesty in a transnational corp don’t you think ?
Think I’m making it up ? see -
http://www.dodge.com
p.s. Comically, the same company which owns Dodge, Daimler-Chrysler, also owns the ‘Smart’ brand. The Smart cars go around four times further per gallon – but they’re v e r y small. Perhaps that’s why they have an ‘end-of-life’ button on the front page of their website - that’s for when one ‘o them big ol’ Hemi™ Ram 1500’s gits up behind ‘em boy ! . . .
More dirt
This time airborne dirt in the form of vehicle emissions. The ACEEE ( American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy ) has just published its findings for 2004. Unfortunately, if you want to see their listings for a particular model of car – you’ll have to pay. $8.95 for a 30 day subscription. But it does give you access to ‘Greeness’ scores for some 1700 vehicles.
Generously though, the non-profit org has posted a top ten list ( top 12 actually ) and also the tub’o’lard list. It’s very interesting reading. Not because of any brand-loyalty nonsense, but because of where the vehicles are designed.
The top twelve list comprises :
5 Hondas ,
3 Toyotas,
1 Nissan,
1 Mazda,
1 Scion (Toyota ),
and a Hyundai.
Indexed another way – that’s 11 Japanese and 1 Korean.
Any German ? Nah.
Any American? Nah.
Any British ? Nah.
So what’s going on ? Well it’s true that Japan has no oil reserves, so you might expect that they’d be a bit more sensitive about designing vehicles which don’t use much. But it also has to do with ‘Kaizen’ - the philosophy of continuos improvement. There’s half a world of difference between the ‘Kaizen’ culture and the ‘That’ll do’ culture of the West.
The truth is that the Japanese carmakers have been gradually tweaking and improving their designs – little by little, year by year – and are now streets ahead. They know that, no matter how well-intentioned the design, there’s always something that can be improved for the next model. When’s the last time you saw a European or American carmaker’s website with a ‘Philosophy’ menu button on the front page ?
The question is, how much longer will consumers put up with an inefficient, tub’o’lard in a pretty costume just because it’s built in Motown or Wolfsburg ?
They may be 4 x 4’s, but designwise they’re well and truly stuck in the mud.
d474
Know what ‘Dirty Data’ is ? No, it’s nothing to do with p07n, it’s just junk – rubbish – garbage – call it what you will. In this case it’s the nonsense collected by websites which insist that you have to register to view the site.
Of course there’s a world of difference between the data collected by small specialist sites and, say, very large online news portals. If you were interested in Madagascan lemurs, you may well register with a specialist site, giving your real name, interests, and e-mail – because you *want* other site visitors with similar interests to get in touch.
If however, you visit a portal such as, for example, the New York Times, why would you want to tell them :
Your name
Your age
Your sex
Your household income range
Your job title
Your country of residence
Your e-mail address
( Oh, and you’ll have to remember a Username and Password as well . .
. )
I guess there might be some insecure people ‘out there’ who derive a peculiar pleasure from knowing that their details are stored on some mega-corp marketing database, and who like the idea of giving out their e-mail address in the hope they get some more riveting promo-mail. But a good few visitors are just going to fill the boxes with pure nonsense, and then go on to view the newspaper – which was all they wanted in the first place.
The marketing suits who dreamed up the idea of insisting on registration are gradually coming to terms with the fact that they now have gigabytes and gigabytes of so-called ‘dirty data’. It’s so contaminated by dross that it’s essentially useless. Well Duh !
With luck, the managers of some of these portals will soon see the inherent daftness of on-line registration, and drag’n’drop the idea into the ‘Recycle Bin’
A password to read the newspaper ? Purleese !
congratulations
In 1973 Woody Allen made ‘Sleeper’, wherein his luckless anti-hero Miles wakes up in year 2173, two hundred years after he went into hospital for a ‘routine operation’. He then has to deal with ‘life-in-the-future’
Woody got his inspiration for the script from the astonishing book ‘ When the Sleeper Wakes ’ by H.G.Wells , written in 1899. He even went so far as to check the validity of the scientific concepts in the film with another visionary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He certainly did his research. But, when he penned the scene in which the ex-dictator is resurrected by cloning his nose, ( which was all that remained of him after an assassination attempt ) he may have thought he’d overstepped the limits of credibility.
He hadn’t.
Now, scientists at MIT have cloned a mouse – from adult nose cells. Congratulations to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research – who have shown us that the ‘Woody Allen Nose-Clone Conjecture’ is feasible - now we can all rest easy abed at night.
Here’s a quote from a 1974 student lecture by Isaac Asimov
“ . . . I hope you see a world in which mankind has decided to be sane. But I must say, in all honesty, that I figure that the chances are against it.”
You can / must read the ( out of copyright ! ) original story online at the link below. In it, H.G. previsions passenger aeroplanes, television and radar . . . ( not nose-cloning though unfortunately )
http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/sleeperwakes/
We’ve all seen the silly labels.
‘ Situate your product close enough to the telephone and mains sockets
so that the cable will reach them ‘ ( on a BT cordless phone
). Or
‘ Contents may be hot’ ( on a take-away coffee ). But I’m
beginning to wonder if bottled water should perhaps carry a warning label – ‘Excessive
water consumption can be dangerous, drink in moderation’
The prestigious US Institute of Medicine is now recommending that adult females should input 2.7 litres a day ! and males 3.7 litres !
3.7 litres ? Strewth ! For a Manhattan yuppie, that’s nearly four bottles of Perrier per day ! Can’t be right surely ? OK, they do point out that around 20% of the water intake comes from the water content of food, but that still leaves an adult male having to drink three litres during waking hours . . . Nah, I’m sorry - got to be wrong.
Before the IOM existed, i.e for about 2.5 million years or so, somehow, without the benefit of medical advice, our ancestors seemed to have an uncanny grip on the right amount to drink every day – it’s called being thirsty. In fact, there isn’t a single example of any animal alive on the planet today (outside Manchester) which doesn’t know how much to drink. If it didn’t, it would have become extinct millions of years back.
But, going back to the first para, water is, unfortunately, dangerous stuff. It’s one of those items, which, if invented recently, would definitely be forced to carry a warning label by the foodstuffs admin dept. Drinking too much water is extremely hazardous. Technically known as ‘hyponatremia’ It can cause irreversible kidney failure, coma, and permanent brain damage.
Healthy adults shouldn’t drink more than 20 litres per day – absolute max. That sounds like a ridiculously high amount - but it’s less than one litre per hour. Tragically, several deaths have recently occurred in weekend-recreational-drug users who over-enthusiastically followed UK government advice to ‘drink plenty of water’.
Athletes need to be pretty careful as well. A top racing cyclist was also recently killed by over-drinking. The USA Track and Field governing body (USATF) now offers the following incisive advice to long distance athletes “ (they) should consume one liter of fluid for every liter lost through sweating during a race, equaling a one-to-one ratio.” rrrrr-right , thanks for the tip . . .
So, if you happen to be in the 50% or so of humans who have access to clean drinking water, the best advice may be – ‘Drink sensibly, whenever you feel like it’ Tricky stuff water. Now, beer on the other hand . . . that’s a whole subject for another day . . .
The IOM report
http://www.iom.edu/report.asp?id=18495
hyponatremia
http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic1130.htm
More on software
Remember the big PR blitz three years or so back? Apple had decided to implement a rock-solid version of Unix as the unseen backbone for its new operating system ‘Mac OS X.’
Unix really is rock solid - or at least just about as solid as it’s possible to make a piece of software. It was written in ‘C’ rather than in the even more impenetrable machine code which had been used up until then to write operating systems. The designers obviously had a good grip on quality-control and reliability, but there are two fundamental reasons why it’s so stable – one is because it’s so old . . . The bugs have, in more than thirty years of commercial use, been ironed out.
The second is that it was developed for a high-end commercial environment. The technical support dept at the prestigious Bell Labs where it was developed, may have got a call from a computing professor at CERN particle physics lab, wanting to know why his results weren’t being parsed properly – rather than some dude at WalMart enquiring as to why his noughts-and-crosses game kept losing scores. Things got fixed fast and professionally.
Apple, on the other hand, started in about 1984, so they only had about fifteen years or so of development before the big switch over to Unix based code. Their Ad. and PR agencies certainly managed to get word out about the new software. Every tech magazine and newspaper reviewed and cooed about the news for weeks and months on end. Without mentioning the obvious implication . . .
Viz. that the Apple programmers had spent fifteen long years trying to get the core of their own proprietary operating system to work reliably – and gave up in favour of Unix . . .
To keep things balanced, let’s look at the pedigree of the other widely used desktop and laptop OS. This one was based on a MS-DOS, which in turn was based on Q-DOS ( Quick and Dirty Operating System ) *written in six weeks by one programmer* in the late 1970’s . . . Er, not quite Unix pedigree then ? To this day, it still suffers from some of the incongruities and inadequacies of the original.
Today, if you visit any company running more than a dozen machines of any flavour in their office, you can be virtually sure to find at least one playing-up and in need of an OS re-install. A process that can take up to two weeks ( in my case ) because all the settings and most of the other installed software gets trashed in the process . . . After you’ve reinstalled, you’ll need to apply the software patches ( bug fixes ) , and then the patches-for-the-patches. Whichever route you take, you’ll never end up with a machine which doesn’t trip over in some way every few hours.
Yes, the machines all have bells and whistles - they have bells , whistles, sirens, clappers, fairy lights, and disco glitterballs. But personally, I’m not interested in that stuff. I want a machine which starts quickly ( 10 sec max ), does the basics fast and with close to 100% reliability, and goes on for months, years even, without attention. It’s not an impossible dream.
The first company to make such a machine will make a fortune . . .
blackouts
As guessed-at in this site’s entry of 29th Sep, last year’s enormous electricity blackout in the New York has been finally diagnosed as probably maybe perhaps caused by . . . a software problem. Well well. Who’d have thought it ? It took rather a long time for the authorities responsible to admit, no not admit, to er, conject, that such a minor glitch could “contribute to” such an enormous problem.
That’s one of the enigmas with software. It ‘looks’ harmless, and, well, soft. But therein lies the danger. The managers who insist that systems are driven by unmonitored* software, have, in most cases, not the slightest flicker of understanding of it’s inherent vapidity. They just want to see the system working – once - and that’s good enough for them. Software control is Cool. It’s Moderne. It’s Empowering. And it’s flaky as hell.
Flaky enough to explode a multimillion € rocket on it’s launchpad ( Ariane 5 ). Flaky enough to put 50 million people in the dark for 30 hours. ( damage estimates $1B + ) . And easily flaky enough to drop a 1 ton ‘Daisy Cutter’ on a village instead of a munitions dump.
Enigmatically, although software is by nature soft, programming it in the first place is hard. Unbelievably hard. So hard in fact that it’s practically impossible for any human being to write more than a few tens of lines of complex code without errors. Our brains simply aren’t wired for this kind of task. By trial and error, we can get it to work, eventually, kind of, on a good day. That’s fine for a geeky computer game - not so good in the control system of a nuclear powerstation . . .
The bug . . .
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8016
A list of bug horrors . . .
http://wwwzenger.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/
* note. The minimum requirement for a substantially reliable method of software control is to have at least three computers, made by different companies, running three suites of software, written by different teams, in different programming languages. If, and only if, all three systems agree, is the command implemented. Anything less than this and you are going to be flying by the seat of your pants . . .
what's that smell ?
The EU is currently ploughing a rough patch - trying to decide on the level of it’s budget. Roughly 1% of the member countries’ GDP goes to the budget - doesn’t sound like much – but it amounts to about €100B - *almost half of which goes in agricultural subsidies*.
That’s a stonking *fifty thousand Million Euros* going to support the EU farmers every year. No other industry in history has ever come close to approaching that kind of subsidy. It’s pretty clear that without that money, most of the current EU farms would fold straight away. The price of food would skyrocket – to a level where farming could become profitable again.
Rocketing food prices and food shortages wouldn’t go down well with
the electorate, in fact, it’s one of the few things that could provoke
such fury from ‘the people’ that they might well remove the politicians
responsible by short-circuiting democracy in very dramatic ways.
The politicians are very well aware of this, and prefer to keep taxes higher,
and then pass on the ‘surplus’ to farmers – basically to
keep the punters quiet – and preserve their own jobs.
On the other hand, they’d also love to be able to reduce taxes – because
that has the opposite effect of making the legislators more popular. They’d
be more than happy to do away with the clearly ludicrous levels of subsidy – but
how can it be done ?
Well, suddenly, there’s a possible solution. There are ten new countries about to join the EU in May. Ten new countries with enormous amounts of under-used, perfectly farmable land. – ( oh, and cheaper labour costs – around 8 times cheaper in some cases !) The total amount of EU agricultural land will far far exceed the amount needed to sustain the population, which is stable, if not declining in numbers. But, most importantly, the farmers are not conditioned to getting paid luscious subsides every year . . .
So, all of a sudden, the politicians have found a way to escape the cleft-stick. In the years to come, there’s going to be an awful lot of picturesque ex-farmland in France, Germany, and the UK. And tens of thousands of far-from-happy ex-farmers in the ‘old’ EU, with a corresponding number of contented ones in the ‘new’ part . . . What are all the ex-farmers going to be doing ? How many paintball arenas, sheep-race tracks, and ‘awayday’ adventure-playgrounds-for-suits do we need ?
Something sure smells bad down on the farm.
Sashimi in Falafel to go . . .
Japanese servicemen are now, er . . serving, outside Japan for the first time since WW2. A small contingent has been deployed in Iraq to ‘help with reconstruction and medical care’ They will not, repeat not, be involved in any fighting ( unless of course they are attacked ). There has been a fair bit of controversy about the Japanese government’s decision to send them, and the authorities are obviously extremely touchy about it. Now, in a painfully p.c. move aimed at closer integration, the defence minister Shigeru Ishiba, has said that the soldiers should ‘behave and look more like the local population’.#
So, following his orders, they are now not allowed to eat pork, ( difficulty rating 4 ) ,
they are not allowed to drink alcohol ( difficulty rating 6 )
and they must try to grow beards an moustaches ( difficulty rating 9 ).
I don’t want to deflate Mr. Ishiba’s efforts, but however much wispy stubble the soldiers manage to sprout, they are never, ever, going to be mistaken for a local.
p.s. A few pointers: Japan has no oil reserves whatsoever. The first Gulf war
was largely bankrolled by Japan. They don’t like negative publicity.
This time they’re keeping a low profile . . .
duck !
Yesterday I went to the cinema. As usual, before the main feature we were treated to a series of promos for the upcoming attractions. I didn’t count them, but there were perhaps eight or nine trailers for new films.
The trailers, and, of course, the films they were advertising, were produced by just three companies, Paramount, Fox, and Sony. You could sit in that particular cinema for the rest of the Earth’s existence, and you’d never see a film by a small independent producer. No, this is the domain of the Big Boys – or more accurately, the Grey Men.
The first two companies are both controlled by septuagenarian media moguls, namely Sumner (National Amusements) Redstone, and Rupert (Fox) Murdoch. The third company’s CEO is a relative youngster, Nobuyuki Idei ,he’s only in his mid sixties.
Although, of course, each company has it’s management team, the fact is that, in practice, the boss gets what the boss wants. If the management team decided to stand up to Sumner’s or Rupert’s wishes – they might soon be head-hunted.
So you could say, that these three grey men, alone, were ultimately responsible for the programming at yesterday’s showing. And it seems that their preferences coincide quite remarkably . . . Of the trailers I watched, every one of them , and I mean *every one of them* , featured a gunfight . . .
So, are these three men personally obsessed with shootings? Or, would they simply say, in their defence, that they were merely giving the public what they want – a fine tuned distillation of years of marketing feedback - via ticket sales data ?
Either way – something’s up. Imagine the following scenario . . .
You are accidentally sucked into a spacewarp / wormhole , and find yourself on another planet inhabited by aliens. After a while, you discover that the alien’s main pastime is watching electronically generated fantasy visuals - which all feature the aliens killing themselves and each other - in the same way, with the same weapons, day after day, month after month, year after year. Wouldn’t you figure that maybe something’s gone just a little bit wrong in the brain-wiring department?
Perhaps, Sumner, Rupert and Nobuyuki are just trying to help. Providing a safety valve, a cathartic short-circuit which keeps violence off the streets by defusing it in the cinema seat or the TV armchair.
Yeah, things could be worse, in an alien world, the global entertainment industry could be controlled by a handful of cynical paranoid meatheads.
copy that !
The storm over digital rights management is not abating. And it’s not about to abate for a long while yet. The owners of copyrighted material didn’t have much of a problem with piracy until the technology arrived to make it easy and cheap to copy their product. Once the ‘easy and cheap’ methodology exists – that’s it. No amount of legislation, litigation, complaining, kicking and screaming is going to stop it. It’s tragically amusing to watch the efforts of the record industry standing on the edge of the shore and commanding the tide not to come in. Not far into the future, we’ll be able to watch the film industry doing the same thing.
The key to the ‘problem’ is the ability to make low-cost almost perfect copies – a truly revolutionising technique, and one which is at least 5 billion years old.
DNA replication. DNA can make almost perfect copies of itself for millions of years at a stretch, at incredibly low cost, and in prodigious quantities. ‘Copying’ , say, a plant variety couldn’t be easier – you just save some seeds and plant ‘em. But beware, because you could be breaking the law.
In the US, for example, the Plant Variety Protection Act makes it illegal for a farmer to sell-on ( or give away ) seeds of wheat varieties which have an ‘owner’ . . . The act was designed way-back to protect the interests of plant breeders, but suddenly, is taking on a whole new meaning. The GM industry is starting to get awfully twitchy about ‘ copyright infringement’ whereby naughty farmers actually have the audacity to keep and replant, and even sell-on, modified plant varieties . . Well Duh !
The mechanism for cheap and easy copying is well and truly established, and, luckily for us, works almost 100%. It’s incredibly easy to surreptitiously bypass the copyright laws – so obviously, it’s going to happen – bigtime. At the moment, the GM industry is adopting the same strategy as the record industry – find a few offenders, and very publicly throw the book at them. They always win the cases – until now.
But there’s one big difference between copying a CD and a stalk of wheat – the wheat stalk can do it all by itself ! Because of the GM ‘leakage’ problem , it will soon be possible for farmers to defend themselves simply by saying “ Nothing to do with me ! I didn’t plant the GM stuff on my farm – must be contaminated seed , or pollen-drift . . . “ Fair point - case dismissed.
So that’s the deal. If you want to make money out of some unique product, choose one where there is no free-and-easy method of cloning your idea – otherwise you may well find yourself standing on the beach with the music, film, and GM barons – taking a bath.
Flagships sailing around in ever decreasing circles . . .
Sorry to hear that Tower Records parent company MTS is filing for Chapter 11. ( The ‘Tower’ shops themselves may continue operations though, because ownership will probably transfer to the shareholders. ) Record industry-wise, it’s big news. But is it a big surprise ?
In fact, a large number of stores in the UK and Japan had already been sold by the parent company, but they continued to operate under the same name, and with the same ‘look and feel’. A ‘look and feel’ almost exclusive to Tower . . .
As an example, the huge Tower outlet in London’s Piccadilly
Circus.
When it first opened, a trip to the store was always a bit like entering another
world. A world where the normal rules of logic didn’t really apply. If
you were after a copy of Elton John’s greatest hits, or a Madonna compilation – you’d
probably find it straight away – in seven or eight different places scattered
across five floors. If, however, you were looking for something even a tiny
bit more obscure, something which didn’t have massive flavour-of-the-month
record-label marketing pressure behind it – well, best of luck.
If you couldn’t find what you were looking for, you could always join a queue for the helpdesk, and, eventually you’d get to the front and could engage in an ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ discussion with one of the assistants. Engaging, but more often than not fruitless.
Not far ‘up the road’ was another huge, but unrelated, establishment, this time selling books rather than records and CD’s. ‘Organised’ on much the same lines. You could spend hours browsing the store – but unfortunately never find the book you were after, although, tantalisingly, you could be virtually sure it was in there somewhere. The shop, which was also world famous, was called Foyles. It went bankrupt.
As mentioned above, the Tower stores still preserve some of the old charm – here’s a sort extract para from the current UK website . . .
“Pricing Error & Inaccuracy Disclaimer.
The information on the TowerRecords.co.uk Website may contain errors or inaccuracies
and may not be complete or current. We therefore reserve the right to correct
any obvious errors or inaccuracies and to change or update information
at any time without prior notice (including after you have submitted your
order) . . . “
Spot their unique take on customer relations . . .
P.S. The Foyles store is now under new ownership, is going strong,
and well worth a visit.
Another squint at the same idea
(i.e. previous entry )
“Ahhh yes, Smith isn’t it ? “
“Er, y . . es”
“Now , I expect you’re surprised to be here, but we have to keep things moving along you know . . “
“ Well I wasn’t really expecting . . .”
“Yes, yes, they all say that. Now let’s see . . . Aha! you were a ‘research chemist’ correct ? Had your own firm as well. Very good. Now . . Well, I must say your record looks very impressive. Exemplary almost. Says here you single handedly pioneered a cure for one of the nastier forms of cancer . . . then went on to set up your own marketing company for the new treatment, and made - well, made a small fortune it seems. Once you had enough to be comfortable, you started ploughing back the profits into philanthropic ventures . . . let’s see, schools, yes very good, a hospital, excellent, holidays for carers, excellent excellent. I see also that you helped to bring up a small, but charming and well-educated family, and even, in your spare time, managed to invent a particularly delicious new recipe for icecream, which, to this day, thanks to your royalty-free publication, delights children over half the world . . . Well Mr. Smith, it seems you led a very productive and concerned life, always doing the best you could to help, never tiring in the battle to improve, in a humble way, the lot of humanity ! . . . But you had to go and spoil it didn’t you ?”
“er sorry ?”
“ Did I, or did I not, instruct all my followers to wear a small sprig of parsley behind the left ear at all times whilst in public places ?”
“ er yes, but I thought . . “
“You thought ! That’s half the blessed problem with you damned human beings ! Look, when I command something, it had better be carried out ! Understand ? Or the consequences must be faced ! “
“But . . .”
“Enough Smith. Your soul is hereby damned for all eternity and you will spend the rest of existence in purgatory. NEXT ! “
Farfetching headdresses.
France banned teachers in schools from wearing headscarves, and other religious symbols, 100 years ago, now there’s a legal ballyhoo going on about whether students should come under the prohibition as well. If implemented, the ban will encompass ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols - presumably including headscarves, skullcaps, large crosses, and sprigs of mistletoe ( the Druids second favourite plant apparently )
Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, also has a ban in all public establishments, which, of course, includes schools. Now the whole of Germany is dabbling with the idea of banning them in all schools too ( as some municipal areas already do ).
Some may be wondering, ‘ well, frankly, who gives a **** ? and, furthermore, how could any person capable of joined-up-thinking possibly give an ounce of credibility to any God who gave a monkeys one way or the other ? An all-encompassing, omnipresent, supremely intelligent cosmic deity that gets all upset as to whether someone’s got the right shaped bit of cloth stuck on their head or not ? Purleese !’
Er . . . isn’t the basic foundation of most religions that we should pay attention to how we treat others, not to what we drape over our ‘all too human’ frames ?
Oh by the way, the German judges, who will be deciding the case, traditionally wear a fetching crimson gown ensemble, in gleaming satin, with white trimmings, topped with a matching crimson ‘pillbox’ hat, and co-ordinated accoutrements. Reizvolle Richter !
Who could possibly take them seriously otherwise ?
More patent nonsense.
The silly season in the patent offices never ends. Here’s a couple of patents mentioned in the media last week. First the Nap Hal patent which was granted to Unilever ( now Monsanto ) – for chapati flour. The ingredients of chapatis are traditionally wheatflour, water and salt. Not exactly high tech then . . . But, Unilever was granted a patent on a specific brand of wheat which it had ‘invented’. The second example was a patent granted to a Mr. Goldberg in 2001 which apparently covers ‘computer games played on a network’. Er, correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t people been doing this on a rather large scale since, oh, perhaps 1980 ?
If you have enough raw funds, you can patent just about anything. The patent offices of the world will bend over backwards to help you find a ‘novel’ aspect to your idea – providing you push wads of cash in their general direction. But when you finally get your piece of paper, it will, unfortunately mean zip - unless you can back it up with substantial legal muscle. Even then, you’re probably on shaky ground.
It occurred to me recently that, in general, all a patent proves is that you had a certain idea on a certain date. It *doesn’t* prove that the idea works, or that no-one had the same idea before you. But there’s another much cheaper, and quicker method of proving the date of your creative idea. And, traditionally, it’s legally recognised in court as evidence. All you have to do is post yourself a sealed registered letter carefully describing details of your idea. ( songwriters have been using this method for decades – they just post themselves a sealed copy of their latest masterwork ). Alternatively, you can lodge a copy with a trusted third party such as your bank or a solicitor. This will save you a minimum of £100K in ‘worldwide’ patenting fees – and approximately a ten year wait.
Should you ever need to use your ‘evidence’ to make some money from your idea, you will, of course have to spend a fortune on lawyers – just as you would have had to if you’d been granted a patent.
Personally, I have decided to patent my own DNA sequence, and I’m just off the Post Office to mail myself some toenail clippings – or maybe I should get the bank to look after them for me ?
let's have another inquiry !
( on the announcement of UK enquiry into Iraq 'intelligence' enquiry )
“ . . . but, what I *do* say to you is this . . . look, you know, . . . “
“Ahem ! . . . If I could interrupt your rehearsals sir . . . “
“Hmmmm, you again ! I feel another Public Enquiry coming on. OK, who shall we get this time ? “
“Well sir, we’ve had an ‘Old Salopian’, how about an ‘Old Harrovian’ ?”
“Harrovian ? . . er, that *is* a public school I hope ? “
“It was last time I checked sir “
“No-one from Fettes then ?”
“That may appear, ahem, a little too close to home sir “
“Well, er, anyway, Great idea! Anyone spring to mind ?”
“Well sir, there is one individual who may be of assistance . . “
“Excellent. He is, you know, er . . Oxbridge ?”
“Naturally sir”
“And he’s not, you know, a ‘she’, not a ‘he’ ? “
“Heaven forbid sir.”
“And he is a ’Lord’, obviously ? “
“Very much so sir. Thanks to *you* sir ! , if I recall correctly “
“Getting on bit then ?”
“Sufficiently senior to command respect, but not so advanced in years as to imply possible senility, sir “
“So, he’s, um, an old, old-boy ! A silver-spoon father figure – kind of ”
“I hadn’t considered it in precisely those terms sir . . . “
“Is he on our side ?”
“Well sir, let’s just say that the chances of him rocking the boat are close to zero sir.”
“How long’s it going to take ? “
“The enquiry sir ? Oh, several months I should expect sir “
“Hmmm, I thought so. That’s all very well, but, you know, how much is it all going to cost ? we need that money for ‘Edukayshun’ ! “
“Very drôle sir ! It’s hard to say, but I shouldn’t wonder if it could end up absorbing the greater part of some few millions sir. “
“And the hearings will all be held, you know, totally in private, right ?”
“Indubitably sir”
“Oh all right. Sort it. “
“Yes, Prime Minister ”
Update July 2004. The report has now been released, all 196 pages of it. So who was to blame ? well . . . Er . . . according to the the old boy . . . no-one really . . .
Well I never . . .
On the balance of probabilities ( probably )
A few days back I read / heard somewhere the definition of a Conservative
:
“ Someone who campaigns for civil liberties – after they’ve
been arrested”
I’ve got a new definition , this time for a Labour minister.
“ Someone who campaigns for civil liberties – until they get
elected”
Mr. Blunkett used to be that nice, quietly spoken, left-wing crusader –now he’s beginning to make Thatcher look like Michael Foot. He’s already in possession of a very large sledgehammer to crack some nuts, but the hammer’s evidently not gargantuan enough for his power appetite – more, more, bigger, tougher . . .
The sledgehammer in question is the ‘2001 Crime and Security Act’, which gives the UK establishment the power to arrest and imprison foreigners indefinitely, without trial – or charge. There are currently 14 individuals enjoying the hospitality of Blunkett’s sledgehammer. The evidence used to justify their imprisonment is examined in secret , and there is no right of appeal. The legislation means, in effect, that the UK government can lock someone away, and ‘throw away the key’ whenever they are ‘minded’ to do so.
But these powers apparently aren’t enough for Mr. ‘God Save the Queen’ Blunkett. ( see 30th Dec 2003 ) Now he’s announced that he wants to reduce the evidence needed to hold someone from “Beyond all reasonable doubt” to “On the balance of probabilities” . Since the ‘evidence’ isn’t going to see the light of day for decades anyway, what’s the point ? The point is Mr. B can make himself look even more ‘Rough ‘n’ Tough’ . . .
Most so-called ‘developed’ countries have concocted special laws which will allow them to lock-up undesirables permanently without trial or appeal. Right now, the UK has at least three legal methods of doing so.
Half a century or so ago, a journalist asked Mahatma Gandhi ( 1869-1948
) what he thought of Western Civilisation he replied . . .
“ Yes, I think that would be a good idea “
I rest my case.
Notes:
The 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act ( Labour )
was used to lock-up dozens of mainly Irish individuals without trial or appeal
on a semi-permanent basis. Public domain Home Office papers now
reveal that 97% of them were innocent.
The Act, which had to be renewed every six months, lasted for twenty six years, until it was replaced by the even more draconian :
Terrorism Act 2000 (Labour )
Which is so vague and wide-ranging it has allowed the UK police to arrest anti
GM protestors and anti-Arms-Fair campaigners on the basis that they are ‘Terrorists’.
Then there is the :
2001 Crime and Security Act (Labour )
Same as above, but for foreigners.
OK Ghadaffi, game’s up, hand over all your saucepans.
( Lybia had just announced weapons compliances )
An old story surfaced again last week. On Thursday the BBC carried the headline “Frying pan fumes 'kill canaries' ”. The report highlights comments from the ‘Worldwide Fund for Nature’ which say that pet birds are being killed by mysterious fumes caused when non-stick frying pans overheat . . . The confused, and confusing, BBC report says that even more mysterious ‘perfluorinated compounds’ are to blame. Presumably, they’re talking about PTFE, commonly known as Teflon™, a trademark of DuPont.
The story that the fumes from PTFE can kill parrots, budgies and some other birds, has been around for at least 30 years. I’ve never mentioned it here in the site, because it does have a kind of ‘urban myth’ flavour about it. Potential evidence does seem to be growing though. Thanks to the www, there are now hundreds of sites which relate problems - many with quotes from very unhappy ex-parrot owners.
DuPont , however, sees things differently, and vehemently denies that the non-stick coating causes any problems. Their site says that “the only toxic thing is the overheated rhetoric” , so no one could accuse them of lacking a sense of humour.
Perhaps not so amusing though, is the number of entries that the chemical has at ‘Toxnet’, ( The US National Library of Medicine’s Toxicology list ) there are currently 1408 for PTFE and related compounds . . . Hmmmm.
For the time being, perhaps parrot owners should move their birds out of the kitchen – thinking about it, should they be in there in the first place ?
The BBC’s half baked story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3441255.stm
DuPont’s handle on it
http://www.teflon.com/Teflon/
PTFE according to the Environmental Working Group
http://www.ewg.org/reports/pfcworld/part8.php
The US National Library of Medicine ( search for PTFE )
http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/
P.S. Some curious notes about PTFE.
( PolyTetraFluoroEthylene )
Contrary to the popular myth, it has nothing whatever to do with the ‘space race’. So next time somebody says
“ Yeah, sure, it cost a lot of money, but there were important tech spin-offs, you know, the space race did give us, erm - you know, non-stick pans ” – you can politely correct them – preferably with the aid of a frying pan.
It was discovered by accident, some 30 years before NASA, when a researcher found a peculiar greasy white sludge in the bottom of a chemical tank. It was investigated, and found to be extraordinarily frictionless, almost entirely chemically inert, and also fairly heatproof. At the time, in the late 1930’s, it was totally unique - there were no other compounds around with these properties.
It was immediately requisitioned by an ultra-secret military department, who used it to solve a crucial problem they were having with the machines needed to manufacture a device they called ‘The Gadget’ - also known as the atom bomb. PTFE played a literally pivotal rôle in changing the course of history - in a very dramatic way. Predictably, DuPonts’ squeaky-clean Teflon™ history webpages neglects to mention this . . .
Later, DuPont started marketing the substance under the name ‘Teflon’ – short for ‘TetraFluoroLondon’ ( from the ‘tetra-fluoro’ part of the name – and the ‘Lon’ from ‘Nylon™’ another DuPont trademark. The name ‘Nylon™’ was derived from ‘New York’ and ‘London’, DuPonts head offices at the time. )
I'm on the bus
Another glamorous new piece of software is revealed to help in the ‘fat ginst terrism’. This one’s called MetaCarta, and it - “searches through thousands of text documents, and cross references them with a geographical database.” Thereby helping the security services pinpoint unwelcome individuals.
I couldn’t help noticing the use of the phrase ‘text documents’ in the P.R. blurb which, it seems, the BBC, CNN, The Economist, New York Times, and Washington Post have helpfully regurgitated. So, the software doesn’t do some sort of real-time webtracing of the sort that’s so common in every spook movie or TV prog you’ll ever see. No, it just searches through dumb old text files, and tries to find mentions of place names. Hmmm, not exactly at the bleeding-edge of Artificial Intelligence research then ? More like a text search through a telephone directory. Vaguely useful perhaps, if you were dealing with underworld individuals who were idiotic enough to reveal their whereabouts – by sending an e-mail, or posting a web entry – and *telling* everyone where they are. . .
Let’s say you were a recalcitrant nogoodnik bent on activities so seriously nefarious that they could destabilise entire countries, and you’re based in Geneva, Switzerland. Would you be likely to say, in every e-mail you send, “Oh by the way, the weather here in Geneva Switzerland, where I’m staying at the moment, is a bit cold again.” What are the chances that you’d post a web message which mentions “Soon, the street where I live, Lieberstrasse 14, Geneva, Switzerland, CH14-00345 , will be bathed in the juices of the infidels ‘
Perhaps I’m overestimating the intelligence of the ‘targets’, but wouldn’t they tend *not* to mention where they are in any comms they send ? Or give some bogus location? Or just spell the location phonetically so the search algorithms won’t find it ?
The company’s slogan is ‘Intelligence for an intelligent world’, Which would be a very nice idea.
Oh, and by the way, should you wish to contact them, my in-house A.I. fractal degrees-of-separation neural-network node-linker software has determined that they are probably based in Massachusetts, somewhere in the vicinity of Cambridge +- 3Km.
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