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A geeky rant that non-geeks really should read

Nice to see that this is finally getting some press...

Tesco web security 'flaw' probed by UK data watchdog, BBC News
Tesco face enquiry over 'lousy' website security, Telegraph

So what's happened? Basically, Troy Hunt, a software architect, discovered a flaw or two in Tesco Online's security a few weeks back. Geeks can read the whole thing here but for the non-technical, if you use Tesco's website your password is being stored on their server in a decryptable way. This is actually provable - go to any website you have to log into, and use the password recovery function. If the function resets your password to something random or allows you to change it to something you can remember, that's good. If it emails you your password, then that's a broken system. Tesco does the latter. If a website stores passwords on a server (which Tesco must do, in order to email it to you) then all it takes is one hacker to get in and all the passwords are compromised. The story has been picked up by numerous IT professionals - including the CTO of Sophos, Graham Cluley - all of whom criticise Tesco's security.

So all Tesco have to do is start encrypting their passwords server-side, and this whole problem will go away. Instead they came out with this tweet:"Passwords are stored in a secure way. They’re only copied into plain text when pasted automatically into a password reminder mail."

This might calm the layman but everyone with even the basic knowledge of computer security will read that sentence and scream at the insanity of it. It's physically impossible to copy a password to plain text if it's actually stored securely. Secure password storage means one-way irreversable encryption (known as 'hashing').

If that didn't annoy me enough, this tweet was the nail in the coffin..."We know how important internet security is to customers and the measures we have are robust." Which is basically the Twitter equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la I'm not listening."

OK, so Tesco hasn't been hacked. But that doesn't matter - the world now knows that their security is crap, so 10 to 1 there are already malicious hackers targeting them. And when they get in, because Tesco don't hash their passwords, your security as a customer is at stake, and Tesco will only have themselves to blame for sticking their heads in the sand. Letting a massive security flaw like this lie is like not locking your front door when you go out. Sure, you may not get robbed for years but the one day that the burglars do come, they'll get away with everything with very little effort.

There is no such thing as too much security... and no amount of security is ever enough. Especially when you're trusted with the details of thousands of innocent customers.

Aaaaaaaghecho!

Dad collapses after bite by UK's most venomous spider, the fake widow

Why don't the Echo bother to even get the basic facts before writing an article? The only actual facts in this one are that a bloke was bitten by a spider, several times, and then later fainted in Toys R' Us.

The article states that "Mr Galton said hospital staff identified the trapped spider, whose body was bigger than a 5p coin, as a fake widow" Or, to put it another way, a man who isn't a vet said that some people who also aren't vets said the spider was a fake widow. Its body was bigger than a 5p. Hate to be a nit-picker, but lots of spiders are bigger than a 5p, 5ps aren't really all that big. Also, there's no such thing as a fake widow. There is a phrase "false widow", but it's not actually an arachnid species, it's a phrase used to describe one of a variety of species commonly mistaken for a black widow. The article admits later on that the spider itself has yet to be formally identified, so in conclusion, nobody yet knows what type of spider it was, or indeed if it was even the spider's venom that caused the man to faint. Which makes the headline "UK's most venomous spider" a bit of a stab in the dark really.

The second piece of fiction: "It delivers enough poison to cause severe pain and inflammation.". Well as we've already established that any so-called facts about the spider in the article are now null and void because nobody even knows what type of spider it was, I should really have stopped criticising by now. But once again I must be pedantic, because spiders aren't poisonous, they're venomous. Poison is generally inhaled or ingested leading to unpleasant chemical reactions, but venom is injected directly into the blood, causing pain in smaller doses and impairment of essential bodily functions in higher doses. Although the symptoms described are typical of a good dose of spider venom, this guy was apparently bitten 10 times by this spider before he fainted, so in fairness, it probably wasn't a very venomous spider if it took that many bites just to cause him to lose conciousness.

By the way - I'm not claiming to be a spider expert. There are many things I don't know about spiders. But I can confidently say that everything in this blog post is the product of either my own knowledge or a small amount of research into the subject. Unlike Mr. Echo reporter who has clearly written an article off the top of his head, without so much as a google search. Annoyingly, he's being paid and I'm not. But the real reason I'm going on about this is that it pisses me off when spiders get a bad reputation, especially when almost all of them (especially in the UK) are completely harmless. All spiders are venomous, but most spiders only bite as an absolute last resort, and when they do, they rarely bite hard enough to puncture human skin. Yes, it's possible that this spider is a special case - maybe it's an exotic spider that escaped from somewhere - but don't believe everything you read about spiders, especially badly researched and factually inaccurate pieces of garbage like this article.

Amateur

Some of you will remember the work of art I made in my parents' back garden last year.

Someone else has gone one better [clevescene.com]. Not only is the cock 7 feet tall, dwarfing my pathetic 3-foot effort, it's in a front garden in full view of the roadside. Now the neighbours are complaining. Which is odd, because when my mum showed the woman across the road my artwork her comment was along the lines of "I wish I could find one that big".

Cookie the Ticklish Penguin

This may very well be the cutest thing I've ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wTWWjYTe1I

Dagenham's Finest

OK, so there I was, watching Dancing on Ice for no obvious reason other than the fact that it was on and other people in the room were watching it. I actually find the show funnier than X-Factor or any of the other trashy ITV weekend moneyspinners purely because of the announcer and his blatently made-up-on-the-spot names for the dancers' moves.

Excuses for watching bad telly aside, I was blown away by a particularly surreal moment during the show. Usually when a celeb has performed, they cut away to someone related to the celeb or ice skating in general for a few soundbites. For no immediately apparent reason, they cut to Stacey Solomon. Now, for those unfamiliar with Stacey, she's a rarity - a reality TV star that I really like, and not in an ironic way, I genuinely think she's wonderful... watch this video and you'll see why. Yes, she is always like that. I'm sure there was some reason they cut to Stacey (other than to make the show more interesting) but I couldn't really think of one. So there we were, watching some supposedly serious ice-dancing routines and suddenly we get an earful of Stacey for a few seconds before cutting back as if nothing happenned.

So this made me think. I'm always thinking of ways that TV can be improved in order to make it more interesting, from filming the weather in front of a live studio audience to sports commentary by the cast of Rainbow. Sometimes my dreams come true (thanks to the power of YouTube), but not often. However, inspired by this Sunday's moment of madness, I have a new idea. I think that every time the BBC or other news service can't find a suitable person to comment on a breaking news story, rather than do what they currently do and ask a self-professed expert who clearly has no idea, they should simply say "and for comment, here's Stacey Solomon". Stacey can then give one of her typically excited performances with regards to whatever's going on in the world. Imagine it... "A suspected suicide bomber has been arrested near Buckingham Palace, over to Stacey Solomon for her comments..." "Oh mah gawd, it's awful! There was this bloke yeah and he was gunna blow himself up... I was terrified!" TV would be 100 times better... I'd pay my license fee for that alone.

Daleks!

It appears [Youtube] that you will soon (if not already) be able to purchase a motorised inflatable dalek.

I can't be the only one watching this video and thinking "race".

Do unto others

This [BBC] is brilliant. The council of Shoreditch are trying to close some of the town's many strip clubs but they've met with some opposition... from the local vicar no less. He doesn't comment on his own opinion of strip clubs, but he does point out that closing them will do more harm than good because as long as there's a demand, supply will simply go underground. According to the report, he's even accused the council of "wrongly trying to impose a moral code on local people". In these troubled times when racial tensions are as high as they are, I for one am greatful for confirmation that it is possible to believe in a religion without being a bigot.

Drugs are bad, mm'kay

OK, so while I obviously applaud Labour MP Bob Ainsworth's recent argument [BBC] for drugs reform, I can't help but be slightly annoyed that he's left it until now to say anything about it. It's a bit rich to start coming up with radical and controversial schemes when you're the only major party who doesn't make up part of the government.

Essential Listening

Last week, the BBC broadcast a wonderful documentary on Radio 4 about so-called "islamophobia", how the gutter press are making the problem worse by spreading lies and hatred, and how the PCC are pretty much powerless to stop them. It covers everything from the english defence league to the now famous 'winterval' myth, and describes how certain tabloids manage to turn non-stories about swimming pools and extractor fans into anti-muslim propaganda.

For those in the UK the show is available on iPlayer, and I couldn't recommend it highly enough, especially if you read and believe stories printed in newspapers.

Eurovision

Oh my fucking christ... Ireland have only gone and entered Jedward for Eurovision [BBC].

Extreme Farming

Firefighters battle 100 tonnes of horse manure after tractor explodes [swns.com]. It doesn't get much more rock and roll than that.

Faking it on TV

Seems like my blog's becoming more and more like the telly these days - full of repeats. I will remind you of this post from 2007 which illustrates my complete inability to give a shit that what we see on telly isn't 100% factually accurate.

Now there's this little incident. For those who don't follow things like this, there was a segment in one episode of the recent documentary series Frozen Planet in which a scene of a polar bear in the wild cut to a scene showing some cubs being born, before cutting to a scene of some cubs leaving the nest for the first time. The BBC was very clear on their website that the scene of the cubs being born was filmed in a zoo, and gave good reasons for doing so - it would be impossible to get such a shot in the wild because the polar bears don't build their dens, they simply lay in a snowstorm and let nature do the work for them. Any attempt to put a camera in the den after it's formed will prompt the polar bear to eat either the cubs or the cameraman. So basically the BBC made the decision, rather than to omit a large chunk of video, to show a short scene of some cubs being born in captivity. Many of the non-BBC media evidently consider this cheating.

It's worth noting that these things happen all the time in nature documentaries. Just looking at Frozen Planet, there are scenes early on in the series that show ice melting, filmed as time lapses. You could argue that this is 'fake' because it's not showing the ice melting at the speed it really does. But ask yourself - would you really want to watch hours of video of ice melting? No, didn't think so. The point is that it doesn't matter if the shots are edited, it's damn good telly.

It's also worth mentioning David Attenborough's previous series, Life. There was a whole episode about plants and the best shot of the entire series, in my opinion, was completely 'faked'. There's a wonderful 30-second scene of a woodland 'coming to life' as plants grow in speeded-up motion. Obviously they couldn't do a time lapse in a genuine wild wood, so they painstakingly recreated the wood in a studio and filmed the scene twice - once in real time on location and then again over the course of an entire year in a studio against a green screen. They then later blended the two shots together to get the finished scene. In the behind-the-scenes footage it shows how they had to ensure that the path of the camera was identical in both instances, how they had to time the plants to grow at just the right times while the camera was on them, and how they had to make sure that the studio scene was identical to the location shot to the centimetre. The shot lasted 30 seconds and took two entire years to plan, set up and film. The end result was a completely 'fake' scene which looked absolutely beautiful and was far harder to produce than any genuine footage could ever be. Is this also 'cheating'? Or would you prefer to see just a 30-second real-time shot of a wood sitting there and doing not very much?

The fact is that TV isn't supposed to be real, it's supposed to entertain. And, my views on polar bears being kept in captivity aside, I personally was very entertained by seeing a little baby polar bear cub in a den with its mother. The experience would have been lessened if the shot had been missed out, or if they'd flashed up a warning on screen to say "by the way, this shot is filmed in a zoo".

So why is this series getting so much stick in the first place, I wonder? Could it be something to do with the fact that the final episode of the series is the first bullshit-free documentary on the effects of climate change that I've ever seen, and that certain people want to discredit it? Hmm.

Fox News Foreign Policy

Despite international coverage in the New York Times and CNN, the Murdoch-owned Fox News has so far ignored the News International phone scandal apart from to confuse it with the Anonymous/Lulzsec-style hacks and therefore implying that the News of the World is actually the victim of a data theft attack rather than the perpetrator.

According to the Guardian, they have now broken silence courtesy of everyone's favourite shouty man Bill O'Reilly.

You know look, people are exploiting this situation. It is a bad situation, anyone who broke the law should be held responsible. Everybody knows that. Journalists are citizens too. We break the law, we should be held responsible for it. But here in the United States there isn't any intrusion of this story thus far on News Corp properties, none! Yet you have the New York Times absolutely running wild with the story, front page, front page, front page, column, column, column, vicious stuff and ah it's all ideological! Is it now?

Ah, good old Fox News. Only reporting stuff from the US and countries it's at war with :)

Gibberish

By now, most of you will have seen this [YouTube], it's LA reporter Serene Branson fumbling over her words while introducing an award ceremony on live national news. If you haven't, it's extremely funny, watch it.

Now let's go into depth... I'm quite annoyed at the media attention that this got. Everyone seems to be in one of two camps: the ones who don't realise it's medical and simply find it funny, and the ones who have realised there was a medical reason and are now assuming that she had a stroke, or something far more serious. Take it from me - she was having a migraine. Being a migraine sufferer myself, I know quite a lot about them.

Actual migraines only affect around 1 in 8 people and the vast majority of people claiming to have a 'migraine' are actually just having a bad headache. It's similar to the way that people walking around complaining of flu actually just have a bad cold, they've just never had real flu so they don't have anything to compare it with. So because the majority of people have never had a migraine, there's this common misconception that they're simply bad headaches, which simply isn't true. Migraine sufferers experience loss of vision, loss of feeling down one side of the body, inability to speak, inability to concentrate and increased sensitivity to light or sound, and that's in addition to a sometimes crippling headache. The symptoms are very similar to those of a stroke, apart from the fact that the sufferer normally recovers completely with little or no medical attention.

But while I am slightly annoyed at the complete lack of knowledge that supposedly well-researched news coverage, as well as the general public, seems to have about a common yet potentially disabling condition, I'm somewhat glad that something like this has happened in the mass media. Maybe a few more people will start to understand from now on that migraines aren't just bad headaches.

Going Backwards

Those who weren't familiar with the Blackberry Messenger service (BBM) before the recent civil unrest are probably familiar with it now. It's basically a text message service exclusively for Blackberry phones, but it's free to use. Which, I guess, is a plan that's working for RIM, the company behind the Blackberry brand, because I'm seeing people swapping BBM numbers on Facebook just as much, if not more than their mobile numbers these days.

A less successful 'brand exclusive' communication medium is Apple's Facetime. It's a method of making video calls between iPhone 4 devices. It's not quite as popular as BBM, firstly because of the restrictions (you need an iPhone 4, the other person needs and iPhone 4, and you both need to be in range of a wifi access point because it refuses to work over 3G) but also because people don't like video calls. Proof of this is in the fact that every halfways decent phone for the last five years (except the iPhone) has had video calling functionality, and people simply don't use it - even though the functionality of the universal service works between different makes of handset and also over cellular.

But Facetime and BBM both do something which I consider quite dangerous... they replace a universally accessible service with an alternative that's restricted to one make of handset. Facetime replaces video calling with a system only available to iPhone users, and BBM replaces universal text messages with a system only available to Blackberry users. It doesn't stop there... Facebook have announced an application for mobile messaging, and there are rumours flying around that Google are about to release their own closed messaging system to tie in with Google Plus.

Now, make no mistake, I strongly dislike text messages. People's attitudes towards them are wrong - if you send a message via SMS and get no reply it's far more likely that the message hasn't got to its destination yet, but many assume it's the recipient being rude. Also the cost is outrageous. It's around 10p for a single message, 140 bytes, depending on your network. That works out at £714.29 per megabyte, and to the phone company that's almost pure profit. I get 500MB per month for a tenner on my current data plan, and the phone network are making a profit out of that. The same amount of data would cost me over £357,000 to send via SMS. If you have a contract with 500 text messages, that's only actually 70K of data, so compared to your data allowance the text messages should be pretty much free. Personally I'd love to see a world in which everyone drops text messaging and starts using mobile email instead - it's cheaper by far, even if you're on a flat rate contract, it's easier to filter for spam and unwanted communications, and people know not to expect an immediate reply.

But all that said, I'd rather have text messages as they are today than go back to the bad old days. Remember when text messaging was a new thing? You could only send messages to people on the same network as you, so you had to make sure you bought a phone on the network most of your friends were on, even if that network wasn't exactly what you wanted... it was a pain in the arse. By segregating messaging systems by OS, by handset manufacturer or by social network, we're basically going back to the way things were in the bad old days of mobile messaging. And that's not a good thing.

Guitars are so last year

It's Rock Band III... making the keytar cool again. [arstechnica.com]

Heir Hunters

So this is interesting...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/heirhunters/emails.shtml

According to the BBC, scam artists are now posing as researchers from BBC's "Heir Hunters" TV show in an attempt to pull of what basically amounts to advance fee fraud (aka a '419 scam'). I've been meaning to moan about Heir Hunters for a while, so this kinda gives me the perfect opportunity.

Heir Hunters, for those who don't know, is a reality TV show that follows various teams of lawyers and geneologists who make their living by finding the relatives of people who have died without leaving a will and assisting them in claiming their inheritance in return for a percentage of the payout. They point out various times throughout the show that if claims to a recently deceased person's estate aren't made within a certain amount of time the full value becomes the property of the treasury.

My first point: personally, had I never seen Heir Hunters and I got an email or other form of communication informing me that someone I'd never heard of has died and I'm in for a payout, I'd have simply ignored it, assuming it's a scam. It's odd to think that this is a genuine business practice in today's relatively security-concious world. But the thing that annoys me most about Heir Hunters is my second point: like the ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers who frequently advertise on daytime TV, Heir Hunters are basically encouraging selfish people to screw over the majority.

Don't get me wrong - if a parent dies and leaves his or her children a fortune I have no problem with that. Direct descendents and relatives are generally very close and although nothing can replace a lost parent, the inheritance will always be welcome. But this doesn't need a team of researchers to accomplish, it's an open and shut case that if a parent dies without leaving a will it goes to the spouse or children. The people on Heir Hunters are basically looking for people who are so loosely related to the deceased as to have never heard of them. Why do these people deserve any kind of payout? Call me a communist if you like, but I'd much rather that money goes to the treasury than to some one lucky individual. That's what the lottery is for. In a time when the government is claiming (dubiously, but that's another argument) that there's not enough cash in the kitty to fund essential services like hospitals and schools, surely any extra cash the treasury gets is a good thing?

So basically, what I'm saying is: if I get any communication from someone claiming to be an heir hunter, I will always ignore them. If they're lying, I'll end up being scammed. If they're genuine, I'll end up shafting the country's economy. I'd rather neither of those things happen thank you very much.

Help, help, a rodent bit my penis

It gets no better [BBC].

I don't remember that bit in the original

Historic flight re-enactment ends up in the poo [ABC Australia].

A pilot recently attempted to recreate the world's first controlled, powered flight, which was made way back in 1910. After a number of technical difficulties, the plane landed in a 20-tonne pile of chicken shit that just happened to be along the edge of the runway. You can't make this stuff up.

I may have been a little hasty

I have argued many times that 3D movies are a complete waste of time and money, and that no movie can possibly make me want to go and pay an extra premium on top of the already high ticket price - not to mention an extra quid for a packet of ibuprofen - just to see it in 3D.

That was before they announced Jackass 3D...

In Related News

Here's an unexpected cameo by the queen in a Telegraph story about spanish prostitutes.

(Here's a link to a local screenshot in case they take it down)

It's a cow

You know that advert for yoghurt with the cow who wants to be a horse running down the beach in slow motion with an 80's power ballad accompaniment?

Now, apparently, they can do showjumping too [telegraph.co.uk].

It's your own fault you got conned

A few weeks ago, a blog post started doing the rounds on Twitter.

http://andy-welch.tumblr.com/post/56687596225/wont-get-fooled-again

This is the blog of Andy Welch, a music journalist. I suggest reading the post before continuing to read this, but if you just want a summary, he was conned out of money by some very clever fraudsters.

Of course immediately every self-dubbed 'expert' went into overdrive, analysing the con, placing blame, criticising banks, security and, I'm sorry to say, the victim. In fact, it was a tweet by an ex-colleague of mine, an intelligent person for whom I have a lot of respect, that made me write this post.

In my opinion the con works because in general people have an expectation that when you hang up the phone the call is cut off. In actual fact, only the maker of the call can terminate it (except for 999 calls). If the maker of the call stays on the line, even if the receiver hangs up, the call remains in place. The clever part of the con in question is that the fraudsters had some kind of device for playing phone 'noises' down the phone. They rang the victim, claimed to be from his bank and told him his account had been hacked, and that he needed to ring the number on the back of his card. Once the victim hung up, the fraudsters kept the line open, but played a dialtone down the line. The victim then picked up the phone, heard the dialtone and proceeded to ring the number of his bank, completely unaware that he was still connected to the fraudsters. We're told all the time by security experts that you should never give cold callers any information, and that if you're in doubt you should hang up and ring the bank yourself. The victim in this case followed that advice to the letter, but because of an oversight in the way the phone system works, he still ended up giving the fraudsters the information they wanted, thinking he was talking to his bank.

Discussing the blog post on Twitter the next day, I was quite saddened to hear people dismissing the story and claiming the victim was stupid for falling for the con. In my opinion, the victim in this case (or any case for that matter) is in no way to blame. Saying 'he was stupid' is in the same vein as saying 'she shouldn't have been dressed like that' about a rape victim. It's just not OK. Imagine getting mugged in a town you don't know very well and later being told by a policeman that it's your own stupid fault you got mugged because, unbeknownst to you, that particular part of town is a high crime area. This is exactly what happened. You can't expect everyone to know everything.

Of course, the person making the harmful claims was a technology expert. It's alarmingly common for people who know a little bit about technology to be arrogant about people falling for cons that rely on the victim not knowing how the technology works, and this arrogance needs to stop. I'm happy to say that the victim got all their money back, although not without a lot of hassle, and if there's a silver lining in the cloud it's that he now knows a lot more about how the phone system works, and if he gets a call supposedly from his bank again he'll no doubt use a mobile to call them back, not the line he just used. Additionally, he's written the blog post, so others can hopefully educate themselves on how this con works. But not everyone will read the blog post, and I bet there are still many people out there who don't know about the hanging up flaw on the phone system, and will probably fall for the same con if it happens to them.

We as computer experts will do much better to help educate potential victims in a positive way, rather than knocking actual victims down a few pegs. As long as there are criminals more knowledgable than their victims, these cons will continue, but the onus should not be on the victim, it's on us to help them from becoming victims in the first place. The only people who actively deserve any critisism are the criminals, anything else is blaming the victim, which is never OK.

Lies, damn lies

OK, this is starting to piss me off now.

There are various stories in the local rag (The Echo) about how things are better/worse than last year, most of which completely ignore relevant factors such as weather and the economy, but this one annoys me the most...

Festive drink drive figures up - despite crackdown

Basically, the number of people arrested for drink-driving this christmas is higher than last year. The article goes on about how the police are disappointed that the figure is so high, despite a 'crackdown', whatever that means. Not once in the article does it mention that last christmas most of Hampshire was under about a foot of snow.

Yes, that's right - only those with very short memories would be surprised that the number of drink-drive arrests are up this year compared to last... last year there were considerably fewer cars on the roads due to harsh weather conditions, and probably fewer police cars around too, for the same reason. I bet if they were to report the number of arrests as a percentage of the total cars on the road, rather than an absolute figure, it'd be pretty constant year on year.

Life Imitating Art

Today it's been announced [BBC] that police could soon get the power to issue on-the-spot fines for people who drive like cocks, rather than being limited to fining a small subset of law-breakers, such as those who speed or drive drunk.

I'd like to take the opportunity to mention that I thought of this nearly four years ago.

Life imitating slapstick

Man viciously beaten over poo-in-handbag

Moderators are a good thing

A hint to all aging rock bands... if you really do want to look cool in the Web 2.0 world, there are better ways than simply automatically re-posting every single tweet containing your band's name on your website...

More Echo Journalism

The Echo has run a story about how Southampton is the worst area in the south east for fly tipping, topping a list of 67 councils.

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/9859261.City_worst_for_fly_tipping/

Shocking, eh? Well it would be if you didn't have a look at the source data from DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs...

http://www.defra.gov.uk/statistics/environment/waste/flytipping-in-england-annual-statistics/

Ignoring the obvious bias always associated with absolute figures - any statistician will tell you that the main figure should really be incidents per square mile or per 1000 people, rather than just total incidents - I can't help but notice that the data is in fact data for 2010-2011 and was released back in December. Obviously this is bad journalism on the Echo's part for reporting these figures as if they were current rather than eight months out of date. But there is another major factor that has been overlooked here - in the summer of 2011 Southampton's batshit-insane council decided to screw over half the public sector, leading to months of strikes throughout the city. Specifically, where I live we had our bins emptied twice over a period of about four months because the refuse collectors were on strike. It's not really surprising that there was an increase in fly-tipping in the Southampton area during this period.

I've said it before and I've said it again - don't believe anything you read in the paper (particularly the Echo) until you've seen the raw data.

Pimp my Tat

Man tattoos giant penis onto mate's back [metro.co.uk]. Awesome.

Product Placement

This is interesting [out-law.com]. It seems that although UK TV channels will be allowed to show programs containing product placement from the end of this month, they must be preceeded with a big 'P' logo to allow the viewers to know they're being brainwashed... er... watching such a show.

What I don't get though is why, and if it will affect all the shows on UK TV that already contain product placement... mainly the US shows that we get on syndication. OK, so if you're watching a UK TV show you can be sure it wasn't funded by advertisers unless it has the 'P' logo, but what about other stuff? Will we get a big 'P' before any of the recent Bond movies are shown? And will it matter, considering the product placement in those films is so blatently obvious? It's just like when you go into a shop and it's always obvious when the salespeople are paid on commission just from their sales technique. That said, the OFCOM guidelines clearly state "Placed products and services cannot" ... "be featured in an unduly prominent way within programmes". So yeah, I guess that means no more Bond movies at all then. Or the Transformers movie.

Likewise, why does it matter that the company in question has paid for the exposure when many shows, intentionally or otherwise, already give exposure to certain brands over others (example: every laptop or smartphone you ever see on a BBC technology show seems to be made by Apple)? Are we going to see an entire breakdown of the TV company's finances? What makes the advertising budget so special?

I say, just let it go. Allow the product placement if you must, but if it gets too annoying most smart people will just switch off. I rarely watch any non-BBC channel purely because I get pissed off with adverts.

Saving the BBC, a bit(torrent) at a time

I love the BBC. As a concept not just as a broadcaster/concept provider. As Mitch Benn quite rightly said: "It's as british as midsummer showers and it's ours". So yeah, I kinda take attempts to shaft it by both the non-BBC (and often Murdoch-owned) media and the current government as a personal attack on an old friend.

Context aside, the BBC have been pretty much forced to take a bunch of their websites offline. Doing so won't actually save much money in the grand scheme of things, anyone who understands the web and how it works will tell you that. My suspicion is that they're being deleted for political reasons, the BBC need to be seen to be doing something to cut costs in order to appease its critics.

But once again, community spirit may save the day. You may remember that back in the 1970s the BBC deleted its back catalogue, including its master copies of lots of pre-1970 TV shows. Many shows were lost, but the most famous example is Doctor Who - the original tapes of the Hartnell and Troughton eras (as well as some of the early Pertwee episodes) have all been lost. Thankfully, for Doctor Who fans anyway, most of these episodes still exist and many have since been cleaned up and released on video or DVD thanks to the fact that people of the day recorded them for personal use and have since made them available to the masses.

Now we have the chance to save history again. We can save these websites. Ben Goldacre's blog recently brought to my attention a fellow geek who had basically spidered all of the websites the BBC plan to remove, and combined them together into a torrent. The torrent is available in several places, and I've mirrored it here as well. So here is my plea:

• If you are a BitTorrent user, and you have a bit of hard disk space to spare, please start this torrent and seed it for as long as you possibly can. I myself am doing so as I write, and I have a 24/7 server. The more copies of this stuff that's out there, the better. Even if you don't ever plan to use any of the data contained within, this is stuff that needs to be saved, so please seed it.
• If you have a website or hosting space of your own, please download the .torrent file and mirror it somewhere, making sure you publicise the link in a blog entry like this one, or a comment on a blog entry on this subject. It's a really really small file and will use virtually no bandwidth or disk space, but allows people to download all these websites.

Hopefully in years to come this will all be worth something, and we will all have something to tell our grandkids about : )

Serial Moaning

This is awesome:

Paris woman trapped for 20 days in bathroom [BBC].

This poor old dear of 69 got stuck in her bathroom when the lock jammed. With no phone or any other way of alerting anyone, she began banging on the pipes in the hope that the sound would travel to neighbours.

Travel it did. And the neighbours' response? Complain about the noise. Yes, that's right, their first instinct when confronted with an unusual tapping noise on the pipes in the dead of night is to start a petition get it stopped, rather than to actually go and find out what the problem was in the first place. I'd make some joke about the french complaining about everything, but I know full well the same thing would have happened in this country. Thankfully, they soon realised they'd not seen her for days and called the authorities who sent in a crew to rescue her... in what seems to be the nick of time, as she'd been living on nothing but water for over two weeks.

Shirley you can't be serious

I am serious, and don't call me Shirley. Leslie Nielsen, undisputed king of deadpan humour, has died [BBC] at the ripe old age of 84. And I think he took a little piece of me with him :(

Slow News Day at the Echo

This story is wonderful in so many ways. The shock news? That there was a mobile speed camera on the A31 this morning.

As if the whole concept of a story about a speed camera wasn't funny enough, it describes in great detail how drivers are being "forced to break suddenly" [sic] and how it's causing tailbacks during rush hour.

EDIT: The spelling error has now been corrected.

Funnily enough, there was no mention of any 'tailbacks' on the BBC travel news beyond the usual rush hour traffic.

Stop the world, I've seen it all

Have some of this, Apple, I bet your fucking phone can't do this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77dbG6DPW_c

Swearing

This is an extension of what I've been writing on Twitter, apologies to those who follow me, I feel that 140 characters aren't enough to explain my position so I'm writing here instead.

It seems that some right wing Sunday tabloids like to complain about swearing on radio, or anything that comes close. Predictably, most of the complaints seem to involve the BBC, which is an organisation over which most privately owned media in the UK seems to have a bee in its bonnet. It began a while back when the Mail on Sunday urged its users to complain to Ofcom about Sandi Toksvig making reference to a swear word on Radio 4's News Quiz. I say 'making reference to', she never actually said the word, she merely stated humourously that the conservative-led government are "putting the 'n' in 'cuts'". Now, the Sunday Express are reporting, on their front page no less, that the BBC broadcast the words 'bullshit' and 'bastards' on a morning radio show. I emphasise that this was the front page of a Sunday newspaper, at a time when much of Africa is experiencing one of its worst famines in living memory, and Norway is reeling from the shock of an insane christian fundamentalist mass murderer.

I like swearing. I think it's perfectly acceptable in context. Billy Connolly wouldn't be funny if he didn't swear. Die Hard wouldn't have been so memorable had Bruce Willis simply said "Yippie-kai-yay" and there are some people, such as Jim Davidson and Piers Morgan, for whom only a word as strong as 'cunt' is suitable when attempting to describe them. Don't forget, also, that the word 'fuck' is possibly the most versatile word in common use, it can be used as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a pronoun, the list goes on. So while the tabloids are mounting their sad attempt to get a TV-style watershed applied to radio, so that certain words can't be said after a certain time of night, I think it's time we abolished the idea of a watershed on television.

Imagine - the weather would be so much funner if the presenter stood there and said "well, today it's going to piss down." X-Factor would be better if the contestants were able to call Simon Cowell a cunt to his face (I might actually apply if that were the prize) The news would be better if they were allowed to say "a man is in hospital after his jealous wife hacked off his cock" and not have to fluffy-fy it by saying that she "amputated his penis". And let's not forget that there is nothing funnier than puppets swearing.

Basically, Mary Whitehouse is long dead, and times are a-changing. It's much less taboo to talk about things like sex on TV than it was back in the bad old days, and I think the same goes for swearing. Let's finally take our thumbs out of our arses and admit that sometimes, just sometimes, swearing is funny.

That band that has the same name as a band I quite like

Guns N' Roses suing Guitar Hero game over Slash [BBC]

Oh, Axl, Axl, Axl, when will you wake up and realise that the whole world thinks you're a cock? So you're worried that Guitar Hero is "emphasizing and reinforcing an association between Slash and Guns N' Roses and the band's song Welcome to the Jungle". Because, you know, co-writing a song, playing lead on the original recording and then playing it live at every gig for the next ten years doesn't associate a guitarist with a song anywhere near as much as appearing alongside it in a computer game does. Twat.

That word again

In the news recently, this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/10/uk-uncut-hacks-vodafone-website

Basically, Vodafone held a competition called 'World of Difference' for people from charities, the winners of which got their charity work funded for [x] amount of time, plus a blog published on Vodafone's website. At least two, probably more of these charitable people are a little miffed at Vodafone's tax avoidance, as detailed in Private Eye, which is currently estimated at £6 billion, massively overshadowing the amount Vodafone have donated to charity. So they gave their account passwords to the protest group UK Uncut, who promptly began posting messages detailing Vodafone's alleged account figures all over Vodafone's website. Obviously, this was immensely funny.

What annoys me is that all the major news outlets are once again using the term 'hacked' inappropriately, as they did/still are doing during the News of the World voicemail scandal. The accounts were not hacked, they were accessed using the correct passwords with the account owners' consent, although admittedly not with the consent of Vodafone. If I unlock my front door and tell you to go inside, nobody would say that you broke in, even if my landlord doesn't like you. Why do the press seem to like using the word 'hack' so much, is hacking becoming sexy or something?

Rant over.

The Brigadier

Nicholas Courtney dies aged 81 [BBC]

Well that puts a bit of a dampener on any rumours of the Brigadier appearing in any future episodes of Doctor Who then : (

The Echo - reporting the news before it happens

I've made fun of the Echo and its obsession with reporting every tiny little incident on the road network as if it's the end of the world before. They seem particularly intent on reporting every time one of their reporters passes a speed camera on the road. Now they're at it again, and pre-emptively this time! Basically, there's going to be some essential bridge work on the most westerly part of the M27 over the winter, and obviously there's going to be some road closures and restrictions, just like there has been for the past few months a bit further up at junction 5-7. I personally have no problem with it - anything that stops a bridge from collapsing is a good thing. But this time it warrants a big ranty news story, because, as the headline seems keen to point out, they're putting in temporary speed cameras.

www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/9384560.Speed_limit_in_force_for_M27_bridge_repair_work/

The article has a washed-out photo, presumably taken from the Romsey Road bridge over the M27, of a yellow pole on the side of the motorway. The pole doesn't have a speed camera on it yet of course, but that's not stopping the article from pressing ahead. The text of the article itself opens with the doom-predicting sentence "Motorists face three months of misery on one of the region's busiest motorways."

First of all, there are two motorways in the region, the M27 and the M3. Both are regularly referred to in the Echo as "one of the region's busiest motorways". You may as well say "my mum's one of the two best parents I've ever had". Even if you count the mini-motorways - the M271, the M275 and the A3M - that's still only five, and you could happily refer to any one of them as "one of the region's busiest motorways". Motorways are generally built because a lot of traffic all wants to go in the same direction, they're supposed to be busy. Stop using this frankly redundant statement.

Secondly, three months of misery? How do you know? Who's writing this shit... Jeremy Clarkson or Mystic Meg? The M27 and M3 always have some kind of road works going on, particularly at night. We're used to it. They're not going to be closing any lanes during the day and most of the work on the bridges will be done at night, so the only thing most people will notice on the motorway is that because of the temporary 50mph speed limit it'll take 18 minutes to drive from Cadnam to Rownhams rather than 12. And don't forget, it's during the winter so if we have snow like last year anyone with an ounce of sense will be driving a bit slower anyway. Any genuine justification for assuming there's going to be three months of misery as a direct result of this essential road maintenance, or was it just a wild guess?

Basically, the entire article could be replaced with two sentences: "Over the winter, it'll take you an extra five or six minutes to drive from junction 1 to junction 3, assuming normal weather and traffic conditions. In return for this minor inconvenience, they're fixing some bridges so the motorway won't collapse with you on it."

The Echo - where headlines don't have to match the story

I moan about the Echo but still read it. Maybe this makes me a hypocrite.

"Town centre closed off as police hunt robber"

The article begins with "Part of a Hampshire town centre is closed off today as police hunt a robber", and goes on to explain that the town in question is Fareham. Fareham's pretty big, and it's amazing to think they'd close off even part of the town centre to catch a robber who stole money from a cash machine.

If you read right to the end, you get "as part of their investigation police say that part of West Street will be closed off for some of this morning."

So basically, they've closed off a small area of west street (probably just the cash machine in question, for some forensic analysis) and the Echo headline implies that the entire town centre is closed.

In tomorrow's issue: "Woman in speeding vehicle causes carnage", a chilling story about a granny on a mobility scooter who accidentally bumped into a kerb, causing a dog walker to wait for her to reorient herself before passing.

The Hazards of URL Shorteners

Anyone who uses Twitter or writes articles with a character limit will love the many URL shorteners on the net. If you have a URL such as 'http://www.somehost.com/path/path/more/wibble/filename.html?blah.blah=blah' or similar you can poke it into something like bit.ly and get a much shorter version. The shortener service simply handles the URL and redirects to the real site.

Obviously the main concern is that you don't know what you're clicking on. A link to bit.ly/12345 could lead to anything from hardcore porn to the official Dora the Explorer website, you just have to trust whoever sent you the link. But it's not always trusting the link creator to not be an arsehole, you also have to trust their spelling, as this story [infoworld.com] shows.

In a nutshell, California politician and ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman, or one of her staff, recently posted a shortened link on her official Twitter feed to a news article about local police support for her campaign. What tweeters got when they clicked the link was a YouTube video of a tall, long-haired oriental gentleman in a pink tutu playing the bass guitar. I'm not entirely sure what moral can be drawn from this, other than to be careful when using URL shorteners. That and the fact that anything, no matter how surreal, that you can possibly think of (as well as some stuff you couldn't) exists somewhere on the net.

The Kinect really is awesome

...and not just as a game platform. This article (hat tip to Nik for pointing me to it) describes viSparsh, a system for assisting blind people which is made from a modified Kinect. The Kinect's depth awareness allows the device to determine how far the wearer is from an object and feeds back a series of vibrations, a bit like a car's reverse sensor. Over time the wearer learns to judge distance using the vibrations, allowing them to walk around much more confidently.

The use of a Kinect for good reminds me of the robot built by researchers from the University of Warwick, which uses a Kinect's 3D imaging capabilities to locate trapped survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake.

There are two things to learn from these stories. Firstly, the Kinect is wasted on video games. It's genuinely groundbreaking technology. Secondly, both these stories are examples of the good that can be done when a tech company opens up their hardware to homebrew developers and hobby hackers. Microsoft have very publically announced [eff.org] that they encourage people to use the Kinect in whichever way they see fit, a very different attitude from Sony, Nintendo and even one-time proponents of freedom Apple, who all frown upon the use of their kit for anything other than its intended purpose, and go to great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen.

Tom and Jerry

Tom and Jerry are doing OK for themselves. Their first show was in the early 1940s, yet they're still stirring up controversy all these years later. The latest piece of newsworthy babble about history's longest cat-and-mouse chase is that Amazon's on demand system has a pretty blunt warning about the content before you view the cartoons.

Tom and Jerry Cartoons Carry Racism Warning - BBC News

Now, this isn't a rant about whether or not Tom and Jerry contains racial stereotypes... of course it bloody does. It's not a rant about whether or not this is OK... of course it bloody isn't. And it's not a rant about how what is socially acceptable is changed over time. If you don't think Tom and Jerry contains racial stereotypes, dig out a copy of the ultra-rare cartoon "His Mouse Friday" and, unless you happen to vote for the BNP or read the Daily Mail, prepare for your jaw to hit the floor.

So what am I complaining about? The warning? No, I'm completely supporting it, because the alternative is censorship. I've always had a problem with cuts to cartoons, and as Tom and Jerry are my favourite cartoons from my childhood I obviously feel a certain sense of annoyance when people try to change them, in much the same way Star Wars fans hate the 1997 'enhanced' versions and subsequent DVD releases. But removing parts because they're racist? In my opinion that's basically on a par with holocaust denial. You can't stop racism by pretending it never happened.

The weird thing is that this isn't the first time this has happened. The Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD Volume 3 contains an introduction by Whoopie Goldberg. In her speech she defends the studio by saying that although the racial stereotypes "were wrong then and are wrong today", they were a product of their time and removing them would be to pretend they never existed. She goes on to say that the general attitude towards ethnic minorities is a part of history that can not and should not be ignored. I could not agree more with every word she says.

OK, so MGM don't have the accolade of hiring the first black animator, as Warner Bros did, but I think the same attitude should apply. The presence of the racism warning is acknowledgement that times have got better and racist jokes are rightly unacceptable nowadays. It's not an apology, but as many of the people who worked on Tom and Jerry have since passed away, an apology on their behalf would probably seem quite patronising. I think the warning is probably the best thing that could happen. It's better than not having a warning there in the first place, and it's certainly better than hiding the racist bits, which in some cases is arguably more racist than simply showing them uncut. Yes, in some edited versions of Tom and Jerry they actually replace black characters and actors with white ones - effectively stopping the racism by getting rid of the ethnic minorities!

If you want to experience Tom and Jerry at their hilarious best, I strongly recommend the original versions of Love That Pup, Touche Pussy Cat, Mice Follies, Solid Serenade and Jerry and Jumbo. All of which are excellent, and none of which contain any racial stereotypes. Enjoy!

Two greats in one day

And now Irwin Kirshner has also died today! [Digital Spy] It's clearly a bad day to be an eightysomething movie legend.

What

Shallow diver breaks world record for paddling pool jump [BBC].

He looks so happy. As would I be. I think.

Who stole all the pies

There was a raid at the weekend [BBC] in one of the garden centres along Allington Lane. The items stolen: 48 pies, 18 pieces of cod and a box of jumbo sausages. Either someone wants to open their own chip shop, or some poor stoner's got a lethal case of the munchies.

Why I don't shop in Boots

I've not shopped in Boots for ages, for reasons I will give in this post. Most of this information is available elsewhere on the web but it was only this morning, when I was accused of being grumpy for moaning about them that I decided to actually type something to justify my alleged grumpiness.

Firstly, the obvious, price. A box of Boots own brand Ibuprofen is just under a quid, I can get the same thing in my local supermarket for less than 30p. Ask any doctor and they'll tell you that ibuprofen is ibuprofen, and they're probably all made by the same company anyway.

Secondly, the tax issue. The current government are cutting things left right and centre (specifically within the NHS) while various big companies get away without paying much tax. Boots is one of them, thanks to their move to Switzerland a few years back. In fact, it's estimated that Boots' tax avoidance costs the UK economy £100 million a year ... imagine how many hospitals could be built or maintained with that money. Basically, if I lived next door to an individual who was screwing the system that I pay for through my taxes, I'd report the bastard. And as I can't really report Boots because the government already know (and evidently don't care) that they're tax-dodgers, I do the next best thing which is to make sure they get none of my money and encourage other decent taxpayers to think likewise.

Thirdly, they're bullshit peddlars. Fair enough, selling mythical crap like magnetic bracelets isn't really a crime, but the website quite clearly claims that the product "allows oxygen and our own natural pain and stress relief chemicals - endorphins, to flow more efficiently around the body, helping to combat free radicals, pain, stress and fatigue", when there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is true. In fact, in the US it's illegal to market magnets as medical devices for precisely that reason. As if this isn't enough, they also hide adverts within their "Web MD" site, a site supposedly offering medical advice, which in some cases is just plain dangerous. For a great example, see this page, a 'myth vs fact' type page arguing that sugar at breakfast time is actually perfectly harmless. The document, despite the small disclaimer saying the content is provided by their sponsor (who happens to be Kellogs, the breakfast cereal manufacturer), reads like a genuine medical guide, with references and everything. It's only when you actually bother to check the references that you discover that their main source is a paper by 'nutrition consultants' Sig-Nurture. The firm's website claims that their business is "to strengthen the evidence-base for your company’s policies, strategy, marketing and claims", and the paper being cited clearly states that the work was supported by a grant from the Kellog company. So much for actual science, then.

Don't get me wrong, there are other companies that probably deserve boycotting just as much as Boots. Vodafone recently had their tax bill written off, costing the taxpayer billions. Philip Green, CEO of the Arcadia Group which owns Top Shop, BHS, Dorothy Perkins and many other well-known high street chains, gets around his tax bill by having everything he runs channeled through his wife, who lives in Monaco. And at least Boots do actually sell real medicine among the new-age alternative homeopathic horseshit, unlike Julian Graves or Holland and Barrett. But I just feel that Boots have let me down, almost to the point of offending me, in many ways and they don't deserve my custom. If me giving a shit about the economy, science or the contents of my own wallet can be construed as grumpy, then so be it.

Why a tax on fizzy drinks would be a stealth attack on the NHS

There have been lots of proposals in the past to tax unhealthy food, particularly fizzy drinks. Just recently the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has called for quite a lot of things that sound quite sensible to me. A ban on adverts for unhealthy food before the watershed is probably a good thing, and extra government money for weight loss surgery is a proactive thing to do in a supposedly increasingly tubby society. But there are a few things I'm not so sure on. Firstly, a ban on fast food outlets in hospitals sounds sensible at first, but I imagine the hospital in question rents its space out to McDonalds and Burger King at quite a high rate, so unless there's something else with which to fill the space, this might not be as clever as it sounds, financially speaking. But the biggest problem I have is with any suggestion to tax unhealthy food or drink.

To be honest, I have a real problem with anyone who moans at obese people for health reasons. You see shows all the time on Channel 4 showing the effects of over-eating, and they all contain the same claim: that over-eating is costing the NHS millions per year. That may be true, but if you use this argument to tax unhealthy food, surely there needs to be a tax on every football sold! After all, playing football increases your risk of pulled muscles, twisted ankles and even broken bones, which must cost the NHS quite a bit every year too. If you victimise fat people for costing the NHS money you must also victimise sportspeople, and people who work in high-risk jobs such as firefighters. Arguing that any one portion of the population is costing the NHS more money than another is completely missing the point of the NHS in the first place. Sure, we could charge people based on how high a risk they are according to their lifestyle, but if we were to do that we may as well scrap the NHS and everyone can sort out their own private medical insurance.

Of course I'd never suggest such a thing - I'm not fond of nationalism, but I do confess to having a certain amount of pride when I tell people that I live in a country where anyone, rich or poor, can see a doctor and get fixed if they need to. Health is something that simply cannot be left to the private sector, as their priority is to make money rather than making people better. If the NHS were to disappear there are large numbers of people, almost certainly some of whom you know and love, who would suddenly not have access to healthcare, either because they can't afford it, or because they have pre-existing conditions that make private medical insurers wary of covering them. I cannot stress this enough: we need the NHS. It is the single greatest thing about the UK.

National Insurance is a tax. It is paid by all who can afford to do so. In return for this tiny contribution, we get the NHS. If we start taxing people more likely to end up in hospital at a higher rate (and this includes taxing things that are considered unhealthy) then we're undermining the integrity of the NHS. Any one of us could end up needing urgent medical treatment tomorrow, and yes, many hospital visits could probably have been prevented if the circumstances were different. You may not have needed that stomach pump if you hadn't got drunk. You may not have needed that heart surgery if you'd have kept your weight down. You wouldn't have broken your leg had you not been playing football. The beauty of the NHS is that it doesn't care about blame, it just makes people better. That's a beautiful thing, let's not lose it.

Why hacking games consoles is a good thing

I often rant on this blog about how console manufacturers should just allow hackers to do what the hell they want with the hardware they themselves have purchased. Sony and Nintendo are both renowned for producing hardware to keep homebrew programmers out and any time someone does find a way in, the company in question immediately push an 'update' via the online connection that breaks any homebrew code. Microsoft recently became the first company to buck the trend by explicitly encouraging the use of their 'Kinect' hardware for Xbox 360 by hackers and other home hobbyists. Every time I rant about not being able to hack my games consoles a lot of non-geeks ask me why I care and why I don't just use my games consoles the way they were intended, to play games? I never really had a good, non-political answer to that question... until now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12559231

Step in, a team of mechanical engineers from the University of Warwick. They've built a robot (that looks very much like Johnny Five) whose purpose is to search for earthquake survivors in rubble too hazardous for a live human to enter. Except rather than use the usual expensive laser scanning technology employed by similar robots, their creation's vision is powered by a Kinect, which is available for £100 at your local toy shop. This thing is cheap and can save lives, and is generally ten shades of awesome. And it's only possible because Microsoft don't care if homebrew developers want to write code for their hardware.