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.
If I had a bit of a cash flow problem and realised I couldn't afford some of the luxuries in life there are one or two things I could do. I could maybe sell my car and get a cheaper one which does essentially the same job, getting me to work and back. I could borrow some money from someone else and pay it back incrementally until my finances are back on track. I could remortgage my house. I could work extra hours at work in the hope that I'd get promoted, or get a second job at the weekends.
Or, I could basically stop paying my heating bill. Or my water bill. Yeah, I'd have to live without heat or water for a while, but hey, it's getting me money. I could stop paying my phone bill. Who needs a phone anyway right? Or internet? I don't need food, I could only go and buy food if I was hungry, that'll save some money. Hey, tell you what, I could make money by selling everything I own! OK, my entire life would be shit and not worth living, but hey, I'd be rich!
The first paragraph above is a sensible way to get finances back on track. The second paragraph is the sort of nonsense you'd expect from a moron.
David Cameron - you are a moron.
This week's Doctor Who was very good. Not excellent, but very good. The consensus on the net seems to be completely polarised - just like Neil Cross's last episode, two weeks ago. Some think it's fantastic, some think it's awful.
Personally, as a fan of both horror and sci-fi, I really enjoyed it. I wrote a big rant about Moffat's episode "A Time of Angels" from a while back, and in that I suggested that the horror had eclipsed the sci-fi, but in this case it was spot on and, dare I say it, very much like the Tom Baker/Douglas Adams days of old in which a supernatural occurance becomes a whodunnit with a satisfying sci-fi conclusion. The bit I didn't get was the resolution for the alien.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the alien. It was great that such a curve ball was thrown - the 'ghost' they were searching for turned out to be two entities completely - but the fact that they had to explain the alien's presence was a bit gratuitous. I felt the episode could have been far better if they'd just removed the last three minutes or so, it wouldn't really have affected the tone or moral of the episode. Maybe it was the scene where the Doctor finally comes face to face with the alien that ruined it for me. The director Jamie Payne did such a good job of ensuring you never actually see what's chasing them, genuinely scary stuff, and then went and ruined it with a man in a rubber suit.
I recall a deleted scene from Ridley Scott's masterpiece of sci-fi horror, Alien. In the scene, a seemingly harmless lump in the corner of the room turns out to be the predatorial creature all along, a trick Moffat himself uses so regularly, but Scott decided to remove the scene because you actually see the alien moving and on-screen for more than a split-second, making it look like a man in a suit. It's a shame Payne didn't do the same. It's almost like someone at the BBC said "oh, we need to have a bit about how ugly inhuman alien creatures aren't all bad" and the writer simply tagged an extra scene on.
Despite my gripe, the episode was very good. Not the best episode this half-series so far - Gatiss's "Cold War" still holds that accolade in my opinion (and not just because Jenna-Louise Coleman spent the entire episode in a party dress and heels for no good reason, something that should happen far more often, dammit!) But yes, let's give Neil Cross a few more episodes next series, he can clearly write well. This week's episode was definately classic Who. But that doesn't necessarily make it automatically perfect (let's not forget that The Happiness Patrol is generally considered 'classic' Who!)
I hope that review's muddied the internet waters a bit.
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.
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.
In the early 1980s, I was but a young lad, walking through London in the company of my parents. Blind to the troubles being experienced by the country and indeed the world, my mind was satisfied with a healthy diet of Dangermouse and King Rollo. Of course that didn't mean I hadn't been intravenously fed other bits of information here and there from overheard conversations and news reports that I didn't fully understand.
"Hold on to my hand," my ever-protective mother said to me, "there's some bad people about." Inquisitively I looked up at her and asked "are they called 'The Miners' Strike'?"
A few passers by laughed, not necessarily in scorn or in agreement, but at my innocent childlike misunderstanding of current events. Had my present 30-year-old self been stood listening, I'd have probably chuckled too.
Fast forward in time to last Sunday. I was at the Jubilee Protest organised by anti-monarchy group Republic. The group had set up a semi-public event where republicans could congregate, share opinions, make friends and listen to several invited speakers. As it turned out, despite careful planning and colaboration with the Metropolitan Police, most of us were refused entry to the site and so we decided to set up a makeshift rally in the street. I believe some 1,200 people were in attendance opposite the Bridge Lounge in Tooley Street, and there wasn't a bit of trouble all the time I was there. The road was already closed due to the tight security for the jubilee celebrations, so we weren't even disrupting traffic. It was a very friendly gathering of like minded people who wanted to congregate, enjoy themselves and have a good time just like everyone else, but at the same time making it clear to anyone passing that they don't share the admiration for the monarchy that many other people in the capital that day had.
As I stood in the street listening to speakers giving speeches on various political subjects, and trying to ignore the occasional childish insult from a passing monarchist, a young family passed me, presumably on their way to the river to watch the royal entourage.
"Why are these people shouting, mummy?" asked the young son.
"They're shouting because they don't like the queen" replied his mother.
At first, I took umbrage at her comment. After all, I have no great dislike for the queen - she's a human being like anyone else. I'm sure she's quite a nice person in real life. I merely believe that it's wrong in the 21st century to celebrate an unelected head of state, hence my attendance at the rally, and hence my continuing desire that we in the UK one day take France's lead and abolish the monarchy (although it'd be nice if we could do it with a few less beheadings). I understand that many will disagree with me, for a variety of reasons, and they're welcome to do so - opinions are opinions. But this woman had made a glaring logical fallacy; she'd wrongly assumed that because I desire for the people of this country to be able to select their own head of state rather than have one chosen for them by an accident of birth, that I dislike a woman that I've never met.
This annoyance only lasted a moment however. At this time I was reminded of myself, in that very same city some 30-odd years ago, when I was the inquisitive child. As I grew up I began to question what I'd seen and what my parents had told me. My middle-class, conservative, christian upbringing had left me with many questions, questions for which I alone had to find the answers. And when I was old enough to think for myself, I read about things like the Miners' Strike and why it happened. I saw that there were two sides to the story. My innocent quest for knowledge has made me into the free-thinking, liberal atheist that I am today. It's led to many arguments with my parents about politics, but they are the ones who pushed me to choose my own path, and whether it was intentional or not, I thank them for that. I became facinated with the 80s, the decade in which I had lived in the protective bubble of blissful ignorance, and it's all because of conversations with my parents that I didn't really understand - I had holes in my knowledge that needed filling. As the young family walked off into the distance, waving their tacky plastic union flags, I found myself with a sense of hope for that young lad. Hope that in 30 years time he'll have questioned why all those people were stood in the street shouting, and discovered why we were really there. Hope that his inquisitive nature will last into his older developing years, so that he may make intelligent judgements on what he believes, and become a better person as a result. And hope that maybe, just maybe, the seed of a future republican had just been sown, just like the seed of a tory-hating liberal had been sown in me all those years ago.
At the weekend, I watched The Social Network, the movie based on the creation of Facebook. Not sure how much of it is fictional and how much is genuine to true life, but it did re-affirm several things in my mind.
As a postscript, with the exception of Eduardo Saverin, who gets absolutely crapped on, and Erica Albright, the first person in the movie to tell Mark Zuckerberg he's an arsehole, by the end of the movie I hated every single character in it yet still quite enjoyed the film overall. I can't remember the last time that happened. Also, kudos is due for being reasonably technically accurate and not just spouting off reams of meaningless techno-babble like most movies do. Overall, I enjoyed the movie but probably won't watch it again.
