rant

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.

Achievement and Appreciation

It has come to my attention that we, as a society, place far too much emphasis on sport. We worship footballers like gods and have many national and international competitions in which athletes and those of peak physical fitness can shine, and be doted on by an adoring public.

This first came to my attention during Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Boyle did, in my opinion, a wonderful job producing a spectacle that incorporated pretty much everything that's good about Britain - while leaving it to the closing ceremony to showcase everything that's bad about it! But there was one thing that stuck in my mind more than anything else, and that's the fact that a grinning David Beckham riding a speedboat down the Thames got instant recognition and applause from the crowd, yet Tim Berners-Lee got a polite and slightly subdued clap only after an announcer told everyone who he is. For those who still don't know, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and Beckham gets paid to kick a ball around a field.

I believe this is a problem that stems from childhood. I was one of the kids at school who was useless at PE, but I excelled in subjects that actually matter, such as maths and science. I'm not for a minute suggesting that it's not essential to get some exercise, but it always annoyed me that one day every year we had to be pulled out of lessons to go and watch the physically able kids show off - we called it "sports day". I certainly don't recall a "maths day" in which academically bright children were cheered and applauded for doing what they're good at. I may even go as far as to suggest that it's possibly a root cause of bullying. We're encouraged from a very young age to worship the physically fit, but not the brainy kids. Who are the kids who most regularly get picked on at school? The geeks and nerds.

I'm not telling anyone off. If you feel that someone who can score a goal from the other end of the pitch or run 100m in under 8 seconds deserves praise and adoration, feel free to give it to them. Heck, if I was feeling particularly cold and ruthless, I might even suggest that we genuinely need to show sporty people all this love, because it may be the only thing preventing them from realising that their achievements don't actually matter in the grand scheme of things, and I personally can't imagine anything worse than having no purpose. But as we show love to these physical powerhouses, let's not forget those who actually get things done. Scientists, doctors, nurses, teachers, builders, inventors - heck, toilet cleaners and street sweepers do more for the good of humanity than most footballers, and get a fraction of the appreciation, not to mention paycheck. So let's make our culture better by celebrating and appreciating everyone, not just people who are good at sport.

UPDATE 2014-07-29: This week's episode of University Challenge was moved from its primetime slot to teatime, because the commonwealth games pushed everything on BBC1 to BBC2. If that doesn't prove my point I don't know what does.

As it's ranting season on Facebook

Facebook have recently added a bunch of new features. They've implemented 'friends lists' (also known as the 'circles' feature on Google Plus) and re-vamped the news feed again. That's not what I want to rant about.

In their ongoing quest to become more like their superior cousin, Twitter, Facebook have created (sorry - stolen) the ability to add people without being friends with them. I've always maintained that Twitter's success is due to the fact that you can add people without the add having to be reciprocal, thus not creating this illusion of friendship that exists on Facebook (and Livejournal before it). You can follow strangers, celebrities and friends alike, and they can choose whether or not they're interested in what you have to say. Facebook have now got something similar in the subscription idea - instead of being friends with someone you can subscribe to them. They don't have to do anything, but anything that they post (publically) will show up in your feed, just like Twitter. Presumably it's to entice the hordes of celebrities who are happy to post on Twitter but are aware of becoming 'friends' with random fans they've never met. That's also not what I want to rant about.

What I do want to rant about is that icon. It's the RSS icon. When I click a link on the web that has that icon next to it, I expect my browser to add it to my feed reader. Not so on Facebook, it simply adds their posts to your Facebook news feed, and increases their subscriber count by one, no RSS in sight. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if it posted something in their news feed saying "Ash is now subscribed to you!" That's not supposed to happen when you click a link that has that icon.

What's even more annoying is that the one place on Facebook from where you still can get an RSS feed now doesn't have the icon, whereas it previously did. Go to your friends' notes page and look at the bottom of the left hand column where it says "Friends' notes"... that's an RSS feed, and until Facebook introduced their subscription feature it had an RSS logo next to it indicating as such. The logo is now gone. Talk about intentionally misleading.

The sad thing is that RSS is an open standard - nobody really controls or owns it. So if Facebook really have intentionally stolen the logo on purpose then there's not really anything anyone can do about it. Hopefully the RSS logo and standard are widespread enough that Facebook will realise it's confusing people and come up with their own icon for subscriptions.

Blaming the Victim

There's a lot of talk at the minute, regarding the recent theft of millions of customers' personal details from Sony's online services, Playstation Network (PSN) and Qriocity. Obviously it's yet another plus point for us paranoid technophobes who don't use the same password for anything, have a separate email address for every service we use and never give out credit card numbers unless we're 100% sure we can trust the security being used, but me saying "told you so" is hardly helpful, and certainly doesn't change the fact that 77 million people are now living in the knowledge that their name, address, phone number and possibly credit card number and password is currently in the hands of a malicious hacker.

But there is a moral dilemma... who to blame? I immediately began badmouthing Sony for this obvious lapse in security, but this morning a colleague of mine pointed out to me that you should never blame the victim; the fault lies with the hacker. This is a very good point, and one echoed by many, some even go so far as to suggest that blaming Sony for this hack is like blaming a shopkeeper for a burglary, or telling a rape victim she was asking for it. I would never blame a rape victim for being raped, nor would I blame a shopkeeper for being burgled. But let's say the shopkeeper were to go home for the night, trusting the locking up to his absent-minded apprentice. Then, let's say the apprentice gets drunk, staggers home leaving the door of the shop wide open, and insults a local gang on the way home before drunkenly daring them to burgle the shop. Would it then be OK to blame the burglary on the apprentice?

For those who don't know, this hack has a history. The hackers almost certainly got in by discovering some weakness in the protocol used to access the Playstation Network from a Playstation 3. This time last year, such a task would have been impossible, but, at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress meeting in Berlin in December 2010, a group of hackers known as fail0verflow presented their work [YouTube] in hacking the PS3. During this presentation, they pointed out that the PS3's security model is fundamentally broken because although Sony uses a pretty damn bullet-proof elliptic curve cryptography method to sign its code, rather than use a different random number each time, they use the same number, which effectively means that anyone with a basic understanding of maths can reverse engineer Sony's private key, effectively rendering the PS3's entire code-signing functionality completely useless. So who do we blame for this... fail0verflow for pointing out Sony's mistake, or Sony for making such a stupid, rookie mistake in the first place?

Soon after fail0verflow gave their presentation, George "geohot" Hotz, the hacker previously known for his work in breaking the security of the iPhone, used fail0verflow's methods to reverse-engineer the master private key of the Playstation 3. Anyone who has this number can write and run any code they damn well like and run it on any PS3 console in the world. It was a godsend to homebrew coders, and I know people who have done some really cool things with it, including one person who wrote some code to use an Xbox Kinect to control a PS3. But in blowing the PS3's security wide open in this way, it's very likely that geohot inadvertently allowed malicious hackers to write code that interfered with the Playstation Network, leading to the theft of 77 million peoples' personal details. So should we be blaming geohot for this mess? Many do.

For my part, we need to go back to fail0verflow's presentation in Berlin. Early in the presentation, the group make a very good point about the PS3's security. The PS3 remained unhacked for 4 years after its release. Many owners of the console wrongly assume that this means the PS3 is very secure, unlike the Wii which was hacked in under a week. But, as fail0verflow point out, when it first came out the PS3 didn't need to be hacked, because it ran OtherOS. This was a piece of software built into the console that effectively allowed homebrew coders to do almost what they wanted with it. This was a happy co-existance for over three years until Sony, for one reason or another, decided to kill OtherOS on existing consoles via a firmware update. At the time I argued that this was a bait-and-switch and that Sony should really be in court for breach of the Trade Descriptions Act... people bought the PS3 knowing they could use it for homebrew and now they've parted with cash they're being told they can't any more. I'm not a lawyer, but regardless, Sony pissed off thousands of hackers with this rather odd decision. This led to the hacking and subsequent discovery of the master private key. The PS3 didn't take four years to hack, it took four years for a hack to become necessary, and then less than a month to hack.

I'm not defending the yet-unnamed person or people who broke into PSN and stole all the customer details, they're clearly bad people. And no, I'd never blame the victim for a crime. But in this case, there are 77 million victims and Sony aren't one of them. Sony, instead, is the incompetant apprentice and a victim only to karma. Perhaps one day they'll learn that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones... and people who suck at security shouldn't piss off hackers.

CD Stickers

I hate CDs that have hard-to-remove stickers on the jewel case. Specifically, pointless stickers which simply say "contains the tracks..." when any idiot can see what tracks it contains by simply turning the thing over and looking at the back. It just adds more proof to my theory that everyone involved in music promotion is a moron.

Rant over.

Charity Gigs

A lot of pubs, particularly chain pubs, have a habit of putting on charity events. These are generally fun days with live music, possibly guest beers, etc etc, and all in the name of some charity. It could be a local charity, a charity close to the hearts of the owners or punters of the pub, or just a charity that is supported by the pub chain. Afterwards you get the obligatory 'big cheque' photos in the local papers.

This week, some friends of mine who are in a band (who shall remain nameless so they're not associated with this overly critical blog post, but whose identities will be known to those who read this blog often) had one of their gigs cancelled by a pub at very short notice. The pub will also remain nameless, suffice to say it's part of a pub chain owned by Mitchells and Butlers, and located in the south of England. The reason for the gig not going ahead was due to an ultimatum given to the band by the pub: it was a charity do and they were expected to turn up and play for free, despite being previously booked on the understanding that they'd get paid. Of course, the band decided not to do the gig, as they have running costs and can't afford to simply gig for free whenever a pub decided to put on a charity gig, and it's more than a little cheeky of the pub to "move the goalposts" in this way anyway. Of course it's easy to assume the band are heartless bastards for not playing at a charity gig, and only in it for the money. But the whole thing made me think a bit more about the situation, and I can only conclude that charity gigs in general are a massive scam.

Charity gigs are usually run by pubs, and the pub is often open as usual. You can go in, buy drinks, listen to live music for free, and there are collection buckets around into which you can throw your loose change. The atmosphere is usually pretty good, and giving money to charity is generally a good thing. But there is one constant in the entire thing that never changes, charity or not - the pub. Think about it - on a normal gig or event night, the pub will pay a band, DJ or other entertainer to appear. The whole point of booking said events is to pull in punters and sell more beer and/or food. On a charity day the bands and entertainers don't get paid, they effectively 'donate' their time to the cause, but the pub don't actually donate anything. In fact, the pub have basically just conned a bunch of bands and entertainers to appear in their establishment, thus earning them extra bums on seats, without actually having to pay them. OK, so they've put a few charity buckets around the place and told one or two of their already-employed staff to run around hassling people for change, but the pub actually contribute nothing to the charity, financially or otherwise, yet reap the benefits of having live entertainment. The pub will usually even get free advertising in local papers in the weeks after the event, which is where the big cheque photo opportunities come in. The local paper will run a story that a nearby chain pub has raised [x] thousand pounds for charity, yet in actual fact they did bugger all, sold loads of beer and food on the back of a load of entertainers they didn't have to pay, and to cap it all off, they're now getting free advertising in the local paper.

So what am I saying? Basically, if you own a pub, run charity events. They're a fantastic way to make money while convincing gullible punters that you actually care about their poxy charity. If you're a band, please don't feel guilty about turning down charity gigs, you can't possibly be as immoral as the pub holding it. And if you're a punter and your favourite local band is playing a charity gig, please give generously. In fact, take all the money you would have spent on drinks and put it in the charity buckets instead. You'll be doing far more good than the pub are.

Declining standards

I've just watched BBC Lunchtime news and they had a 'feature' (I can't really refer to it as a report) on the country's financial situation. It began with the shock news that the Dixons group have made a loss. It then moved to Plymouth where it took a straw poll of passers by, asking them whether they thought they would be better or worse off this time next year. Unsurprisingly, most people said 'worse off'.

OK, even ignoring the fact that the poll was taken in a shopping centre in the middle of a weekday, when most employed people are at work, how is this even remotely credible? They're asking random passers by whether they think they'll be better off in a year's time and drawing a conclusion from that. They may as well conduct a straw poll of five year olds, asking them what they want to be when they grow up, and then conclude that there's going to be a surge in the number of astronauts in the next 15-20 years. Secondly, the reason for the article in the first place, the Dixons group. They've made many losses over the last few years, even before the credit crunch... it's nothing to do with the economy, it's more likely to be a combination of their high prices, piss-poor customer service and the fact that more people are buying online these days.

Come on, BBC, I know that the government are shafting you up the arse after getting into bed with Rupert Murdoch, but that's really no reason to start producing tripe worthy of Sky News or the Sun.

Dependencies

In my current employment my job is to manage the flow of large amounts of data for quite a well-known university. It sounds quite dull but it's actually really exciting because I don't just get to maintain data I get to write cool stuff that uses the data too. For example, every five minutes I get fed a list of all the PCs in the university and whether there's anyone using them, so while I was going through the process of making sure this data was being stored and managed correctly, I took a few hours to write a little web app for students which draws the uni's workstations on a map and tells them where their nearest available one is. I've had loads of positive feedback and the site gets hundreds of hits per day, which is why my job's so rewarding.

My predecessor and mentor had similar experiences - he used live information fed to the university from the council's transport department to produce a website which gives up-to-the-minute bus information, and because we re-publish the data in a sensible format, anyone who can program can write a website or smartphone app that does the same or similar things. Just recently the council changed their data provider and I've spent large amounts of the last month (and probably the coming month too) hacking the code on our server to ensure that no external apps break during this transition phase. OK, some downtime is unavoidable, but in a month's time if there are apps written six months ago that no longer work, I've done something wrong. This is really important to me, as I feel that by publishing this data and having people rely on it, we have a duty to those who trust our data. I really don't want to have to track down everyone who's using our data and tell them they need to re-write their code because I've changed the format, and I certainly don't expect any developers who've written apps to keep checking our site to make sure we haven't just changed the format without telling anyone.

But this is why it pisses me off when others don't do the same. I've had so many troubles writing Facebook apps that I just don't bother any more - if I need data from Facebook I screen-scrape it. You think the front-facing parts of Facebook change all the time, well you should try using the API. I've written so many things that worked for months and then simply broke without warning because Facebook decided to change something. The most recent example is their sudden removal of user RSS feeds, which I've been using for years, as I tend to use Google Reader rather than logging into Facebook. I write quite a lot of Twitter-related scripts too, and I noticed while checking something in their docs today that they indent to deprecate version 1 of their API "within the coming months" in favour of version 1.1. It's not a simple transition either, things that before required no authentication now require OAuth, which is a real pig for a programmer because things I used to be able to do in one line of code (eg getting the public tweets of a particular user) now requires me to implement an entire authentication pipeline, which will probably take me hours.

The biggest bane of my life in recent years was in my previous job as a computer science researcher. I worked on a pervasive device for sufferers of memory loss, and a part of its functionality - recognising the faces of friends and colleagues - was provided by an external service known as Face.com. We used the service for about a year before the company was bought by Facebook, and as soon as this takeover happened they shut down their API, effectively making our system useless overnight. All the training data we'd provided to Face.com was lost, and even if we had found another service, we would have had to start again from scratch. Cheers, guys.

Google seem to be doing the right thing - I've written many Google Maps applications, the first of which was the places part of this very website. The Google Maps API is now up to version 3, which I use when writing anything new, but the places page still uses version 1, and it still works. I've not had to re-write anything. Although v1 of the API is officially deprecated and unsupported, Google have kept it live so that apps written using it don't break. It amazes me that organisations such as Facebook have so much contempt for developers that they can't keep old APIs active, or at least consistent, despite being worth billions of US dollars. If you can't support an API, you really shouldn't provide one.

I doubt anything relies on the data made available by Madhouse Beyond, but I promise you now I take data dependency very seriously. The URL structure of Madhouse Beyond changed considerably in the last year, but I made absolutely sure that with a few exceptions (the text speak translator has gone because it's not funny any more) all the old URLs redirect properly. I did this myself, because I care, and it's sad that I seem to be one of a very small number of people who do. I just hope that as the world wakes up to the possibilities of linked open data, app developers gravitate towards data sources that actually bother to keep their formats consistent. This will force less competant providers to improve their practices or simply fade away.

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.

Fighting Fire with Water

There's a lot of controversy in the press at the minute (rightly so) about the fact that a bill is about to be passed through parliament. All the main party leaders (plus Nick Clegg too) have come out in support of it despite it not even being read in parliament yet. It's being called "emergency" legislation, meaning it'll be passed through much quicker than any other law. In fact, had Tom Watson (the only MP for whom I have any respect whatsoever) not brought it to the attention of the press, we probably wouldn't have even heard about it until after it became law. The big-shot politicians are all saying this is necessary to prevent terrorism (textbook excuse #1) and paedophiles (textbook excuse #2) but a lot of people are beginning to think that, in the wake of the actions of Edward Snowdon and Chelsea Manning, maybe a government isn't really fit to wield this kind of power. Whether you agree with that or not (I'm torn, I must admit) it's not exactly a healthy sign of government when bills get rushed through parliament lickety split before anyone can read them, even when you consider this bill will probably have no effect whatsoever on the powers available to, say, GCHQ.

So you'd think that I'd be outraged at this bill. Well, I'm not. And the reason is simple: technology is a much more effective weapon against law than law is.

Law is slow. I mean, really slow. It's also dumb. I kinda lost my last shred of respect for the law during the infamous Twitter Joke trial when they started arguing over grammatical technicalities, when anyone with more than two brain cells could see the guy had no intention of blowing up an airport. The fact is that law doesn't understand technology, so usually when laws are made to restrict technology there is an awful lot of collateral damage. This is partially because law makers like to cover all bases, but mostly because politicians, judges and lawyers don't know enough about the technology they're trying to legislate. Basically, law is really bad at solving problems, particularly modern ones.

Compare this to technology, which is very good at solving problems. The problem of your ISP being required by law to store logs on your browsing habits, solved by Tor and VPNs. The problem of not being able to smoke legally indoors, solved by e-cigarettes. Heck, when vehicle clamping became illegal suddenly every private car park in Southampton had ANPR cameras installed. Look at any kind of obstacle, good or bad, legal, technical or otherwise, and there's more than likely a form of technology that can circumvent it.

I don't fear a surveillance state because I know that for every wall there is a higher ladder. And as I'm not a lawyer, or anyone with any kind of political influence whatsoever, my ladder is technology. When (not if) the new bill is passed, I will simply continue using Tor to encrypt my traffic. I will continue to use VPNs to mask my IP address, and to fool my ISP's traffic shaping procedures. And the next time a law is passed that I'm not happy about, I'll come up with a technical solution to that too, rather than waste my time lobbying politicians who don't listen.

Getting political for a sec

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.

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.

Google are evil, but everyone else is OK

So here it begins... the Wall Street Journal report that Google are bypassing security settings on certain versions of Safari, specifically the iPhone version. Cue the shitstorm as hundreds of "privacy advocates" start bleating about how Google are 'evil'. Well I'm not going to make excuses, nor am I going to claim two wrongs make a right, but there are a few points that need to be addressed and nobody seems to be doing so.

Firstly, an analysis of what Google are actually doing. In order to make their 'Google Plus' code work, they need to be able to drop what's known as third party cookies on peoples' web browsers. You don't need to know what these are or how they work, but the default security model on lots of browsers these days is to disallow this, as it's a common method that advertising sites use to track you round the web. Maybe Google are doing this, maybe they aren't. Truth be told, they probably are, seeing as how advertising is how they make all their money. But the fact is that Google used this exploit to drop cookies on versions of Safari for which they had been disabled. You'll notice that the exploit was is over a year old, and since then it's become common in Facebook applications, which also rely on passing cookies between IFRAME elements.

So my first point: are Google really doing anything wrong? It's not hacking, it's computer science. They hit a problem, they solve it. The problem in this case is that they can't drop cookies on some browsers. They learn that it's possible to do so using a clever form hack as described in the previous link, and implement it. Problem sorted, they can now drop the cookie they needed, let's move on to the next problem without even batting an eyelid. By the same logic, Google Maps is 'evil' as it uses clever hacks to generate dynamic scrolling maps in an otherwise static web page.

My second point: even if the practice is slightly shady, why is everyone having a go at Google when the exploit has clearly been working on Facebook for over a year? If it really is such a problem, why have Apple not patched the hole? They've had a year to do it. Even if you do consider this frankly quite clever workaround to a programming problem to be wrong, let's bash Facebook as much as Google, and certainly let's bash Apple for not patching a one-year-old vulnarability in their web browser. It's certainly a genuine shame to see Google getting so much stick rather when openly privacy-apathetic organisations like Facebook and companies with a piss-poor reputation for fixing security vulnerabilities like Apple seem to be able to get away with anything these days.

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.

Hotels and technology

OK, I'm all in favour of technology. I'm the bloke whose house is slowly becoming a digital mecca, I have screens all over the place, the music in every room can be controlled from a phone, and I have a photo frame in my kitchen which alerts me to when the bins need taking out. I'm a geek, I love technology. So it's great when hotel rooms have little control panels for all the lights next to the bed, and the telly is less of a dumb VDU and more of an entertainment hub.

There's a proviso... if it's not obvious what something does, it should be labelled. I'm in the Trento Grand at the minute, which as the name suggests is quite posh. Sadly, like most posh hotels, it's shit. Ignoring the late night bar which seems to shut at 9, the pathetic excuse for a car park and the fact that they seem to have taken a leaf out of Ryanair's book in that you have to pay extra for everything, the rooms are technological masterpieces that are generally about as intuitive as an Apple product in that they make no logical sense whatsoever.

Firstly, it's sadly quite common for plug sockets to turn off by themselves if you leave the room, but this place goes one better... the sockets go off if the lights all go out. So no overnight charging of phone. I solved this problem by unplugging the desk lamp and plugging my phone into the socket where that was, and then leaving the desk lamp 'on' overnight. Of course in my mad stress session trying to find a socket that didn't go to sleep as soon as I did, I ended up unplugging the mini-bar and didn't realise until the evening. Hopefully they won't charge for all the gone-off food in there.

There's a switch by the front door that clearly does something, but I've no idea what. Switching it from one side to the other makes a light change from green to red, but nothing else obvious. I've left it on green purely because that's where it was when I got here, but I might leave it on red when I check out. There's also two wall panels, one in the bathroom and one in the main bedroom, which seem to contain an IR LED. Not a sodding clue why, but they do look a bit like HAL to me. Additionally, it's quite creepy how there's a light on the outside of the door that says if anyone's in the room or not, and that the cleaners seem to like drawing/undrawing the curtains for me as soon as I leave the room for 10 minutes.

| | | --- | | What the fuck does this do? |

But what pissed me off the most, I had a shower this evening. There's a vent at the top of the bath with a white cord next to it. Not wanting the room to become humidified, I pulled the cord to turn on the extractor fan. Nothing happened. Then when I got back into the main room I noticed a funny smell (a bit like a fan motor burning out) and the panel by the side of the bed was flashing "HELP". Additionally, the panel on the outside of the door was also flashing red. I tried turning the A/C on and off, lights, going out and coming in again, opening the window, nothing. I then went round the back of the panel, pulled it out and realised it's nothing more than a dumb terminal with a couple of RJ-11s plugged into the back. Unplugging it and plugging it back in again did nothing to stop the flashing. So I got dressed and trowpsed down four flights of stairs only to be told in broken english that the cord in the bathroom is the alarm and I shouldn't have pulled it. I asked how to stop it, I was told it'd stop itself. 20 minutes later it was still flashing and clearly it was a pointless alarm because nobody had come to see if I was OK, so I went back downstairs again, spoke to the same bloke, who got quite grumpy that I was back again and told me not to pull the cord again. I refused to leave until he turned the alarm off, which he eventually did. It was quite a complex process involving typing my room number into a computer and clicking a mouse three times. I can see why he was so annoyed he had to go through all that just for my benefit.

Anyway... everything now seems to work ok, and I'm leaving tomorrow, although I will be exchanging all the towels in the bathroom for the biggest turd I've ever produced. Probably in the sink.

I'm never happy

So, it seems that Hasbro has begun to release the Masterpiece line of Transformers here in the UK. I've yet to see any of the earlier figures, such as Thundercracker or Optimus, in Toys 'R' Us, and I doubt I'll ever see Megatron due to our restrictions being so much stricter than those of the Japanese, but nonetheless, they're doing good. I've now seen Starscream and Grimlock in the UK (in US-style packaging) and today I saw the latest Masterpiece figure, Rodimus Prime.

But there's an issue. OK, some figures get modified for the west. The Binaltech/Alternator series were completely different in that they were made entirely out of plastic rather than die-cast metal, virtually every re-release of Optimus Prime since the 80s has had short smoke-stacks and Masterpiece Grimlock has flatter teeth. Rodimus has a pleasant addition for the west in the form of his Targetmasters accomplice Firebolt (renamed Offshoot for some bizzare reason). But there is something rather major missing - his trailer.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not annoyed with the lack of trailer. Personally I preferred Rodimus when he was still called Hot Rod and had no trailer, he looked 10 times cooler (despite being the moron who got Optimus Prime killed in the 1986 movie). Every toy version of Rodimus I've seen I always got annoyed at the trailer - it's supposed to be integral. The only Rodimus toy I've ever liked was the Titanium edition which actually changed successfully from robot to van without having a massive chunk of kibble left over. In fact, when I first saw the Japanese masterpiece Rodimus (which does have the trailer) I got annoyed and wondered why, with the Masterpiece scale and budget, couldn't they have done it properly. I was tempted to buy it and simply throw the trailer away and call him Hot-Rod. So now they've released him in the west at a fraction of the price without the trailer I should be happy, right?

No... because they still call him "Rodimus Prime". For those who don't know, the two characters are the same entity, Hot-Rod was a robot that turned into, surprise surprise, a hot rod. He was introduced in 1986. At the end of the original animated Transformers movie, he inherits leadership of the Autobots from Optimus Prime (via Ultra Magnus) and is 'reformatted' into Rodimus Prime. During this transformation his robot mode stays the same but his alt mode changes from a hot rod to a hot rod-styled van/winnebago type thing, which is basically his old alt mode with a hulking great trailer thing on the back. So my issue isn't that they've released him without the trailer, my issue is that they're calling him "Masterpiece Rodimus Prime" when he's clearly "Masterpiece Hot-Rod".

So in conlusion, Hasbro - thanks for finally thinking of us UK trans-fans and releasing some Masterpieces in the west, but do try to get it right. I look forward to some good figures from Takara in the future, in the hope that they also make it to these shores, incomplete or otherwise.

I've always been ahead of the trends

I'm in a bit of a pickle. I'm not sure whether to be happy that the entire country now seems to share my view of celebrity coprophiliac "Doctor" Gillian McKeith, or whether to be saddened at the state of humanity because it took a brain-dead reality TV show for people to finally realise quite how full of bullshit she actually is.

Don't get me wrong, I don't watch I'm a Celeb. X-Factor I can almost stand, although the 10-minute intros and relentless commercial breaks that make me wish the BBC were the only broadcaster in the country continue to try my patience. But I do feel that watching a bunch of attention-seekers in a jungle isn't really a constructive use of my limited time on this planet, especially I can think of far more constructive pastimes; wanking, for example. I have, however, been made aware of McKeith's cringeworthy antics, and the fact that there's some controversy surrounding her recent "fainting" episode.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not it was staged (apart from to suggest that dumping a bucket of insects on her would have removed any ambiguity) but I'm thinking she's now in a real state no matter the outcome. If she was faking, it'll merely damage her already tattered reputation further. If it later turns out she was genuinely ill, well, I don't think anyone will be following her dieting advice from now on if she's the only person on the show who faints at the mere thought of anything remotely unpleasant.

ITV's short on talent

Anyone see the National Television Awards last night? Anyone other than me thinking that they really seem to be running low on celebrities?

So the show was introduced by Dermot O'Leary, who, had I not been forced against my will to watch several episodes of X-Factor, I would never have heard of. They then began the typical "and here to present the next award is [insert name of some unrelated celebrity here]". Then it started getting silly... "And next to present an award is Luis Urzua, one of the miners who was stuck down a hole in Chile a few months back. Oh and by the way, he doesn't actually speak a word of English". Er... yeah, nice sentiment, but who the fuck thought that would be a good idea? After Señor Urzua had failed to disguise the fact that he had no idea what was going on, it turned out that Dermot himself was up for an award so he actually left the stage and handed the mike over to Jonathan Ross for one poxy award, before coming back to continue the show afterwards. I'm guessing they knew before the show started that Dermot was up for an award, it's been on the web for quite some time, so why not get Jonathan to present the whole show? Oh, sorry, I forgot, ITV can't afford him, and Dermot is undoubtebly far cheaper. Amusingly, Ant and Dec won the award anyway, and they couldn't even be arsed to turn up - Simon Cowell collected the award on their behalf. But that didn't stop ITV from dedicating about 10 minutes of screen time to the idiotic pair via a supposedly live feed. At the end of the show they actually ran out of celebrities to present awards, so had to go up to the public audience and pull two kids out to present the award for 'Best Serial Drama', ironically won by Eastenders, a flagship show of ITV's rival, the BBC. Meanwhile, Dara O'Briain was tweeting from the event and informed all his followers that one of the people in the crowd was Gillian McKeith and the three women around him were all seat-fillers because the people who were supposed to be sat there hadn't turned up.

Remind me again... exactly why does ITV still exist?

In which I defend the BBC

More BBC-bashing in the press, I notice. I'm not really surprised - first an episode of Newsnight that was supposed to investigate allegations of Jimmy Saville being a child molester was dropped over fears that there wasn't enough evidence, which caused people to assume the reason was actually some kind of BBC cover-up (Saville was employed long-term by the BBC). Then, when Newsnight was given allegations that a high profile Thatcher-era Tory MP may also be part of the same paedophile ring, they ran another episode, stopping short of actually naming the MP in question... and they were still criticised when it turned out that the allegations may not be true. Basically, the BBC are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Frankly, I think they did the right thing with the Saville incident. Being accused of being a child molester is a career-destroying event, even if it's not true. No media outlet, particularly a publically funded one, should do this unless they are 100% certain that their allegations are true, and can back it up with hard evidence. So dropping the Saville allegations at a time when nobody was completely sure if they were true was correct. The subsequent episode about the Tory MP (which later turned out to be former Tory treasurer Lord McAlpine) was maybe a little hasty - OK, had he been guilty then the BBC would have had a scoop, and the Newsnight program was intended to encourage other victims to come forward. Happily, it now looks like the allegations against Lord McAlpine are false, but even though the BBC didn't actually name him, they're still getting it in the neck for starting the witch hunt. Which is sort of fair - the superinjunctions scandal of last year pretty much proved that you can't hide information with the likes of Twitter out there. So I do agree that in the Lord McAlpine case the BBC did perhaps make a bit of a boo-boo, even though their intentions were clearly good.

Let's remind ourselves of a chap called Chris Jeffries. He was a landlord in Bristol and he owned the flat in which a young student named Jo Yeates was living. Yeates was murdered by her neighbour, Vincent Tabak, but one of the suspects in the early days of the case was Jeffries himself. He was never actually charged with any offence, but this didn't stop many news outlets from participating in a character assassination of him the very second it emerged that he was being questioned as a suspect. Every piece of dirt possible on Jeffries was published in the national press. When he was released from police custody, Jeffries rightly sued eight major news organisations for libel, which was settled out-of-court for an enormous sum of money, and the Mirror and News International were both found guilty of contempt of court. The BBC were not one of the organisations involved.

Earlier this year, we had the Leveson inquiry. This was an investigation into the ethics of the news industry, particularly the practice of illegally accessing the voicemails of public figures in order to steal private information. Many high-profile journalists and figures in the newspaper industry have been accused not only of wrongdoing but also criminal acts. These people represent News International and the Mail... but not the BBC.

Even more recently it came to light that the Sun had been a key player in covering up the true facts of the Hillsborough Disaster, a catatrophic event in 1989 in which incompetant police measures indirectly caused the death of 96 people at a football match due to overcrowding. The Sun had reported at the time that it was an unruly crowd, and not the police, who were at fault for the fatalities, and it was only this year that a proper inquiry was carried out, and found the police to be the ones at fault. The Sun, to their credit, apologised. The BBC were not involved.

So the point that I'm making is that there are many news and media organisations that are guilty of serious miscarriages of justice. The BBC is actually relatively squeaky-clean compared to some other organisations out there. But the other organisations don't get nearly as much stick as the BBC.

Why is this? There are several reasons. Firstly, the BBC is publically funded rather than being a private business. They have a core requirement to be impartial, and lots of people know this. So any time the BBC says something someone doesn't agree with, they get criticised, and have to act accordingly. This is why Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were sacked for making one slightly offensive radio show, and people like Richard Littlejohn and Jon Gaunt can continue writing as many offensive comments as they damn well like, provided it sells newspapers. It's also why the BBC can't show anything too controversial while Channel 4 thrives on controversy. Secondly - and most importantly - the BBC is in the enviable position of not having to rely on external funding, and other media organisations are jealous. The Mail, the Sun, even ITV are always complaining about the BBC and referring to the license fee as a tax (it isn't). As I've said before, the BBC don't have to worry about pandering to advertisers or coming up with novel funding mechanisms involving premium rate phone-ins, and just get on with producing good telly... and frankly that's an incredibly envious position to be in. Over time, the BBC have produced masses of really good stuff in an incredibly efficient way. The license fee is currently £12.13 a month - if anyone can find me a newspaper or paid TV subscription for less than that I'll be very surprised. Your license fee pays for the BBC's TV, research and development, iPlayer, Radio, the website, plus more. The BBC runs Sport Relief, Comic Relief and Children in Need. And it does all this without having to bombard you with adverts. I personally can forgive the occasional cock-up.

Basically, this whole thing is a witch-hunt. It's every media outlet against the BBC, and the BBC isn't very good at sticking up for itself. It can't be - to do so would be to compromise its impartiality. Which is why we, the people of Britain, need to stick up for it. As Mitch Benn says in his fantastic song 'Proud of the BBC', "even if you don't always choose it, you'll know what you had if you lose it." Let's stop following the media witch hunt and use our brains for a change. You really wouldn't want the whole british media run by Rupert Murdoch.

In which I do give a damn about inaccurate metadata

I'm going to do a tech rant now, so you can turn off if you're sick of them. Apple fans, however, may be pleased to know that for once the rant isn't about something they own. It is in fact about the HTC Desire Z.

Firstly, it's not a bad phone overall. It's certainly not the most technically advanced phone in the world, but it has a keyboard which is a must for my fat fingers. It does everything an Android 2.3 device should do. One of the things it does is take photos. Sadly the camera app on it is pathetic.

Again, I must clarify: I appreciate that all phone cameras are shit. The lenses are tiny and despite manufacturer claims of massive numbers of megapixels and "high definition" cameras, there isn't a phone camera in the world that is good enough for anything more than taking photos for sharing on Twitter. This I can forgive. What I have a problem with is the actual camera software, specifically the metadata it stores with each photo.

Every digital camera since the dawn of time has a realtime clock. When you take a photo, the time and date is stored with it. This allows photo management software like Picasa and iPhoto to organise photos in chronological order. Over time, geo-tagging has become common, mainly because of smartphones. The idea here is that the geo-coordinates of the image are also stored in the digital file, so you can now sort by location as well. The Desire Z does both of these things badly.

The timestamp stored is always the local time, with no timezone information. This means that if you take a photo in Paris, then fly to London and take a photo there within an hour, the London photo will appear to have been taken first, and there is nothing you can do about it other than manually edit the time in the image. This is also a problem during summer time when DST is in place, if you have lots of photos taken at the same time each day, you need to adjust the time for summer. The correct thing to do would have been to store the timezone information along with the date, or even better, simply store the UTC timestamp which is the same worldwide, like my standalone camera does.

It also buggers up the geo-information. When you open the camera app it begins searching for GPS satellites. If you take a photo before it gets a fix, rather than not adding a location, it will add the last location it found, even if it was hours ago. Frequently I take photos miles away from my home and they're tagged as being at my house because that was the last place I used the GPS. No problem, I hear you say, simply turn geo-tagging off, right? Well, no, because if you turn geotagging off it will still store a location, but it will store latitude and longitude co-ordinates 0,0, which, as any geography expert will tell you, is in the Atlantic just off the west coast of central Africa.

I've no idea if it's just the Desire Z, all HTC phones, or indeed all Android 2.3 phones that have these two problems, but for christ sake someone sort it out. If I were to buy a camera phone and take a photo of my hamster and get a photo of a goat I'd consider the phone to be faulty - EXIF data is no different.

It's all about the pixels

At some point over the last few years it became the 'de-facto' standard for 'high definition' to refer to a picture size of 1920 by 1080 pixels. Allow me to rant on why I think this is dumb and wrong.

Firstly, 'high'. When DVDs came out, they were capable of producing (in PAL territories anyway) a progressive picture of 576 lines high. This is now known as 'standard definition', despite the fact that before DVDs pretty much all video was interlaced, meaning there were only really 288 lines of visible video at any one time. High def is obviously higher, but it is just that: higher. Not high. High def only came in because TVs are getting bigger. Compare 'high' definition to the definition of, say, a cinema camera and it looks very low indeed. So in 20 years time when everyone has an 80-inch screen in their front room, 'high definition' will start to look really pixelly, and you'll probably find that 'extra high definition' and 'super extra amazingly high definition' will need to supercede high def. They really should have called it 'digital video generation 2' or something like that, so they can go for 3, 4, 5, etc next time.

But secondly, and more importantly, people say 'definition' when they actually mean 'resolution'. By only taking into account the image resolution (the frame size in pixels) when defining 'high definition' you end up with some pretty shocking pictures that are, in my opinion, wrongly classed as high definition. Heck, the word 'definition' actually means clarity, so why is it that a blocky, low-bitrate video stream can be classed as high definition just because it's 1080 pixel lines high when a crystal-clear, higher bitrate displayed at 576 lines is considered standard definition, even if it has a clearer picture? The answer is simple: 'high definition' is nothing more than a marketing term. It has about as much meaning as the 'V' in 'DVD'.

A brief analogy: go into any decent camera shop and the salespeople will (correctly) tell you that megapixels are pointless, it's the lens that's important. More and more cameras, and even phone cameras, are being sold with 8, 10, even 12 megapixel definition... but if you don't have a decent lens and CMOS sensor then it's only producing 12 megapixels of rubbish. Video is exactly the same... you can have a high def camcorder, but if it's storing hours of video on a poxy 2GB SD card then you may as well be recording in standard def and upscale it later, it will look just as bad. I'm labelling home-video types with HD camcorders here, but professionals aren't flawless; try watching some low popularity digital TV channel (ie Sky 3, ITV4, etc) on a full-HD setup and you'll see how bad the picture is. There is no trickery or half-truth going on, the picture is indeed 'high definition', at least by its universally recognised definition, but it's a low bit rate and this is why it looks crap and blocky.

I think it's time we stopped thinking purely in terms of pixel resolution and more in terms of bit rate. We also need to redefine the phrase 'high definition' to better reflect the reality of digital video... it's not just about the picture resolution. As for me, I'm going to start saying 'high-res' rather than 'high-def', it's more technically accurate. You're welcome to join me if you like.

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.

On Jordan

I despise Katie Price. There, I said it. Not because she's everywhere, not because she's famous for doing precisely nothing, but because she is something that I dislike very strongly - a hypocrite. She's such a bane that she actually had me liking Peter Andre for a very brief minute (the minute he dumped her, incidentally).

I recall seeing part of her TV 'reality' show. It was an episode in which she noted a photo of her house in a national newspaper and spent the entire episode running around her massive estate trying to work out the location of the camera when the shot was taken, so that she could sue the cameraman for trespassing. This, in case the irony isn't blindingly obvious, is the woman who has her own reality TV show and would probably be on the dole if the press weren't so interested in her.

Now she's at it again. You may recall Frankie Boyle doing some stand-up on Channel 4 a while back (just after he was dropped by the BBC for being too controversial) in which he made fun of Katie Price and Alex Reid's relationship. He made a throwaway comment, pretty typical of his material, about Katie only marrying a cage fighter because she's worried her son Harvey will try to fuck her. Price then went to great lengths to try (unsuccessfully) to sue Boyle for having a go at her disabled son, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the joke was making fun of her, not her offspring. Whether it was funny or not is, of course, a matter of opinion. So now that we've all long forgotten about it, Katie's bringing it up again. She's made a documentary entitled Standing Up for Harvey, in which she talks of the hurt and suffering caused by Boyle's joke. Clearly so much hurt and suffering she has to keep banging on about it, and is now being paid to do so. Nice one!

On being the bad guy

Democracy dictates that I'm the bad guy. It's the curse of everyone who goes slightly against popular opinion, unfortunately. It happened to Darwin, it happened to Aristotle and it happens to me. I've just got back from my local supermarket. It was quite busy, as it was 3.30 on a Sunday and only half an hour to closing time (that's a rant for another day.) I only had four items in my hand, so I looked for the magical 'one basket only' till. Nothing annoys me more in a supermarket than having to wait for three people to do their weekly shop when all I want is one or two things, so I'm a big fan of the basket lane. I put my items down on the conveyor belt and stood waiting.

As I waited, a woman came up behind me with a trolley load of groceries. She began to put them onto the conveyor. I smiled and politely pointed out to her that this is the basket only lane. She apologised, clearly not realising her mistake, and went to find another queue.

At this point, the old guy in front of me said "She'd have probably got away with that!" I smiled and looked back in the other direction in the stereotypically british 'I don't really want to talk to you' kind of way. But he went on "that was a bit harsh, she'd have been alright. I wouldn't have said anything, myself..." completely ignoring the fact that the basket only lane is there for a good reason, so that people like himself don't have to wait behind people doing massive shops if all they want is a loaf of bread and some washing up liquid.

And this is, of course, the problem. Not just the fact that this bloke wouldn't have told the woman that she was doing something wrong, but that he was more keen to chastise me for saying something to her. We have actually somehow sleep-walked into a society that is not only afraid to call a spade a spade, but actually considers it unacceptable to do so. If this kind of logic is allowed to continue, I predict the next generation will grow up without being potty-trained because parents are too afraid to scold their children for shitting on the floor. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, it's already happened; I've certainly been shit on quite a lot in my life by people who really should know better. Still, society eventually gave in and admitted that Darwin and Aristotle were right, so I'll probably get my day one day. Knowing my luck I'll be long dead by then.

On photography

So there I was, at the zoo, among a small crowd, watching some penguins. As I do. They were swimming around the enclosure and Holly (yes, I'm on first name terms with most of Marwell's penguins) was stood on a rock surveying the pool. Suddenly, the peace was shattered. I was literally barged out of the way by some old bloke with a camera. "Mind out the way, mate," he ordered, pushing some children aside in order to get as close to the safety bar as he could. After unleashing a torrent of flashes in Holly's general direction he turned around and left, presumably oblivious to the 20-odd people who now hate him.

I'd like to say he's a one-off case, but sadly he's not. The simple case is that photography has become so cheap recently that everyone's doing it, even arseholes. I don't claim to be exempt, I have a camera and frequently take photos of animals at the zoo, as well as other things, people and places. Photographers' rights are something for which I stand strongly, and always support photographers in arguments with ill-informed police officers and self-important security guards who mistakenly think they have a right to decide where the general public can and can't take photos. One of the benefits of living in the UK is that in nearly all cases you or I can take a photo of whoever or whatever we like, whenever we like, without having to worry about obtaining permission from anyone. But there are some who take it too far the other way, as if owning a camera makes you immune to basic common decency.

I see arguments all over web bulletin boards about what constitutes a 'real' photographer. Some claim that people who own point-and-shoot cameras as opposed to expensive DSLRs aren't 'real' photographers. Others claim that you're not a photographer unless you make money out of photography. Obviously, this is all just snobbery. I've seen some truly shocking photos taken by supposedly 'professional' photographers with big expensive cameras that are massively inferior to some other photos that I myself have taken with a mobile phone. And I'm sure every hobby photographer in the world will disagree with the making money argument - I know people who know everything there is to know about photography, yet have never made a penny in their lives on it. I believe that if you've ever taken a photo, you're a photographer. There are good photos and bad photos, and I'm sure every photographer has taken their fair share of each. So I have my own suggestion as to what makes a 'good' photographer: one who's not a complete dick.

I have been to friends' weddings where the 'official' photographer (running around in a suit with a motorcycle gang-style patch on his back advertising his services) was continually snapping photos all the way through the bloody ceremony making it incredibly annoying for pretty much everyone in the congregation. I've been to conventions and conferences where several people, all wielding outrageously large cameras, have considered it acceptable to run around at the front and crawl all over the stage getting in the audience's way in their quest to snap photos. I have even been to events at which a photographer has complained to the event organisers afterwards that the light was too low on stage, making it hard to take photos, completely ignoring the fact that the show was put on for the 350-odd people in the audience, not one prick with a camera.

Fact is, it seems to me that many so-called photographers have forgotten what a photo is - it's a memory. And if the memory contained within the photo is that of a pompous, inconsiderate and in some cases bloody rude photographer, then the photo wasn't actually worth taking. Fellow photographers: if you're taking photos at an event, respect the audience who have probably paid good money to be there, use a telephoto lens from the back, or sit in the front row rather than crawling all over the stage getting in everyone's way. If you're taking photos in a public place, such as a zoo or art gallery, wait until your subject isn't surrounded by other people who have just as much right to look as you have to take a photo. Much of photography is waiting for the right moment, and if you have to barge people out the way, you've picked the wrong moment. For most people, I'm sure, this is all just common sense. Sadly, for some it isn't. To those people: stop being a dick. That is all.

Open Letter to the NoToAV Campaign

`Dear Sir/Madam,

Until quite recently, I was sitting on the fence of the Yes/No to AV debate. I can see the good and bad points of both systems. Our current system is clearly broken, it allows MPs to be selected even if the majority of the electorate vote against them, and it forces many people to vote tactically, often having to vote for their second choice just to keep their least favourite out. On the other hand, AV is a compromise and still not true proportional representation, it will take longer to count the votes, and any BNP supporters who until now have voted tactically will now vote for their first choice.

I have now made my decision to vote 'yes' to AV in tomorrow's referendum, and ironically it is the 'NoToAV' campaign that's convinced me to do so. So far I've actually heard nothing from the Yes camp, although during my visit to their website I read some very good points, some answers to common criticisms, and the whole thing was quite informative without scaremongering or being patronising. Compare this to the rubbish that I've had through the post from the No camp. The first leaflet posted to my household was pure comedy and read like an article from a right-wing tabloid, misrepresenting statistics to support an agenda, bold statements with absolutely no sources or figures to back them up, and in many cases outright lies. It also claimed that millions of pounds will need to be spent in order to teach people how to use the new system... which is a bit of an insult to peoples' intelligence. I agree, most people in this country are morons, but I'm sure most of them can count.

This morning I received a second, shorter leaflet which contained many of the same statements but this time omitting any kind of justifications, presenting them as fact, and going further and further into what I like to call 'worst case fantasy land'. The leaflet insists that AV will cause more coalitions - an arguable claim - and that in the event of a coalition, Nick Clegg will get to choose the prime minister "by cutting a deal behind closed doors after the election." This is nonsense... even assuming the result of the next general election is identical to the last one (and it won't be), Nick Clegg didn't 'choose the prime minister'. The Lib Dem/Tory coalition was the only way to form a majority government, and I'm sure Clegg's first choice for PM would have been himself!

The leaflet then goes on to explain that someone else's fifth preference will be worth the same as my first. Again, this is worst case being presented as if it's the norm. Reverse the situation, it's entirely possible that my fifth preference will be worth the same as someone else's first, but if I managed to pick so many unpopular MPs that my fifth choice was taken into account, then surely I should be grateful... under FPTP anyone who doesn't vote for the winner is effectively ignored. Finally, it's claimed in the leaflet that under AV supporters of the BNP and other fringe parties will decide who wins. So you're saying that if I support a 'fringe party' my vote shouldn't count? I dislike the BNP as much as anyone but under AV they'd need more votes to get in than under the current system, which is why they're opposing AV. Your 'no' campaign can't really use the BNP as a scare tactic when they're on your side!

My general opinion of this is simple: if you have to lie and mislead in order to get your point across, then maybe you don't have such a good point in the first place. And it is for this reason, NoToAV campaign, that I shall be voting 'yes' tomorrow. I'm not entirely sure who handles your PR, but as a piece of friendly advice you might like to consider hiring someone different in any future campaigns.

Yours faithfully,

Ash, Madhouse Beyond.`

Open letter to landlords who book bands

This weekend the band with which I associate have had two gigs, both made less pleasant by a pub landlord or landlady who clearly doesn't realise "how it works". It seems to me that these days a small minority of pub owners and managers book bands purely because it's the done thing - the bands themselves are more a necessary inconvenience than anything else.

If this is how you think, then please don't book bands. Be a sports pub, or a food pub, or a real ale pub. Don't book bands if you don't actually want them there. Most pub bands do what they do for the love of it, they're not in it to make a profit. If they were, they probably wouldn't be playing pubs. So when a band turns up to a gig in a pub only to be ordered around and effectively told that they don't know how to do what they've been doing for years by some self righteous arse who likes to assert authority, it's more than a little bit irritating. It also doesn't help if you blame the band for not bringing hundreds of adoring fans with them, or taking up space where paying customers might want to stand; pub bands are not an investment. They just set up, play, and leave when finished. Their job is to play music, not sell drinks - that's the pub's job. The band will publicise the gig as much as possible among their friendlies, but they can't guarantee it'll be a blast. After all, if people who want to see a band have a choice of seeing them in a shit hole venue one week or a much nicer pub just up the road the week after, they're going to pick the nicer pub and you can't really blame the band for that.

The sad fact is that we live in a time when pubs and live music are both in the same boat - struggling to survive. We all have a much better chance of survival if we stick together. Most bands are quite reasonable, but they're not your employees. Treat them like human beings and they'll be more than happy to come to an agreement that benefits all parties. Asserting authority, making unrealistic demands and generally treating bands like dirt is only going to piss them off. This isn't helpful for either live music or the pub trade, so why do it? And if you really can't grasp this concept then maybe you should be asking yourself why you want a band in your pub in the first place?

Previously on Madhouse Beyond

It's about time I did another rant. Oh yes it is. Tough, I'm doing one anyway.

Things change over time, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Television is no different - it's changed. For better because budgets are higher, special effects are better, picture quality is better and so on. But for worse because ad breaks are longer, originality is harder, and, it seems, people are getting forgetful. At least the TV shows seem to think this is the case.

Back in the 60s we had Doctor Who. It was a time when long-running radio dramas were commonplace and Doctor Who took the same path. It was on every week and each episode was part of a longer story. The first story lasted four weeks and the second, the first appearance of the infamous Daleks, lasted seven. The cool thing is that if you play each episode back-to-back, very little is repeated. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger and the next episode picks up pretty much where it left off with little to no overlap. There was no 'next time' trailer at the end, and no pre-credits 'story so far' to waste valuable storytelling time. This was commonplace.

In the 80s and 90s our TVs were bombarded with US shows, some of which were serials. Occasionally these would begin with "Previously on [name of show]" and have a really quick (ie 10 seconds) reminder of the previous episode just as a memory jogger. This was, I believe, unnecessary, but not really a problem.

Fast forward to the present. We still have Doctor Who, although the pacing has changed considerably since the early days. I recall the final episode of series 32 had quite a long 'previously...' section which, due to the series-long story arc, recapped several episodes. Part of this recap was a scene or two from a seemingly unrelated episode, and that recap basically spoiled a very carefully concealed Chekhov's Gun, effectively giving away the ending for those paying attention. Not good.

Another show I quite like watching is The Apprentice. But I don't usually turn it on until 5-10 minutes after the published start time because every episode begins with the same thing - a long intro explaining the format of the show (is this really needed after eight series?!) followed by the opening credits and then another five minutes explaining in meticulous detail what happened last week. I actually have theorised that you can just watch every other episode of the show and still follow it just as if you had watched them all. But even this complete disregard for the viewer's memory was not as far as the TV companies could push it. After all, the Apprentice and Doctor Who are both BBC1 which has no commercial breaks...

Last night, I was watching Derren Brown's Apocalypse. I'd recorded it when it was shown on Channel 4 quite a long time ago, and I finally got round to watching it last night. Of course, as I'd recorded it, I could skip the commercial breaks, but this only emphasised the problem. Not only did the second part of the two-part series do exactly what the Apprentice does, spending far too long going over what the viewer already knows, but after every commercial break there was a cutaway scene with Brown explaining what the show was about - you know, as if in the five minutes since the adverts began, the viewer had completely forgotten everything that had happened up until now. I've not got any actual science on the matter but the two hour-long episodes get cut down to 45 minutes each if you remove the adverts and I'm sure you could knock at least another 20 minutes off the total running time if you remove the scenes that are repeated as 'memory joggers'. Basically, Channel 4 have taken a one-hour show and spread it over two hours.

OK, TV companies, we're not stupid. Well... I'm not stupid. I can follow a plot even if it's broken into bits. I don't read books all in one sitting and the same is true of TV shows. I understand you need to break things up, sometimes for scheduling reasons and sometimes for commercial reasons, but stop being so bloody patronising about it. And frankly if there are people who can't remember a plot because of a five-minute break in the narrative, then either they're morons, or the plot was so shit that it probably wasn't worth spending money on making the show in the first place. So please, enough with the recaps and previews, they're just wasting valuable plot and/or advertising time.

Proof (if any were needed) that greetings cards aren't worth the paper on which they're printed

I've ranted about greetings cards before. I had lots of response - apparently it's still 'thoughtful' to send someone a greetings card if the occasion calls for it.

This week, those who know me will know that I got another year older. Cue lots of cards from various old friends and distant family members through the post. Most of these people I've not seen for months, even years. But likewise, most of these people clearly can't remember the 'congratulations' card they sent me three years ago, or they'd have addressed the card to Dr Ash, rather than the Mr Ash that they all chose to use instead.

Seriously, folks, if you're going to waste your money on pointless pieces of paper at least know why you sent it. Otherwise it's basically just an expensive Facebook wall post... easy to send and requiring no thought whatsoever. I'd rather have no birthday cards than token cards from people who don't even know what my name is.

Salesmen

I'm not one to despise all salespeople. I appreciate that there is a need for salespeople and marketing in general. After all, without such things products wouldn't sell, a large part of sales is to inform. There is an art in sales and marketing, from simply producing a catchy or annoying advert (ie webuyanycar.com) to ensuring your product's name becomes synonymous with its type (ie iPod).

But there is one particular type of salesperson I despise, and that's the one who's so convinced he's flogging a dead horse that he actually has to pretend he's not even a salesperson in order to make a sale. Case in point, today, my front door:

| Doorbell | [ding dong] | | --- | --- | | [Ash goes to answer door, expecting it to be a courier delivering a parcel. Opens door to a man in his early 20s wearing a 'Southern Electric' hat and jacket and carrying a clipboard.] | | | Ash | Hi there. | | Man | Hi, I'm from Southern Electric, here's my ID. | | Ash | Oh, the meter's just round there [points to the side of the house]. | | Man | No, you've actually been flagged on our system. | | [Ash, taken by surprise, goes into his 'suspicious mode' and notices something that until now passed him by] | | | Ash | Hold on - we're not with Southern Electric, we're with a different provider. | | Man | Ah yes, but we're the distributor for this area. | | [A little alarm bell labelled 'bullshit' starts ringing in Ash's head] | | | Ash | So... basically, you're a salesman trying to get me to change provider? | | Man | [avoiding the question] Look... [gets out a map of the UK] if you can see, these areas are Southern Electric... | | Ash | OK, yes, I know what the UK looks like, can we cut to the chase, I'm quite busy. | | Man | Ah ok, if you're busy we can pop some literature in the post for you? | | Ash | Thanks, you do that. |

As a little epilogue, he didn't actually get my name, so if he does put something through the door it'll be addressed 'to the occupier' and will therefore get binned without being read.

Ironically, I'm sure in the sales industry he'd be seen as a master salesman. In fact, had I been a little old lady with not all my marbles, he'd have probably tricked me into signing something that switched my energy supplier without my knowledge and consent, and he'd have been paid a hefty commission for doing so, because sales figures don't actually take into account whether the customer actually wanted the service or not. On the contrary, a good salesman, in my opinion, is one who sells the best product to a customer who actually wants it. Surely if you start to find people don't want to buy your product you'd be much better off finding people who do and selling it to them, rather than trying to con people into buying something they don't want. And if you find that you've descended to the level whereby you have to actually pretend not to be a salesperson at all in order to sell it, surely you should be wondering why? I'm sure the sales industry would be a lot less despised if they started treating people like people, rather than as sales figures.

Science

I was on a plane, travelling back to the UK. To keep me sane, I had with me my Amazon Kindle, a fine example of modern technology, which allows me to buy, store and read books and electronic documents from a single device measuring about the same as a sheet of A5 paper, and less than a centimetre thick. It's a moot point, but I was reading Charlie Brooker's "The Hell of It All", a collection of his wonderfully funny and well-observed columns previously published in the Guardian.

We began final descent. Soon after, the cabin crew did a tour of the passengers, checking everyone had their seat backs and tray tables up, and so on. One of the stewards noticed the device in my hands and asked me if I'd turn it off until after we've landed as electronic devices may interfere with the plane.

Those who have a Kindle or similar e-book reader will know of its power consumption, or lack thereof. The battery lasts weeks on a single charge. Due to its electronic paper screen, it literally only uses power when in wireless mode (which of course I'd had off for the entire flight) or when you're turning a page, it needs no power at all to keep the page unchanged. In fact, even in 'off' mode, it displays a picture of some classic author on the screen, rather than the page you were reading. Even when the battery dies completely, the screen continues to display a message saying that the battery has run out. Basically, turning the device 'off' actually makes no difference to its operation, how much power it is consuming, or how many potentially interfering signals it's emitting. (EDIT: I've since been informed that you can actually blank the Kindle's screen completely when it's off. Happy to plead ignorance on that one.) The only practical difference between off mode and on mode is that in off mode I can't read my bloody book.

Now, I could have explained all this to the steward and continued to read for the remaining 10 minutes of the flight. In a completely rational world this would have been a sensible course of action to take. Sadly we live in a world of irrational people and, knowing this, I decided to simply comply with the request of a less technologically literate person than myself in a bid to avoid unnecessary hassle.

I'm not bitter about the experience, 10 minutes of reading isn't really anything to cry about, but the experience did make me think about the state of the world in general. It made me think about Professor David Nutt, former drugs adviser to the government, who was effectively sacked for doing his job. He advised, with the benefit of scientific knowledge and research, that many illegal drugs were less dangerous than legal drugs such as alcohol. But because his comments went completely against the government of the time's anti-drug stance, his advice was ignored and he was later sacked. Thanks in part to a campaign by the National Farmers' Union, the UK government is currently very close to allowing farmers to kill badgers in order to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis even though genuine taxpayer-funded research conducted over ten years suggests that reactive culling is actually counter-productive, and more research needs to be carried out in order to determine why. According to a freedom of information request by the Telegraph last February, some 30% of NHS primary care trusts are funding homeopathy, despite there being no actual scientific evidence that it works better than placebo. Insisting that homeopathic remedies are denied NHS funding will more than likely piss off the British Homeopathic Association, whose website has a prominent "What You Can Do" section encouraging people to write to their MPs and PCTs insisting that homeopathic remedies are continued to be funded by the taxpayer. And my own personal bug bear, being as I am a computer scientist, the Digital Economy Act. This was passed during the death throes of the previous government and obliges internet service providers to spend large amounts of their own money and time policing the internet for the benefit of the movie and music production indutries, something I've blogged about several times before. The act was strongly opposed by pretty much anyone who has the slightest clue about how the internet works, but was eventually passed by MPs due to pressure from the content providers, and has since led indirectly to the ACS:Law scandal and a recent High Court decision to order a major ISP to block access to an entire website just because a coalition of multinational corporations didn't like people having access to it.

So how does all this relate to my previous anecdote about the plane steward and the Kindle? Simple: in order to secure an easy life, we're listening to those who can shout the loudest when we really should be listening to the people with the most knowledge. I don't deny, I'm all for drug reform, specifically the legalisation of marijuana, but if an expert in chemistry and toxicology were to tell me that it's a bad idea, I'll admit I'm wrong. I'm against the taxpayer funding homeopathy, but if someone were to actually show me some genuine scientific data that proves that it's as effective as other, more mainstream types of medicine then I'll happily support it. The sad fact is that the politicians who make the rules aren't in it for what's true and right, they're in it for votes. So long as people who support homeopathy can shout louder than the actual scientists, homeopathy will be available on the NHS, and as long as rich media moguls have more political influence than people like me who actually know quite a lot about technology, then destructive laws like the DEA will continue to be passed. Democracy is flawed; in any random sample of people there will always be more non-experts in a particular field than experts, but democracy is designed to support the majority, even if they have no idea what they're talking about.

I'm not calling for a shift to some kind of meritocracy - although doing so would solve the problem - I'm simply saying that for civilisation to prosper, we need to start thinking critically, forming our opinions based on real science and evidence rather than what we've been taught is right or wrong. Had Darwin and Gallileo simply gone with the beliefs of the masses we'd still believe that the earth is flat, the sun goes round the earth and dinosaurs didn't exist. We as a society must learn not to form opinions unless we know all the facts, accept the difference between what we want and what we need, and above all, only vote for politicians who do likewise.

So in conclusion, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're an air steward, and you see some chap on the plane reading a Kindle on landing, just let him finish his book. He'll only end up writing a hypocritical rant like this one otherwise.

Sexually implicit

I've recently got a new job. As part of the job application process I had to fill out an 'equal opportunities' form. For those who've not seen one, it's purely for gathering statistics on the people who work in an institution. It asks questions about nationality, gender, marital status, ethnic background and religion.

Most questions on an equal opportunities form have "prefer not to say" as the final option, and I always tick this box. It's not entirely due to my preference to keep my personal life and work life separate, it's also because I believe statistics on who's gay or straight isn't going to end homophobia any faster than statistics on race are going to end racism. It's a massive political issue that involves attitudes as well as numbers, but is far too complicated for this blog.

What did interest me was the fact that in this particular form, the optional question about being gay or straight was preceeded by a question on marital status, which had no opt out option. More alarmingly, the question specifically segregated 'in a civil partnership' from 'married'. Obviously my socially liberal politics consider this an outrage anyway, but come on... what's the point of having an optional question on sexuality when the answer is potentially given away by the previous (compulsory) question?

Basically, we need to let gay people get married. If not for liberal or human rights reasons, for reasons of data protection.

Shakespeare and Language

There are a lot of classic authors, and lots of books and lots of movies of books. Some of these books are written by Shakespeare and some aren't. Yet for some reason every time an adaptation of a Shakespeare play is released, it has to remain faithful to the original in terms of dialogue, and no other author is extended this courtesy.

Some examples are quite extreme. Baz Luhrman's film version of Romeo and Juliet and Geoffrey Wright's adaptation of Macbeth are both modernised versions of their respective plays, changing many concepts to their modern day equivalent (eg Macbeth becomes a gang leader instead of king, and the Montagues and Capulets are rival business empires rather than feuding families). Despite this, the dialogue is taken directly from the original, which sounds more than a little odd, having people in familiar modern day settings talking like shakespearean characters.

Done, I think, much better is Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' Sherlock, a modern re-telling of Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, interspersed with the odd original story. The first episode of the last series was a faithful modern adaptation of A Study in Scarlet, and the first two episodes of the upcoming series are based on A Scandal in Bohemia and The Hound of the Baskervilles. All are set in modern day England but the dialogue has been modernised with the setting. Yet the adaptation is very faithful to the original in terms of plot.

I'm on the fence in the usual book/movie adaptation argument - I appreciate that you sometimes need to change elements from books to make them work on screen. For example, I support Peter Jackson's decision to omit the entire 'Cleansing of the Shire' section from Return of the King because it would have spoiled the pacing of the movie. That said, sometimes things go a bit too far - many of movie adaptations of Roald Dahl books change things for no good reason and ruin the spirit of the original story (eg The Witches). I guess this is all a matter of opinion though, and therefore a slight digression from the point.

Basically: why is it that Shakespeare's language is immune from any kind of Hollywood meddling, even in a supposedly modernised adaptation, and that of other equally skilled wordsmiths (ie Tolkien) isn't? Shakespeare was indeed a literary genius, but he's hardly a special case and we need to stop treating him like one.

Shops

I avoid shops where possible. Most things I need are available online, even groceries these days. Sadly if you need something in a hurry, or want to look at it first, you still need to walk through the hordes of mindless sheep known as the human race and brave a shop.

It was in one of these "shop" things today where I spotted something in a display cabinet that I wanted to buy. "Can I have one of those, please?" I asked the sales assistant. He checked the item number and vanished out the back for what seemed like an age. As I was about to give up and leave, he returned with some news. "Sorry, we're out of stock of that item."

Then he said something weird. "We can order it if you like?" he asked. OK, so ignoring the fact that they're basically advertising a product they don't have, why in the name of arse do they even ask this question? The reason I fought my way through a shop in December is because I want it now, not when it's delivered. As far as I'm concerned, there are two ways of buying stuff: ordering online takes time to get to you but you have, by law, 14 days to return it under distance selling regulations if you don't like it, plus you don't actually have to leave the house or worry about opening times. Buying from a shop means you have to drive, park, fight, etc but you get the benefit of seeing the item before you part with cash, and you get it straight away. So why would I want none of the benefits of either method? And why do they display stuff that you need to order? It's no wonder people generally shop online these days.

Oh yeah, and fuck christmas. Fuck it up its stupid arse.

Southampton Fucking Train Station

Some of you may be familiar with Southampton Central train station. It's a convenient place to get off the train if you're going to Southampton, unlike Southampton Airport Parkway, which is actually in Eastleigh, not Southampton. As if that's not confusing enough, the central station has two sides, neither is an obvious 'front'. I've had arguments with many people over which is the 'front entrance' and which is the 'back entrance'. I think of the front as being the side facing town, the Toys R'Us side, but others disagree.

Another good way of determining which side of the station to enter or exit is to go by platform number. Thing is, you can't figure out where the platforms are unless you're inside the station, which means paying for a ticket. Fat lot of good that does you if you're supposed to be picking someone up.

National Rail have actually been really helpful and provided a station plan for the station. It's a Javascript thing that shows all sorts of stuff, such as where the cash machine is, and where the disabled entrances and shops are. It even has little photos of everything. It has just one problem... it's upside down.

Yes, that's right - on this map, unlike every other map in the known universe, north is down and south is up. It's even more confusing because there's a small building to the north side which is the HQ of the transport police, but it's not obvious. It's incorrectly marked on the map as 'Southampton Police Station'... WHICH IS SOUTH OF THE FUCKING STATION.

Why the hell does Southampton central station try to be as difficult as possible?! There. Rant over.

Supermarket Bigotry

Supermarket (n) A large self-service store selling foods and household goods.

Bigotry (n) Bigoted attitudes; intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.

I know lots of people, myself included, who live quite near to a supermarket. Supermarkets attract traffic to an area, and there is a particular action as a driver that seems unique to the entrances of supermarkets and large shops. I refer to this as 'supermarket bigotry', and I will explain.

You are driving along a main road. There is a turning to the left, into a supermarket. You don't want to go to the supermarket, and intend to continue straight on past the entrance. Consequently, you do not indicate to turn, you're not planning on leaving the road or altering your course. There is a vehicle in the entrance to the supermarket, intending to pull out onto the road on which you're currently travelling. The driver of this vehicle, having just done his or her shopping, assumes that the only possible reason anyone could be on that particular road is to visit the supermarket, and therefore, despite the fact that you are not indicating left or making any attempt to slow down, assumes that you must be turning left and pulls out in front of you, causing you to slam on your brakes. This is supermarket bigotry. The driver has failed to explore the possibility that you might be on that road for a different purpose to their own, and in doing so, nearly caused an accident.

I live near a Sainsburys where this happens all the time. I have a friend who lives in a cul-de-sac which also contains a Tesco, and it's near impossible to turn into said cul-de-sac without some moron pulling out in front of you, completely oblivious to the fact that there are things other than the Tesco in the road that I may wish to access. My parents also live next to a large out-of-town shopping area and I'm forever having to brake on a roundabout because of people assuming I'm turning into the shops and pulling out in front of me.

People - not everyone is going shopping all the time. In fact, if you're pulling out onto a main road having done your shopping, there is actually more chance that the oncoming traffic isn't on their way in; the hint is usually in the indicators (or lack of). When exiting a supermarket, believe it or not, normal road rules apply, meaning you should give way to traffic already on the road you intend to join. It really isn't that hard.

Rant over.

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 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 Does It Again

I love how the Echo always manages to make a mountain out of a molehill.

M27 motorway to be closed eastbound for three days, screams the headline. The article begins: "The eastbound carriageway of the M27 will be completely closed for three days, it has been revealed". Yet the very next sentence clarifies somewhat: "The motorway will be closed between junctions four and five on March 9, 10 and 11." So in one sentence, we've gone from the entire eastbound carriageway being closed to one junction being closed eastbound. Still - three days, what are they thinking?

Ah, hold on... let's check the actual source of the news, namely the Highways Agency website. "The work will be carried out during a 32 hour closure of the carriageway, from 9pm on Saturday 9 to 5.30am on Monday 11 March. Fully signed diversion routes will be in place," say the HA. So basically the road will only be closed for one full day plus a bit of night work, and the full day will be a sunday, when most of the traffic on the eastbound M27 gets off at junction 4 anyway.

This doesn't actually annoy me - the Echo, like most tabloids, should be taken with an extremely large helping of salt. What annoys me is that I've already had an email at work (sent to the entire department) from some hysterical loon "warning" people who drive to work about the traffic, making it very clear that they've only read the headline and not the article, and certainly haven't bothered to check the information source. Is it any wonder that urban myths circulate so easily when people actions are based on such inaccurate and incomplete information?

The Flag

There are people who are very fond of their flag. In some countries it symbolises national pride, in some it's actually an offence to destroy or deface the national flag. Yet, as a british citizen I don't feel the pride and joy many fellow brits feel when they see their flag, I just feel miserable as I think of what it's come to represent.

It all started the day I saw an advert for a local double glazing company whose name escapes me. They'd somehow managed to incorporate the union flag into their logo, presumably to show their heritage as a british company and encourage proud british citizens admire them for this. However, it had the opposite effect on me; I saw the flag in the logo and my mind immediately told me "BNP leaflet" before had the chance to actually read the text. It's sad when a far-right organisation like the BNP can hijack a country's flag to the point that a citizen of that country begins to associate their own flag with extreme right-wing politics. But as my life went on, I began to find this only too apt.

I've always hated patriotic people. For me, patriotism is basically borderline xenophobia, the belief that one nation is better or worse than another. The way I see it, being patriotic is just like being religious: it's admirable to others with similar views, but repugnant to everyone else. Face it: despite being a pretty good place to live, Britain isn't perfect. Even the whole concept of "buy british" annoys me - if you can buy the same product cheaper or quicker from another country then why don't you? I like to think of myself as an entirely logical and rational being, and patriotism for the sake of it is completely incompatible with this. Especially in a country like the UK where - apart from the Isle of Wight and certain parts of Cornwall - we've been raped and pillaged so many times by everyone from the vikings to the french that there aren't actually any indigenous people here any more, and if there were they'd be easy to spot thanks to their extra fingers.

As an aside, please don't get me wrong. I'm not ashamed to be british. OK, our history on the world stage isn't exactly rosy, but I don't believe we or anyone else should be judged on the sins of our fathers. And even though I strongly disagree with a good percentage of what our current government does or says, you can't hate the people of a country based on their government. I despise the opressive nature of the chinese government, for example, but I don't hate chinese people. In fact, the few chinese people I know are all really friendly, and outrageously polite. Their manufacturing industry is going from strength to strength, and their food is considered a delicacy. China is mostly good, it's just the politics that let it down. So no, bringing this argument back home, despite my many problems with the UK I'm not ashamed to be british. We have (for the time being anyway) an excellent national healthcare system that ensures poor people and those out of work can get the same treatment as the super-rich, a superb public broadcaster in the BBC, and I don't think any other country makes better beer than we do. OK, so our illustrious leader has made us the laughing stock of Europe, we let the US buttfuck us on a regular basis and keep crying for more, and we started a few silly wars over trivial things like oil and penguin-infested rocks in the atlantic, I can ignore those when I consider that the alternative could be living somewhere like North Korea.

But I do draw the line at the flag. I can happily say that you will never see me waving a union flag. And to understand why, you only have to look at what it stands for, and where you see it the most. BNP rallies and mindless patriotism we've already discussed. Football matches (OK, mainly the St George's flag rather than the union flag, but the same applies), and other sporting events. I imagine that with the olympics in London this year, manufacturing flags is probably a good business in which to be. Wars. Every time some huge great boat pulls up at Portsmouth docks, the flags start to fly. And anything to do with Royalty. If the queen takes a day off her usual job of sitting on her arse, her loyal subjects line the streets waving their little flags, their tiny, primitive minds so pleased to be supporting the very notion of a ruler chosen by an accident of birth rather than any kind of democratic process. These are things that the union flag represent to me. Things to which I'm extremely opposed, like racism, wars and the monarchy, and things that don't actually matter but people take far too seriously, like football and the olympics. You don't see people waving union flags while enjoying a pint of fine english ale, collecting their prescription from the chemist, watching Doctor Who or eating fish and chips. The flag represents, to me, everything that's wrong with this country, from bloody imperialism right down to Geri Halliwell.

The Madhouse Beyond Sports Day

I think far too much emphasis is placed on sporting achievement in this country.

There, I said it. Don't get me wrong, I could never run the 100m in under 10 seconds like some of the top athletes in the world can, and this amazing ability should be congratulated. But likewise, I bet Usain Bolt couldn't build and set up a PC in under an hour. I can, but I don't get a gold medal for it, it's just what I do. I used to know a guy who can solve the Rubik's cube in under 30 seconds. Everyone has something they can do better than anyone else, but most of these achievements go un-noticed unless it involves sport.

It begins at school. I was always the fat geeky kid (some say I still am.) Nothing used to piss me off more than having to trowpse out onto the field on sports day and cheer on an elite community of pupils who happened to be good at PE. What's so special about PE anyway, and why does it deserve its own day? I don't recall the entire school being marched into a hall to watch me and all the other A* maths students doing hard sums on a blackboard for an afternoon, why not a maths, or history, or art day rather than a sports day? Translate this into adulthood and I get moaned at for being a miseryguts because I refuse to cheer my national side in a game of football, or some other sporting event such as the Olympics. Some go so far as to call me unpatriotic. Well, excuse me, I'd much rather be working on something innovative to improve the quality of human life, or writing ranty letters to my MP about the fact that hospitals and schools are being sidelined in favour of millionaires' salaries. You know - things that actually matter, as opposed to a ball game. I'll happily cheer on sportspeople doing their job when hordes of adoring fans turn up at my place of work and start cheering me on.

Of course there are two knock-on effects to this collective over-celebration of sport. One of these, fittingly enough, harks back to the last paragraph - the financial issue. We could be paying doctors and schoolteachers higher salaries for the sterling work they do, but instead we as a country are blowing millions on a massive international sports day that we can't really afford. Even other non-essential things don't get the same treatment as sport. Compare the Eurovision Song Contest to the Olympics - they're both the same, massive national expenditure for something that doesn't really matter, yet viewing figures for the former will likely be dwarfed by the latter. I suspect many of the people who take the piss out of me for watching Eurovision have taken time off work to watch live international football, stayed up late to watch sport in other time zones and will no doubt be glued to their televisions come the Olympics. It seems that everything is acceptable provided it's sport, otherwise it's just sad.

The second effect of (or possibly reason for) sport being so universally adored is the celebrity effect. Maurice Wilkes has done more for this country than Bobby Charlton ever will, but I bet if you have to google either of them it won't be the latter. I have to listen to football fans droning on and on about the one time our national team was above-mediocre enough to win the world cup, completely ignoring the dozens of failures before and since, but you don't hear us nerds worshipping Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the web, for example. Nobody mentions Berners-Lee, or Wilkes, or Charles Babbage, or Alan Turing... heck, I know people who can name every player who's played for England in the last decade but couldn't tell you who designed the Colossus, and that practically won us a world war, not just a poxy game of football.

So what do I suggest? Am I calling for the eternal damnation of anything physical? No, of course not. As I said first of all, exceptional ability should be celebrated. But all exceptional ability. If you consider someone impressive because they can run fast, jump high or win trophies, then don't belittle those whose ability is less - well - televised. And let's stop getting so worked up over things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. I can name every pokemon, that's considered sad. If pokemon were a sport, it would be considered 'passion'. So watch the Olympics, or Euro 2012, or Wimbledon, or fucking Dancing on Ice if you like, it doesn't bother me - just accept that I really don't give a shit, and stop calling me grumpy.

The Unknown Known

People often ask me why I trust Google more than Facebook. After all, both provide services in return for personal information, both are big US companies based on a clever piece of technology, both were started by university students, and both are worth an awful lot of money. Both have privacy issues, most have been identified and many have been fixed. Both are opt-in, you don't have to use them. The reason I trust one more than the other is simple: the unknown known.

Here's a good example. Check out Google's privacy policy. It states happily that when data is 'deleted' from their services, the data may be retained by Google even if not publically available. Facebook contains no such line, so it's implied that deleting something actually deletes it from Facebook's servers. Yet I had a Facebook profile that I deleted about two years ago, and the photos I uploaded to the account before I deleted it were still accessible to anyone with the JPG URL some eighteen months later. In fact, the only reason I can't access them now is because Facebook changed their URL structure a few months back and all old URLs became invalid; I don't for a minute believe that those images aren't still on Facebook's servers. There are good reasons why the images don't disappear immediately - residual data and backups being the main two. But the fact is that Google announces this up front, and Facebook doesn't. And this is the crux of why I don't trust Facebook as far as I can throw it.

Another issue of contention with Facebook is the Friend Finder feature. You enter your Hotmail or GMail username and password and Facebook logs into your account and hoovers up all the email addresses it can find. It specifically states that it doesn't store your password, but it doesn't mention keeping a login session active and it certainly doesn't say what it does with the emails and contacts that it finds. Someone I know, who has never had a Facebook account, recently had an invite email sent via Facebook saying "[x] wants to be your friend". Contained within the email were suggestions for about a dozen other people she knows, some of whom were family members who had no contact whatsoever with the person who sent the invite. The only way this could have happened is that the family members also used the Friend Finder, and Facebook stored all the connections for future use. Basically, Facebook has a sort of dark network underneath its world-facing one to which you have no access and can't opt out of, Facebook account or not. If you have an account you can delete all your Friend Finder history, but this doesn't really help you if you choose not to have a Facebook account, or if someone who has your email address has previously used the Friend Finder.

Back to photos, you may already know that when a digital camera takes a photo it stores lots of information about the camera as hidden data within the JPG file. The time, the date, the camera settings, make and model. Smartphones with GPS often geo-tag images, meaning that the location in which the photo was taken gets stored as well. When you upload images to Facebook, it processes them to optimise them for web use, and this includes removing meta-data - download a photo from Facebook and load it into an EXIF viewer and you'll see it has no meta-data whatsoever. However, recently Facebook have started trying to encourage people to 'check in' to places they've visited and occasionally you'll get one of your photos shown to you with the message "this photo looks like it was taken in [y]". It gets this information from the geo-tag, which it's been storing, inaccessible to you or other Facebook users, since the photo was first uploaded. It's not that Facebook are trying to do something clever with the geo-tag information, it's the fact that they're clearly storing meta-data and not telling anyone that I have a problem with.

There is a movie called The Social Network, which tells the story of the creation of Facebook. The opening scenes show founder Mark Zuckerberg building a collection of photos of every Harvard student without their knowledge or consent, and hosting it on a public server for everyone to see. Zuckerberg's complete contempt for anyone's privacy is illustrated further in an infamous leaked IM conversation between Zuckerberg and an anonymous friend. He offers his friend personal info from Facebook's database. When asked how he got the data, he simply replied "They 'trust' me. Dumb fucks." Zuckerberg is still running Facebook, and probably has complete access to all sorts of information about you, whether you use his website or not. At least the information Google collects is used in their products and services to their users, and not just hoarded away where only the site admins can see it. Google even has a dashboard feature where you can see exactly what information they have on you and with whom they're sharing it, which gives you the opportunity to delete information if you don't want it shared. Facebook has no such feature.

So, to summarise: Google take your information, are completely transparent about what they're collecting and how, and give you something useful back in return. Facebook take your information, often without your knowledge or consent, fuse it with information they've conned out of your friends and family, and then hide it away, sometimes even denying they have it. It's not really surprising that I trust Google more.

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!

Trolls

This has been annoying me for some time but it's about time I said something about it.

There's been an increase in the traditional media just recently of stories about 'trolls'. Trolls, as anyone who's been on the internet for more than 20 minutes will tell you, are people who engage in the act of trolling; posting comments on online bulletin boards and similar services with the intention of provoking an outraged response. Call it a form of online baiting if you will. Skilled trolls will post seemingly genuine and innocent comments on posts on typically emotionally charged subjects such as religion or politics, and see who bites. The troll never directly instigates any hostility, merely encourages others to do so. I've done it many times, it's actually quite good fun if you like winding up easily aggitated people with not enough things to worry about... Mac users, for example ; ) Trolls normally target entire communities rather than individuals - a good example would be the 4chan users who turned up to launch parties for the final Harry Potter book armed with leaked copies of the book and then proceeded to spoil the ending of the book to everyone in the queue. It's a matter of opinion as to whether this is funny or not, but it doesn't actually hurt anyone, and certainly doesn't target an individual or a small group of people.

Compare this with stories in the press and you'll see no similarity whatsoever. Examples the BBC give of trolls are the guy who sent abusive emails to Louise Mensch, and a guy posting abusive messages on the Facebook page of a dead girl. Neither of which are trolls by the correct definition of the word, they're simply online bullies.

Let's get this straight before the word 'troll' becomes as misunderstood as the word 'hacker' currently is - trolls are harmless. They're just out to have wind people up and have a good laugh at the reaction. They merely post or do things likely to provoke a strong response. Bullies are quite different - their aim is to abuse, hurt and emotionally scar people. They say very hurtful things, often aimed at vulnerable individuals. These people are not trolls. It's unfair to dismiss online bullies with such a tame word as 'troll' and it's certainly unfair to most trolls to tar them with the same brush as these hateful, spiteful bullies. Please, BBC, Guardian, and many other news sources I otherwise respect, please stop using words you clearly don't understand. Confusing bullies with trolls is like confusing Wolfgang Priklopil with Jeremy Beadle.

We Won't Rock You

Last night I went to see "We Will Rock You" in Southampton. I'm not really into musicals, so I'll forgive the melodramatic acting and wafer-thin plot as I'm sure theatre-goers are used to this kind of thing. However, although no fault of the show, I will not forgive the Mayflower Theatre. In a time when farming battery hens is such a big no-no, I can't understand how the size and density of the theatre's seating arrangement can be considered anything like acceptable. But I digress.

The idea of the show is that it's set in an Orwell-style dystopian future in which freedom of expression and free thought are banned, along with rock music. All music is electronically produced and owning an instrument is illegal. There are some very snide yet, in my opinion, valid swipes at Simon Cowell and TV talent shows, and in general the message of the show is one with which I think many people can agree. The opening 'timeline' video documenting everything from Elvis and the Beatles to the show's present includes such wonderful lines as "Simon Cowell sent from Hell to destroy rock". But this brings me to my first problem with the show: it doesn't rock.

The first half of the show I assumed the music was all pre-recorded. The sound was very soul-less, top-heavy and compressed to hell, and it plodded along in perfect time with a set of background videos while the cast sang karaoke-style over the top. So imagine my shock when towards the end of the second set the background was removed to reveal a live band stood at the back. The sound did improve slightly for the last two songs (We Will Rock You and Bohemian Rhapsody) and during Bo Rhap they actually let the guitarist down onto the stage to play the solo, but it still had some awful compression artifacts that make me wonder if the guitar was actually amped up at all, or simply plugged straight into the mixing desk and bombarded with effects. Whatever the reason, the sound was a disaster.

My second problem with the show is its hypocrisy. Here we have a show which is ruthlessly vicious towards TV talent shows and their part in the destruction of music, yet a large number of the main cast are all TV talent show 'stars'. We have Hear'say's Noel Sullivan - Hear'say were the product of the TV show "Pop Stars", Jenny Douglas from TV's "Over The Rainbow", and not in the Southampton cast but billed anyway we have X-Factor alumnus Rhydian Roberts. Noel Sullivan actually has a good voice, but he's clearly a pop singer and simply not suited to sing songs by Queen. The part - in fact all the parts - should have gone to rock singers. Still, in his defence, he wasn't anywhere near as bad as the female villan, played by Tiffany Graves, who was absolutely frickin' awful and seemed to think that ridiculously over-the-top acting was an acceptable substitute for singing ability.

My final, and certainly my main problem with the show is that it seemed gratuitous as if it were using the legendary status of Queen to promote what is, in effect, a below average theatre show. Queen actually do play an integral part in the plot towards the end, but it seemed like the whole show, particularly the first half, was just an attempt to shoe-horn as many Queen songs into a bad plotline as possible. Some make sense, such as the protagonists singing "I Want to Break Free" as they endure their oppressed lives, but some just seem stuck in for the sake of getting as many of Queen's songs in as possible... what the hell was "Flash" doing in there? But the most unforgivable act of the musical arrangement: if a song really didn't fit anywhere, rather than not use it, the lyrics were changed so that it did. And if the bastardisaton of the songs of a great band just to fill a musical wasn't bad enough, most of the changed lyrics couldn't actually be understood because of the piss-poor sound that I mentioned earlier. "One Vision" and "Radio Gaga" were the worst offenders.

In fairness, the show wasn't without its good points. The rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody that finished the show wasn't bad, especially as Queen never actually played it in its entirety live, and Jenny Douglas performed an excellent rendition of "No-one But You", proving herself to be by far the best singer in the cast, despite being a lowly supporting character. The show was stolen, however, by Ian Reddington who plays a stereotypical roadie and reminded me of Ralph Brown's character in Wayne's World 2. His deadpan delivery of a multitude of rock clichés and shameless sexual innuendo provided the most entertainment of the night for me.

In conclusion: I'm not going to say it was crap, this is clearly a popular musical. Maybe I just didn't get it, or maybe I expected too much. I'm sure that veteran theatre-goers with a passing knowledge of Queen's greatest hits will love this, but if you're actually a Queen fan, do yourself a favour and stay away... at best you'll leave disappointed, at worst you'll leave offended.

What I meant by Proper Coffee

I've been known to gush in the past when I find a coffee shop that sells what I consider to be 'proper' coffee. I'm also famous for my hatred of Costa and Starbucks. This is not an anti-capitalism thing, they simply sell coffee I consider to be very poor quality. Starbucks in particular are well known for their brewing method of burning the beans so that they can happily change bean or supplier and not affect the taste of the coffee, because all individual flavour and character from the beans is removed when they're burned. I don't know about Costa, but judging by the taste of the stuff they probably do the same thing.

It's also come to my attention that an espresso is nowadays considered to be a coffee. I disagree, albeit only in the way that a Coke is not a Pepsi. Yes, it's brewed with the same type of beans, but it's done at high pressure to get the maximum strength out of it. Italian coffee, usually brewed in this way, has come to be considered a deliacacy, but I personally can't stand it, in the same way that I don't actually like belgian chocolate. That's my personal opinion and I'm fine with the fact that I'm a minority. But espressos can be modified in so many different ways, to the point that trendy coffee shops simply sell variations of one espresso and call it variety, and it annoys me that so many so-called 'coffee shops' actually have bugger all in the way of variety, and society considers this acceptable.

Let's just have a bit of a rundown, shall we?

| Espresso | A small 'shot' of coffee, pulled at high pressure. | | --- | --- | | Lungo | An espresso with double the water | | Americano | An espresso with water added to it | | Latte | An espresso added to frothy milk | | Cappuccino | An espresso with frothy milk and chocolate on top |

See the pattern here? That's right, it's all just bloody espresso. I bring Starbucks and Costa into the argument because they take it to the nth level, you can get all sorts of weird and wonderful caffiene-based drinks and it's all made using the same coffee. It's like a pub only having one type of lager but claiming variety because they sell lager, lager shandy, lager and lime and lager tops.

So what do I consider a proper coffee shop? Well, one that serves more than one variety of coffee basically. I personally like my coffee either drip-brewed or brewed in a cafetiere. Good coffee is like good whiskey, you need to start with a good bean, and brew it properly. Also like whiskey, blends are acceptable. Personally I like medium roasted single-bean Nicaraguan coffee, but I'm quite partial to Taylor's Lazy Sunday as a blend. I do hate espresso though, and I certainly don't like the 'trendy' coffee shops that are becoming more common across the western world. It's a rare treat to be able to sit down and try several different coffees, I remember the most pleasant flight delay I ever had was at Cologne-Bonn Airport in 2011, the coffee shop there has coffee from all over South America. I recently found a similar cafe in Edinburgh. Sadly, for me at least, this is the exception rather than the rule - you ask for coffee in most places and you just get an americano. So next time I'm ranting about 'proper coffee', you know what I'm on about.

What's for breakfast

Increasingly, I am unable to find a hotel in the UK that actually serves what I consider to be breakfast.

Oh sure, lots of hotels claim "bed and breakfast" but when you get there it's a so-called 'continental' breakfast, which is basically a bowl of oats, some fruit and a piece of toast if you're really lucky. The last UK hotel in which I stayed, the Holiday Inn Express in Bath, claimed a 'hot' breakfast on the website but when we got there it turned out to be a continental breakfast, but with grilled sausages and scrambled egg stuck on top - it seems the age-old english tradition of a 'fry up' is dead and buried. A more racist person than me might be tempted to moan at 'EU culture' destroying our traditional english breakfasts.

I have just returned from a business trip to Vienna, which you will note is on the continent. The hotel price included breakfast, and I was delighted to discover that, unlike the shit hotels that seem to be infesting the UK, in Vienna breakfast actually does include things such as bacon, mushrooms, fried bread, fried eggs... all the things that are associated with the so-called "full english".

So the next time I stay in a hotel and they can't provide me with the breakfast I actually paid for, and claim their breakfast is 'continental', I shall be calling bullshit. "Continental" is, as far as I can see, a crap excuse to charge you full price for breakfast and then cheap out when it comes to actually delivering, while at the same time, no doubt, endearing themselves to the trendy types who think it's like so cosmopolitan, dahling, to not have a proper breakfast.

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.