Tag Archives: Rant

Rage Against the Council: Why Recycling in Flat Blocks Sucks

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A few min­utes ago, I attempted the sim­ple task of tak­ing out a bag full of recy­cling.  Hav­ing cir­cum­nav­i­gated the car that some though­less Mazda-driver saw fit to park in front of the area where our recy­cling bins are kept, I dis­cov­ered this:

Overflowing Recycling BinsNot only is there no way I could fit my recy­cling into these bins, but each and every one — ten in total — is marked with a “Con­t­a­m­i­nated” sticker, mean­ing that the col­lec­tion peo­ple saw some­thing they didn’t like in every bin, and refuse to col­lect any of them until the man­age­ment com­pany of our flat block pays the coun­cil to take them to a land­fill site.

This left me with two options — dump my recy­cling (in its non-recyclable bin-bag) on the ground and hope that some­one help­fully puts it in a recy­cling bin once they are emp­tied, or the only real­is­tic option: put them straight in the rub­bish bins myself, imme­di­ately wast­ing all the effort my fam­ily put into sep­a­rat­ing them from non-recyclable waste.

Contaminated Container StickerNow I spent a year of my life work­ing on tech­nol­ogy for Mate­r­ial Recla­ma­tion Facil­i­ties — the big sort­ing depots where your recy­cling ends up.  For bet­ter or worse (it’s a weird thing to be geeky about) I know exactly what can and can­not be recy­cled locally, what hap­pens to it when it is, and what hap­pens to any “con­t­a­m­i­na­tion” that makes it through. For my sins, I even know what all the num­bered codes on plas­tic bot­tles mean.  The net result is that my fam­ily and I are metic­u­lous about what gets put out for recy­cling.  I would hap­pily bet that none of the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is our fault.

But this isn’t a “boo-hoo, I have to pay and it’s not my fault” rant.  The fact of the mat­ter is, I live in a block of 93 flats.  Some­one in one of those flats is going to be too lazy to sort their recy­cling or take it out of plas­tic bags.  Some­one is going to be unable to read the signs, or just to not care.  Prob­a­bly not just “some­one” but quite a lot of peo­ple.  It’s unavoidable.

The coun­cil sys­tem is sim­ply bro­ken for large flat blocks.

If a sin­gle fam­ily house gets their bin marked as “con­t­a­m­i­nated” and has to pay to have it taken away, maybe they’ll learn.  But given human nature, a block of 93 flats is always going to have con­t­a­m­i­nated bins, every sin­gle week.

Either the process needs to change, col­lec­tors need to be more tol­er­ant of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, or else there’s no point giv­ing us recy­cling bins at all.  Just let us put it all out for rub­bish and damn the envi­ron­ment, because that’s what hap­pens now, only right now it takes much longer and costs us all a lot more money.

IE6, WordPress, and Dick Moves

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For years, anti-IE6 sen­ti­ment on the inter­net has been ris­ing — and justly so. It’s ten years old, and cares so lit­tle for stan­dards that web devel­op­ers often have to code for it specif­i­cally. Quite rea­son­ably, they — we — are a bit fed up with that. Suc­ces­sive ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer have become much bet­ter at stan­dards sup­port, and it would be great if every IE user would just upgrade to IE9 tomorrow.

But life isn’t like that, espe­cially not in the world of cor­po­rate IT.

Par­tic­u­larly infu­ri­at­ing for those with no choice over their browser are the pop-ups that tell us to “upgrade our browser for the best expe­ri­ence”, or worse still, land­ing pages that flat-out deny access to any­one not using a mod­ern browser. The IE6 users of the world agree with you! We don’t like the browser much either. But to rub our faces in it is kind of a dick move.

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With ver­sion 3.2, Word­Press is incor­po­rat­ing one of these “upgrade your browser” pop­ups along­side an acknowl­edge­ment that their admin dash­board may no longer work. I’m sure the many cor­po­rate blog­gers who have no choice but to use Word­Press from IE6 won’t be too happy about that move, but even for the rest of us just try­ing to get to our site dash­board from work, it’s annoy­ing. Much as we hate those pop­ups, our own sites (at least, their admin areas) will now be dis­play­ing them.

Word­Press’ announce­ment con­tains a handy sam­ple e-mail to send to your boss or sysadmin:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Inter­net Explorer 6 was cre­ated 10 years ago, before mod­ern web stan­dards, and does not sup­port mod­ern web appli­ca­tions. More and more sites and appli­ca­tions are drop­ping sup­port for IE6, includ­ing the new ver­sion of Word­Press. Even Microsoft, the mak­ers of IE6, are count­ing down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more infor­ma­tion). Can you please install an updated ver­sion of IE or any mod­ern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more infor­ma­tion) on the avail­able com­put­ers? Thank you very much.

I get the feel­ing that the Word­Press team haven’t spent a lot of time behind the cor­po­rate firewall.

Luck­ily, my com­pany has within the last year upgraded to IE8. But many oth­ers are not so lucky. From me a year ago, that sam­ple e-mail would have had to look more like this:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. […] Could the Min­istry of Defence please spend tens or hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds of pub­lic money check­ing and vet­ting a new browser, so that I can access a cou­ple of web apps that are by no stretch of the imag­i­na­tion business-critical? Could this browser then be added to the list of those allowed on our net­works? To my own com­pany, please could you spend a sim­i­lar sum of money test­ing this soft­ware, deploy­ing it to our PCs, check­ing our cor­po­rate soft­ware for com­pat­i­bil­ity, mod­i­fy­ing it where nec­es­sary, pur­chas­ing newer ver­sions of our core busi­ness tools, and deal­ing with users’ tech­ni­cal sup­port calls over the fol­low­ing months? I’m sure this can all be hap­pily afforded within our boun­teous over­heads. Thank you very much.

The cor­po­rate upgrade process is long and slow, and lit­tle can be done about that. We already hate IE6 — popup ban­ners telling us that have to upgrade it to use your site don’t make us hate IE6 more, they make us hate your site more. Please, please, stop it.

Geo-IP Security: Option Three

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Face­book, and many other online ser­vices, have an almost-clever secu­rity mea­sure that tries to pro­tect users against account theft. It uses your IP address to do a “Geo-IP” lookup — that is, to fig­ure out roughly where in the world you nor­mally access the site from. If an access attempt hap­pens from else­where, the user will have to sup­ply extra infor­ma­tion to log in — often an “iden­tify this per­son from their tagged pho­tos” quiz.

Even if you pass this test of your iden­tity, how­ever, strange things some­times hap­pen — after a recent trip to France I found myself hav­ing to re-authenticate all my apps, and after a few days in Ger­many, my friend Pete could only restore nor­mal ser­vice by chang­ing his password.

I can see how this fea­ture could be use­ful for some peo­ple — per­haps even the major­ity — but for some it has the poten­tial to be a major irri­ta­tion. Not only is there no way to dis­able it in Facebook’s case, there’s also no way of vent­ing your frus­tra­tion when it goes hor­ri­bly wrong.

For this rea­son, I sug­gest that Facebook’s set­tings page needs the fol­low­ing options:

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The UI of Least Resistance

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I was work­ing up to a blog post on Ubuntu’s new “Unity” inter­face a cou­ple of days ago, but repeat­edly stalled when it came to mak­ing a point. The only point I could come up with was essen­tially just “I don’t like this”, which isn’t the great­est of sub­jects for a blog post — to say noth­ing of the hun­dreds who have trod­den that ter­ri­tory before me.

Ubuntu's Unity interface

Ubuntu’s Unity inter­face (image credit: webupd8.org)

It’s a fairly bold new direc­tion for Ubuntu’s UI, and the first time their default inter­face has really diverged from what the upstream GNOME project pro­vides. Now I don’t like it for a num­ber of rea­sons: it’s slow, it doesn’t pro­vide some basic func­tion­al­ity, other func­tion­al­ity is really well hid­den (Go on, re-order your icons. Try it.) and it’s got an “our way or noth­ing” approach to han­dling workspaces.

On one hand, as a soft­ware guy whose main spe­cial­i­sa­tion is user inter­face design, I under­stand the urge to try new UI par­a­digms as often as pos­si­ble, on the grounds that sooner or later you’ll dis­cover some­thing that really is bet­ter than what you cur­rently have. On the other hand, I qui­etly despair at how far off that “some­thing bet­ter” seems.

Take, for exam­ple, me. I’m a UX per­son, and a per­fec­tion­ist when it comes to inter­faces. I’m irri­tated by slightly-wrong fonts and icons a cou­ple of pix­els out of align­ment. I love new things, new ways of organ­is­ing and dis­play­ing data. I’m big on aug­mented real­ity. And my desk­top looks like this:

Bare XFCE Desktop

Now I think that’s aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing, but in terms of func­tion­al­ity, it resem­bles noth­ing quite so much as:

Windows 95 Desktop

Yeah, that.

The only notable excep­tion is GNOME-Do (think Launchy on Win­dows or Quick­sil­ver on OS X), which I use exclu­sively for launch­ing apps. The main menu, lower left, only gets used if I for­get the name of some­thing. Aside from that, I’m using my com­puter in exactly the same way I was 16 years ago.

The rea­son for that, as far as I can tell, is that it is the UI of least resis­tance. In six­teen years, prob­a­bly 99% of my computer-using time has involved an inter­face that’s very sim­i­lar to that one. Sure, there are cer­tainly bet­ter UIs out there. Maybe from an objec­tive point of view, Unity is one of them. But for more than half of my life, my brain has been slowly opti­mis­ing itself for the Win­dows 95 style interface.

To become the “next big thing” in desk­top UI, a new par­a­digm must not only be bet­ter than what came before, it must be so much bet­ter that our brains don’t mind los­ing half a lifetime’s worth of learning.

That’s a mile­stone I haven’t seen reached lately on the desk­top, and a fear we may not see it reached before “the desk­top” stops being a thing.

In Praise of Disjointed Communities

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Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is set to make a speech on immi­gra­tion today which, to the very vocal dis­plea­sure of Vince Cable and doubt­less many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Con­ser­v­a­tive party. Accord­ing to the BBC arti­cle:

Com­mu­ni­ties have been affected by incom­ers who are unable to speak Eng­lish and unwill­ing to inte­grate, [Cameron] will argue.

“That has cre­ated a kind of dis­com­fort and dis­joint­ed­ness in some neigh­bour­hoods. This has been the expe­ri­ence for many peo­ple in our coun­try — and I believe it is untruth­ful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.”

Granted, I’m prob­a­bly far from the aver­age mem­ber of the pub­lic in my opin­ions, and cer­tainly I’m far from core Tory mate­r­ial. But I see that dis­joint­ed­ness as more of a good thing than a bad one.

Many years ago, I lived for a while in the vil­lage of Eas­ton, on Port­land. It was blessed with both a Chi­nese restau­rant and a Chi­nese take-away, as far as I am aware the only two on the island. When I was there, the restau­rant was staffed with Chi­nese peo­ple (or at least those of Chi­nese descent) — whether they lived on the island or not, I have no idea. But the take-away? Well, I guess they ran out of Chi­nese peo­ple. It was staffed entirely by Brits. 96.8% of the pop­u­la­tion are of white eth­nic­ity.

I come from, and have since returned to, Bournemouth. Just 30 miles away, it has a pop­u­la­tion more than 10 times that of the whole of Port­land. Dur­ing most of the year it is home to thou­sands of uni­ver­sity stu­dents; in the sum­mer it opens its doors to thou­sands more for­eign lan­guage stu­dents and a never-ending influx of tourists. I live in an area with a high Brazil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Ori­en­tal and Middle-Eastern shops are everywhere.

It’s part of the world in a way that Eas­ton is not.

By and large, immi­grants nat­u­rally pick up enough Eng­lish to get by — instead of impos­ing require­ments on their pro­fi­ciency with the lan­guage, how about we try to learn each oth­ers’ languages?

Instead of impos­ing some require­ment to “inte­grate” with soci­ety (pre­sum­ably that means read­ing the Daily Mail, drink­ing tea and moan­ing about the weather), why not cel­e­brate each oth­ers’ cultures?

More to the point, why not stop pre­tend­ing that there’s a sin­gle homoge­nous British soci­ety for peo­ple to inte­grate with in the first place? My com­ment about the Daily Mail was only partly in humour. How do you define such a neb­u­lous concept?

I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I rarely drink tea. My instinc­tive reac­tion to the phrase “Oh dear, it’s come over all cloudy again, hasn’t it? Typ­i­cal.” is an impo­tent rage as I realise that no mat­ter how much of a trav­esty of con­ver­sa­tion it is, in the eyes of the law, it’s still not cause enough to legit­i­mately punch some­one in the face.

Like most Brits though, I do love French food, Ger­man beer, Ital­ian cof­fee, chow mein, pizza and chicken tikka masala.

If I’m try­ing to make a point here, it’s this:

  • Every­one else’s cul­ture is just as good as ours

  • Every­one else’s lan­guage is just as good as ours

  • And by the way, every­one else’s food is bet­ter than ours.

Let’s stop cling­ing to an idea of British cul­ture that we can’t even define, and pre­tend­ing our way of life is under attack from Poles or Pak­ista­nis.  Let’s not be Easton.

There’s a whole world out there.  Let’s live in it.

UX is in the Radio

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This morn­ing, on the daily hour-long moan-fest we call “com­mut­ing”, we engaged in our nor­mal pat­tern of radio use — work­ing our way across the entire spec­trum sev­eral times, not find­ing any­thing par­tic­u­larly appeal­ing, before at last set­tling on the least annoy­ing option. Then, a minute and a half later once that one not-too-bad song had fin­ished, repeat­ing the whole cycle again.

I am given to under­stand that most peo­ple pick a pre­ferred radio sta­tion and stick with it, tol­er­at­ing the annoy­ing bits while they wait for what­ever they like lis­ten­ing to to come on. I, and the car­pool, just don’t quite “get” that behav­iour. For me, ten min­utes of inane Scott Mills dri­vel, yet another yokel radio “guess the sound and win two tick­ets to the cin­ema!” com­pe­ti­tion, the hun­dredth fuck­ing advert for Apple Fuck­ing Con­ser­va­to­ries — they’re intol­er­a­ble obsta­cles in the way of possibly-decent music.

I approach this prob­lem in the man­ner of what old peo­ple might term a “dig­i­tal native” (a term which sug­gests to me that I should have a neck­lace of USB sticks and per­haps a bat­tle cry that’s some­thing to do with Super­Pokes). The choice for me is not Radio 1 against Wes­sex FM, Radio Solent against Wave. It’s FM radio ver­sus net radio.

And against that com­pe­ti­tion, the user expe­ri­ence of tra­di­tional radio sta­tions is appalling.

Say, like I usu­ally am, you are in the mood to lis­ten to a par­tic­u­lar kind of music that you don’t hap­pen to have on you in any form. Here’s how some pop­u­lar ser­vices compare:

  • Spo­tify will, for free, play you exactly the songs you request, with the occa­sional advert — so let’s call that about 95% “what you want”. By pay­ing, you can remove the adverts and essen­tially, so long as your taste isn’t too obscure, get that to hit 100%.

  • Pan­dora will try to guess your exact taste over time, delv­ing deeper than just high-level gen­res. With a few adverts and the occa­sional bad choice, you’re prob­a­bly get­ting 90% enjoyment.

  • Last.fm will play you your “Rec­om­mended Radio” songs that are “sim­i­lar to” an artist of your choos­ing, or songs with a cer­tain user-contributed tag. No adverts, but a higher rate of play­ing songs you don’t like — call that 85% enjoy­ment, though of course as with Pan­dora you can always skip the ones you’re not in the mood for.

  • Local radio, by con­trast, often ded­i­cates around 10% of its time to adverts, 5% to news, and (con­ser­v­a­tively) 20% to inane DJ dri­vel. This leaves 65% for music, and if you’re lucky, you might enjoy half of what they play. A mis­er­able total of 32.5% enjoy­ment. And of course, if you’re par­tic­u­larly in the mood for say, metal or EBM, well… out of luck.

I’m sure it would be pre­ma­ture of me to declare the death of broad­cast radio, just the same as I’m sure lots of peo­ple enjoy Scott Mills being a twat and the pos­si­bil­ity to win vir­tu­ally noth­ing by doing vir­tu­ally noth­ing in some local radio competition.

But as a means to con­sume music? It’s a long way from being a ser­vice that gives its users what they want.

“Meh” to AV

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There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and already the #yes2av and #no2av cam­paigns are hot­ting up on Twit­ter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incum­bents were more into spin and sur­veil­lance than the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and the oppo­si­tion Con­ser­v­a­tives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giv­ing them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems hav­ing as much of a chance as pos­si­ble to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a dif­fer­ence a year can make.

The Tories are dec­i­mat­ing the pub­lic sec­tor and some­how still believe that char­ity and the free mar­ket will make it all bet­ter. The Lib Dems are com­plicit and must be on course for break­ing the major­ity of their elec­tion pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do any­thing apart from offer the occa­sional doom­ful pre­dic­tion about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party can­di­date because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a gen­eral elec­tion were called tomor­row? Nobody.

In fact, the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has almost brought me full cir­cle on the sub­ject of the Alter­na­tive Vote. Under a sys­tem like AV, smaller par­ties are likely to do bet­ter. But with a three-(major-)party sys­tem, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coali­tion or any­thing inter­est­ing — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is con­tinue the last 13 years’ rush for the cen­tre ground.

The Tories are rush­ing for it so fast that they’re alien­at­ing half their party. The Lib Dems, in the­ory, define the cen­tre, and despite elect­ing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Mid­dle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s inter­est in pol­i­tics, is an unend­ing suc­ces­sion of coali­tions, each one indis­tin­guish­able from the last.

So if it could hap­pen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coali­tion and the Conservative-UKIP coali­tion. Any­thing to keep things inter­est­ing. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their pop­u­lar­ity, it can’t — then let’s have the next gen­er­a­tion of Mag­gie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some peo­ple with real ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences fight­ing it out in the Commons.

Bring me some­one I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dear America, Your Missile Defence is not Broken

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@CampaignReboot, mak­ing a good point as always, ear­lier linked to this CNN arti­cle which bemoans the state of the United States’ mis­sile defence pro­gramme after the fail­ure of a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor test.

Just to rein­force his point, let’s look at how insanely dif­fi­cult a task a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor (GBI) mis­sile has.

An ICBM launch is first detected by detec­tors, usu­ally radar, at sea, on land, and in space. All this data must be fed back to the mis­sile base and analysed by a com­puter within a few minutes.

A GBI attempts to inter­cept it while it’s in its “mid­course” phase, which gen­er­ally lasts for around 20 min­utes — but it’s not as if the GBI turns around and tries again if it misses. You have one chance to inter­cept dur­ing that time win­dow. Dur­ing the mid­course phase, the ICBM is in space, over 1000 kilo­me­ters above the Earth. It’s mov­ing at sev­eral kilo­me­ters a sec­ond. In this test, it was over 4000 kilo­me­ters from the GBI’s launch point.

It’s around 10–20 metres long.

And you have to hit it.

This is, shall we say, not a triv­ial challenge?

Any­one assum­ing that their country’s mis­sile defence sys­tems entirely remove the pos­si­bil­ity of nuclear attack is kid­ding them­selves. Mis­sile defence is just a part of the great game of deter­rence played by the world’s few nuclear pow­ers. If any­one launches, the world is still screwed.

Luck­ily for any remain­ing Cold War doom­say­ers, the GBI’s 50% inter­cept suc­cess rate is pretty nicely matched by the Russ­ian Bulava ICBM’s 53% test suc­cess rate. And if your Red (/Green?) ter­ror of the month is North Korea or Iran, can you imag­ine their mis­sile pro­grammes hav­ing any­thing like the suc­cess rate of the Rus­sians’ or the Americans’?

So if all the ranty CNN com­menters could get over it, it would be appre­ci­ated. The US needs mis­sile defence, even though it isn’t per­fect and never will be. Aegis has a bet­ter record than the GBIs any­way, did you for­get that you had that too? North Korea is not going to nuke you tomor­row anyway.

Stuxnet is in the hands of Bad Guys?!

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Hey! Do you like fear? Do you like bull­shit head­lines? Well, has Sky got an news for you! “Super virus a tar­get for cyber ter­ror­ists”, which bears the even more fas­ci­nat­ing <title> tag of “Stuxnet Worm: Virus Tar­geted At Iran’s Nuclear Plant Is In Hands Of ‘Bad Guys’, Sky News Sources Say”, is their lat­est fan­tas­ti­cal fear­mon­ger­ing piece. Let’s butcher it together.

(Thanks to Chris of Cam­paign Reboot for tweet­ing this story. He beat me to it with his post “Sky News, work­ing hard to prove they’re morons”.)

So, shall we start from the top?

A super virus that was used to dis­rupt Iran’s nuclear programme…

Poten­tially — though there has been no admis­sion from the nation that it was successful.

…has been traded on the black market…

Got any evi­dence, Sky? No? Okay then. Granted it’s not infea­si­ble, but it would be nice to know if you just made that up.

…and could be used by ter­ror­ists, accord­ing to Sky News sources.

CORN FLAKES COULD BE USED BY TERRORISTS! EVERYBODY PANIC!

Senior cyber-security fig­ures have said the Stuxnet worm — the first to have been used to dam­age tar­gets in the real world…

Almost cer­tainly not, although the inter­net is not being help­ful with sources of pre­vi­ous real-world virus dam­age (except to com­pa­nies’ finances). There’s also no evi­dence that Stuxnet has caused any meat­space damage.

…could be used to attack any phys­i­cal tar­get which relies on computers.

Any phys­i­cal tar­get run­ning Win­dows with attached SCADA con­trollers from one man­u­fac­turer con­trol­ling a cer­tain num­ber of fre­quency con­verter dri­ves made by one of two com­pa­nies run­ning at cer­tain fre­quen­cies. Unless they’re just refer­ring to the Win­dows exploits Stuxnet uses rather than its pay­load, in which case… nope, every other OS is immune. (Source: Syman­tec)

The list of vul­ner­a­ble instal­la­tions is almost end­less — they include power sta­tions, food dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works, hos­pi­tals, traf­fic lights and even dams.

Again, Stuxnet in its known form will cause prob­lems for none of those.

A senior IT secu­rity source said: “We have hard evi­dence that the virus is in the hands of bad guys — we can’t say any more than that but these peo­ple are highly moti­vated and highly skilled with a lot of money behind them.

You can’t say more because you’ve received threats from the FBI if you release this super-secret infor­ma­tion that would be use­ful for pro­tect­ing the world’s net­works? Or because you’re mak­ing it up? Present evi­dence or GTFO.

“And they have realised that this kind of virus could be a dev­as­tat­ing tool.”

Really?! Oh, gosh.

Will Gilpin, an IT secu­rity con­sul­tant to the UK Gov­ern­ment said: “You could shut down the police 999 system.

“You could shut down hos­pi­tal sys­tems and equipment.

“You could shut down power sta­tions, you could shut down the trans­port net­work across the United Kingdom.”

Again, I guess we’ve moved on to talk­ing about a heav­ily mod­i­fied pay­load rather than Stuxnet as it cur­rently exists. And then, it’s only sys­tems run­ning Win­dows, and only until Microsoft patch the two (of five) remain­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that Stuxnet is known to exploit. (Source: F-Secure)

The Stuxnet attack on the Bushehr nuclear instal­la­tion in Iran is believed to have been orches­trated by a country.

Believed on the basis of spec­u­la­tion, with no hard evidence.

Now experts warn that the West is extremely vul­ner­a­ble to sim­i­lar attacks by crim­i­nal gangs seek­ing black­mail pay­outs or more likely by ter­ror­ist groups.

Crim­i­nal gangs and ter­ror­ists that have extremely detailed inside knowl­edge of man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems, which are prob­a­bly not a com­mon tar­get for either group, and who are dumb enough to rely on a virus that we now have an exten­sive dossier on, which most virus scan­ners now detect and neu­tralise, and for which there are known clean­ing methods.

Stew­art Baker, a for­mer assis­tant sec­re­tary with the US Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, said: “They could shut down power sys­tems, dams, almost any sophis­ti­cated indus­trial process that requires a con­trol soft­ware. Which is prac­ti­cally everything.”

I think we’ve seen this point some­where before.

There has been a rise in cyber attacks in recent years.

On April 8, 15% of all inter­net traf­fic was routed through China for 18 min­utes in a mys­te­ri­ous inci­dent the Chi­nese author­i­ties have denied any part in.

Because it was prob­a­bly an acci­dent rather than an attack, and it’s not as if rout­ing through China is unusual — the event was merely an unex­pected spike. There has been no sug­ges­tion that any unen­crypted sen­si­tive data was inter­cepted by China dur­ing that time. (Source: BGP­mon, plus the more knowl­edge­able com­ments on Slash­dot and Red­dit.)

The Royal Navy’s web­site was shut down on Novem­ber 5, allegedly by a Roman­ian hacker.

In Octo­ber, the UK Gov­ern­ment declared cyber war­fare to be a “tier 1″ threat to national security.

Are those… could they pos­si­bly be… facts?! My god.

But experts say a more co-ordinated effort is needed to tackle attacks, along the lines of the Cyber Com­mand agency set up in the US this year.

It’s the most rea­son­able opin­ion in the arti­cle, and it’s the one you don’t pro­vide a named source for?

So, er, thanks, Sky News. I feel so enlight­ened now.

If you’re look­ing for some more amuse­ment, the YouTube-calibre com­ments sec­tion is pure Retarded Inter­net Com­menter gold, too.

The Atheist’s Sense of Wonder

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I’ve no idea why this thought should crop up now, but I recall being asked sev­eral times by reli­gious folk why I would choose not to believe in a god. Often their ques­tion is some­thing like “Why believe that every­thing you see around you was cre­ated by ran­dom chance, when it would be so much more won­der­ful to think that some­one cre­ated it all just for us?”

I dis­agree completely.

Isn’t it more won­der­ful to think that at some point, bil­lions of years ago, every­thing we know was just an unimag­in­ably tiny, unimag­in­ably hot and dense energy field? That within sec­onds, it coa­lesced into quarks and lep­tons and other stranger things, that those quarks became pro­tons and neu­trons, then on into hydro­gen and helium atoms?

Isn’t it more won­der­ful that a sim­ple force like grav­ity drew those atoms together into huge balls of gas, so hot and dense that they ignited and became shin­ing bea­cons vis­i­ble from the far end of the uni­verse? And that they even­tu­ally exploded, scat­ter­ing heavy atoms far and wide? And that those atoms — oxy­gen, car­bon, iron, even as heavy as ura­nium — gath­ered around another newly-forming star, clump­ing together into big balls of rock, one of which hap­pened to be in just the right place around just the right kind of star to sus­tain liq­uid water on its surface?

Isn’t it more won­der­ful that after a bil­lion years of vol­can­ism, aster­oid impacts and boil­ing, toxic atmos­pheres, some­where in that water, a bunch of mol­e­cules lined up in a pat­tern on the sur­face of some clay and became the first pro­teins? That these chem­i­cals strung them­selves together in mol­e­cules so com­plex they could con­tain the code for their own repro­duc­tion? That they became so much more com­plex still that they could encode the infor­ma­tion to gen­er­ate a cell, a micro­scopic blob with a mem­brane that means it can keep con­di­tions inside itself dif­fer­ent from those outside?

Isn’t it more won­der­ful that over mil­lions or bil­lions of years, they devel­oped gills so that they could extract oxy­gen from the water, and gain their energy from that rather than directly from the sun? That after yet another unimag­in­ably long time, some of them went on to develop legs that would allow them to colonise the land?

Isn’t it more won­der­ful that mil­lions of years ago the Earth was ruled by giant lizards, and that that isn’t just the plot of a sci­ence fic­tion movie but the real his­tory of our planet?

Isn’t it more won­der­ful that 14 bil­lion years after the first quarks formed, we stand here today? For all that we are vul­ner­a­ble, disease-ridden, self­ish and fond of killing each other, we alone have the med­ical knowl­edge to under­stand our­selves, and we alone have brains advanced enough to con­tem­plate them­selves. We alone under­stand biol­ogy, chem­istry, physics, math­e­mat­ics. We alone have tele­scopes to study dis­tant stars, and we alone have built space­ships that we have thrown out beyond our solar sys­tem into the cos­mos beyond.

And is it not more won­der­ful still that we may not be alone in the uni­verse, that amongst the bil­lions of stars and maybe tril­lions of plan­ets, there could be other crea­tures like us — or even that the uni­verse could be swarm­ing with life; great civil­i­sa­tions span­ning the dis­tant galaxies.

But an omnipo­tent MacGuf­fin that made the Earth just for us? That’s not all that great.