More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • The Ass-Hole

    To our American friends, it should be pointed out that an ass-hole is a large hole in the ground filled up with donkeys.

    Whilst such a landscape feature is curious, it remains a mystery as to why it causes so much excitement over there.

  • Are Modern Houses Too Small?

    Are modern houses too small?

    The Daily Mail is always a good bet to get the blood pressure up but the one that took my eye today dovetails nicely with some thoughts I’ve been having about modern houses.

    The first thing that comes to mind when reading the story, is why didn’t it occur to them that the garage was too small when looking at the house? I mean, I’m no garage expert – I don’t have one, nor anything to park in one – but even a quick look at the photo caused me to think: “Cool. A garage door to the garden shed … making it easy to park the lawn mower. But why is it pointed in the wrong direction? And where’s the garage?”.

    But anyone moving house knows that you get swamped with details, and anyone without OCD is likely to miss a detail or two.

    But why were the developers building garages too small for cars? It’s not as if garages are difficult to size sensibly. Just walk down the street someday measuring a random selection of cars, and you’ll soon have an idea of how wide a car is. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you need a bit of added space on both sides to let people out. Hell, I thought of it, and I’ve never used a garage.

    The developer has responded to the house buyers with the standard advice: Why didn’t you use a tape measure? But you have to ask why the developer chose to build a garage so small that anyone using a tape measure would run a mile rather than stump up the cash. Probably there’s an element of stupidity and lack of oversight in the design department. Plus pressure to make houses as cheap as possible – a big garage takes more bricks, and more bricks cost more money.

    And if you look at modern homes, you see that the inclination to make homes cheaper has resulted in smaller homes.

    Average Home Sizes

    At least it does in the UK. Why are our homes so small?

    But instead of pure floor area, there are other aspects to home sizes. Why are modern ceilings so low ? In an age when very few people are shrunken by childhood malnutrition, we are far taller on average than we were in the 19th century. Yet to get a decent ceiling height, I have to choose a Victorian era maisonette to live in. Low ceilings make modern houses feel cramped to me.

    And why are doorways still too narrow for wheelchairs? Adjusting doorways and hallways for a wheelchair user – either on a full-time or part-time basis – must be a complete nightmare. So why not size them sensibly for new builds ?

    Reducing housing costs is sensible in itself, but being mean in terms of size is the wrong answer. The real answer is to be smarter but perhaps property development companies are too busy making money to be smart.

  • Does Google’s Glass Herald The End Of Civilisation?

    Executive summary: No.

    According to some, the introduction of Google’s latest product – the Glass(es) – will undoubtedly herald the end of civilisation as the we know it and the survivors will be skittering from bunker to bunker in a forlorn hope of evading surveillance. Actually the biggest threat Google’s Glass(es) have to the world, is the threat to proper grammar – they’re glasses!

    The strange thing about the lists of problems encountered with Google’s Glass(es) is that they are “problems” that are already here. Google has done something nifty with their product, which is basically to integrate possibilities into something a non-geek can use. And it is not as if it is particularly revolutionary – people have been looking at augmented reality on smartphones for years and thinking that it was pretty cool, but wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to hold up your smartphone all the time?

    The big problem is the threat of pervasive surveillance, and threats that come about as a result of that pervasive surveillance. If Google were never to have invented these things, we would still have a problem with pervasive surveillance. As other have pointed out, the use of video (and still) recording on smartphones is already bring in an age of pervasive surveillance; or at least pervasive surveillance under the control of individuals as we already have pervasive surveillance by corporations and government.

    It is true that there are negative aspects to pervasive surveillance, but it is also true that there are positive aspects too. Street crime becomes a far riskier proposition if everyone around can just say “Ok. Start recording video.”. People getting up to foolish activities being “outed” on Youtube? The more it happens, the less the pain.

    And of course make laws to punish the publication of privacy invading video but not the recording of it; with a proper public interest imminity. That is what the public should be interested in, not what it wants to be interested in.

    There are those who say that publication of embarrassing activities onto social media sites may make it harder for people to get employment. The fault here is not what is published to social media sites nor people who take part in such activities, but with the employers who insist on having employees so squeaky clean. If you never employ people who have danced naked on top of a table, you’ll end up with boring employees.

    And I’ll bet that there is a high incidence of naked table-top dancing in the past of anyone whose thinking is inventive, creative, and out-of-the-box. Or in other words, employers should be going out of their way to hunt down and employ the naked table-top dancers (No I probably haven’t).

    There are those who say that it will somehow increase bullying. It is true that this will be an extra tool in the arsenal of bullies, but in can also be an extra tool in the arsenal of those targeted by bullies. To stop what happened to Amanda Todd (and others), we need to stop bullying whether assisted by technology or the old-fashioned kind.

    And of course we have the argument that Google is powerful enough already, and Glass(es) will make that worse. Well, first of all Google Glass(es) won’t be the only product of this kind out there. And if Google is too powerful, it is time to chop them down to size rather than blocking this product.

    At least the hysterical reaction of some businesses is giving me a new retirement fund possibility. When I eventually get around to getting some, mine will have prescription lenses in, and any business that wants to ban me will get sued for discrimination against the “disabled”.

    We need to be careful of condemning a technology for the poor behaviour of people, when it is the poor behaviour that is at fault.

  • Tories To Splinter Over Europe?

    Probably not … this is hardly the first time that the Tories have had a spat over membership of Europe.

    But when one of them grandly announces that they are all united over Europe, you know there’s trouble. You hardly need to announce that you’re united when there’s no trouble.

    When you’ve got Lord Howe announcing that David Cameron is running scared over Europe, and rumours of someone close to the top using the phrase “swivel-eyed loons” in connection to grass-roots party activists, then you have a party with definite issues. In addition to the normal doubts over Europe, Tories have a streak of unrealistic traditionalists within their party – who could quite well qualify as “swivel-eyed loons”.

    The loons want to hark back to a time when Britain had an empire, hung serious criminals, flogged less serious criminals, and a few other policies from the 19th century. And the thought of co-operating to any extent with the old enemies of France or Germany raises the hackles.

    Well they are entitled to their views, and I’m entitled to borrow a phrase and call them “swivel-eyed loons”. And good luck to them; they will be the cause of the Tories becoming unelectable for another decade or so.

    And of course there is the other half of the party – those with more than one brain cell – who realise that such archaic world views are really not helpful. Could the division cause the Tory party to splinter? Well there’s always wishful thinking.

    But realistically there is already a place for disgruntled Tories to head off to: the UKIP party. You could almost say that the split has already occurred and that we’re watching the painfully slow death throws of the old Tories.

     

  • Is China The Bad Boy In Cyber Warfare?

    The strange thing about being involved in information security is the phenomena of cyber warfare.

    After all, what does tinkering with computers have to do with real war? Well it depends what all that tinkering leads to, and we simply do not know what would happen in a real war. We are in the beginning of the era when aggressive hacking supports war.

    But probably the overwhelming majority of activities labelled as cyber warfare are in fact espionage, or a grey area in between. Any kind of hacking that leads to information disclosure, is espionage rather than warfare. More aggressive hacking – such as writing malware to spin centrifuges into destruction – falls into the grey area between espionage and warfare; it’s too aggressive to be labelled espionage, but isn’t part of a legal war (and yes there is such a thing). In terms of legality, it could well be that such acts are illegal acts of war, but morally justified.

    And why is China always the bad actor here? Practically every hacking conference video dealing with cyber warfare drops big hints about the activities of China with little in the way of evidence. There is some evidence that China may be involved in cyber espionage, but as for cyber warfare itself, there is far more evidence for the involvement of the US, Israel, and even the UK; although the rumoured replacement of an Al-Qaeda recipe for a pipe bomb with one for cupcakes doesn’t seem like an act of war, but perhaps an exhibit of the English sense of humour.

    Part of the problem is that anyone who reads their firewall logs will find a huge number of attacks coming from Chinese address space. As an example, a quick inspection of the addresses blocked on one of my servers for attempted ssh brute force attacks gives the following table :-

    Count Country Code Country
    255 CN China
    51 US United States …
    29 KR Korea (South)
    19 BR Brazil
    17 DE Germany
    15 IN India
    13 RU Russia
    13 GB Great Britain
    13 FR France
    11 ID Indonesia

    This is not intended to be an accurate reflection of anything other than the number of infected machines trying to brute force accounts on my server.

    The high presence of China is an indication of the number of malware infections within China, and the large population of the Chinese. It doesn’t actually say anything about where those attacks originate. Every hacker with enough sense to tie up their shoe laces will be pivoting through privacy proxies, and using armies of infected hosts to send out their attacks. These infected hosts are the ones whose addresses show up in your logs.

    Assuming that because these addresses are Chinese means that the Chinese state is behind attacks is faulty logic. There is no reason why the Chinese state hackers (if they exist … although it is almost certain they do) would use Chinese addresses to attack from; they are more likely to be using addresses from the US, Europe, South America, etc. If anything, attacks coming from Chinese addresses indicate :-

    1. Private sector hacking (which is the majority)
    2. Attacks from state groups other than China.

    It may well be that China is engaged in industrial scale cyber espionage; it may also be that what people assume are Chinese attacks are in fact other states. After all cyber espionage is probably one of the cheapest ways to get involved; within the means of even the smallest and poorest states.