Karen Matthews Is Pure Evil?

 General, Media, Politics  1 Response »
Dec 052008
 

Now that we officially know that Karen Matthews is guilty of kidnapping her child in the interests of sharing the reward for finding a missing child, the floodgates have opened to headlines accusing her of being an evil mother. Personally I think it is a bit of a stretch to call her ‘evil’ given other examples of true evil in the world today … the mother of Baby P for example, or that Austrian gent who imprisoned his family underground and repeatedly raped them (or the English equivalent for that matter).

Let us have a look at what she did. She asked (or forced) her boyfriend’s uncle to pick up her daughter from school and imprison her inside his flat until they could arrange for him to ‘find’ Shannon and collect the reward for the both of them. The words for this that come to mind are ‘cruel’, ‘greedy’, ‘uncaring’, ‘malicious’, and ‘deceitful’, but not exactly evil.  The words of Shannon when she was rescued by the police (“Stop it, you’re frightening me!”) don’t indicate a child who was in chronic distress … it sounds like she was more distressed by the police barging into the flat!

That doesn’t mean to say that Karen doesn’t deserve a lengthy prison sentence for what she has done, and the uncle (Michael Donovan) too, but labelling her ‘evil’ is putting her crimes on the same levels as those monsters who deliberately go out of their way to torture and/or kill children.

The tabloid press are obviously having a field day with this, often blaming the welfare state and the ‘scrounging underclass’ for producing a Karen Matthews. Firstly the crimes of Karen are not a product of her class, but a product of her greed. If she was a middle-class accountant, she would be fiddling the books; if she were a stockbroker she would be guilty of insider-trading. If she were a banker, she’d be running off to some nice warm place with stolen money.

Secondly the existence of people whose lifestyle could classify them as ‘scroungers’ is just as irritating to me as anyone else, but removing the safety net of the welfare state does not seem to be a good idea. I might not like funding the lifestyle of the other Karens out there, but I would rather do that than risk harming the other Shannons out there.

Media Lies

 Media  No Responses »
Nov 122008
 

So this morning I am sitting in front of the TV with my caffeine fix and some news channel on to break up the silence. On comes this item about how a school has shown a dramatic improvement after having introduced a new disciplinary regime. Something like an increase of 25% in pupils getting 5 or more GCSEs (cannot recall the exact numbers and it does not matter anyway).

But wait! The reporter goes on to say this increase does not include English or Maths and when those subjects are included, the increase is not quite as dramatic. So English and Maths are unimportant subjects are they ? Or perhaps the story does not come across as so interesting if the real increase is given.

So this reporter has stretched the truth (i.e. lied) by reporting a meaningless statistic that sounds good rather than a proper set of figures which would still sound good to those who do not have unrealistic expectations.

Why does the media do this ? Well obviously to make things sound better than the really are or more usually worse than they usually are. That is fair enough on an entertainment show, but surely news should present the facts and not try to stretch the truth.

UK Data Leaks: Public Sector Vs. Private Sector

 Computing, Media, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 022008
 

Today we woke up to learn of yet another UK government data leak. Apparently a memory stick was left in a pub car park. Of course as always, not is all quite as it seems; the person who actually left the memory stick where it was, actually worked for a private sector company doing contracting work for the government. So was this really a UK government data leak at all ?

Well yes, the data was government data and it does not matter who leaked it. From memory (i.e. I am too lazy to hunt down the links to check) this is not the first time that government data leaks have been caused by private contractors. Perhaps the government should stick to doing their own work when it comes to working with data that contains personal information; if there is anything more aggravating than being slated for your own stupidity it is being criticised for someone else’s stupidity.

Of course most people will be under the impression that data leaks pretty much only occur when the government is involved; somehow data leaks from private sector companies never seem to hit the headlines in quite the same way. For instance the headlines for this morning’s leaks were all about the government role in the data loss and no mention of the private sector firm involved :-

  • “Government memory stick found in pub” – Independent on Sunday.
  • “Government passwords left at pub” – Guardian; also “Fears for personal data after government passwords left in pub car park”.
  • “Brown says government cannot ensure data safety” – Times.

I have left out a few … I could not find the story on a few websites belonging to the gutter press, and lost interest after one too many pages with lurid colours and half-naked women popping out at me. But it’s all “the government” in those headlines; although they do in the end point out that it was a private contractor who lost the data.

Anyone reading (and trusting!) the media would be under the impression that the Government cannot be trusted with our personal information whereas private sector companies can because they rarely end up as front-page stories for losing data. Well I am not totally convinced that the Government has a monopoly on stupidity; there seems more than enough to go around.

Hunting down stories about private sector data leaks is kind of tedious because there does not appear to be that much out there, but a few stories did show up (not linking to anything before 2007) :-

The last story is particularly interesting – 56 reported data leaks from financial firms in 2008 (who are not required to report data leaks). In a report by Verizon, it is estimated that of all private sector data leaks, only 14% of leaks are from financial firms; doing a little arithmetic indicates that there have been at least 400 data leaks this year.

So is the private sector any better or worse than the public sector ? They are probably just the same – woefully irresponsible. People rarely care about information security of others in their daily lives; in fact they are often also completely naive about their own information security.

So why does the government come in for so much criticism in comparison to the private sector ? Partially it is simply that we do not get a choice in the matter of whether to do business with the government or not. And partially it probably makes for a better media story. Or perhaps the media just wants to attack the government.

Perhaps some journalist can take a proper look at the private sector leaks, do the job properly and just for once the private sector can get some justified criticism. They might also want to take a closer look at the media’s preference for attacking the government on this matter.

Onto another matter; encryption. The government response was that the only personal data leaked in this case was encrypted as though that would protect the data. Well maybe, but only if it was strong encryption. Most people who use encryption are not aware of whether the encryption method is strong or not. For instance a quick google for “Word document password recovery” returns a huge list of choices for applicatiosn which will break the encryption on Word documents – making the encryption built into Word completely pointless. But how many people who use this encryption know that they are getting a false sense of security ?

Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, and “That” Radio Show

 General, Media  No Responses »
Oct 292008
 

Over the last week or so, the news has been swamped with details of a certain radio show that involved Russell Brand (the host), and Jonathan Ross (the guest) phoning up Andrew Sachs and leaving “abusive” messages on his answerphone. I have not heard the show myself, but from the descriptions it goes well beyond what should be acceptable. But the right word is “silly” and not “malicious”.

But does it really deserve all this attention ? From what I can tell, there are plenty of other more serious problems that could be reported in the news. This is after all really just a couple of idiots on one radio show insulting another “showbiz” personality.

Russell has resigned, and the BBC has suspended Jonathan pending the outcome of an enquiry. There are some grounds for complaining about the BBC’s tardiness in dealing with this. Although this feels like a typical corporate tendency to keep quiet until everyone has huddled around and come up with an answer rather than responding immediately with “we’re investigating”.

Some of the criticisms around focus on the fact that the BBC is not a commercial organisation and there are claims that this sort of thing would not happen in a more commercial organisation. This is just classic anti-Beeb propoganda by those who believe that all broadcasters should be commercial. There are those who believe that free-market forces would ensure that such things never happened. I have no belief that the commercial sector is any better at dealing with such incidents, and those same free-market forces will ensure that broadcasters would be much less inclined to take risks.

There also seems to be some jealousy around the level of pay that these two celebreties get. I am not entirely sure why they are worth the amount of money they get, but criticisms of their pay should not be a consideration during this incident.

History Teaching

 General, History, Media  No Responses »
Jul 222007
 

One thing on the news recently that caught my eye was a complaint about how modern history at school concentrates in detail on a few periods in history but presents no grand overview of events throughout history. Well assuming this is true (the media does not always get things right) then it’s a shame there is no ‘grand overview’. However the pundits commenting on this and suggesting that a grand overview should be part of the course did immediately jump on the old rote memorisation of dates bandwagon.

There’s a large number of people who seem to think you don’t know history if you cannot reel off a huge list of dates of significant events. Mistaking a list of dates for ‘history’ is one of the dumbest mistakes anyone can make … to everyone other than the dedicated rote learner, a history lesson of long lists of dates is excruciatingly boring, doesn’t teach you anything interesting, and has very little to do with history. Those who campaign for children to spend hours memorising dates are doing nothing more than trying to re-introduce a style of teaching that gave a big advantage to those with good memories (and I happen to be one) and a huge disadvantage to those whose memory was less capable but perhaps could understand history more.

There is very little need for people to memorise lists of dates when there are so many reference works available. Does someone who thinks the battle of Hastings was in 1066 have a greater understanding of history than someone who thinks the battle of Hastings happened sometime in the 11th century but also knows it occurred just after the battle of Stamford Bridge ?

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