Catastrophic Sense of Humour Failure at Fox News Regarding #foxnewsfacts

 Media  No Responses »
Jan 122015
 

For those who are not aware, Fox News is a cartoonish “news” channel best regarded as a comedy channel. Today they managed to make themselves ridiculous when a so-called “expert” claimed that there are hundreds of “no go” zones across Europe including the whole of Birmingham, and that London had gangs of religious police roaming around beating up anyone without appropriate attire.

In response, there have been thousands of tweets published to a twitter hash tag (#foxnewsfacts) mocking Fox News for this mistake. To be precise they have been posting ridiculously over the top “facts” in the style of Fox News without claiming that they were really statements made by Fox News.

The so-called “expert” has apologised, although after calling Birmingham “beautiful” you do have to wonder about how much research went into his apology. Birmingham is a great city that can be described in many ways, but beautiful isn’t the most obvious adjective to use.

Fox News on the other hand seem to have lost the plot (if they ever had one to begin with), and have been issuing legal threats in response to some of the tweets :-

Epic Idiocy!

Just for the benefit of the idiots at Fox, the Black Country is a long-used phrase used for the region to the north and west of Birmingham. As could be found out with a few clicks of the mouse. And …

Nobody is claiming the ridiculous statements tweeted were made by Fox News; they are merely taking the piss. And by making pointless legal threats, they are prolonging the ridicule.

Or was it all a fake? Perhaps.

Ebola in the UK: Don’t Lick Any Strangers!

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 312014
 

Which is ridiculous of course. You could lick every person (including the nurse who was incubating Ebola) on flight AT800 (the plane from Casablanca to Heathrow that carried the nurse) without catching Ebola; plenty of other things! But not Ebola.

Ebola is hard to catch. You have to come into contact with infected bodily fluids which isn’t likely to happen if you share an airplane cabin.

So of course the press is overreacting in it’s usual way resorting to scaremongering to push sales. It is pretty obvious given some of the wild stunts they have come up with that we cannot trust the mainstream press to accurately tell us what is going on :-

  1. The Daily Mail wants the planes involved to be disinfected. Why? Without going into graphic details, unless the nurse was exuding bodily fluids on her plane journey there is no risk from getting on a plane that previously carried someone who was incubating Ebola.
  2. They wonder why returning health care workers were allowed to travel onwards using crowded public transport. Ignoring the fact that treating returning heroes as pariahs is contemptible, there is in practice no risk in allowing people without symptoms to travel in public.
  3. The nurse was allowed to travel onto Glasgow after raising concerns and after being tested for raised temperatures. Apparently her raised temperature was not considered to be significant (there’s lots of things that can cause a raised temperature) and she had no other symptoms.
  4. They are making contact with fellow passengers and are testing two other patients “just in case”. Well of course they are – with something as nasty as Ebola, you take precautions a step or two further than is strictly necessary but you don’t wander off into the realms of the ridiculous.

The press is of course announcing the review of procedures for dealing with those arriving from West Africa whilst implying that things were not up to scratch. Well of course they are reviewing procedures – procedures should be reviewed regularly whether or not there is a problem.

In practice, the only people in this country at risk from Ebola are those who have worked with Ebola victims – either in West Africa, or by nursing those who have caught the disease there. In reality, the rest of us currently are at a risk so low as to be negligible. Even everyone on flight AT800 and the BA flight to Glasgow.

Robin Knox Johnston: He’s Old. So What?

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 142014
 

Recently, Robin Knox Johnston took part in a sailing race, and the BBC spent some time interviewing him and highlighting his progress throughout the race.

Fair enough, but why was it necessary to keep banging on about how old he is? Yes he’s old enough – after all he completed his around the world voyage in the year I was born – but it’s probably the least interesting thing about him and what he was doing.

(Image obtained from http://www.robinknox-johnston.co.uk/)

In practically every interview with him the BBC did, his age came up … and many times it came up more than once. Anyone would think the BBC is under the impression that old people should be sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket on their knees drooling gently.

 

NATS Software Failure: Old Code or Buggy Code?

 Computing, General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 142014
 

Anyone watching mainstream media for news about the software failure at NATS can be forgiven for thinking that old software is responsible for the problem that occurred recently causing many flight delays. The mainstream media seems to have clung onto the idea that the code is old and decided to blame that for the problems. You do have to wonder where they got these ideas from given that most journalists have the technology qualifications of a gnat. Perhaps from industry insiders who have a vested interest in selling new products perhaps?

Anyone who has written code can tell you that it is not old code that is responsible for software failures, but buggy code. Old code can be buggy, but so can new code. In fact as there has been less time to spend debugging it, new code is likely to have many more problems than old code.

That sounds like a recipe for leaving old code well alone. But it isn’t really. Old code needs to be updated and refreshed on a continual basis but not replaced in a “big bang” approach just because it is old.

Small changes and not big changes. Small changes are easier to do, quicker to do, and it’s feasible during testing to say that the small change is rubbish and to throw it away.

The more important a system is, the more important it is to evolve it towards the future rather than simply replace it with something newer and shinier.

And letting mainstream journalists dictate your IT strategy is always a mistake.

Naked Celebrities!

 General, Media, Security  No Responses »
Sep 042014
 

So apparently a whole bunch of celebrities have had their naked selfies leaked by some “hacker”. As to how this was done, we don’t really know and will probably never know given that Apple is so secretive. But we can guess some possibilities :-

  1. The hacker built up a list of possible account names – jennifer (Jennifer Lawrence) might be a good one to try – and then tried the top 100 dumbest passwords against each one in turn. You would not get every single account this way, and a fair few would turn out to be a fan of Jennifer Lawrence rather than the celebrity herself. But you would get a few that way.
  2. The hacker targeted the celebrities with a phishing attack – basically asking the celebrity what their account password is. This sounds too unlikely to succeed, but with a plausible looking login page it does work surprisingly often. It’s not just the terminally stupid that fall victim to such attacks; the victims are really those who are too trusting and often in too much of a hurry.
  3. The next method a hacker might use is to tackle Apple’s password reset service which uses “memorable information” such as the name of your first school, your mother’s maiden name, etc. There is always a bit of a problem with “memorable information” such as this – it isn’t really that private, and a celebrity is likely to have “leaked” all such private information over time.
  4. Through some unknown vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service. Given that we suspect that iCloud has certain “issues” with security (apparently Apple has no intruder lock out to make password guessing attacks harder), this isn’t impossible but I would guess that it is less likely that the two more obvious attacks above.

There’s a great deal of hateful “slut-shaming” going on over this celebrity leak which apart from anything else is really missing the point. It may be embarrassing for naked selfies to be leaked, but other personal information could be dangerous if leaked – the celebrity’s home address and alarm codes?

It is not the victim’s fault; it’s the fault of the anonymous (at the moment) hacker.

But the victim can improve their behaviour to make it harder to victimise them :-

  1. First of all if you’re called Jennifer Lawrence, don’t use any permutation of your name as a username; or even enter that as your full name into any cloud service. Make one up.
  2. Make sure you are using a sensible password. It needn’t be excessive, but anything that is just a single word is just not good enough.
  3. Be less trusting with your acount credentials. Make sure you know what the location bar in your browser is and where it is, and check it when you login. And don’t click on links in emails.
  4. If the service you are using offers two-factor authentication, turn it on.
  5. Learn about security; you are a target. Don’t go overboard (but see step 6), but spend an hour a week doing a little reading and taking steps to improve your personal security.
  6. Hire or befriend a geek who can act as your early warning system for threats. And someone you can go to for advice.

Note that I haven’t said “don’t take naked selfies” – it may be a bit foolish, but a life without a bit of foolishness is hardly a life at all.

And of course most of those suggestions work for ordinary people and not just celebrities!

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