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  • The Charlie Hebdo Killers Were Not Muslims

    (Stolen from a Facebook posting)

    Sounds daft doesn’t it? Because the killers themselves would have claimed they were doing it for islam. And of course there are plenty of feeble-minded bigots who are now attacking muslims and islamic places of worship.

    Now don’t get me wrong: I have no patience with organised religion and think anyone who believes in an imaginary infectious friend in the sky needs their head examining. But they have a right to believe anything they want.

    They just don’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us.

    Within any community (religious or otherwise), there are two sorts of people, and yes I’m being overly simplistic here. There are the majority who go along with the community and obey the dictates if they are not too inconvenient. And there are the zealots who take it to the extremes. And amongst the zealots there is a deranged minority who want to inflict the standards of their community on everyone. Some of them use violence to do so.

    Now there was some idiot on the news today who claimed that despite Charlie Hebdo publishing a cartoon insulting to christians, that it wasn’t christians shooting journalists. True enough, but it there are christians murdering abortion doctors and harassing those entering abortion clinics, so it is not as if there are no christian terrorists.

    Now comes a bit of a leap of faith: These terrorists whatever their faith, have more in common with each other than their co-religionists. They all espouse an extreme form of their faith, are compelled to inflict it on everyone, and resort to violence to pursue their goals.

    Their most significant attribute is terrorism and not their religion. Their crimes overwhelm their faith and make their religion irrelevant.

    An alternative way of looking at it is a quantitative approach. There were 3 killers involved in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket. The number of muslims in France is not known precisely, but a figure of about 3 million seems a reasonable approximation for this sort of calculation, which if you work it out makes the number of killers in this incident just 0.0001% of the muslim population of France.

    So why were there only three killers? Because muslims as a whole are not terrorists.

    Besides which, there is nothing we could do to annoy the killers more than to deny their islamic nature.

  • Je Suis Charlie

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

    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.

  • Xmas Rail Chaos: Time To Stop The Holiday Works

    So we have another story about how overrunning maintenance work on our railways has caused travel chaos. One of the things to remember is that we only hear about the overruns and not the successfully completed work. I would not be surprised if only a tiny minority of work overruns.

    But that isn’t much comfort to those caught up in the chaos.

    Somewhere within National Rail, there is a department that decides when engineering work can take place, and they will have made a calculation to determine when the least “costly” overruns can be scheduled. They probably make this calculation based on the number of travel hours lost.

    But perhaps they are not considering the quality of those hours lost. Some travel is more valuable than other travel; not in simple economic terms, but including other factors such as the amount of distress caused.

    Holiday travel is a bit different to everyday travel in that :-

    1. People tend to travel further and make more connections. Disrupting their travel could well leave them stranded in an unfamiliar environment.
    2. More “vulnerable” people travel for holidays – children and old people – who are less likely to cope well with the disruption.
    3. Frankly most normal people value their holiday trips higher than their work trips; missing a day’s work because you cannot get in is mildly annoying, but missing a holiday is devastating.
    4. Lastly, making alternative arrangements is much more possible during normal working hours.

    Of course nothing will change because all this will make no difference to those in charge who have chauffeur driven cars to take them everywhere and who regularly get their ears bent by industry pressure groups.

  • Sony’s Tale of Woe

    What with North Korea’s latest explosion of bile, Sony is having a network security issue that will be used as an example of how bad things can get for probably decades. The phrase “I’m in the middle of a Sony” will be regularly used within the industry for the worst types of incidents.

    It is not clear just what happened to Sony during the incident, and it will quite possibly never be clear. There are rumours that it may be something as simple as a phishing attack, and the FBI has claimed it has recovered code with similarities to code used in previous attacks against targets the North Koreans would wish to target.

    It seems pretty certain that the North Koreans were involved in the attack against Sony; in addition to the code fragments, the North Koreans have gone out of their way to claim the attack was orchestrated by themselves. Yes they denied the attacks, but in the same way that a little kid denies having stolen the cake with all the evidence on his face.

    Normally a corporation under attack from a state actor can be forgiven for getting opened up like a can of peaches, but this is Sony and a bunch of idiots who if they hadn’t lucked out by being in charge of North Korea would have trouble getting a job flipping burgers.

    So Sony Pictures needs to have a good long look at it’s security. Two big tips for Sony:

    First of all, change the name of the security team to the insecurity team. That is not a criticism of the team that does security at Sony right now, but because there is an assumption that the security team handles security and the rest of us doesn’t have to bother.

    In reality, security is everyone’s responsibility.

    Secondly take a second look at every recommendation that your security team has ever made and you have said No to. And reconsider.