GCHQ Spying On Trump?

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 182017
 

There is a media commentator (Andrew Napolitano) in the USA who has solved the mystery of who was spying on Trump during the election. Apparently it was GCHQ after being asked to by Obama. If it had remained just a commentator on Fox News which is well known for letting kooks, weirdos, and the generally insane spout all sorts of garbage, that would have been it.

But Sean Spicer then repeated the claims in a White House briefing.

And GCHQ have denied it.

But can we believe them? In this case almost certainly.

There is a very long standing convention within British intelligence agencies of neither confirming nor denying any action. Refusing to comment no matter how embarrassing is better than being caught in a lie, so the extremely unusual denial by GCHQ is believable because it is so unusual. But there’s more.

Firstly, Obama as president didn’t have the phone number of GCHQ (which is after all a British agency). A request from the president directly to GCHQ would probably be (and should be) answered with something along the lines of “Wrong number pal”. If he wanted to make a surveillance request it would go to the NSA who would then make an inter-agency request to GCHQ.

Which would of course result in a very secret paper-trail.

And if the request did make it through to GCHQ, the only surveillance data they are likely to have access to is international data (phone calls, Internet, etc) from Trump Tower to places abroad (with probably particularly good capture rates when passing through Europe). Which may well be of interest, but to actually put surveillance equipment inside Trump Tower?

That’s the job of a domestic intelligence agency, and whilst GCHQ could get involved in such an operation on foreign soil (and probably have), it is exceptionally unlikely in this case because it would put the intelligence co-operation agreements between the US and the UK at risk.

Whilst believing statements of an intelligence agency is a risky business, in this case it is probably true that GCHQ had nothing to do with any supposed surveillance of Trump Towers given the number of reasons why GCHQ wouldn’t be involved.

 

 

Veganism & The “Carrying Capacity” Of Different Diets

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 052017
 

There is an article being advertised around that uses a scientific report detailing the carrying capacity (how many people agriculture can support) of different diets. The article itself is titled in a way to bash vegans for not being as environmentally friendly as they claim to be. Which is odd because the scientific report does show that a vegan diet is more efficient (in terms of how many people can be fed) than a normal diet; it’s just not quite as efficient as some diets – specifically diets that make use of grazing land that cannot be otherwise used.

So a relatively mainstream article is bashing vegans because?

Well the usual reason is because of the holier than thou attitude of vegans. Actually it’s the militant fundamentalist wing of the vegans who do the whole holier than thou thing; just like an iceberg most of the vegan population isn’t visible.

Of course any reputable news organisation would know this, so only resorts to demonisation of vegans as click-bait. Obviously desperate.

The interesting thing about the report is that they have actually shown that different diets can be more efficient (in terms of the number of people that can be fed) than others, and that the average diet is probably one of the least efficient possible diets. Even more interesting (especially for the meat eaters out there) is that omnivorous diets (admittedly with significantly reduced meat intake) can be even more efficient than a vegan diet.

This is apparently due to the fact that a vegan diet will not make use of marginal grazing land which can only be used for raising meat.

If the doom-mongers are right about climate change and rising population, all those dedicated meat eaters out there should probably be encouraging vegans (and vegetarians) so when things get marginal, there are still a few animals to share out.

Should Politicians Be Profiled?

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 282017
 

With the enfant terrible Trump in charge of the USA and petulant Putin in charge of the Russian bear, it seems like an interesting idea to subject politicians to psychological profiling to determine their suitability for public office and power over us.

When you look at the list of monstrous political leaders we have had over just the last 100 years – Hitler, Pol-pot, Stalin, etc., the idea of testing politicians to find out if they are psychos or loonies starts to make a great deal of sense.

The first complaint about this would be that it would be an invasion of privacy. Well we don’t need to know the details; we simply need to have a trustworthy organisation certify that person A is suitable (or unsuitable) candidate.

The second issue is determining just what makes a suitable or unsuitable candidate which is something we need to persuade a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists to propose.

The final issue is to get politicians to agree to it, and there we can simply refuse to vote for any candidate who has not been certified.

How Cloud Services Do Mail Wrong

 Computing  No Responses »
Feb 272017
 

Strictly speaking how some cloud services do mail wrong, but whilst it is not all, there are still quite a few that do which is why there are no names contained within this rant.

When you have some cloud-based service send email, it makes sense for the “From” header (i.e. what sensible normal people think of as the sender address) to contain the email address of the person using the cloud-based service.

Fair enough.

But if the real sender address or envelope sender address (which is contained within the SMTP transaction) comprises the email address of the person using the cloud-based service you may well run into problems. Many organisations publish an SPF record in their DNS to indicate what network addresses are approved for, and many mail servers check the envelope sender against the published authorised network addresses.

If the network address used by the cloud service provider does not match what is in the organisation’s SPF record then the recipient’s mail server is free to reject the mail. And they often do.

Now the most obvious “fix” for this is to add the cloud service provider’s network address to the organisation’s SPF record.

The only trouble with that is that it isn’t always possible. There are various limits to how long an SPF record can be so adding addresses to the SPF record recklessly is unwise, and a sensible DNS administrator will only add to the SPF record for important services. So if the cloud service is being evaluated or being used by something less important, or is being used for non-work related purposes, then it likely won’t meet the “important enough to get added to the SPF record” criteria.

So why not fix the source of the problem?

All that has to be done is to use a different address for the envelope sender, and you can even arrange things to send bounces back to the right place.

Set the envelope sender to something like “customer+${original email}@${cloud service address}” (obviously when replacing the ${original email} you will have to change the “@” sign to something reversible). All of a sudden you are no longer “forging” the envelope sender, and not tripping over anyone’s spam defences.

Process the bounces to “customer@${cloud service address}” and you can send the bounces to the right place.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design (Creationism)

 Religion, Science  No Responses »
Feb 132017
 

As an atheist, I find it difficult to be polite and not fall about laughing at things like “Intelligent Design”, but for the duration of this blog posting, I’ll try.

On one side are the scientists who spend their working lives investigating biological processes who have their theory of evolution. Now that word “theory” needs a bit of explanation; it does not mean that evolution hasn’t been accepted as fact by scientists. Evolution is one of those rare scientific theories that has never been disproved; merely refined. Essentially the word “theory” here is a challenge to disprove evolution and come up with a better theory – if you think you’re hard enough!

On the other side are a collection of religious leaders (admittedly Charles Thaxton trained as a chemist) who have spent their working lives telling people about god; and coming up with the theory of “Intelligent Design” in their spare time. The suspicion is that these people are letting their religious beliefs influence their “scientific” thinking.

When I want to know about plumbing, I ask a plumber. When I want to know about welding, I ask a boiler-maker. And when I want to know about biology, I ask a biologist.

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