Who Do We Think We Are?

 History  No Responses »
Dec 092016
 

B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestonesGenealogy, and inspired by the TV programme: “Who Do You Think You Are?“.

Sometimes I feel that when we dive into family history, it is possible that we are distracted by the records we come across and ignore the records we do not find. Which is perfectly understandable – those who history does not record disappear.

And related to that is that we sometimes tend to concentrate on the more famous of our ancestors; it is noticeable that the programme “Who Do You Think You Are?” always seems to find an interesting ancestor. Some may be under the impression that it is because that the programme only researches the ancestry of the famous, but if you look back far enough into the ancestry of anyone you will find a famous ancestor and a good story.

Even me.

Yet in some ways the more interesting stories are those of the less famous – how the ordinary rank and file of our families survived day to day, because frankly the past was harsh and unforgiving.

The other thing is that family historian have an unrealistic belief in the historical record. That all marriages were happy, children were born in wedlock, and that there was no “hanky-panky” going on.

I recently scanned through the birth records of one person and was amused to see that of those with the same surname approximately a third had unmarried mothers (it showed the mother’s maiden name). Of course that was just one surname in one year, but there are other signs pointing the same way.

All of those concrete lines in our family tree are no more than the story that each of our families told the authorities which may or may not reflect reality. It is difficult to appreciate today, but there were perfectly reasonable reasons for concealing the true parentage of “illegitimate” children – a surprise legitimate sister is less of an embarrassment than a surprise “illegitimate” daughter.

 

Confessions Of A Spy In The Data Centre

 Humour, Security  No Responses »
Nov 262016
 

(actually we don’t usually sit in the data centre; it’s too noisy and usually the wrong temperature for people)

There is a perception amongst people that security “gurus” who work in network security are spying on all your network traffic. Not the hackers (which is a whole other matter), but the people who run enterprise firewalls. We do, but we’re not interested in what you are doing but instead what is being done to you (and the enterprise as a whole).

Frankly nothing strikes me as more boring than spying on someone’s porn browsing – if I really need to, I’ll hunt down my own porn thank you very much! And we’re busy; you could probably double the size of every network security team in every organisation on the planet and still nobody would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

On the subject of porn (as an extreme example), it is not a security issue. There is an argument that browsing porn sites is putting yourself at greater risk of picking up some kind of nasty infection, but avoiding porn sites to avoid getting infected with malware is a tactic that results in your computer being infected. So the intended content isn’t a problem as far as security is concerned, but we’re interested in unintended content.

Now there are places that enforce browsing censorship – blocking anything that isn’t work-related. That role is usually dumped on the network security people because they have the tools to do the job.

Does porn browsing on the office matter? Of course it does – some people are upset by the sight of such things, and almost as important, when someone is browsing porn they are not working. But such matters are best dealt with in the office by the line manager – if someone isn’t doing their work it doesn’t matter if they are browsing porn, hitting Facebook, or snoozing under the desk. All should be dealt with appropriately by the line manager.

And centralised censorship is a rather clumsy tool – blocking Facebook is all very well if it is to prevent personal usage of the Internet, but what about the Marketing department using Facebook for publicity? Or the Customer Service department keeping an eye on Facebook for product problems that they need to look into? These can be allowed through on a case-by-case basis, but it highlights that censorship is a clumsy tool.

The word from a nameless vendor who is in this space, is that in many cases this censorship has less to do with preventing people from doing “naughty” things, and more to do with controlling bandwidth usage. And as bandwidth becomes cheaper, there is less interest in censoring Internet activities – certainly from a personal perspective I notice a decrease in the number of people who complain they cannot visit certain sites because of work’s “firewall”.

There is also the subject of TLS inspection where firewalls intercept and inspect TLS or SSL encrypted traffic between you and “out there”. Again there is a suspicion that we are for whatever reason spying on your activities. The answer to this is the same as previously – why should we bother? It is too much like hard work, and frankly most of the information that passes through a firewall is unbelievably boring.

No, TLS interception is used to do the boring task of inspecting traffic for malware, spyware, and other security threats. And with the increasing use of TLS to encrypt traffic it is becoming more and more important to do TLS interception for security reasons.

Yes there are those who would use that sort of technology to spy on your activities, but those organisations are typically nation states … and repressive ones at that. But it is extreme foolishness to blame a useful tool for the abuses that an abusive government perpetrates.  Your average enterprise just isn’t that interested in what you’re up to.

And if you still don’t believe this, there is a simple answer: Do anything private on your own private network.

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The Liepaper – The Sun

 Media  No Responses »
Nov 192016
 

The Sun claimed Jeremy Corbyn danced (don’t bother clicking; the story was removed for legal reasons) down Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday. What actually happened is that a photographer edited a picture to show Corbyn apparently waving his hand as though he were dancing when he was really walking, talking, and gesturing with a veteran (a Desert Rat).

So what The Sun really did was airbrush out a veteran in order to pursue an ongoing vendetta against Corbyn. Now pursuing a vendetta against Corbyn is fair enough – if you restrict yourself to his policies and politically relevant stories. But making up lies and you lose your status as a newspaper and become a “liepaper”.

There are those who argue that it was the photographer that invented the story, and that The Sun was taken in by the lie. Which is why the first rule of journalism is to make sure you have at least two sources, and check the sources. Again, not following this basic rule disqualifies The Sun as a newspaper and makes it a liepaper.

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The Suicide Solution

 General  No Responses »
Nov 162016
 

If you are personally interested in suicide as a solution, please contact the Samaritans who can help. This article is not a suicide prevention guide nor is it written by someone qualified in this area.

I have become interested in suicide recently – no, not in that way! In suicide statistics, and the reasons for suicide.

In the UK, in 2014, there were 22 suicides per 100,000 people in the UK (all statistics are taken from the Samaritans suicide report for 2016). It gets rather more interesting when you examine the differences in population groups – for instance, the overall suicide rate for men in the UK is 16.8 suicides per 100,000 men whereas the overall rate for women is 5.2 per 100,000 women. In other words for every woman who commits suicide, there are more than 3 men who commit suicide.

There are regional variations as well of course, but none of those variations are anywhere near as dramatic.

Another significant variation contained within the Samaritans report is the difference in suicide rates at different ages. For instance, the biggest risk group for suicide is between 45-59 where the overall suicide rate is 31 per 100,000 compared with the lowest rate age group of 10-29 years where the overall rate is 13.1. Interesting the comparison between the genders is almost identical here – the rate for women more than doubles, and the rate for men more than doubles.

So if you’re male you are more likely to commit suicide, and if you are middle-aged you are more likely to commit suicide.

One possible explanation for the gender difference is contained within the Samaritans report in that men supposedly choose to opt for more effective suicide methods than women. Perhaps, but this is a rather difficult to test, and there are plenty of other possible reasons why the rate for men is so high. But let’s not dwell on this …

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But what else?

There are all sorts of factors that contribute to an increased risk of suicide, including but not limited to :-

  1. Certain professions such as doctors, etc.
  2. Many diseases or health conditions (excluding mental illness) cause an increased risk of suicide – such as psoriasis, or more fatal conditions such as cancer.
  3. Bullying, prejudice (esp. against young LGBT people), racism, etc. Basically anything where one person can be made miserable by nasty people.
  4. Mental illness of course.
  5. Stress.

And there are probably many more reasons.

But the real rant here is about those who say that suicide is no solution; it shouldn’t be a viable solution because nobody should be reduced to the point where they see it as a solution. But to simply say “suicide is no solution” distracts from the real problems – that other factors cause some people to feel it is a solution.

And it is those problems that need solving.

 

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