“Not Guilty” Means “Innocent” ?

 General  No Responses »
Aug 192016
 

Of course it doesn’t. Anyone who claims so needs their brain rebooted.

This topic came up on an online discussion where there were many comments indicating a poorly conceived belief that a “not guilty” verdict from a court means “innocent”.

In a criminal case the court has to decide whether there is enough evidence to determine if the accused can be found guilty in the opinion of the court. The legal system very wisely knows that whilst it has the job of determining truth (as part of dispensing justice), it cannot do that so restricts itself to determining whether there is sufficient evidence to find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

That means those who get a “not guilty” verdict comprise two groups – those who are innocent, and those who are guilty, but there is sufficient doubt over their guilt that they cannot be found guilty. Any policeman (or woman) will tell you that those found “not guilty” include plenty of people who really are guilty, but the evidence isn’t sufficient.

We have a legal system where there is a presumption of innocence – the old saying is that it is better that 99 guilty criminals go free than 1 innocent person be convicted. The legal system assumes that mistakes will be made (quite rightly – the decisions are made by people), and weighs the system heavily in favour of ensuring that mistakes result in people going free when they are guilty.

It does this by asking the jury to decide if the accused is guilty; not whether they are innocent. And they must have no reasonable doubts over the guilt of the accused. In a perfect situation a simple question has a black or white answer – the accused is guilty or innocent; in the real world we all know there are grey areas – there is plenty of evidence showing that the accused killed the victim, but she has a good alibi.

Where a case becomes grey and there is sufficient doubt, the verdict should be “not guilty” even if the accused was probably guilty.

The Edge

Tips On Staying Cool …

 Humour  No Responses »
Jul 192016
 

(because everyone else has some)

  1. Stay in the shade; the big shiny thing in the sky is the heat source.
  2. If you are in the sun, wear white; it absorbs less of the heat from that big shiny thing. See point#1.
  3. If you are in the shade, wear black; it radiates more heat. See point#1.
The New Defence

The New Defence

USA: Racial Tensions Or Wealth Inequality?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 172016
 

As seen from afar, the USA seems to be having a problem with racial tensions – police shootings, protests, “Black Lives Matter“, etc., and racial inequality such as found at Facebook. Nobody with any sense doubts that there is racism in the USA – everywhere there are bone-headed bigots worrying about the colour of the dead stuff that keeps the squishy bits on the inside.

But we may be too quick to assume that it is simply racism; many of the symptoms could well be caused by wealth inequality and relative poverty.

The wealthy (and their children) are more like to succeed because of a number of factors :-

  1. They are more able to afford private education – either to supplement state education or to replace it with presumably higher quality private education.
  2. They are more able to afford higher education; even though it is possible for those who cannot afford it to get loans to pay for higher education in the USA, this will leave those in debt at a disadvantage.
  3. Social networks (the “old boy network”) that the wealthy have access to includes greater opportunities at internships at organisations that give their children greater opportunities.
  4. And internships themselves seem designed to favour the children of the wealthy – unpaid work in the hope of getting a better job at the end of it is something that is only a suitable option if you already have money to live on.

There are those who point at people from relatively poor backgrounds who have “made it”, and there’s certainly no doubt that exceptional people can succeed whatever their background. But most of us are not exceptional.

Relative poverty and lack of opportunity can easily lead to frustration with the system, and amongst the criminally inclined a tendency to resort to crime – those with more wealth or more opportunities will not resort to crime to the same extent.

So does the USA have a racism problem or a wealth inequality problem? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I would not be at all surprised if the answer is both.

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Anti-Virus Is Dead. Long-Live Behavioural Analysis …

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Jul 142016
 

One of the throw-away statistics I tripped over recently was that there are 5 new malware releases every second.  Now many of those new releases are variations on a theme – there are pieces of software designed to distort a piece of malware into a new piece of malware with the same functionality. This is done deliberately to evade anti-virus software.

And it works. Every so often I feed some strange mail attachments into virustotal to find out how widely it is recognised. It is not uncommon to find that only 2-3 will recognise it as malware out of 50-odd virus checkers on that site. So if you happen to be dumb enough to download and activate the attachment, your anti-virus checker has a roughly 5% chance of protecting you.

Not exactly what you should expect.

I recently sat through a sales pitch for a not-so-new corporate product that does anti-malware protection very differently. Of course it is also insanely expensive, so I will not mention the actual product, but it does offer something new. Protection against malware by checking and blocking behaviour.

Whilst they add all sorts of clever data analysis tricks, fundamentally anti-virus products recognise malware because they recognise the data that makes up the malware. If they don’t recognise the signature of the malware, then they do not know it is malware; so they have an incredibly difficult time recognising new malware releases.

But recognising malware based on behaviour is far more likely to successfully recognise malware – for example by recognising an attempt to make itself persistent in a way that an ordinary application does not do, and blocking it. Which is a far more practicable method of blocking malware (if it works!).

It is also something that should probably be built into operating systems, which to a certain extent already has been.

The New Defence

The New Defence

 

 

Hospital Sick Days Greater Than Public Sector Average

 General, Humour  No Responses »
Jul 142016
 

You do surprise me. Who would have thought it? If you go to work in a place with zillions of sick people each of whom gets a stream of visitors, you get sick more frequently than other jobs?

The accountants have been at work and decided that the NHS could save up to 2 billion by “doing something” about the sick days. Perhaps they should consider banning sick people going to hospital.

B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestones

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