Ilfracombe

 Photography  No Responses »
Sep 012011
 

As some of you already know, the trip to Ilfracombe was a touch on the wet side so the number of photos to sort through was fewer than expected. However I think a small number turned out ok …

#1: Lundy

Lundy

That funny lump on the horizon is probably Lundy island – famous haunt of pirates and sea birds.

#2: Incoming Rain

Incoming Rain

There were quite a lot of opportunities to shoot photos like this, but perhaps you’ll see that inclement weather sometimes makes for better images.

#3: Dark Harbour

Dark Harbour

This is the closest I have of a photo of Ilfracombe itself. Not just in the ones I thought to put up online, but even amongst the raw images!

#4: The Gentle Coast

Gentle Coast

Naked Couple Exposed By Laptop Security Software

 Security  No Responses »
Aug 312011
 

I became aware of this story through an article on The Register – to summarise the facts, a woman bought what turned out to be a stolen laptop, and whilst using it to conduct a certain kind of webchat with her boyfriend, an employee of Absolute Software used previously installed software on the stolen laptop to ‘grab’ several items of data including screenshots of the webchat session.

Even if someone unintentionally using a stolen laptop cannot expect reasonable levels of privacy (and the Judge doesn’t believe that their privacy should have been breached), ordinary human decency should have been enough to exclude the naked pics. Anyone involved in the security world (including IT security) should be aware that anyone using a stolen laptop may well not be the person who stole the laptop and may be guilty of no more than stupidity by buying a stolen laptop.

Such stupidity deserves punishment, but the loss of the laptop is punishment enough – having naked pics of yourself passed around a bunch of geeks and then shown to the police is going just a little too far. And what about the boyfriend ? He didn’t have anything to do with the stolen laptop, so why were Absolute Software stealing naked pics of him?

Once you have a timestamp and a network address of the stolen laptop, that is sufficient in almost all cases to identify who to talk to about the laptop. Grabbing screenshots of a webcam chat is merely prurient voyeurism of the same order of magnitude as setting up network webcams in a shop changing room.

But there is more to this than just the salacious details of the kind of pictures captured. Who owns the data on that laptop ? Well all of the data on the laptop at the time it was stolen surely belongs to the owner of that laptop (unless of course they have been stealing data themselves!), but any data created since then does not. And that surely includes screenshots of what activities are shown on screen.

If Absolute Software had chosen to activate the webcam to grab pictures of the person using the laptop rather than grab screenshots, they would have been on slightly less shaky ground because they would then be creating data and not stealing data. And of course they would not have grabbed a naked pic of an entirely innocent man! However they should also have the decency to ensure that any images they grabbed didn’t contain an ‘unusual’ amount of skin exposed.

Plus of course by grabbing any sort of image from a webcam could put the employees of Absolute Software at risk of creating and viewing child porn – not everyone engaged in ‘adult’ webchats is necessarily over the age of consent!

UK Riots: Part 2

 Politics  No Responses »
Aug 202011
 

Now that some time has passed, it is time to rethink thoughts about the riots in the UK. Everyone (including me) reacted very quickly in the wake of the riots in London and elsewhere with their immediate reactions. Not always with impressive results, and indeed even those who had a reasonable point to make would probably agree that the situation is more complex than at first supposed.

Was It Really That Bad ?

Well of course it was to those who were actually caught up in the riots, but sometimes we get the impression (especially amongst the more … excitable foreign bloggers) that the rioting was worse than it actually was. For instance the London riots involved 22 districts out of a total of 326 districts, or in other words only 6.7% of London by area was involved in the rioting. And that’s an exaggeration – for instance my brother lives in Enfield which saw two nights of rioting, but hardly saw a thing other than the Sony warehouse burning in the distance.

Or by population, the police estimate that up to 3,000 people will be charged with various offences relating to the riots. Let us assume that only 1/5 of the people involved in the riots will ever be charged with anything – that adds up to a total number of rioters of 15,000. Given the population of London is 12.58 million, only 0.11% of the population was rioting. Even if I’m out by a factor of 10 (so there were really 150,000 rioters), that would still be only 1.1% of the population were rioting.

Even if you assume all those 15,000 rioters were from Croyden (a place with some of the most serious riots), a place with a population of around 330,000 people, we find that 15,000 out of 330,000 gives a percentage of 4.5% – so even when we over inflate the figures for rioters ridiculously, we still get a tiny proportion who actually took part.

So what we saw recently, was the result of a tiny proportion of the population. Even amongst young people, the majority were appalled at what they were seeing and what is less commonly reported is that the volunteers who turned out to cleanup the mess caused by the rioters included even more young people than took part in the riots.

One of the other things that doesn’t get so well reported is that the rioters were not all young people – there were more “mature” adults in the mix as well. It also wasn’t particularly racial either – all “races” were involved in the rioting.

So what about the underlying causes for the riots ?

No Excuses: They Were All Just Criminal Thugs

Well, there’s no arguing with the fact that the rioters were criminal thugs … or at least the worst ones were. But just disregarding underlying causes is the action of the feeble-minded. Why were these criminals rioting this year and not last year ? Or the year before ?

There is some underlying reason why the riots occurred this year and not in other years. Whatever underlying causes turned these people into rioters should be examined to see if there’s a viable method of stopping that from happening – whilst they may be rioters this year, even without riots they are likely to be creating trouble of some kind at any point in time. Theft, burglary, assault, etc.

Police Brutality

The riots started with what began as a peaceful protest into the shooting by police of someone called Mark Duggan. If there had not been a shooting, there probably would not have been a peaceful protest about the shooting. Which in turn would not have descended into rioting, which in turn would not have caused what we could call “copy-cat” riots elsewhere.

So in a sense the “police brutality” in shooting Mark Duggan did cause the rioting, but the later riots were not in support of Mark Duggan at all – they were simply acquisitive and destructive riots. It could have been any cause triggering them – a protest at the killing of anyone, a demonstration against student fees, protests against the globalisation culture, etc.

Whereas there may be a problem relating to the shooting of Mark Duggan, and we can regard that as the trigger for the later riots, in no way can the shooting be described as the cause of the riots.

Economy

This is my favourite underlying cause as I have made the point before.

In summary, the rioters are to some extent economically disadvantaged but that is not why they rioted. The poor (unless they are exceptionally so), can put up with their situation if they see there is hope of improvement. For the young, this means seeing opportunities for improvement – that they can get a job, can pursue self-improvement through education, etc. If they do not have hope, this leads to frustration with their situation exacerbated when they see others improving their lot.

Not all of the “hopeless” riot of course, so again there are other reasons as to why the rioters were made into rioters.

Parental Failure

This is of course the favourite excuse for the “family values” politicians … frequently coming up with this without checking any of the evidence. And they usually get a dig in at “failed” families too – single parent families.

Maybe it’s true that all of the rioters came from single parent families where the remaining parent has poor parenting skills. Although I have not seen any evidence of this … one or two examples that may have come to light do not make a trend. Even if it is poor parenting contributing to the riots, the answer to this problem is not going to be simple.

One of the most obvious answers is to provide “alternative” families … young people below a certain age (say 16) are always grouping together to form a pseudo-family of sorts whether they need one or not. If we’re worried about gangs and gang culture, we need to provide alternative groups for young people to join; if they are not joining the ones that already exist then there is something wrong with the ones that exist.

Gun Control

Probably one of the most bizarre and offbeat claims was that the UK’s gun control laws helped kick off the riots … which is patently ridiculous. After all the US (with somewhat more lax gun control than the UK) has had riots itself, and gun control didn’t seem to stop the looting then.

Besides which there is an assumption that the shopkeepers whose shops were looted were present and able to defend their property … if only they had had guns! Well it turns out that most shopkeepers were not present, and some shopkeepers did protect their property, and without the assistance of guns.

So the presence of someone prepared to face down the rioters, sometimes stops those rioters. Whether or not guns are available.

Where’s The Enquiry ?

One of the most bizarre reactions to the riots has been to pointedly refuse to hold a public inquiry into what is going on. No matter how “wise” someone is, they cannot know all of the answers to the riots. Or if they do, why were they not able to stop them in the first place ? I have fairly strong opinions as to why these riots started, but I would love for an inquiry to get to the bottom of the causes.

Apart from anything else, it would be a great opportunity to say “I told you so”.

But more importantly, it would be an opportunity to get to the root causes of the problems with evidence to those causes. The riots are a symptom of an underlying problem, or far more likely a number of underlying problems all combining into the riots. These underlying problems undoubtedly have other outcomes than the riots.

Fixing the underlying problems will not only make future riots less likely, but will also improve our society in other ways.

Is It Time To End The Clearing Process ?

 General  No Responses »
Aug 202011
 

We are now in the middle of the confirmation and clearing process, which is a process by which students check to see if their place is confirmed at the University of their choice, and to cast around looking for alternative places if they are not confirmed. To those not familiar with the process of applying for a University course, the following is a quick overview of the process.

Back around the beginning of the calendar year, A-level students take ‘mock’ exams which give them (and the Universities) an idea of what they might obtain in the final exams. They then use these results to apply for University courses – if they choose to go to University.

What happens then is that the relevant University offers a provisional place to the student dependent on them getting those results.

Once the students get their real A-level results, there is then a frantic rush to :-

  1. Contact the University of their choice to confirm whether their results entitles them to a place on the course they chose. Sometimes if the results were not quite as good as expected, but the University has spare places, the University will confirm their place anyway. If not the student goes onto clearing.
  2. The student looks for a place on a course available through clearing that matches what they want to do, and the results they have obtained. This has to be done quickly because the best places will be snapped up fast – you may have heard that Universities have started to close their clearing phone lines this weekend, but that gives a false impression. The best courses can close for clearing in as little as an hour after clearing starts!
The whole process is very stressful for the University staff involved as the Universities have to hit a target for the courses. Too many students and the University loses money; too few students on a course and a University won’t make as much money as it could do. Plus the process is very expensive.

But more importantly the students themselves are not only being put into an incredibly stressful situation, but during one of the most stressful periods of their lives – when many have obtained results that are poorer than they wished – they are expected to make decisions that will have a significant effect on the rest of their lives. We usually concentrate on students who get poorer results than expected, but what about those with better results ? In theory they could go through clearing to try and find a better course, but in practice this is very hard – a better strategy would be to take a year off and apply with their real results during that year.

That last bit is a clue as to how we could get rid of the whole clearing mess. Students should wait until they have their A-level results and then apply for their University course. The deadline for applying would be around the end of September, at which point Universities could sort through all of the applications and offer confirmed places to those students they wished to teach.

There would have to be a system comparable to the clearing process to sort out courses for the students who weren’t offered a place at their first choice of University, but this could be handled in a much less stressful manner with better results for all involved. At the very least, there would be much more time available to the students needing to hunt down a place.

This would also involve the start of the academic year to be moved to January which would involve its own challenges but as someone involved in the HE sector, I would rather see the pain of changing the academic year than see the current clearing process continue.

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