In the UK, FGM Victims: 66,000 in total, MGM Victims: 31,000 per year!

 General  No Responses »
Mar 012014
 

According to an article in the Guardian about the schoolgirl who campaigned for more information on FGM in schools, there are up to 66,000 victims of female genitial multilation in the UK. If you count circumcision as male genital mutilation, then according to a couple of sources, there are roughly 31,000 victims of male gentical mutilation per year.

And the rate of circumcision has been falling for decades; according to an article on the prevalence of male circumcision, the average rate of male circumcision approximates about 10% which would mean that there are in total approximately 2.7 million men who have been circumcised.

Let’s perform a little experiment with those figures. Let us assume that a victim of MGM suffers 1/100 of the agony of a victim of FGM. This is of course nonsense as different kinds of FGM are practiced and how on earth do you measure the level of agony for any victim? But let’s crunch those numbers …

It turns out that using those assumptions there are the equivalent of 27,000 victims of FGM amongst the male population!

Now in case anyone misunderstands me, I’m fully behind the campaign against FGM. It’s a primitive and barbaric custom practiced for reasons that are probably due to religious fanatics being terrified of female sexuality.

But we shouldn’t ignore MGM just because it seems less severe and is practiced for less repressive reasons – for mistaken health benefits, spurious “aesthetic” reasons, or just to mark someone as a member of a tribe. Whilst it may seem a little extreme to call male circumcision MGM, it is worth pointing out that there is a reason for calling it male circumcision. In the past FGM was called female circumcision; changing attitudes have relabelled it FGM. There is no reason to suppose that in the future, male circumcision will be universally reviled as MGM.

There is something else that is overlooked too. There is nothing wrong with genital mutilation if it is freely chosen by a responsible adult … for themselves. In other words there is nothing wrong with either FGM or MGM.

What is wrong is any kind of childhood mutilation – genitial mutilation or otherwise. Nobody has the right to make that sort of decision on behalf of another, not parents, nor religious leaders. At one time, paedophiles were labelled “kiddie fiddlers”, well it’s time to label practitioners of CGM (FGM+MGM) “kiddie fiddlers” too.

People Of Colour …

 General  No Responses »
Mar 012014
 

Every time I encounter this phrase (usually misspelled “people of color”), or the phrases “men of colour” and “women of colour” (and presumably “children of colour”), it grates.

Now don’t get me wrong, it beats the hell out of phrases like “nigger”, “gook”, “wog”, “chink”, etc. And even not quite as insulting terms such as “minority” or “non-white”.

But :-

  1. White is a colour too. In fact most of those who are labelled “white” are not in fact covered in skin whose colour is actually white. We’re all colourful people!
  2. Wouldn’t it be better to label the problem rather than the target? I.e “rascists”. One of the problems with using the target (“people of colour”) is that whilst most racism is directed against people of colour, some is still directed against others – and the problem is racism rather than the target.
  3. There’s something wrong with the world when it is necessary to categorise people by the colour of the dead stuff that keeps the squishy bits on the inside.

Slicing Up The Liberty PIE

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Feb 272014
 

The Daily Mail has decided to attack Harriet Harman in relation to her involvement with the Liberty organisation when it was known as the National Council for Civil Liberties (it is still formally called that). Liberty (in the 1970s) allowed an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange to affiliate with Liberty.

Personally I feel it is more than a little unfair to target Harriet Harman in this way, and I’m not exactly one of her fans.

In retrospect, it is clear that Liberty were very mistaken in being associated with PIE (and PAL). But their support was not unconditional – it is clear that their support was limited to suggesting that society should consider whether consensual sex between an adult and a child was necessarily damaging.

Or in other words whether a 16-year old woman who sleeps with her 5-year old boyfriend should be painted the same colour as a predator such as Jimmy Saville. However it seems that many of PIEs leaders were the kind of predator that would have gotten along well with Jimmy.

Liberty terminated their relationship with PIE by 1983 and the current head of Liberty issued an apology for the relationship: “It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s.”

So like many organisations, Liberty made a mistake in the 1970s and have apologised for it. But what about Harriet Harman?

Harriet Harman was the legal officer for Liberty at the time – she didn’t head the organisation and probably had no more than a small say in the direction of the organisation as a whole. If she knew about the connection to PIE, and objected, she would probably been told the liberal lefty equivalent of “shut up and soldier on”. Picking on Harriet Harman is unfair … it is the organisation that was at fault not her.

And indeed Patricia Hewitt‘s apology for Liberty’s association with PIE clearly indicates that Harriett Harman had very little say in whether Liberty accepted PIE’s affiliation or not; and indeed her work had nothing to do with PIE.

As always we can see the Daily Mail is conducting little more that a witch hunt against those who hold views not on the extreme right.

Reshelving ….

 Computing  No Responses »
Feb 232014
 

Just an experiment in producing a video :-

Not especially good because I’m too lazy to go back and even out the exposure (so the lighting doesn’t keep changing).

Time To Name And Shame The “Bad” ISPs – It’s Not Just NTP DDoS!

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Feb 222014
 

Having had a wee bit of fun at work dealing with an NTP DDoS attack, I feel it is long past time to tackle the root cause of the problem – the ISP’s who have neglected to implement ingress/egress filtering despite it being considered best practice for well over 15 years. Yes, longer than most of us have been connected to the Internet.

It is easy to point at the operators of NTP services that allow their servers to be used as attack amplifiers. And yes these insecure NTP servers should be fixed, but given the widespread deployment of NTP in everything it could take up to a decade for a fix to be universally deployed.

And what then? Before the widespread use of NTP for the amplification distributed denial of service attacks, DNS was commonly used. And after NTP is cleaned up? Or even before? There are other services which can be exploited in the same way.

But the way that amplification attacks are carried out involves two “vulnerabilities”. In addition to the vulnerable service, the attacker forges the packets they send to the vulnerable service so that the replies go back to the victim. Essentially they trick the Internet into thinking that the victim has asked a question – millions of times.

Forging the source address contained within packets is relatively easy to do, and it has been known about for a very long time and the counter-measure has also been known for nearly as long. To put it simply, all the ISP has to do is to not allow packets to exit their network(s) which contain a source address that does not belong to them. Yet many ISPs – the so-called “bad” ISPs – do not implement this essential bit of basic security. The excuse that implementing such filters would be impossible with their current routers simply doesn’t wash – routers that will do this easily have been on the market for many years.

It is laziness pure and simple.

These bad ISPs need to be discovered, named, and shamed.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries