Amanda Knox: The Murderer On The Run

 General  No Responses »
Feb 022014
 

The recent Italian court verdict has found that Amanda Knox is guilty of murdering Meredith Kercher together with her accomplices, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede. One of the accomplices is in prison, and the other is in Italy so it is unlikely that he will escape imprisonment but what about Amanda Knox?

The key fact here is that a court one assumes to be reasonably competent has found Amanda Knox guilty of murder.

So she is a murderer on the run.

You may believe she is innocent, but is that because you have taken a long hard look at the evidence and made a considered judgement? Or is it because she looks cute? Or because you have certain prejudices about the justice systems in foreign countries?

 

And It Turns Out That Journalists Can’t Count Up To Three …

 Media  No Responses »
Feb 022014
 

The Independent is claiming today that the government’s cut in the means tested council tax is being described as “poll tax mark II”.

But what they really mean is “Poll Tax Mark III” :-

  1. The first Poll Tax was in fact a series of taxes charged during the late medieval era in Britain. Some were genuine flat rate taxes where everyone pays the same; some were in fact progressive taxes although the first “step” may have been so distant to normal people it would have looked like a flat rate tax.
  2. The second poll tax was the Community Charge which was probably the most reviled tax of modern times with mass protests against it’s implementation and huge non-payment movements.

Remembering Pete Seeger

 General  No Responses »
Jan 282014
 

So I learnt today that Pete Seeger has died, and was somewhat surprised to hear the one line obituary only mentioned his 1960s protest songs.

It is somewhat understandable because just about everyone knows a Pete Seeger song even if they don’t know the name. His protest songs (and protest songs he popularised) were covered by others before, during and after the 1960s.

But he was more than that. He was also a deeply committed political activist from the 1930s all the way through to his death. With his banjo labelled “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”, Covering issues such as racism, fascism, environmentalism, and war, he was one of the few people of whom you could say: “When the barricades go up, if you’re not on his side of the barricade, you’re probably on the wrong side”.

If you work through the list of awards he received during his lifetime on the Wikipedia article (link at the top), the ones for music leap out at you. But if you look closer, only 1/2 are directly for music; many are for his activism or children’s writing.

There was a lot more to Pete Seeger than just a few popular folk songs.

“There is hope for the world.”

The New Cold War

 Computing, General, Politics, Security  No Responses »
Jan 272014
 

I’m old enough enough to remember the tail end of the real cold war between the West and the old Soviet Union when we were waving nuclear missiles at each other. And threatening each other with nuclear annihilation.

So it is a bit of an exaggeration to speak of a new cold war when the threat is nowhere near as apocalyptic. But if you take a look at how the old cold war was fought – with espionage, and signals intelligence – you begin to realise we do have a new cold war. Intelligence agencies around the world are cooperating in fighting against a new enemy.

Us.

Oh, they’ll defend themselves by saying that it’s not the normal man or woman in the street they are worried about, but but the terrorists in our midst they are targeting. But to do that they have to spy on us.

They’ll say that they are not spying on the people in their own country; just on those sneaky foreigners. But when GCHQ spies on US citizens, they pass the information they obtain to the NSA; and the NSA passes information on their spying activities to GCHQ.

Which means that what little protection we have against our own intelligence agencies spying on us is effectively meaningless.

How Old Is The Internet?

 Computing, History  No Responses »
Jan 172014
 

There is no clear answer to the question of how old the Internet is. For different definitions of the “Internet”, there will be different starting dates.

For instance, it is commonly held that the pre-cursor to the Internet – ARPANET – could not be called the Internet. And it is true that ARPANET was not the same as today’s Internet even at the lowest possible level. But there is a commonality to ARPANET standards through Internet standards – the very first RFC (issued in 1969) to one of the very latest (RFC7115) are all part of the same body of work.

And whilst the overwhelming majority of ARPANET era standards have been superceeded, there are a few that are still valid today. For example, an early standard for the names of hosts which restricts what characters can be used is still valid and (for example) restricts the names that can be used in email addresses – see RFC608 (it has been updated but the essential restrictions remain).

The next milestone in the history of the Internet came when the older NCP protocol was replaced with TCP/IP in 1982 (actually the “flag day” was 1st January 1983); this immediately raised the possibility of joining networks together and to route between them. Previous to this, different networks had gateway machines which were connected to two (or more) networks. Before the Internet took off, there were more than a few precursor networks – MERIT, JANET, BitNET, …; all of which used different network protocols.

Gateway machines would typically only gateway certain kinds of application traffic from one network to another; typically email was the bare minimum leading to services which would send information via email – at one point you could even “browse” the web using email!

Routing on the other hand allowed end to end communication so it was possible to use applications directly.

The next milestone was allowing commercial traffic on the Internet. The earliest networks were founded for research purposes by the American military or academic organisations, and prohibited commercial traffic Until the core networks allowed commercial traffic we wouldn’t have seen the Internet as we see it today.

There are plenty of other milestones – some would include the foundation of the world wide web (in 1991 and not 1993) as one of the most important. I don’t; simply because it was something that was bound to happen in one way or another.

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