Archive for the ‘Badger Rants’ Category

Just time for a quick post about two very troubling stories that have appeared in the last day. The first is a report in the Times which reveals that Ministers are to consider plans for a database holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK.

A massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism.

Now anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see that if - and what a gigantic ‘if’ that is - this plan were actually implemented, it would have pretty much zero impact in stopping terrorism. There are just so many ways around it, such as pay-as-you-go mobiles, pay phones, sat-phones, internet cafes, VPNs to offshore servers and even old fashioned letters and face-to-face meetings, that no serious terrorist would be deterred by it.

If the Government did have a database of all phone calls, emails and “time spent on the internet” (what does that mean anyway?) would they be able to resist the temptation to start data mining, profiling and scanning people’s communications to look for suspicious patterns, rather than performing targeted searches of known suspects? They can do the latter now anyway. Hmmm, total surveillance society anyone? So much for Article 12 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Of course such a system would present some massive technological challenges, and we know what the Government’s track record is like when it comes to large-scale IT projects. And they’re not so hot at protecting our personal data either, are they? One would think that the merest mention of the word “database” would have Ministers running a mile by now, but sadly these ill-conceived IT ‘panaceas’ still seem to make them cream their pants. Still, least it would be a nice little earner for the likes of EDS.

Even if the whole story is just a bit of kite flying by the Home Office, the fact that anyone could contemplate floating the idea scares the hell out of me. I particularly liked this comment on the Times article by Alan Black:

I think someone ought to point out to the government that 1984 was meant as a critique and a warning, not a blueprint.

The second WTF! story today concerns the teenager facing prosecution for calling Scientology a ‘cult’.

The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.

Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

That’s despite a judge sitting at the Old Bailey previously stating that

Scientology is both immoral and socially obnoxious…It is corrupt sinister and dangerous. It is corrupt because it is based on lies and deceit and has its real objective money and power for Mr. Hubbard… It is sinister because it indulges in infamous practices both to its adherents who do not toe the line unquestionly and to those who criticize it or oppose it. It is dangerous because it is out to capture people and to indoctrinate and brainwash them so they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult, withdrawn from ordinary thought, living, and relationships with others.

As is so often the case, the Register came up with the funniest take on the story - their caption for the photo of the police confiscating the placard was “PC plodette extends the long tentacle arm of Xenu the law”.

Is it just me, or does the City of London police seem a little too cosy with the Scientologists? Perhaps Scientology is the new Freemasonry?

(If you have never seen it, you must watch the South Park illustration of what Scientologists actually believe.)

Oh noes

If you have a chance to vote in the election for the London mayor today, please, please stop Boris Johnson being elected. He may play the loveable buffoon, but the reality is that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a hard-right Thatcherite, who:

• despises anyone not of his class
• was pro-Iraq war
• was against the Kyoto treaty
• is against the minimum wage
• was fired as a journalist from The Times for making up quotes
• will not back Ken Livingstone’s pledge to make 50 per cent of all new homes cheap enough for ordinary workers

He has expressed racist, sexist and homophobic opinions over the years, including such gems as:

Right, let’s go and look at some more piccaninnies.

Boris Johnson speaking to UN workers and their black driver in Uganda.

He liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.

Boris Johnson on Bush

Whenever (he) appears on TV … I find a cheer rising irresistibly in my throat.

Boris Johnson on Bush

Gay marriage can only ever be a ludicrous parody of the real thing.

Boris Johnson on homosexuality

the most dangerous thing [on roads]

Boris Johnson on pedestrians

I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me, Nihal

Boris Johnson speaking about race with Nihal Arthanayake, BBC Asian Network

In short, Boris Johnson is not fit to run/represent a city, and would be an absolute bloody nightmare for London.

Today’s Guardian has various Londoners, some of them slebs, imagining what it would be if Boris Johnson became mayor.

How to keep out Boris … whatever your politics

If you passionately want to keep Boris out

1st Choice Ken
2nd Choice Anyone except Boris

If you don’t like Ken, but want to keep Boris out at all costs

1st Choice Not Ken or Boris
2nd Choice Ken

If you’re still not sure who to vote for, the Vote Match site will tell you which candidate most closely matches your views. This is what it came up with for me:

I’ll be voting for Siân Berry (Green) as my first choice, and Ken as my second choice. As Ms Berry says,

I’m after every first preference vote I can get in this election, and pointing out wherever I can that there’s no risk of letting in Boris Johnson by putting me first and Ken Livingstone second. If you already support the Greens, or if you are fed up with Ken, but anxious not to turn our city over to the Tories, this is probably the ideal combination of votes.

I’m not a big fan of Ken any more and it pains me to vote for a New Labour candidate, but it’s the only way to stop Boris Johnson. (Interestingly, the Federation of Small Businesses has said that the Green Party manifesto is best for small businesses.)

As Chicken yoghurt says,

If Boris Johnson does get voted in on Thursday, a law should be passed immediately prohibiting Londoners from making jokes about George W Bush. Only fair, I think.

The BBC Trust has released its provisional conclusions on the BBC Executive’s proposal for on-demand catch-up and simulcast Internet services. Now they want our feedback.

It’s not looking good for Apple or Linux users; from the BBC on-demand proposals:
provisional conclusions (PDF):

The Microsoft-based DRM strategy for seven-day TV catch-up over the internet

The BBC Executive proposes a digital rights management solution which would require consumers to be using Windows XP (or above) and Windows Media Player 10 (or above) to be able to access seven-day TV catch-up over the internet.

Our understanding is that the BBC Executive aspires to offer an alternative DRM framework, which would enable Apple and Linux users to access the service, but has yet to identify a satisfactory solution. In either case, we will expect this to have been addressed within 24 months.

If you’re a licence fee payer, please take a few minutes to let them know that a Windows-only DRM solution is a very bad idea by completing the short survey.

I managed to get away from London last weekend to do a bit of long-overdue catching up with friends. I took my iBook with me so I could get a couple of hours work done on the train, in between enjoying the complimentary drinks and muffins in first class (not because I’m too stuck up to travel with the riff-raff in standard class, but because this country’s stupid transport policies mean that it’s cheaper to buy two first class singles than a standard class return).

Unfortunately, within a couple of hours of arriving, my friend Chris managed to spill a very large glass of wine over my iBook as we browsed the web. It got well and truly drenched and immediately cut out. Chris quickly turned it upside down and I whipped the battery out, and we then dried off as best we could before leaving it to one side. Chris was pretty mortified, but with a few glasses of wine in me I had to laugh.

The next day I popped in to a shop and had a play with the latest Apple laptops, and started to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a disaster after all… claim on my insurance and get my 18 month old iBook replaced with a new Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sweet.

After three days drying out time I decided to try turning the iBook on, still convinced that all that wine would have shorted out the logic board and turned it into an attractive paperweight. Much to my amazement it booted up with the familiar Apple bong, and I was able to log in as usual. Screen, sound and hard drive all fine. By now I was looking forward to getting a new MacBook, so I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not (I decided I was happy, as a new MacBook would mean shelling out on a larger Crumpler bag too). Quite how the iBook survived I don’t know, but it’s definitely earned the tag “Old Faithful”.

If only the same could be said about the Antec PSU in my Windows box. When I got back to London I fired up the PC and within seconds the PSU died. I was not a happy bunny, especially as this is the second Antec PSU I’ve had to replace within the last year. Although it’s still under warranty I decided to buy a different one rather than wait for Antec’s painfully slow RMA process.

My shiny new 600w PSU arrived yesterday and what did I discover? Not only did the Antec PSU die, but it seems to have fried my rather expensive motherboard in the process too (and I had to try every component in Rob’s PC to be sure). So now I’m waiting for a new motherboard to delivered.

The moral of this story? Don’t buy Antec PSUs. In fact, don’t buy/build a PC, just get a Mac. And be careful with your wine.

The next step, moving World of Badger to the new server, went without a hitch (well, apart from the 20 minute period this morning between changing the nameservers and remembering to actually run the SQL to populate the new database with the old content!). As for the problem of Wordpress incorrectly showing zero posts under some categories, that was easily fixed by re-saving a single post from each miscalculated category.

The only other major issue I’ve yet to deal with is Bad Behavior; don’t get me wrong, it seems to be doing a sterling job of blocking spam (over 2000 attempts blocked in the last 48 hours), but unfortunately it doesn’t like my ISP NTL. Or more accurately, Distributed Sender Blackhole List (one of the spam IP address lists it uses) doesn’t like NTL’s transparent proxies, some of which are blacklisted.

NTL infamously routes all its customers’ web traffic through transparent proxies which cache content in order to reduce network congestion (in a similar way viewed pages being cached by your browser). There are a couple of dozen NTL proxy servers around the country, with their own IP addresses (as far as I know, the only other UK ISP to do this is AOL, and I believe they even use proxies in the US). Unfortunately, rather than checking my actual IP address against the blacklist, Bad Behavior is checking the IP address of the particular NTL proxy I happen to be being routed through. Even though the proxy can be shared with thousands of other users, all it takes is one person doing something bad (sending spam, or just having a PC infected with malware) for that proxy’s IP address to get blacklisted. That’s the situation with the NTL proxy at Bromley (my default) - because it’s blacklisted, all the NTL customers using it are effectively blacklisted too.

As a result of Bad Behavior thinking my IP address is blacklisted, I can’t actually log in to my own Wordpress admin area when connected through this proxy! (I’m blocked from other sites too, such as the ever-helpful DNS Stuff). Luckily there is a short-term solution - it’s easy to change to a different proxy (see here for more help and information on NTL’s crap proxies). Connecting through a non-blacklisted proxy in Cardiff means Bad Behavior allows me through.

Long-term this isn’t a solution though - obviously any visitors using blocked NTL proxies won’t want to switch just to post a comment. Bad Behavior dos have a ‘whitelist’ facility for listing IP addresses to let through, so I suppose I could enter NTL’s proxy IP address ranges. Perhaps a better option would be to tweak the plugin so it grabs the visitor’s real IP address and not that of the proxy server (I may have a go if I have time). Better still would be for NTL to stop using transparent proxies, but I guess if they’ve over-sold their services that won’t be happening any time soon.

For once I actually have a decent excuse for not having posted lately — work has been completely hectic, and to be honest I’ve felt totally drained.

A couple of weeks ago, in the early hours of the morning, there was a big power outage at the data centre that’s home to our main server (and this site). Unfortunately, rather than the UPS taking over until the backup generator kicked in, something fried/died, and it took the hosting company — DSVR — nine hours to get everything up and running again.

Even once DSVR had got all the servers back online, web and FTP were crawling, and mail was totally dead (something on the internal system was utterly screwed, quite possibly related to DNS).

The problem meant that not only were we without our main email accounts for the best part of two days, but so were over a dozen of our clients. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down too well, and when we weren’t sat watching the queue of emails growing in Exim, we were trying to placate clients.

Luckily we have our .com domain mail server hosted on a completely different server, for contingencies such as this, so at least we had some way of getting emails out. Nevertheless, it took until after the weekend for the backlog of emails to clear from our main server.

It wasn’t always like this with DSVR; when we signed up with them some years ago, we chose them because they had what turned out to be a well-deserved reputation for excellent service. Yes, they were more expensive than some, but the good up-time, versatility and great support was well worth the money. Support tickets were answered quickly, and the staff took an active role in discussions on the customer forums.

On the rare occasions when there was a problem with the service, DSVR’s status page would contain detailed explanations of the problem, and the steps being taken to rectify it and ensure it didn’t re-occur. The support staff would also happily discuss the problem in the forums, often with a refreshing honesty.

Sadly DSVR were bought by Legend Communications (formerly Business Serve, subsequently bought by Thus) in 2004, and the service has been going downhill ever since. Earlier this year there were big problems when they moved data centres, and despite lots of promised improvements, things just seem to be going from bad to worse. There aren’t any of the original DSVR staff left either.

Leaving aside the point that a power outage shouldn’t be able to screw up the servers for a couple of days, to add insult to injury the communication from DSVR/Legend/Thus has been almost non-existent. Little more than “Blah, blah, power outage, some customers experiencing problems with email, engineers working to restore service as soon as possible” on the status page for a couple of days. Certainly nothing like a decent explanation.

Rumour has it, because Legend/Thus are a PLC, any communication (including the status page) has to ‘go upstairs’ for approval by management in case if impacts on share price. Hoorah for capitalism!

Legend weren’t any more forthcoming when the Register reported on the problems:

They gave us a standard “we apologise for the inconvenience”-type response which, after days of their customers losing business, is unlikely to smooth relations.

They added that the email issues were caused by high volumes of traffic. Now, we’re not systems engineers lads, but we thought your business was all about dealing with high volumes of traffic.

Indeed. Except that the email issues weren’t caused by high volumes of traffic, they were a symptom of it. The problems seem to be related to their DNS system getting hosed, which is pretty worrying.

Sadly this is the large bundle of straw that’s broken the camel’s back, and we’ve decided not to renew our contract with DSVR at the end of October. It’s a real shame, but with the unreliability of DSVR’s service reflecting badly on us to our clients, our loyalty has been stretched to its limit.

So we’ve now started migrating our clients to our new server, which means lots of extra work — moving databases and domains, changing secure certificates, getting new IP addresses, updating payment gateways etc.. We’ve been pretty snowed-under with work lately anyway, so the extra hassle of moving servers is something we need like a hole in the head (we haven’t had a weekend off for a few weeks now). Anyway, enough self-pity….

I was planning on switching from b2evolution to Wordpress soon anyway, so the move to the new server seems like as good a time as any to convert. I haven’t yet finished the new look for World of Badger, which does mean I might have to go with the default Wordpress look until I’m less exhausted. Do not be alarmed though, the drabness won’t be permanent.

I’m still wondering quite why the BBC broadcast The Path to 9/11, given how controversial it has proved to be (see Washington Post article). Defective Yeti has compiled a list of a few minor errors and inconsistencies in the docu-drama, including:

The finale, in which Bush crashes Airforce One into a remote Afghan stronghold, emerges unscathed from the wreckage, and defeats Al Qaeda using nunchucks and pyrokinesis, is actually a composite of several different events.

Easy to overlook amidst the wall-to-wall images of Bush gurning in front of patriotic backdrops and the numerous docu-dramas on TV (including the rather revisionist ‘The Path to 9/11′ made by dodgy right-wingers that the BBC is currently airing), but September 11th also marks another anniversary: the 33rd anniversary of Pinochet’s US-backed military coup against Chile’s democratically elected government. Over the following years, thousands of civilians were murdered, jailed or tortured, and Chilean secret police carried out international terrorist activities (which it later emerged the CIA knew about).

Don’t get me wrong, what happened in the US five years ago was absolutely horrific, but let’s try to remember everyone whose lives have been destroyed by terrorism and the war (or ‘war’) against it.

On a slightly lighter note, News Sniffer tracks changes to BBC online articles. Some examples include accusations of US torture becoming claims of clandestine CIA activity, and Many Palestinians feel Mr Blair has ignored their suffering being changed to Mr Blair met with the families of captured Israeli soldiers.

If you didn’t see it last night, Channel 4 News’ piece on the two reports into the July 7th bombings is well worth watching online, particularly for the interview with two of the survivors and the husband of another. Apparently the reports make no direct references to the war in Iraq (robust allied action), which does suggest that they’re little more than whitewashes. Common sense dictates that in order to be able to take effective steps to prevent a similar act happening again, we have to know the full facts about the July 7th attacks, and what motivated the terrorists. And clearly the only way we’re going achieve that is through a public enquiry. If you agree, you can sign the petition calling for a public enquiry.

The next Lib Dem or Labour person I catch putting a campaign leaflet through my letterbox is going to be limping away with their remaining local election material protruding from their backside.

I have a ‘No junk mail please’ sticker on my letterbox (which actually works a treat when it comes to takeaway food and double glazing flyers), but for some reason the political parties don’t think it applies to them. Over the last month, barely a day has gone by when I haven’t had something in the post or delivered by hand from Labour or the Lib Dems, telling me why I should vote for them, how much they’re doing for East Dulwich etc. (amazing how interested they are in my views in the weeks leading up to an election). I’ve never known an election like it.

It’s not just campaign printed material either; I been phoned three times, and had a Labour councillor turn up at the door. I rather enjoyed that one — I almost felt sorry for him by the time I’d finished with him.

For a split second I considered giving him my standard response to anyone from Nu Labour — ‘Fuck off’ — but then I thought a) it would be fun to let him know exactly why I will never vote Labour again, and b) the more time he spends talking to me, the less time he has for trying to convert genuine floating voters.

It started with him asking me if I knew who I’d be voting for on 4th May, and I replied Green. ‘Well we’re not sure if they’ll be fielding any candidates yet,’ he responded. This was a bare-faced lie; at the last local election, the Green Party came second after Labour in this ward (the top three candidates are elected, and the Green candidates came 4th and 5th), so of course they would be fielding candidates.

Next, the councillor asked me if I would consider voting Labour, at which point I explained that I used to vote Labour, but will never do so again. I then spent several minutes going through some of the reasons for this: the destruction of our basic civil rights under the guise of prevention of terrorism, the National Identity database, the government’s inaction on climate change, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, PPP/PFI schemes, the war in Iraq, our dodgy MP Tessa Jowell and her dodgy husband, and of course Tony Blair.

‘But these are local elections,’ replied the Labour councillor rather forlornly.

My resonse was that a) these issues are far more important than any local ones, b) he was standing under the banner of the Labour Party - if he didn’t want to be associated with their policies, he should stand as an independent, and c) if Labour do well in the local elections, Tony Blair will take it as a vindication of his policies and become smugger than ever.

The councillor looked rather deflated by the time he left me.

His ‘but it’s a local election’ line was rather undermined by the latest Labour election leaflet to come through the door. In it, they make a big deal about the Lib Dems’ national policy of wanting to give prisoners the right to vote. Not just prisoners mind, but ‘prisoners like Ian Huntley’. Jesus fucking wept, was the leaflet written by sub editor at the Sun? Or is it just some sort of Brasseye parody I’m not aware of?

(Well, as a matter of fact, I do think prisoners should have the right to vote in elections. What are Labour afraid of? That the ‘Let All Criminals Out of Prison’ party will win a landslide victory? The vast majority of people in prison are not child killers, and are serving relatively short sentences. Surely we should be doing everything we can to make prisoners realise that they do have a role to play in the wider community. People who feel disenfranchised and alienated by society, who feel that nobody cares or listens to them, are bound to find it easier to commit crimes against that society. Give them the vote, give them some responsibility, make them feel like, to coin a Nu Labour favourite, stakeholders. It can’t do any harm, and who knows, it might do a tiny bit of good.)

Anyway…

So, today’s the day when we get to find out how few MPs have any principles or backbone left, as the Government seeks approval for its most appalling assault on civil liberties yet:

After a succession of U-turns and mixed messages, ministers have decided to stick to their original plan to give the police unprecedented powers to hold suspected terrorists without charge or trial for up to 90 days. This is more than six times as long as the existing 14-day limit and, taking current remission procedures into account, is equivalent to a six-month sentence. It is a huge breach of the 300-year-old habeas corpus principle that every arrested citizen has a right to be either charged or freed. Democracies are not supposed to allow imprisonment without trial.

An article in today’s Independent does a pretty good job of tearing apart the arguments for 90-day detention.

One of the victims of the July 7th bombings has written an excellent piece on the latest NuLabour legislation, and the disgraceful methods being used to push it through:

Why the rush if not for political gain? How dare you co-opt ‘the victims’ to defend this attack on liberties, as if we are all some amorphous bloodied mass that you can wave in front of the Commons as a fig leaf for your naked desire to be seen to be ‘tough on terror’?

As I type, the radio’s just announced that the 90-day internment proposal has been defeated (well, they didn’t actually use the word “internment”, but that’s what we’re talking about)! They’ll soon be voting on a “compromise” of 28 days.

Every so often I feel moved to send in comments on BBC programmes; sadly I have yet to have one selected for their site, and my comment on Monday’s The New Al-Qaeda was no exception (Update: my comment subsequently appeared on the site). The first part of Peter Taylor’s series was BBC documentary at its worst: shallow, sensationalist and deeply flawed. For the programme to have been any more tabloid, it would have had to have been presented by a Page 3 Stunna, offering the chance to win £10,000 in a bingo game at the end.

As the majority of comments chosen by the BBC could have come straight from the Daily Mail’s letters page, I might as well post the one I submitted (perhaps not the greatest critique ever written, but what the heck!):

Whereas The Power of Nightmares provided an informative, intelligent analysis of the current Islamist threat and its origins, this was nothing more than dumbed-down terror-porn masquerading as insightful documentary. No amount of “edgy” camera angles could disguise the fact that the majority of the programme was taken up with tabloid-style stating of the obvious (wow, who’d have thought that bad people sometimes use the internet too?). Taylor’s unquestioning interviews with US military officials and self-proclaimed security experts never challenged any of their assertions. A year to research? I could have come up with a more informative documentary in a week.

Elsewhere, John Lettice provides a pretty thorough (and amusing) debunking of much of the programme in his review for the Register, and Spy Blog discusses some of the serious legal implications of the documentary.

Incidentally, I recently started reading Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam by Jason Burke, and highly recommend it to anyone looking for intelligent analysis of the subject.