Weird I’ve just had in the space of a few minutes four different people turn up for the 6pm screening of Control with a Q&A with director Anton Corbijn. That’s four people who have separately managed to arrive an hour late!
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Year: 2008
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How to Kill a Human Being
In the BBC Horizon documentary How to Kill a Human Being former politician Michael Portillo investigates the current methods of execution used by countries that carry out capital punishment concentrating on those used in the United States
Prompted by the American Supreme Court’s examination of whether the lethal injection is causing prisoners to die in unnecessary pain Michael Portillo set out to find a solution which is fundamentally humane.
I was suspicious of his motives throughout this documentary as he started by explaining his changing views on the death penalty and how he had been in his political career initially in favour but then as more and more miscarriages of justice came to light in the UK he altered his stance and voted against it’s reintroduction in Britain. If it was the case that he was opposed now why is he investigating methods so as to find the most humane?
But as the programme went on and Portillo discovered that each and every method was deeply flawed I began to think that perhaps he was not in fact doing what he’d stated but had in fact set out with the purpose of failing so as to create a credible argument in opposition to capital punishment. Throughout he is exclaiming that “it’s the 21st century surely science can come up with the perfect way to kill a human being!” And of course he is correct and it’s hypoxia, the restriction of oxygen, and which is one of the primary methods used to humanely kill animals used in medical research.
He then visits a couple of facilities in Holland that have been designed to measure the effects of oxygen depletion through extreme G forces or through extreme altitude so that he can experience it for himself to the point shortly before loss of consciousness and death. Discovering that it is completely painless and far from being stressful is actually euphoric Michael Portillo now thinks he has the answer but needs a more practical method of administering it. He turns to Dr Mohan Raj of Bristol University who has been researching more humane methods for use in slaughterhouses and who has developed the very simple system of using inert gases such as Nitrogen, which are non-toxic and tasteless and the subject is completely unaware of the gases presence.
Now armed with his ‘perfect’ method of how to kill a human being Portillo returns to the United States to put his findings to the pro-death penalty side of the debate to gauge their reactions and he doesn’t get the reaction he was hoping for.
Oddly he only seems to have a discussion with a single person and that is Professor Robert Blecker of the New York School of Law who as a known retributivist advocate of the death penalty surely can not be representative of the views of most Americans who are in favour of capital punishment.
Robert Blecker is very much in favour of the method of executing criminals being horrific and painful (despite the US constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment) and is appalled by Michael Portillo’s perfect method.
I would think that the majority of those who are in favour would also respect the US constitution and believe if the state is to kill people that it should not come down to the level of those it is executing but do it in a humane manner. In a way I’ll be glad if Portillo’s perfect method doesn’t gain traction for the longer the debate rages in the US about their current methods being cruel and unusual the more likely it is that it will abandon the death penalty entirely.
Plus we have to return to the point that Michael Portillo made right at the start and that is with the dozens of miscarriages of justice coming to light and the investigations that have revealed a number of people have been wrongly convicted and subsequently executed in the US how can capital punishment be justified when it is likely to be used again on the wrongly convicted. I’m left confused as to what Portillo’s current position really is.
Wikileaks has published a couple of leaked documents that detail how the Bavarian police, Ministry of Justice and the Prosecution office tried to arrange the purchase of malware to aid in the interception of encrypted data submitted via SSL or Skype via the internet.
If the intention was to intercept all Skype traffic in Bavaria or perhaps further afield then this could be a serious breach of civil liberties but I suspect it is merely the Bavarian authorities looking for an equivalent to a court-approved phone tap now that criminals have presumably adopted Skype or other voice over IP type technologies.
I don’t think the trojan horse approach is very practicable though as it either requires the targets to unwittingly install it or for the police to secretly gain physical access to their target’s computers in order to install the software themselves.
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Launch loops
Hitting the random article button at Wikipedia can often yield very interesting results.
A launch loop or Lofstrom loop is a design for a belt based maglev orbital launch system that would be around 2,000 km (1,240 mi) long and maintained at an altitude of up to 80 km (50 mi). A launch loop would be held up at this altitude by momentum of the belt as it circulates around the structure, in effect it transfers the weight of the structure onto magnetic bearings at each end which support it.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes interviews George Piro an FBI agent who had been assigned to interrogate Saddam Hussein upon his capture.
Piro reveals that the Iraqi dictator miscalculated the threat that the US posed to his regime.
Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.
I have to say that this comes as no shock to me. Saddam believed he was playing a regional game by feeding disinformation to Iran unaware that his game would backfire on the world stage with a US President needing a victory for propaganda purposes having failed to capture Osama Bin Laden.
It seems that both Saddam Hussein and the Western leaders that took us to war had failed to heed the words of Sun Tzu to “Know your enemy”.
Or as the Japanese learned following their attack on Pearl Harbour “Never underestimate the United States willingness to go to war”.
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Oscar nominees announced
The nominees for the 80th Academy Awards have been announced.
I’m annoyed but not really surprised that Atonement has received so many (seven) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford so few (two).
And that Elizabeth: The Golden Age got any at all is astonishing, although Best Costume Design probably is a given because being a period drama about a monarch there’s bound to be lavish costumes.
Robert McMillan writes that CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid
Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst said this week.
Speaking at a conference of security professionals on Wednesday, CIA analyst Tom Donahue disclosed the recently declassified attacks while offering few specifics on what actually went wrong.
Criminals have launched online attacks that disrupted power equipment in several regions outside of the U.S., he said, without identifying the countries affected. The goal of the attacks was extortion, he said.
This doesn’t surprise me but it does perplex me that companies create systems whereby major power grid equipment can be accessed via the internet.
By making anything accessible over the internet you have created a vulnerability because no matter the security systems put in place there is now a chance that criminals will be able to gain access. Even if the technology securing access is perfect (and it is almost impossible to verify whether it is totally secure as new bugs come to light all the time) then there is the avenue of social engineering where a person with access privileges is compromised by the criminals and gives out the required information to access the system.
I’m Not There is a brilliant, but flawed beautifully strange movie. As I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the life and work of Bob Dylan I cannot say whether it is an effective study of the man, I would suspect that if you were looking for that then Don’t Look Back or No Direction Home would suit your needs better.
All the six actors playing the part of ‘Dylan’ are wonderful although through no fault of his Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark seems the least Dylan-like. Of the supporting actors I think Bruce Greenwood deserves a lot of praise for his dual roles of Keenan Jones and Pat Garrett. It’s packed to the gills with references to or homages of other movies and references to the life and work of Bob Dylan himself of course although I think I probably missed far more of the latter. With the Richard Gere segment being heavily influenced by Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid it is appropriate that Kris Kristofferson be the narrator for the story.
My two main criticisms of the film are that there is almost no narrative flow between each of the segments, the film mostly just seems to cut between them at random and it seems unnecessarily long I don’t believe the film would suffer from having many of the scenes cut entirely.
Roel Verdult, an MSc. student from the Raboud University of Nijmegen, used an RFID tag emulator to perform a successful practical relay attack on the single-use OV Chipkaart (the Dutch RFID public transportation card), that uses MIFARE Ultralights. [via]
His report is titled Proof of concept, cloning the OV-Chip card (pdf link)
In this special interview Rick Falkvinge, the founder and the leader of Swedish Pirate Party, gives his own views on the wildly heated political filesharing debate in Sweden, evaluates the political and technological prospects of P2P and talks about the dangers of citizen surveillance and Big Brother society. “Our enemy has no intellectual capital to bring to the battle”