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The Enchantress of Numbers

Today the 24th March is Ada Lovelace day whereby blogger around the world celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science by choosing one to profile and write about. This year I’m cheating a little and am linking to an excellent animation produced by Brainpop about the life of the lady herself who was called “The Enchantress of Numbers” by Charles Babbage.

Categories
Computing

Twitter phishing attack via Direct Messages

The F-Secure blog reports on a clever little phishing attack which uses Twitter’s own Direct Message service and URL shortening services.

Unsuspecting users will click the link provided in the message which comes from somebody they know as Direct Messages can only come from people you follow on Twitter. However the message is likely coming from a hijacked account and points to a URL which hosts a phishing page that looks like Twitter and is asking you to sign in.

Once they have your credentials they then send messages to all your contacts and their web of hijacked accounts grows exponentially.

The good news is that Twitter has reacted quickly to this attack and are closing down the avenues of attack.

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Computing TV

Playboy TV content played on children’s television

BBC News reports that adult content from Playboy was accidentally played out on children’s TV.

TV bosses in the US have apologised after preview clips of the Playboy channel were accidentally played out on two children’s channels.

“We’re very, very sorry it happened – we know parents are concerned,” spokesman Keith Poston told local news station WRAL.

“It took about an hour or so once we were notified of the problem to actually get it fixed.

“It was a technical glitch and unfortunately it hit at the worst possible time on the worst possible channels,” he added.

The error occurred on the Kids On Demand and Kids Preschool On Demand channels where clips from Playboy TV appeared in the top right hand corner.

I suppose it could have been a glitch, but if it was then it was by accident the worst possible mix up of TV programming possible.

Also it seems to have taken quite a while for it to have been fixed once they had been notified. Could they not have simply taken the entire channel off the air?

It seems more likely to me that this was a deliberate and malicious act by somebody, perhaps a disgruntled former employee, that has access to the computer system used to automate the process of putting content on air.

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Movies Reviews

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The original Swedish title Män som hatar kvinnor translates to Men Who Hate Women, which is I think is a little literal. I prefer the enigmatic English title, but I think that this is typical of what I believe is a fundamental difference between Swedes and Brits.

Categories
TV

Lost: Which dead people are really the man in black

It has been established that the Man in Black is the Smoke Monster and has now taken the form of Locke.

Illana says that since Jacob is now dead that the Smoke Monster cannot taken any other form other than that of Locke. http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Substitute

Back in episode http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Man_Behind_the_Curtain Ben follows his mother into the jungle and then has a meeting with Richard who asks whether his mum died on the island?

We now know that the Man in Black can take the form of dead people whose corpses are on the island

But what about people who died elsewhere?

Can Jacob perform that feat but the Man in Black cannot? Was the vision of Emily Linus a manifestation of Jacob?

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Politics

James Dyson’s report Ingenious Britain

BBC News: Conservative-endorsed report calls for science boost

Entrepreneur Sir James Dyson has produced a report titled Ingenious Britain for the Conservative Party urging a raising of the profile of science in the UK to help diversify the economy and boost growth. The pdf of Ingenious Britain can be downloaded here.

James Dyson makes the same argument that he made in 2004 when he gave the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, that the British economy cannot be sustained as merely a service economy. Manufacturing is the key to future success and it should lie in high tech goods where we have a competitive advantage. In fact things are now worse since his 2004 lecture as Design and Technology has been phased out of the curriculum at many schools since it was made non-statutory.

The part of Dyson’s report title Education: Getting young people excited about science and engineering made me think about James May’s Toy Stories which showed that although children initially thought stuff like Airfix and Meccano was boring that given the chance to play with it they really changed their minds. I think that if each class of maybe Year Six in schools were given a Meccano set then we’d end up with a lot more people going into engineering. Ironically Meccano is a British engineering success story that due to lessening interest in engineering in this country ended up becoming a foreign success story. Meccano is the only French manufacturer of toys that are internationally recognized, manufacturing part of its line in France.

Dyson believes that his company represents a good model for future British economic growth whereby the assembly of the products is done overseas but all the important engineering research and design is done in the UK. If this is to be the case for future success for British companies then we need to produce more engineers in our universities. In fact our universities are producing many excellent engineers unfortunately rather than being homegrown a large proportion of these are from overseas and many then return home to work.

Analysts of the current British economic crisis argue that the pound needs to remain low in order to boost are exports. But I believe that this does not need to be the case if the products we are exporting are competitive in ways more than just price. The Dyson vacuum cleaner is an excellent example, it is more expensive than rival vacuums but the benefits are worth the premium and it sells extremely well overseas even when the strong pound created an even greater premium in price than seen in the UK. Truly innovative products which are protected by patents can sell well and command a premium overseas.

Much of the British economic growth of the last few decades has been due to greater consumerism but the recession has brought that to a head and we are unlikely to see growth in the same way. We need to be more than just a nation of shopkeepers and because engineers are generally paid better than people in the service sector then a move to a greater proportion of the workforce being comprised of engineers is a good thing in many ways.

As well as the encouragement of engineering as a career choice Dyson recommends that tax breaks should be given in order to encourage investment into the development of innovations which do not necessarily produce a quick return on investment but do represent good long term growth.

Categories
Politics

Power 2010’s Power Pledge

Power 2010 have decided on the five key issues for their Power Pledge.

– Introduce a proportional voting system.
– Scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.
– Replace the house of Lords with an elected chamber.
– Allow only English MPs to vote on English laws.
– Draw up a written constitution.

I am a strong supporter of the reforms to introduce proportional representation and to scrap ID cards and roll back the database state.

I believe that the current first past the post system causes many people to feel disenfranchised because they live in a constituency which has strong leanings one way or another and their vote has no effect. This system all leads to negative voting where people vote for candidates for parties they don’t particularly support but which represents the best hope of defeating the party they’d least like to win.

The ID card and National Identity Register should be opposed because of the principle that citizens in a free democracy should be allowed to go about their lives without government intrusion. The project is also so technically flawed that it will inevitably either have to be scrapped because it is unworkable in practice or because it causes one of the very problems than it is designed to combat namely an increase in identity theft.

The House of Lords should be replaced with an elected second chamber but the form of the second chamber needs to debated intelligently before it is implemented. Replacing the Lords is a major undertaking and there will not be an easy transition from the present house to a new wholly elected chamber.

Categories
Movies Reviews

Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a fascinating documentary about filmmaker Thierry Guetta who in his failed attempt to make a documentary of Banksy became himself a street/pop artist and subject of this documentary film made by Banksy.

Thierry Guetta is a fascinating character who through his cousin became an unofficial documentarist of the street art world. It was all based on a lie though as he was never really making a documentary as all the footage just got stored away never to see the light of day until Banksy got his hands on it.

Having failed to make a coherent film out of his footage Guetta hands the task over to Banksy who casually suggests to him that he should try his hand at being an artist. Banksy later comes to regret having done so when he realises to what extreme Guetta has taken the comment as Guetta launches his career as Mr. Brainwash.

However I think that all is not as it seems and that the film has been produced by Banksy in order to quell the criticism that he has sold out. Once we get into the part of the film that chronicles Guetta’s insane art exhibition as Mr. Brainwash it becomes an attack on the art scene and the bogus nature of the people that buy into it.

There is literally no originality to any of Mr Brainwash’s work it is a mess of extremely derivative work that lacks a connecting theme other than it is derived from the work of artists that Guetta admires such as Warhol, Banksy and Shepard Fairey. He is however extremely successful as the show attracts huge crowds and he sells hundreds of thousands of dollars ‘worth’ of work.

Critics praise his work as being commentary on the work of other artists, but I believe that it isn’t and that the fact that it is entirely lacking in substance is deliberate. I think that both his name and his work are a joke/scam being pulled on the art world and are a fabrication created by Banksy. That they will buy any old shit if there is the smallest connection to the name of Banksy

However now the illusion has become reality in a world where anything can be called a work of art if it is produced by and called such by a person that a number of people believe to be an artist.

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Books Reviews

Review: The Girl who Played with Fire

The Girl who Played with Fire

The second book in the Millennium trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson is as good as There Girl with the dragon Tattoo. Dark secrets from Lisbeth Salander’s past cause her to be implicated in the murder of a young couple. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is also connected to the case and in trying to prove Salander’s innocence uncovers things that powerful people do not wish brought to light.

Larsson has created in Lisbeth Salander a truly remarkable character and in this book has crafted yet another intelligent and gripping thriller around her.

Categories
Computing

What is your mother’s maiden name and other insecure security questions

Security Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory have produced a whitepaper titled Evaluating statistical attacks on personal knowledge questions.

Aside from the fact that the answers to these questions are readily findable for celebrities and increasingly easy to uncover through social networking sites for the average individual the researchers found that even guessing is good enough to render the system insecure if carried out on a wide scale.

There is a strong result that anything named by humans is dangerous to use as a secret. Sociologists have known this for years. Most human names follow a power-law distribution fairly close to Zipfian, which we confirmed in our study. This means every name distribution has a few disproportionately common names—”Gonzalez” amongst Chilean surnames, “Guðrún” amongst Icelandic forenames, “Buddy” amongst pets—for attackers to latch on to. Combined with previous results on other attack methods, there should be no doubt that personal knowledge questions are no longer viable for email, which has come to play too critical a role in web security.

I think that until such time as the companies that use password reminder questions as a security method change the system they use I recommend that people give a nonsense answer to the question. If you are sure that you’d never need to use the password reminder facility then you could just use a completely unguessable random alphanumeric string as the answer. Otherwise it would be a good idea to choose something memorable as your nonsense answer that you consistently use e.g. Throatwobbler Mangrove unless inexplicably that does happen to be your mother’s maiden name.

There has been other research in the last few years into this subject.

Microsoft researchers wrote Measuring the security and reliability of authentication via ‘secret’ questions