The lost art of conversation...

So, the ISPs (including phone companies) have begun to retain data on our digital lives for 12 months.

Under EU regulations, the "where and when" of all digital communications must be retained. that includes all mobile phone calls, emails, etc. However, the content of those communications isn't being stored. The idea is that a web of associations can be drawn up to link one suspect with another, regulated by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act. However, isn't this the same RIP act that local councils have been using indiscriminately to detect petty crime?

I'm sure I'm not the only one to figure out that by simply eschewing digital communications, there are literally dozens of ways to avoid having your associations recorded. I suspect that any organised criminal worth his salt will be using face-to-face meetings in anonymous places at pre-determined times, for example. Maybe sales of books and DVDs featuring spies will increase. After all, such stories are filled with the techniques used by the very people whose job it is to avoid having their communications noticed.

The rest of us are simply filling yet another useless government database (of sorts ) with noise.

Jason Lewis Watch... part 94

Well, it's Sunday and, as predicted, the Daily Mail has published yet another story on its RSS feed by Jason Lewis telling us how our privacy is under threat. This is getting predictable. In fact, clicking on Mr Lewis' name shows a long series of sometimes scantily supported stories. 'A spokesman' could be anyone (or no one), for example.

Yes, the idea of Big Brother expanding its reach into the lives of innocent people is something that needs checking, but I keep thinking maybe it would be a good idea to extend my reach into the Daily Mail by calling and asking to speak to Mr Lewis, just to make sure he's real. If he exists, I have a few questions...

The North Korean satellite fib...

The BBC reports that North Korea has failed to get anything into orbit. The US military says that the two-stage rocket and its payload crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The really funny thing is that North Korea insisted for a while that the satellite had reached orbit and was transmitting data back to Earth ...the little liars.

That this was almost certainly a test of a long-range missile capable of hitting the continental US is immaterial. What's galling is that this pointless missile programme exists in the first place. There's no warhead to put atop it. No, what's really galling is that North Korea can't feed its own people. It relies on food aid. It is a country whose borders aren't just to keep others out. It is home to one of the last brutal totalitarian regimes.

The suspense...

Well it's Saturday afternoon. The Grand National has been run, and the football played. However, there's still one thrill left. What will be the scaremongering national security story posted to the Daily Mail's RSS feed later tonight by by Jason Lewis? I can't wait!

MPs have needs too...

"Wacky" Jacqui Smith has submitted an expense form. That's not unusual. Perhaps frustrating for anyone who's ever tried to get legitimate expenses signed off, it's a bit much that hers contained the bill for her Virgin Media cable package. While we leave the tabloids to infer and sniggeringly imply what she may get up to in the privacy of her own home after it came to light that the bill included two porn films, let's examine her reaction to being caught putting a domestic expense through as a legitimate business one.

"I am sorry that in claiming for my internet connection, I mistakenly claimed for a television package alongside it. As soon as the matter was brought to my attention, I took immediate steps to contact the relevant parliamentary authorities and rectify the situation. All money claimed for the television package will be paid back in full," She said in a statement.

Fair enough, you may think, but if her husband (whom she's reportedly "furious" with) could order up pay-per-view skin flicks, it's not a simple broadband connection she's got - it's a full high-speed cable package. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't pay for the internet connection separately in a cable package. It's an all-in-one deal. If the charges for each part of the package were itemised, however, how did she mistake the high figure for the total package for one of the lower itemised charges? Did she even fill out her own expense claim?

There's a far more interesting aspect to this story, however. The natural conclusion many people will have jumped to after learning about Smith's porn bill was that she enjoys having, shall we say, a lovely relaxing time with a bit of porn. Go on, admit it - you did didn't you. However, the films were watched on 6st and 8th of April. Smith wasn't at home at the time. What a let down!

The interesting aspect is that the data collecting facilities Smith wants in place to collate details of our lives will ultimately be analysed by humans who are capable of making equally misguided inferences about us. If she doesn't learn that this can lead to some erroneous yet compelling conclusions that may ruin lives or worse, when the hell will she learn?

Catch 'em young

A young man is on trial in Northern Ireland, accused of murdering PC Stephen Carroll, of having an assault rifle and ammunition, of membership of the Continuity IRA, and of "collecting information of use to terrorists". He's just 17 years old.

Born in 1992, he can have no real memory of the Troubles, and yet this young man is on trial for a sectarian killing. How the hell did that happen? The answer could be that grown ups - possibly even members of his own family - taught him to hate. An attitude has been instilled into him to the point where, it is alleged, he was prepared and ready to take part in murder.

If he did it and is convicted, he'll go to prison. But what of the people who taught him to hate with such vehemence, the people who continue to flog a dead conflict? They remain free; free to hate, and to instil that same poison into other impressionable young minds.

The madness begins...

I've just signed up for Twitter, as if I didn't already spend too much time sat on the rickety chair in front of the large pile of computers, wires and other technological detritus in the corner of the room.

Daily Mail in story burial shocker... part 2

You have to laugh. The Mail has again posted a curiously fact-free scare story about the state apparently watching us all. However, once again, it pulled it from its feed just hours later.

The last time I noticed them doing this, it was a Sunday and the story had exactly 29 comments - just like this one. Coincidence can be a right swine, can't it? I can't wait for the next one to happen!

The BBC botnet

A botnet is a group of infected computers, which have all been infected to accept orders from a botnet "herder". The orders might include sending massive amounts of spam, or spewing huge numbers of connection requests at target web sites to effectively knock them off the Internet for the purposes of extortion (a so-called DDoS attack). The biggest botnets are even capable of taking down an entire country's infrastructure.

The BBC, in the guise of its usually very interesting Click programme, has succeeded in renting and using a botnet of 22,000 infected computers in a demonstration of the risks of not protecting yourself adequately online. The show launched a successful DDoS attack against a site that had consented to the test, and sent thousands of spam emails to a test address. At the end of the test, it ordered the botnet to apparently change the infected computers' screensavers explaining everything and suggesting the owners updated their security measures. "If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law," said the BBC.

However, the BBC has actually broken the law, it seems. The UK's Computer Misuse Act act is very clear. Section I says it's illegal to gain unauthorised access to a computer. The BBC did this to 22,00 of them. Section II makes it illegal to make unauthorised changes to a computer system. Clearly, changing 22,000 screensavers breaks this law. It's arguable whether sending commands ot the botnet is also an offence under Section II.

I await developments with interest...

When is a killing not a killing

Over the weekend, two soldiers and a policeman were shot dead in Northern Ireland in, it seems, a desperate attempt to derail the peace process and return the people who have to live in that bedevilled province to the terror of past decades. However, what's bugging me is the use of the word "killings" to describe what's happened.

The word sounds almost designed to allow for the idea that maybe it wasn't murder. Let's be clear about this. Those people were murdered,deliberately, and in cold blood. And what did it achieve? A show of redoubled unity.

When Martin McGuinness (ex-leader of the IRA itself, now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland) stands shoulder to shoulder on camera with the Chief Constable and they both express disgust at what's happened, the time for terror has clearly long past.

This is a democracy, but it's a spiky one. If you try to kick against it, it hurts you back; you must engage with it. If McGuiness can grasp that idea, so can anyone.

Post 110010

I'm sat here trying to watch teatime TV (the inestimable showbiz machine that is Paul O'Grady, in fact). However, it's pouring with rain and blowing a gale outside and, while the reception on terrestrial TV is slightly snowy, it's still perfectly watchable. On digital, however, the picture keeps freezing for up to 10 seconds at a time, rendering it unwatchable. It was the same with Radio 3 this lunchtime. It's Mozart week, but trying to hear the great maestro's work was almost impossible.

The government is insisting we all switch to digital reception. To help us make the switch, the terrestrial transmitters are being switched off. Now, this isn't a knee-jerk "this bloody government, so called" objection to being told what to do. It's an observation that if digital transmissions are to become universal, there's going to have to be far more investment in transmitter power to overcome the British weather because at the moment, it's true what they say: a bit of bad weather and Britain grinds to a halt. In future, this may include the one medium that can provide information and advice in times of, er, bad weather.

110010 is 50 in binary, by the way.

Daily Mail in story burial shocker

Here's an interesting thing if you're a bit bored. The Daily Mail's web site reported on Sunday that the bright green Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras installed by the Highways Agency to monitor journey times have been linked into "a police database", according to an unnamed Agency official.

However, the Highways Agency page detailing its camera types claims that "The data is anonymised and transmitted to the [National Traffic Control Centre] at least every 5 minutes. Once this has been matched to a record from an adjacent camera or a defined period has lapsed the data is deleted. The only information being retained being the average journey time for that section at that time. No one has access to the full number plate data." So, it's anonymous and used only for the purposes of measuring traffic flow. Am I the only one to think that something doesn't add up here?

However, at the time of writing, this story hasn't been reported anywhere else that I can find, and has been removed from the Daily Mail's RSS feed. But if, as the Mail reported, "Thousands of CCTV cameras across the country have also been converted to read numberplates – as have mobile cameras. Police helicopters can spot plates from the air and officers have live access to London’s Congestion Charge cameras," then there's a major scandal brewing here. It's a huge worry for the vast majority of us law-abiding people to be spied on wholesale, and 29 predictably indignant Mail readers have already left comments on the story.

So, is this story, by Jason Lewis, mere speculation? After all, it contains little hard factual content. Who was this official who seems to have spilt the beans, for instance? What would the Association of Chief Police Officers be doing with $32 million of "government cash" for the project? Is the newspaper simply stirring the pot or is the Highways Agency saying one thing while allowing its ANPL cameras to secretly be used for something quite different?

I think we should be told.

Think of the children!

Cerrie Burnell is a kids TV presenter currently working for the BBC's CBeebies channel. I say currently, because even though she seems like a perfectly nice person, some parents want her removed from their screens. Their reason? Her right arm ends in a stump just below her elbow.

According to a report on the Digital Spy media web site, parents are voicing their objections on the CBeebies message board. "Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?" wrote one. Other comments are in the same vein. Can you imagine being Burnell herself and knowing what some parents think of her? It must be heartbreaking.

The kids these people claim to be protecting have clearly dealt with Burnell's disability - as has the rest of society. Perhaps some are actually fascinated by her arm. They're definitely more aware that we're all different in lots of ways, not just skin colour. Are they freaked out? I think not. The proof? Not one poster is claiming that their kid is actually upset about Burnell's presence on-screen. I think these posters are expressing their own aesthetic disgust, and justifying it as a child protection issue. That's far uglier than any physical disability.

In a modern, inclusive society where every reasonable person has a chance to shine, there's no place for this kind of meaningless aesthetic bigotry. People have disabilities. It's part of the human condition. Arms, legs, eyes, and many other body parts don't always look perfect. We're all freaks of nature and circumstance. Especially bigots.

Happy birthday Charles...

It's the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin today, the first man not only to describe the way that species evolve from one another, but to provide a chain of evidence to support his argument. This is a remarkable achievement; at once both an elegant and inspirational idea while being one of the simplest a human mind has ever had. It has no conditions, no special pleading, no supernatural entities guiding it. Just a long series of almost imperceivable mutations blindly offering up alternatives for members of each successive generation of a population of organisms, and possibly offering an advantage that enables one or two to cope with changing conditions oh so very slightly better than their siblings. Evolution + time = the modern world.

It's both a seemingly mundane and yet entirely awe-inspiring idea. And, while no one with a proper scientific training would ever completely rule anything out, there's an overwhelming and indeed growing weight of evidence to suggest that old Darwin was bang on the money first time. The discovery of DNA and its replication errors, the use of selective breeding, the constant battle against pathogens that adapt faster than medicine can thwart them; evolution is becoming more relevant every day. Philosophically, the only constant really is change.

What I find personally fascinating about evolution, however, isn't that people feel uncomfortable with the idea that we're part of the fabric of the universe we inhabit, rather than having been declared special and plonked here by some god or other, but that the argument in favour of so-called creationism itself has *evolved* significantly over the past few years as it tries to find an attack that will work against a mere idea. The irony is lost on so many people, and yet evolution is something that hasn't had to change to meet that challenge. It just explains, consistently and calmly, how come things are so.

"Theologians," wrote Lawrence Krauss in last week's New Scientist (p25),"have an obligation to attempt to understand the knowledge about the world that has been gained through science, because only through such knowledge can their theology possibly be consistent." One way of marrying science with faith is in accepting that science showcases creation, explains it and gives man an insight into "the mind of God", as Hawking has it. Rejecting science using its products and applications is at best a cynical, paradoxical exercise.

So, happy 200th birthday Charlie.

Surveiling the Innocent...

"Wacky" Jacqui Smith, the UK's Home Secretary, has written a letter to The Guardian defending our country's growing surveillance culture.

She says that CCTV has "helped to reclaim our town centres and public spaces for the law-abiding majority." In fact, with CCTV so ubiquitous, few consider it. Go to any town centre at closing time to see what stupid crimes are committed right in front of CCTV cameras. Indeed, some councils have started equipping them with loudspeakers to remind people they're being watched and that they face prosecution. So, what CCTV has actually done is made it easier to convict people after a crime has been committed.

Smith also defends the DNA database. "Each year," she writes, "literally hundreds of homicides and rapes are resolved with the use of DNA matches." Again, this detection is a marvel of modern technology, but it is always used after the fact. There are no statistics for crimes not committed because of CCTV or DNA matching, and so for the Home Secretary to imply that there's a quantifiable figure is, well, it's bogus.

In the same way that people don't think about CCTV, they don't think about the DNA they leave everywhere they go. After all, would there be any vicious rapes or murders of strangers if it were foremost in their minds? There's no doubt that DNA evidence and CCTV have caught thousands of dangerous criminals, but I don't understand why Smith can't understand that the opportunistic way genetic identities are also collected from the innocent who happen to come into contact with the police as part of their investigations is deeply odious to a society whose traditions include a strong sense of personal privacy.

CCTV and DNA databases are detection devices. Their ubiquity means that they're "invisible" and are therefore useless as crime prevention measures. Insisting to the contrary doesn't make it so. However, there's some good news. "In December I announced immediate steps to remove the DNA of children under 10 from the database, and set out the case for greater flexibility and fairness in the system," wrote Smith.

That's a good start, but if you've done nothing, why should the state keep tabs on your genetic identity "just in case"? To me, as a reasonable, law-abiding Englishman, and even though I'm not on this database, such arbitrary recording feels genuinely and deeply wrong. You should be free to go about your business without such a record. After all, the presumption of innocence has no statute of limitations, which is something that records in the DNA pertaining to the innocent must have in a decent, fair society.

Old Pets As New...

It's been ages since I posted. Maybe I should be using that Twitter thingy...

Anyway, I recently heard about a company in South Korea cloning puppies for people who have lost their beloved pets. This seems at first sight to be a great idea, the first of what I'm sure will become a long succession of "undo buttons" on life, but I'm not so sure.

Does anyone remember Dolly the sheep, cloned by the Roslin Institute in 1996? Dolly died early of a progressive lung disease found in much older sheep. The underlying problem is that genomes age, and as they do they become less able to repair themselves, leading to age-related diseases such as cancer, arthritis and so on. If you take the genome of, say, a five-year-old animal and create a newborn clone from it, that clone starts with a genetic age of five. It ages prematurely.

I can't help thinking that the joy felt by owners who have their dead pets cloned using today's techniques will be short-lived as they realise they may have created a replacement condemned to suffer an early death.

Is this the world's simplest ATMega8 development Board?

Here's my attempt at creating a development board for the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. I'm rather proud of it. It has no external electronic components; just some bits of wire and 6 pins creating the header for the programming cable. When hooked up to the PC with a Pololu USB to serial cable, it connected to AVRStudio 4.0 first time to have its ID read. It works, in other words, and I feel rather chuffed.

Why is this important? Well, microcontrollers are very special little computers, designed for running embedded applications - everything from the injectors in your car to your DVD player and beyond, to cool robots. They contain a small amount of memory into which you upload your program and store data. The memory is, get this, non-volatile! This means that you can switch off the power, and when you turn it back on, the program is still there!

Microcontrollers also have plenty of pins designed to be connected to other components, such as transistors to drive motors, directly to LEDs and LCD displays, etc. Most models can also measure analogue inputs from sensors, etc. Instead of learning electronics in any great depth, they make it possible to control things quickly and cheaply directly in software. Change the program, change the way the rest of the circuit functions. What's more, they're manufactured in their hundreds of millions each year, so the cost of that chip in the picture, despite being a real, functioning 16MHz computer in its own right (delivering nearly 16MIPS if you're interested) was just £1.73 retail from Rapid Electronics.

All this may seem unforgivably geeky, but there are a lot of people beavering away in sheds and on kitchen tables doing some genuinely cool things with mocrocontrollers. I'm almost at the point of doing the unthinkable and dropping my lovely Arduino robot controller and starting my robot head project again by "going native" by simply programming the chips directly for insertion into the "head".

Life at The Sun...

The Sun reports that NASA has found life on Mars.

"ALIEN bugs are responsible for strong plumes of methane gas detected on Mars, it was claimed tonight. Nasa scientists say the gas emissions could have either a geological or biological source - as The Sun exclusively revealed today."

Exclusively, eh? Hmmm... In two sentences the hacks go from declaring life being found to offering two possibilities: life or geology. But since when has geology been life?

Here's the actual skinny form NASA: "Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

Finding life on Mars would be profound. Life at The Sun would be more useful. Still, no need to let facts get in the way of a good story, possibly the story of the age.

Any sufficiently advanced technology...

According to Digital Spy, the rapper "Coolio" has claimed on the UK's immensely tedious Celebrity Big Brother that "Computers aren't from this planet".

"All this technology. You believe it came from this planet? Bullsh*t! I don't think men are that smart. I think it came from somewhere else." Clearly, you're not that smart, Coolio - not by a very long way - but please don't lump all humanity under the same banner of idiocy.

The lack of education displayed by someone millions admire is staggering. It's also a testament to the need to fill the vacuum of ignorance with something, anything so obviously idiotic, and yet still actively t odecide to believe it completely. There are too many snake oil salesmen ready to fill such vacuums with easy-to-believe solutions, from creationism to homoeopathy and beyond (for some reason, "Dr" Gillian McKeith sprung to mind writing that last sentence). However, Coolio's lack of knowledge and understanding is interesting for the fact that he seems to have some vague awareness of how difficult it is to start from first principles, do proper science and create the modern world.

Who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to primitive people? It's time to leave the superstition of the cave, Coolio, and to evolve a little! To paraphrase Douglas Adams: The secret is to keep bashing the rocks together.

That's a nice boiler you've got there...

...it'd be terrible if something happened to it.

British Gas is again trying to frighten householders with junk mail alerting them to the dire consequences of not taking out a maintenance contract to insure against boiler breakdown. Their latest attempt has just flopped onto my mat. On the front cover is a boiler repair bill, complete with invoice number. Inside it says "For once, we thought you'd like to see a boiler repair bill." Though there's a certain amount of plausible ambiguity in the wording, we're clearly being asked to imagine that the figures quoted on the bill can and will be a lot higher if we don't pay £13 a month, whether the boiler we own is brand new or 20 years old. That price is, I discovered after following the associated asterisk to the small print, only available to new customers for the first year, and is "subject to change". Oh, and "Evening and weekend calls cost 6p plus to 2ppm from a BT Calling Plan...". The acronym "ppm" means pounds per minute. That's outrageous, as is "6p plus".

After a certain age, boiler insurance is a good idea, but it's not a good idea to put the frighteners on people to get them to sign up. This literature is clearly designed to scare people. Well, bring it on, Sid. I don't care. In fact, I welcome a deluge of British Gas nastygrams, and here's why.

A postman I know says he's compelled to deliver junk mail given to him at the sorting office when it's not actually addressed to an individual. It's an offence for him not to deliver it, in fact. There's no opt out via the Mailing Preference Service, either. That's a great loophole, but it's backfired in British Gas' face. You see, where I live is all electric and I can change a fuse. So, British Gas are wasting their money. The question is, what would they give to know exactly which households in the UK are all-electric? £13 a month, perhaps? Only for the first year and subject to change, of course...