It's 2:30am GMT as I begin to write this post on November 5th 2008. Democrat Barack Obama has gained 195 votes against 76 for John McCain. Obama needs just 270 and he effectively rules the world unopposed for the next 4 years. Maybe the American civil war is finally over and this is the first true US General Election.

This was John McCain's only ever chance at being President, but it couldn't have come at a worse time. Someone had to stand for the Republicans, and I think he gave it a good shot - given that he must have known he only had at best a slim chance of winning. I reckon not many republicans would have agreed to give it a go. Fair play to him.

Here's my worry, and I'm sure it's nothing, but watching the US presidential coverage, I can't help remembering the feeling I had one balmy night in early May 1997. The witch's ghost was finally laid to rest and things, they told us, could only get better. Their definition of better turned out to be an interesting one to say the least, but as long as Obama isn't planning to launch New Democrats on the world, maybe things will start becoming a little less stupid on this damned planet.

Please don't forget to vote

UK voters may remember the night of April 9th 2002, when Labour were expected to landslide against the stagnation of the post-Thatcher years and yet another recession. The trouble is, they didn't win.

Instead of voting, I went to watch some rather poor quality jazz (Andy Shepard and In Commotion at Band on the Wall in Manchester, as I recall). I, like everyone else, felt confident I'd be waking up under a Labour government the next morning come what may. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Enough voters also seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion that there'd be a change of government and didn't vote. Somehow it seemed like it was just time for change. Maybe if enough people had voted the way they said they would and Neil Kinnock had become premier, New Labour would never have come into being. What a different world it may have been.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion in politics, specially at election time. So, if you want change in the US tonight, please for the good of your own happiness, GET OUT AND VOTE!

Security Begins At Home (Office)

Well, it's happened again; though the Department of Work and Pensions says there's nothing to worry about, millions of private identities are on the loose - again.

This time, a data stick containing the passwords of people who used the UK Government's Gateway system for everything from tax returns to fine payments was found - wait for it - in a pub car park. Do you want to know how many times the identities of UK citizens have been lost since the amazing bungle that saw 25 million child benefit claimants' details lost in the post last year?

According to the Daily Mail, the Information Commissioner says it's 277. That's data loss incidents, not lost identities.

A couple of months ago, I tried calculating the number of identities government contractors have lost for an article I was writing. My estimate was that about half of us have had our details lost (some of us multiple times) by the very people who should know better - contractors cleared to work on or engaged in managing supposedly secure UK government systems. But are these systems even secure in any meaningful sense when it's clearly possible to simply copy live, sensitive data to a USB pen drive, slip it in your pocket and leave the building so to speak, or when it's possible to take a laptop containing such data home and leave it to be stolen from the back of your car overnight?

The concept of "secure" when applied to government data systems seems increasingly to be a nonsense. What the hell was someone doing with live data in a pub car park anyway? This leads me to a very grave question; one I'd seriously rather not be asking, but one that needs asking.

How long until someone reads the data they find on a lost USB stick or stolen laptop, and realises it's worth far more than simply punting the hardware around the pubs or on eBay? What happens when someone with serious terrorist intentions buys such data and picks YOUR identity at random to buy the equipment for an atrocity? How do you explain to the very nervous anti-terrorism officer screaming and pointing a loaded machine gun at you that you're an innocent, law-abiding dupe, and that it's the government itself that's ultimately responsible? The answer is, you can't.

The rate at which the government is haemorraging our identities is horrific: 277 data loss incidents divided by 12 months is an average of 23 incidents a month or about 5 a week. Under any circumstances, this is completely unacceptable. In such apparently dangerous times, it's deeply and criminally incompetent to the point of recidivism. It's getting to the point where I'm seriously beginning to fear that not only will politicians but the civil service itself lose the confidence of the British public. What happens then? I shudder to think what stupidity may pass for a solution, or what dangerous new influences the country may fall under as we look for a quick fix to a terrible mess.

Instead of our Home Secretary insisting that we, the poor sods who form the great mass of innocent potential terrorism victims, must be monitored ever closer, the state should be watching those whose job it is to keep us safe. Because no one in Whitehall seems to have figured out who those people are, I'll spell it out. They must begin with the people we have no choice but to trust with all our identities. Ultimately, that's themselves.

It's the roof, silly...

Cannabis use in the UK has fallen since the drug was downgraded to Class C in January 2004 . That's not an opinion; it's a fact compiled by the Government itself. Illicit drug use in Britain is down across the board according to the British Crime Survey. But why would this apparent paradox be so?

Maybe, and this really is an opinion, all the people who were going to smoke dope anyway are still doing so, but those for whom the illegal status was the thrill failed to see it in such a glamorous light once downgraded. So, if downgrading shook out the market, why the hell is the UK government trying to reclassifying cannabis to class B again in January 2009? Does this sound sensible to you?

Apparently, the proposed reclassification is required because "skunk" - the powerful herbal variety of dope - is prevalent in the market and the Government want to be able to go after the farmers. Well... why don't they? After all, this is a government that's good at applying laws incorrectly. It recently applied the Anti-terrorism Act to seize Iceland's assets!

More properly, why not simply split out skunk from the more traditional and milder resinous form of the drug and reclassify it in isolation? Or split out skunk farming? After all, if it's genuinely cause and effect that downgrading led to lower use, surely putting all forms of dope back up to Class B will increase it's overall use again. I'm so confident of this happening, I'm actually thinking of putting £10 on at Ladbrokes. The problem is, it's so obvious, I doubt I'd get anything better than evens.

This muddle smacks (if you'll pardon the expression) of a man who on a Bank Holiday Sunday hears a dripping sound in his attic. He tells his neighbour that he plans to call a plumber out to fix the header tank. The neighbour looks into the attic and tells him he needs to fix the roof because that's the source of the leak, not the header tank. No, demands the householder: a plumber to fix the header tank is what he wants. In other words, only a fool begins with a conclusion, but it takes an even bigger fool to stick with it.

My hovercraft is full of eels...

The BBC reports on a sign erected by Swansea Council. In line with the Council's bilingual policy, it contains both English and Welsh versions of the same phrase.



















Nothing wrong with that, you may say... unless you can read Welsh. Translated, it reads, "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." What do they say about assumption being the mother of all cock-ups?

A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Imagine how you'd feel if your web browser suddenly disappeared for 24 hours, or worse still, if you simply received an email from its developers saying, "Sorry, mate. No more browser, and by the way, all your bookmarks are gone too."

You'd be outraged, right? Now imagine that instead of it being your browser, its an entire office suite that disappears along with all your documents. Everything. Your fundamental ability to continue your business is affected. It's a good job software doesn't work like that, isn't it? The trouble is, it's beginning to do so in a very big, very frightening way, and I don't understand why.

Cloud computing is, "Worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," GNU founder and open source guru Richard Stallman told The Guardian recently. He may be a controversial figure, but I can't shake the feeling that he's right. You see, instead of keeping your infrastructure on your own server behind your own firewall, cloud computing involves handing everything to a vaguely-understood third party, accessing it using a web-based service, and trusting that everything will remain both safe and available.

According to the Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) Wiki, such services have already experienced 12 major incidents this year. But here's the kicker: One service has actually closed down, taking a lot of people's data with it. The Linkup ceased trading on 8th August after what began as a simple data transfer from a legacy system. After losing an incredible 45% of data in the process, it seems to have simply shut up shop. Nice one, lads. Way to increase confidence in what Larry Ellison of Oracle has described as "complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

The steady stream of cloud computing service outages is gathering pace. The CCID Wiki shows just 2 incidents for 2007. At the time of writing, however, it shows that 10 of the 12 incidents recorded so far for 2008 occurred in the latter half of the year. Would you gamble on it sticking at 10 until New Year's Eve, with a drop in 2009?

Stallman's advice is to, "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program," but it's not always easy to afford hardware when you're in a hurry to get a start-up off the ground and make your first million cheaply.

The evidence so far is that when you buy into cloud computing, you also buy exposure to any potential data storage, network and business continuity problems your service provider may have. Maybe the only way to limit that exposure is to use cloud computing (if you must) only for non-essential tasks. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for.

This is a story that is sure to run like a toddler's nose, but if I ever set up a company, I'll be paying for my own hardware, thank you very much.

Innocent Criminals

The BBC is following the story of a couple from Scotland who received a letter from Atari's UK attack dogs Davenport Lyons accusing them of illegally sharing a game called Race07. The letter demanded £500 not to prosecute. Fair enough, you might say, but there's a problem: Gill and Ken Murdock, aged 54 and 66 respectively, have never heard of the game, don't know what peer-to-peer file sharing is, and anyway, they don't play video games. I'm sure you can guess where this is going...

For those hell-bent on destroying the games industry by illegally dishing out the fruit of its labour for free, someone else's computer is a god-send. Simply trojan it with p2p software and store your stolen goods on it for others to take at will. The poor sap who owns the computer takes the blame. The trouble is, this is 2008, not 1998, and this simply shouldn't be happening.

The problem is the owners of the hijacked machines. Though they perceive the need and have the resources to acquire and hook up to broadband something that would put a Cray-2 to shame, some people seemingly don't perceive the need to secure it. What other reason could there be for a middle-aged couple being caught innocently ripping off Atari? This has to stop. We live in a time when perfectly good anti-virus software exists, and much of it is free, free and free.

So, what's the solution? To scare the population into protecting themselves by wrongly convicting a few until they get the point? To make it illegal not to take basic online security seriously? To insist on every Internet user having a yearly computer MOT? While the problem persists, software companies are going to lose out, and possibly even go bust. Chasing the file sharers doesn't work, and as the NLP lot are fond of saying, if what you're doing doesn't work, do something else. So, maybe it's time for the likes of Atari to be taking charge and teaming up with anti-virus companies to ensure that people like the Murdocks are safe to be let out on the Internet in the first place.

For reasons of cash flow if nothing else, that's not practical. To write operating systems that behave as if they were designed for use in 2008 rather than being shipped as an easily exploited work in progress also seems to have become impossible. An easier alternative might be to follow the example set by a group based around ETH Zurich. Their research into the number of out-of-date browsers still in use (it's a hell of a lot, and I'm willing to bet the Murdock's browser is one of them) led to the idea of creating software that tells you that it's out of date. The logical conclusion is to build this feature into Windows, so that after several attempts to get you to update, your computer will not perform any other networked function until you do so. Let's just hope Microsoft can get it together to implement something like this in a form that isn't badly holed below the waterline - again.