Taxi Please...

The Daily Mail reports with some glee that BBC radio presenter Sam Mason has been sacked after calling a taxi for her 14-year-old daughter one afternoon and requesting a non-Asian driver. The conversation was recorded and passed to The Sun. Mason apparently says, "A guy with a turban is going to freak her out. She's not used to Asians." When told that it would not be possible to service her request, she the apparently retorted: "You've managed it before."

Why am I commenting on this story? Well, some of the comments left on the Daily Mail's web page covering the story are interesting to say the least. Here's an example:

"Dont blame her,but in PC UK you have no freedoms any more."

...while having the freedom to say so, it seems. This correspondent's idea of freedom is about the race of the driver not the quality of service he offers.

"More selective discrimination PC rubbish. Bet there wouldn't be this fuss if she'd specifically asked for a female driver."

True, requesting a female driver could be about real fear, whereas this is about the race of the driver. So, why didn't Ms Mason simply ask if a female driver was available? Given that it's just a taxi ride and that the driver is immaterial, how can it be that someone in a turban will "freak out" a 14-year-old in this day and age? Clearly Ms Mason has no qualms about letting her daughter ride with an unknown male taxi driver - just not an "Asian" one.

"If it were me I wouldn't care if it had two heads," Mason is alleged to have said, "but it's my little girl we are talking about."

Black American comedian Reginald D Hunter once said that there are two kinds of racism. There's the racism that's just ignorance and doesn't really affect anyone, and there's the racism has consequences. It stops people getting housing, jobs and so on. She may not realise it, but by denying a fare to a perfectly good taxi driver on grounds of his race (or more accurately, religion), Ms Mason falls (perhaps unwittingly, but very definitely) into the second category. I think, however, I'll leave the last word on this to a twistedly self-rigteous comment left on the Daily Mail web site by someone calling himself "Peter". See if you can guess which of Hunter's categories he's in from what he says:

"What the PC brigade have done and are doing to this country is frightening. You'll find Ms.Harman and her troop at the root of much of it. We all have prejudices and that does not make us racist. Simply she didn't want a chap in a turban for her daughter."

The 9 Acres That Saved Humanity

The BBC reports that Bletchley Park has been thrown a bone in the form of £330,000 to perform essential maintenance on what is possibly the most important and symbolic 9 acres of land anywhere on the planet.

Let's be clear about this: if it wasn't for the code breaking work carried out at Bletchley Park during WWII, we wouldn't now be speaking German as plenty of people think; we'd never have been born at all. England and English culture as it existed would have been utterly destroyed. As it was, after the victory of El Alamein, helped in major part by decrypts of Rommel's secret orders, the allies never lost a battle. We knew what the German high command was ordering before its field commanders did.

When I visited in 2005, Bletchley was in a serious state of decay. The famous huts, where Turing, Welchman, Knox and the others struggled to solve the greatest intellectual chalenge of the age, were falling down. Tony Sale, however, was just putting the finishing touches to a Colossus. Out of interest, the original Colossus was designed and by Gordon Welchman and Tommy Flowers, not Alan Turing.

On the tour I attended, someone asked if the machine works. Sale said that yes it does, and that though they ran it for the morning tour, it was now a little too warm to risk the machine's delicate thermionic valves. Now, I have as much religious belief as the keyboard in front of me, but due to a lack of lunch, dehydration and heat, when I suddenly heard the subframe cracking as it cooled, I swear I came the closest I've ever been to a genuine religious experience. Colossus may look like an overstuffed store room, but to me it's a thing of genuine beauty and wonder.

I love Bletchley Park; if you value the fact that you exist at all, so should you. So should the Lottery Heritage Fund. Bletchley should be a place of pilgrimage. It's where the modern age began and where the Nazis were defeated. Frankly, if my home was on fire right now, the only things I'd save would be my teddy (of course) and the pine cone I found on the path leading from Bletchley station.

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.