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.