Banditry

In the wake of the Guardian newspaper’s treacherous attempts to photograph the secret, hitherto unseen building at 1 St Mary Axe, everyone considering taking photographs in public places in England and Wales should really ensure they’re aware of the complex legal situation surrounding photography.

A conventional reading of the law can be seen in this memo from Chief Constable Andy Trotter, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, where he reiterates many times that “there are no powers prohibiting the taking of photographs, film or digital images in a public place“.

However, layman as he is, Constable Trotter has failed to consider three very important legal concepts in this matter: the doctrines of ‘jobbious worthious’, ’soulibus stealibus’, and ‘facina nonce’. Respectively:

1) Jobbious worthious highlights the long-established precedent that any arsehole in a uniform [*] has the absolute right to tell you what to do, demand respect at all times, pretend that he’s a policeman, and be backed up by the real police when they arrive, despite the fact that the closest he’s come to an understanding of the law is the time he got cautioned for beating up some bleedin’ liberty- taker after 12 Stellas on a Saturday night.

2) Soulibus stealibus relates to the fact that the fact that if you take a photograph of someone in any context in a public place you are, ipse facto, guilty of ‘infringing their bleedin’ human rights’. The harm done to the victim reflects the fact that your camera captures a proportion of their soul with each click (proportion captured depends on size of camera, which is why cameraphones are viewed as less serious and tripods as worst of all), and hence the social concern that with sufficient photographs you’ll start to own the person in a voodoo-slavemaster capacity.

3) Facina nonce takes precedence over soulibus stealibus in the event that there is anyone who is, resembles, or has ever been, a child in any part of the
photograph. In this context, you are automatically guilty of making and distributing child pornography (which is defined as anything that a person who is sexually excited by photographs of children, irrespective of context or content, might be sexually excited by), and hence will be summarily hanged.

[*] applies to: security guard uniforms; PCSO uniforms; railway staff uniforms. Does not apply to: school uniforms, although see point 3.

Supporters of nuclear weapons systems like Trident generally justify the cash by saying things like ‘dangerous world, Kim Jong Il and Ahmadinejad very bad men, we can’t just disarm’. Or, more cynically, ‘place on world table, we can’t just disarm’.

I’m not totally sold on this argument – after all, the US will continue to have nuclear weapons for as long as it has a military-industrial complex [*] – and anyone who we can’t defeat with our conventional forces is realistically also going to be a strategic threat to the Yanks, no matter how annoyed they might be with our lack of military spending. And ‘place on world table’ is awesome for a few hundred diplomats and politicians whilst making c.sod all difference to anyone else.

But let’s say it’s true: we need nuclear weapons to deal with global security threats and enhance our prestige. Fine – but I don’t think I’ve seen any coherent argument for why we need to spend £60-80bn on Trident, rather than achieving all the ‘potential for revenge’ and ‘woo, we’re a nucular state’ through a lower-tech programme like India’s – which would cost somewhere between 10% and 25% as much.

That would still give us ballistic and cruise missiles capable of obliterating anyone except for the US and Russia – who we wouldn’t be able to obliterate with Trident either, even if we wanted to (not least because most operational aspects of Trident are controlled by the US). Which ought to be enough, oughtn’t it?

Anything I’m missing…?

[*] which we don’t to quite the same extent.

This Wired piece about some techies who discovered a major flaw in the DNS systems that underpin the Internet, and co-ordinated a mass surreptitious effort to fix it, is worth reading if you like That Sort Of Thing.

However, there’s one aspect of it which strikes me as utterly bizarre:

“The first thing I want to say to you,” Vixie told Kaminsky, trying to contain the flood of feeling, “is never, ever repeat what you just told me over a cell phone.”

Vixie knew how easy it was to eavesdrop on a cell signal, and he had heard enough to know that he was facing a problem of global significance. If the information were intercepted by the wrong people, the wired world could be held ransom. Hackers could wreak havoc. Billions of dollars were at stake, and Vixie wasn’t going to take any risks.

And later:

Andreas Gustafsson knew something was seriously wrong. Vixie had emailed the 43-year-old DNS researcher in Espoo, Finland, asking to talk at 7 pm on a hardwired line. No cell phones.

Gustafsson hurried into the freezing March evening—his only landline was the fax in his office a brisk mile walk away.

But mobile phones are protected by fairly hardcore encryption. While it’s theoretically possible to break GSM encryption, there’s no evidence of anyone actually having done so outside the lab, and the effort required to do so would be immense – while criminal gangs could muster the technology and expertise required, it’s extremely unlikely anyone in advance would realise the commercial importance of a few geeks calling each other up. CDMA encryption is harder still to break. On the other hand, tapping or bugging a landline is a trivial effort.

I know first-generation, analogue, mobile phones were easily intercepted (as Princess Diana discovered), but nobody uses them anymore, even in the US, and the events in the Wired article all took place this year. Now, Paul Vixie is a long way from an idiot when it comes to tech security issues – so is this a sign of encroaching senility on his part, with the other players indulging his whim, or are there some substantive concerns that I’m missing?

(and yes, this post should probably just have taken the format of ‘email to Alex Harrowell’…)

Buy this book. If you understand why you need to buy this book, then buy this book. If you don’t understand why you need to buy this book then – for the love of all that’s worth a damn – buy this book.

Just don’t listen to the author talk, because he’s got an unfortunately whiny voice – one of those chaps who makes those of us who’re ‘prettiest on the radio’ briefly view that as a compliment…

Yes, I know that I’m 29 years old, middle class and white. But fuck it, this is awesome:

(yup, it is indeed from this. How did you guess? And yes, I am indeed quite grumpy that I’ve got to go out every night this week. Can’t people leave me alone for, ooh, a month or so…?)

This is awesome statistical-demographic stuff. Combined with Rick Astley and depraved Japanese pornography, it’s precisely what the Internet was invented for…

[via Matt]

So, it transpires that Apple will launch a 3G iPhone within 60 days. Thanks for announcing that the same day my new TyTn II arives…

The hot drinks vending machine currently has a sign on it saying ‘no tea’. Obviously, that made me think of this.

I didn’t try and get any ‘no tea’, though.

A very long time ago, I had a blog whose software platform I wrote myself. It was pretty ropey by the standards of Wordpress and Moveable Type, although it beat Blogger’s offer in those days (for really dull reasons, the only server I had access to ran Windows and Access; no existing blog software supported this setup, so I had to write some).

I learnt a lot about Access, IIS, and databases and scripting in general. And for ages I was relatively immune to spam, because automatic spambots were configured to deliver the right form data to work with Blogger, MT and WP. But after a year or so, blog comment spamming was sufficiently big business (and my old blog sufficiently popular, he said self-aggrandisingly) that – presumably manually – the droves of spam started coming.

Read more…

Article: O2 (UK) has shifted 190,000 iPhones in its first two months of sales, just short of its target of 200,000.

From the comments: “190,000 surprised me at first – given that we and the Europeans understand mobiles far too well to buy an outdated overpriced paperweight like the iPhone, I thought the number sold in the UK should be closer to 19. Then I remembered that there are Americans in Britain too. Some rigorous intertubes research later and I find that there are 220,000 Americans living in Britain. Mystery solved.“