Monthly Archives: August 2008

num_Items<=10

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Do you understand “Ten items or less?”

If you were standing in the supermarket queue with a handful of grocery items, you could count them, reach 10 and feel pretty sure that you could go through the (often ironically-titled) Quick Checkout. (Assuming you aren’t worrying about whether a collection of 4 rolls in one bag counts as one item or four. Argh. A bunch of grapes? How many items is that? Maybe one, if they are firmly attached to the stalk. But a few might fall off and tip the balance against you. )

Pedantically, you might think the sign should say “fewer.” However, a supermarket sign isn’t an English essay. In any case, modern grammar books are likely to suggest that observing modern usage reflects better style than sounding deliberately pompous. Well, I would, at least, setting myself up as grammar expert, in the face of the evidence that I’m not.

Pedant alert. I get as riled about misplaced apostrophe(‘)s and stupid grammar as anyone does. Sentences like 🙂 such as “He asked my husband and I where we were going” are really annoying. This usage ignores the basic rules of grammar – confusing where to use subject and object pronouns. The offensive bit aspect is that it’s done just to sound formally correct. To evade the scary grammar teacher in the sky who might smite any sentence, at random, if it doesn’t sound stilted enough.)

Back to the supermarket. According to the BBC:

Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute.
The supermarket giant is to replace its current “10 items or less” notices with signs saying “Up to 10 items”.
Tesco’s move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use “fewer” instead of “less”.
The new wording was suggested to Tesco by language watchdog The Plain English Campaign.

What? “Up to ten items” is less confusing than “10 items or less”? No it isn’t.

There are ten items in your basket. Which checkout do you use? If the sign says “Up to 11 items,” you can walk through the Quick checkout, smugly confident that your basket contents meet the numeric criteria. But, it says “Up to ten.” The Plain English campaign thinks “Up to” means the same as “Less than or equal to.” It may do. I’m not sure.

I am sure that “ten items or less” includes the number ten. It’s right there, mentioned by name even.

Fear of breaking a rule about correct use of “fewer” or “less,” which is almost never observed in spoken English has led Tesco to make its signs ambiguous, where they were previously clear.

The Plain English campaign is taking the credit for this silliness. Use of plain English is a desirable goal. This campaign was started decades ago to challenge the bureaucratic language used in official documents. The valid point is that some documents are incomprehensible to anyone, particularly to people who are not very literate.

However, some items on their website suggest that they have come to interpret their role in “grammar and spelling police” terms.

For instance, they castigate a University lecturer for mildly suggesting that bad spelling isn’t the end of the world.

Dr Smith, a lecturer in criminology at Buckinghamshire New University, suggested that students and lecturers should be ‘given a break’ and allow misspellings of words such as ‘judgment’, ‘twelfth’, and ‘embarrassed’ (from the news page on the plain English campaign site)

They complain furiously that students can get good marks in SATS tests despite errors, as if the content is less important than the sub-editing:

… revealed that an essay littered with spelling and grammatical errors had received a higher mark than another, more literate one.

So, it is with a pedantic glee that I reprint this paragraph:

We are part of Liverpool and it’s history and culture so naturally we want to be part of the Capital of Culture celebrations. As the campaign grew out of the frustration of ordinary people in Liverpool with the way they were being treated we feel that it is right that we should return to the city at this time. We’ll be reminding everyone of the importance of clear language and how this can help people understand what to do and what is happening in their lives” says Chrissie

it’s. at this time instead of now. Missing commas where you need them to make sense of the sentence.

It’s hardly surprising that so many government documents (that are supposed to show a commitment to using “plain English” ) remain completely incomprehensible, given that the UK government takes so much of its Plain English advice from this organisation.

Chomsky tells us off

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In an Independent interview today, Naom Chomsky said that Britain:

has failed in its duty to stop the US from committing “shameful acts” in the treatment of suspects detained during the war on terror, …… Professor Noam Chomsky calls on the Government to use its special relationship with Washington America to secure the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
Claiming that he has heard only “twitters of protest” in the UK , the emeritus professor of linguistics also asks British “thinkers” to be more conspicuous in their opposition to the erosion of civil rights since the 9.11 attacks on the US.

National pride should compel me to put up some sort of defence of the UK here, but I’m afraid he’s just right.

(Except that there’s basically less than no chance the UK could stop the US doing anything, but at least we could stop encouraging them.)

The Independent article quoted Andrew Tyrie, the MP who set up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition (APPGER).

(That repulsive phrase is of course the Dilbertspeak neologism for the old-fashioned “kidnap and torture” phrase. In this case, I can’t blame them for using it. It’s in a good cause.)

“The UK Government’s reaction to the US programme of rendition: a policy of kidnapping people and taking them to places where they may be tortured, has been inadequate, to say the least. It is scarcely credible that now, despite all we know about rendition and the UK’s involvement in it, the British Government still refuses to condemn this illegal, immoral, and counterproductive policy.”

I looked for something about this group, about whom I’ve previously read nothing..

The Chairman of the APPG is Andrew Tyrie MP,[Conservative] the Vice-Chairmen are Chris Mullin MP [Labour] and Norman Lamb MP, [Liberal Democrat]and the Treasurer is Lord Hodgson.[Conservative peer] The Coordinator of the APPG is Stuart McCracken. [Lord Hodgson’s researcher]. I googled this information in square brackets so you don’t have to.] (from APPGER site About us page)

Here are their press release documents.

The very existence of this Parliamentary group lifts a tiny corner of the blanket of national shame under which I am cowering after the richly deserved rebuke from Chomsky.

However, David Milliband – am I developing an anti-crush on this man? – brings back the feeling of national shame by his apparently unironic recommendation of this group:

The questions asked by… the all-party parliamentary group are precisely the sort of parliamentary interrogation and questioning that is wholly appropriate. (quote from Milliband on the APPGER home page.)

Well, he might respect their questioning role but he’s buggered if he’s going to address teh issues they raise. Blimey, he and his department won’t even willingly submit to a court order (“National security”, yada, yada..) in the Mohammed Binyan case. Are the embarrassing questions of a few decent parliamentarians going to bother him?

The Scientific Method

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(hat tip: post by SurfinSeaOtter on FSTDT)

More Church and Schools

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Good to see that the UK government is still coming under political pressure to drop its demented encouragement of “faith schools”.

The BBC reported

Ministers are being urged to stop faith schools in England selecting pupils and staff on the basis of their religion.
Accord, a new coalition of secular and religious figures, wants the government to stop state-funded schools engaging in what they say is “discrimination”.

Faith schools getting forced into not favouring people who hold their “faith”?

Well, that would be a start.

But, they are wrong on so many levels that, if they were buildings, they’d need the world’s biggest elevators. Demolish the lot of them.

Church and school

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Churchgoing is associated with teenagers getting higher grades, according to a study cited in Ecumenical News International and discussed in the Times. On first consideration, this seems a bit counter-intuitive, given the preponderance of non-believers in the higher academic world and all those flattering studies that suggest that atheists are generally more intelligent and educated than believers.

The findings suggest that it’s whether the student actually attends church rather than whether s/he has any religious belief that has an impact.

The study suggested four reasons church-going teens tend to have more success at school.
One of these is that they have regular contact with adults from various generations, who serve as role models. Another reason is that the young people’s parents are more likely to communicate with their friends’ parents. Other factors at play are that teenagers who attend church develop friendships there with peers who have similar norms and values, and they are also more likely to take part in extracurricular activities. (from the ENI site)

I haven’t seen the data, only the reports, so I’m not challenging their figures or even their suggested explanations.

But there are some alternative ways of looking at this evidence.

Most crucially, it seems to me to be confusing correlation with causation.

i.e. On average, kids who go to church get better grades. Even, if it’s true, this doesn’t imply either one causes the other.

At an individual level, isn’t it likely that teenagers with a greater tendency to conform are more willing to do what their parents want – both in terms of doing their schoolwork and church attendance? So the good grades and the willingness to go to church might both just be manifestations of a general willingness to please adults.

Like brushing their teeth at bedtime. Which may also turn out to be positively correlated with good school attendance and good grades.

The implications that church-attenders are more involved in the community would seem to apply mostly to people who live in cohesive “communities” in which – especially in countries such as the USA – church attendance is pretty much the norm. Questions I would like to ask would be about the localities that the researchers looked at. Villages, towns, cities, slums, suburbs? Incomes? Family stability?

I can think of quite a few questions about this study. But the one that really nags at me is the use of the concept of “good grades.” Good grades are not necessarily indicators of real learning, or even of an academic capacity.

The research might suggest that many schools encourage conformity, rather than independent thought, and penalise those kids who show a troublesome desire to think for themselves (by refusing to go to church, for example.) Hence, more church-non-attenders drop out or put minimal effort into their schoolwork.

No Atheists Wanted

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Freedom of religion still does not mean freedom from religion. The BBC has a news item today about a an atheist in Co Donegal (Republic of Ireland) having to be buried in Co Londonderry (United Kingdom) because all the graveyards in Donegal are church owned.

A Donegal atheist had to be buried in Londonderry because the county has no facilities for non-religious burials.
Journalist Roy Greenslade’s mother was buried in Ballyowen cemetery in Derry on Tuesday after a humanist service.
He said he was told atheists could not be buried in Donegal because the graveyards are church-owned.

Strikes me as being a touch petty and very strange that this appears to have been the first atheist / humanist burial in Co Donegal. I know the Republic of Ireland teeters on theocracy, but surely…

Once I got over the farce of a whole county being unable to bury the non-religious, I did wonder a touch. Why did an “atheist” family want a Church burial in the first place? I certainly dont. And, reading the article something else struck me as slightly odd:

“Therefore unless one is willing to compromise one’s beliefs by agreeing to a religious service, it is impossible to be buried,” [Roy Greenslade] said.

Here we see atheism described as a belief system again. I find it hard to compromise my lack of belief, simply because it is a lack. If I wanted to bury my atheist mother in a church graveyard, I would pretend she was what ever religion is required. If I want my children to go to a church shool, I will pretend to be what ever religion is required. This is not immoral – if I needed to get my kids into Santa’s school I would pretend to belive in Father Christmas. It is all the same to me. Dying for your religious beliefs is the act of a religious believer.

Where there is a difference is the issue of choice. Should, for example, a law be passed saying I have to belive in Faeries, I will stand up against it. To me, these are two very different things.

On a final note of black comedy, the BBC have a delightful example of Irish (Northern Irish in this example) reasoning regarding religions:

“When I [Roy Greenslade] rang up and asked Derry City Council’s cemeteries department if it was possible to bury an atheist in a municipal cemetery they said it was possible because there were different sections for Catholics, Protestants and Muslims.

“My wife asked if it meant they were going to start an atheist section and the woman said, ‘oh no, she can go in with the Protestants’.”

It really is a joke that just keeps giving.

Captcha

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“Captcha is the bane of the internet,” says Matt Mullenweg, who runs the massively popular blogging site WordPress.com. “I can’t figure them out myself half the time!” (from the Guardian technology page today)

This is from a Guardian piece discussiing how captchas are welll and truly broken – by algorithms and by cheap human labour -thus increasing the volume of blog comment spam. The writer suggests Akismet or the type of non-machine readable questions that you find on ApathySketchpad as viable alternatives.

I’m comment-impaired at the best of times. I’ll try and comment on a blog and find that my comment just disappears. Granted, this suggests the universe has an innate capacity for mercy. But, just occasionally, the words that disappear into the net’s black hole were comments that I really wanted to make. So, I’ll try and rewrite it, in a half-hearted fashion. It will disappear again. I’ll have a final stab at writing. And sending. But by this time, it’s incoherent garbage, sent only to show the comment-eating demon who’s boss.

And then the captcha is there mocking you. Matt Mullenweg is so right, except, on his own proud boast, at least he gets them right half of the time. Falling foul of captcha is a daily occurrence here at WhyDontYou Towers. And a score of 50% correct is just a fond dream.

The idea is that only humans can read the things. A reverse Turing test. This whole concept falls down on the point that any shapes that are too unlike characters to be read by a souped up OCR-style algorithm are much too unlike letters or numbers for human beings to interpret them.

Even when you can distinguish those shapes that are meant to be characters from the deliberately inserted wavy lines, you face something like:

oo9I0g

There is no way to reliably distinguish between 9 and g, 0 and O, 1 and l and I.

So you type in zero zero nine one zero g, on the offchance. It rejects you. You don’t get another shot at the ambiguous letters.

Oh no. A fresh bleeding captcha. This time you find you have to choose between identifying a letter as either a very thin letter j or the letter i with a slight curve at the bottom. Failed again.

Next time it’s either an l with a slight curve at the top or an anorexic letter c. Ok, got the c right but then you thought that oddly shaped capital A was a 4, didn’t you? Robotic fool.

By this time, the human-detector software has often decided you are a bot cos you couldn’t even guess one out of 3. So your comment is bounced anyway.

If you’ve ever thought that you might as well go for the disabled option, don’t bother. That’s not worth it either. Captchas that claim to be for the disabled are actually even harder to use than their able-bodied comrades. Different experiences you can have with the accessibility captcha include:

  • A long silence. So you think it’s not working and cancel a fraction of a second after it kicks in.
  • so much feedback and background weird noises (to simulate the visual noise on the visual captcha) that you couldn’t even work out what it’s saying if you had a comic book aural discrimination superpower.
  • Voices so bizarrely accented and echoey that you are stunned by the novelty that this is suposed to represent speech. So you don’t notice, let alone memorise, the content as it racespast you in a jumble of syllables.
  • The disabled version sometimes matches the written one and sometimes doesn’t. Which one do you try? The wrong one, of course.

The whole concept of the disabled one seems stupid to me. You are assumed to be too blind to see the captcha image. So how do you see the captcha box and spot where the disabled button is? Are the blind fitted with memory enhancement chips that let them translate a string of meaningless letters and numbers from the native gibberese AND remember them long enough for their screen reader to kick in and tell them where to type?

Headline news

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The BBC reports on a WHO report that social factors, rather than genetics, are responsible for the massive disparities in life expectancy across the world.

This is like saying that humans have been found to breathe air rather than treacle. I.e., It should be no surprise to anyone.

The WHO report webpage makes no mention of “genetics” as a possibly valid alternative explanation. Unsurpisingly. Nor does the BBC report, if you read past the headline.

So, why does genetics even get mentioned in the headline, as if there’s a legitimate debate over whether poverty or genetics is the main determinant of health and life expectancy?

Whatever the reason, the effect is that the lazy headline scanner – i.e., pretty well all of us readers – is left with a vague impression that poverty and genetics are almost equally valid explanations for global inequalities.

My today’s-imaginary-friend – the lazy headline scanner (OK, that’s usually me) – is also likely to be misled by the headline Arab warning after racist death. Hmm, doesn’t that sound – in the current climate – as if there has been a racist Arab threat? You can almost picture the people who inspired the twat-o-tron frothing at the mouth at yet another example of “political correctness gone mad” and so on.

However, this story relates to a 16-year-old language student from Qatar who was murdered in Hastings, apparently for being an Arab.

The “warning” is his uncle’s suggestion that he would advise other Arab families not to send their children to language classes in the UK. Which may not be a statistically valid conclusion about relative risk, based as it is on a sample of one, but I’m pretty confident you’d feel the same in his position.

So, no Arab actually made a racist threat. No Arabs even warned that they’d be taking vengeance for a racist death. In fact, the real story is that an Arab teenager was murdered by racists.

Not that you could guess from the headline.

It’s not that these headlines are deliberately targeted at stirring up the bigots. (The Daily Mail et al exist for that purpose and are so successful at doing it.)
But the general effect of such headlines is still misleading. They are just examples of the background noise in which mass stupidity can flourish.

The nature of evil

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I know, I know. Mocking the people who post on Rapture Ready feels like hanging round the special needs kids and laughing at them.

But still. This is the most comically ironic thread that I’ve followed to its source, from the reliably hilarious Fundies Say the Darnedest Things, for – well – a few days at least.

There’s a Rapture Ready thread on the topic Are Skull Shirts Evil?

Evil? Can clothes be intrinsically evil? This could explain several of life’s mysteries.

Why, for instance, do the top buttons on the most expensive blouse I’ve ever owned pop open whenever I’m in a public place? Why does one in every pair of socks disappear in the washing machine. How can labels scratch weals in your skin, despite feeling as soft as toilet paper when you touch them? How can things that looked stunning on a hanger in the store make the wearer look like a dumpier and more taste-challenged version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame?

Realising that evil may indeed live in the hearts of garments can explain so much. I had previously had to rely on the working assumption that some clothes were under an RPG curse. But now, I’ve seen the truth. They are just innately bad. Probably manifestations of lesser demons or something.

However, reading Rapture Ready with attention, it seems that it’s not clothes in general, just clothes with skull motifs, that are evil. Regular member scapegoat says

It’s part of the “Culture of Death” our world is embracing. Homosexuality, abortion, etc….

RDY4HIM says:

…. From what I can tell, it is directly associated with the kids embracing the spirit of death. They obsess over it. Some are actually suicidal, some practice self-injury, but most are extremely depressed. They see death as a way out and look forward to it because they have no hope. These are the kids that I minister to on-line through Facebook.
….. there is a really cool line of clothing out at Mardel’s and maybe other Christian stores called NOTW (Not of this World). The look is very similar to the skulls and crossbones attire but with crosses instead. They have hoodies, t-shirts, shoes, jewelry, you name it. Very cool, and an awesome way for our kids ti witness. My daughter will definitely be getting some for her b-day.

Lucky, lucky girl…. What an awesome b-day that will be. (It’s not as if a cross has anything to do with death or anything.)

Lucky suicidal kids who get ministered to on Facebook, too. (Yet another reason for avoiding facebook like a biblical plague of boils.)

Some posters say it’s just a fashion, even “cute” in pink (Is there anything on earth that some people don’t think is cute in pink?) But most are predictably aghast – satan’s trickery, EMO death cult and all the rest of it.

Culture of Death, indeed. Let me get this straight:

Rapture enthusiasts = people for whom mass human extinction can’t come soon enough. I think that defines a death cult.

These are the members of a death cult, who see some clothes as evil because – wait for it – their decoration represents a death cult.

So they suggest that their fellow Rapture Xians replace death symbol A (skull) with death symbol B (a cross)

I bet that is sooo cuuuute in pink

Bank Security?

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Here in the UK things such as ID-theft and bank fraud are “big news.” It feels like almost every day there is a news item about the government or large organisations losing personal data or a scare about how many people are out there stealing our online banking details. While I have a professional interest in people worrying about information security (and will provide a wonderful consultancy service for a discount if you quote WhyDontYou Blog) I have to say there is more than a small dose of hype and overkill in this.

That said, there is a risk and it is only sensible that people are aware of the potential risks and given the correct advice to mitigate against them.

The important bit is the “correct advice.”

In the UK at least, the Banks are largely responsible for making good any fraudulent use of an account unless they can prove it was the account owners fault. This is a good thing and while the banks will suffer a bit because of some stupid people, the majority of “innocent” victims are protected.

Obviously the banks dont like this. They could take measures to improve their banking security or they could take measures that give a superficial improvement but, on the whole, only shift the burden onto the account holder. Not too long ago, in the UK, if you wanted to buy something with a card you had to sign to prove who you were. The shop owner compared this with the signature on the card and verified your ID – if they were in doubt, they could seek additional documentation. Despite what people think, signatures are hard to forge. This method also forced the shop keeper to physically check the card and read the details.

Despite this, there was still some residual fraudulent activity so the banks changed the process to “Chip and PIN” where you now enter your card into a reader and type in a 4 digit PIN. Wonderful. This is a reasonably secure system but it has a few pitfalls. The most basic is often the shop staff have no contact with the card during the transaction. This means they don’t carry out the basic authentication check of seeing if the person before them is the owner of the card. My wife regularly uses my credit card to shop, because nowhere we go checks that the person in front of them is Mr **** ****** despite it saying that on the front of the card in big letters. This is less important because the 4 digit PIN becomes the safeguard, but basically, it makes it easier to pass of a cloned / fraudently created card – 4 numbers are reasonably easy to find out or, if the card is “created” then they are irrelevant. As far as security goes, this is (largely) marking time. But it does the important task of moving the burden away from the bank.

The latest brainwave the banks have come up with actually annoys me.

Barclays Bank has decided to implement “PINSentry” when you log into their online banking or try to make online payments. Wonderful idea. Well, maybe.

In a nutshell, they have sent everyone a card reader that you use when you log in. To do online banking, you enter your password (etc) as normal, then you have to enter your card into the reader, get an authorisation code and enter that. All well and good – in fact this is a wide scale implementation of a time-worn authorisation system. Previously the entry system was username+password, then a “secret” code. Now the secret code has been replaced by this token generation system.

The problem is that it undermines one of the reasons you do online banking. For me, I like to use online banking from various locations – I often use it from work and if I am travelling. If I were a Barclays’ customer I would now be forced to carry this bloody stupid PINsentry device around with me. Should my bag be stolen, the thief would have my card and the PINsentry, defeating any security improvement it gives.

From the banks point of view, however, it is a good idea. It shifts the burden of blame in the event of a fraudulent transaction. Now you have to prove your PINsentry was compromised, not them having to prove their systems were not compromised.

This is not a good change. It doesn’t really make your transactions any more secure. It just makes you more to blame if something goes wrong. (Even, I suspect, if the bank has sold your details on eBay…)

Food

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More from Ted. Following my triumph at posting the Dawkins video link, I’m following up with another. I’m posting this video link because I’ve never seen anyone express such perfect good sense about food. It’s Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat.

This is something on the blog for those people who come here looking for “5 fruit and veg” posts.

Dawkins talks to Ted

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This video link was just sent to me. It’s an elegant Dawkins speech from a couple of years ago that I hadn’t seen it before. It is on a website called Ted that sponsors conferences called Ted. That’s an acronym, not somebody’s name (although there may be a companion site called Bill.)

Other speakers include Daniel Dennett and Billy Graham. Yes, that was Billy Graham. I haven’t listened to the rest of the discussion yet. I remain unconvinced I can embed the video so I’m going to paste the link first.

The site is sponsored by BMW. Note to BMW. I’m thinking of this link as potentially lucrative product placement. Please enclose my payment for mentioning this in the form of a late model vehicle.

Wittering on about blog spam again

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This blog feels slightly shortchanged in the weird searches department. For example, if you look at HjHop’s site, he gets searches that are bizarre enough for him to make a funny feature of them.

Search engine choices that bring unsuspecting people here are generally just odd. Not entertaining, just odd. Normally, there are between 5 and 15 for Schwarzenegger (?) and similar numbers for pictures of guns. (??????) Sometimes, castles come top, usually Bodium castle – but there were only 7 searches for this today. Today’s search referrals also included Rorschach (?7) art and fine art, (?6) and (?5). 5 Fruit and veg is normally a front runner but came nowhere today. I defy anyone to make a readable post out of that lot.

I suspect noone has ever been directed by a search engine to what we fondly believe is the normal content of our posts.

But this blog could acquit itself well, if it ever gets in a competitive event relating to volumes of blogspam. According to WordPress stats for this blog, there have been 2,624 approved comments but

Akismet has protected your site from 13,409 spam comments already

Akismet doesn’t even cover the whole life span of the blog and it’s probably been reinstalled a couple of times – hence, reset to 0 – but even on these figures, that’s a good few times as many spam comments as there were legit ones.

There are clearly spam fashions. I quite admire the craftsmanship involved in the ones that have generic phrases designed to flatter you into allowing the comment through the filter:

Love your blog. I’ll bookmark it and return later.

or the old favourite from last year, with words to the effect that:

I didn’t quite understand what you said on [insert name of blog] but I’m interested to know more.

However, it’s as if the heart has gone out of the spammers. This week’s “new black” for spam seems to involve sending some random syllables, occasionally with a load of links:

qkncihdf tjnprcd mitqlanp oznqx eaqrpzu imfwatulo sjmxrqgh

for example. Or, what about this, where even the links don’t make an effort to disguise their innate spammishness, let alone entice the unwary with promises of free meds or unfeasible bodily expansion?

biprong unbrimming martinetism bosn amative biota spongida expectingly
ziafm wnwwqwuy
http://jdskmnffl.com
ktuhbdk info
http://jlvxkeva.com
uosgu wcmqjs
http://sgqwajre.com
kxrrd qzfkagqn

What’s going on? There are eleven of these in the Akismet spam queue today. Not one has an English word in it.

The Register had a long security post about blogspam, on Friday. The article was about a malware scam that claims to take the user to various legit sounding places.

Over the next several weeks I noticed a lot more of these, not only pointing to Google but also to Yahoo and MSN. The servers they pointed to all had the same basic structure, such as google-homepage.google-us.info, msn-us.info, yahoo-us.info, etc. Every one resolves to the same IP address: 124.217.253.8. That IP address is registered to Piradius.net in Singapore. The server appears to be hosted out of Kuala Lumpur. The domains, however, are registered in Ukraine:

(They’ve all moved since the article was written, of course.)

The rest of the article is fascinating. Click on one of these imaginary images and they run an executable. The article shows a series of legit looking screendumps, with the alerts very well designed. They put the fear of malware into you and offer you apparently Microsoft-approved solutions. There’s even a blag Microsoft Security Centre. The only intrinsic design flaw was that it said XP Security Centre, which was immediately suspicious to someone running Vista.

I’m as much of a mug as anyone. I just hope I haven’t fallen for any of these…….

One thing I’m pretty sure this blog been subject to (thanks to Firestats’ fund of fascinating information on referrers) is a hack of restricted WordPress content using the Google cache. It just involves asking for things from the cache by modifying the url request string. (I’ve done that by accident I suspect)

That password-protected site of yours – it ain’t
It’s one of the simplest hacks we’ve seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it’s still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.

We don’t have any restricted or pay-per-view content,so no loss as far as this blog is concerned. But, it’s sort of blog-validating to be in there in a “dizzying number.” 🙂

Placebo effects

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The placebo effect is popular this week. There’s a New Scientist article that you can read half of without a log-in. There’s a badscience article in the Guardian, in which Ben Goldacre discusses research that suggests that things you think are healthy for you become so.

Topical for me. I managed to cover my legs with nettle stings from the knee down. This felt rather as if I’d smeared patches of petroleum jelly on my lower legs and set them alight. I still have burning blisters a couple of hours later. That was one mean nettle.

There was a brief time in which I assumed I’d been attacked by a mutant nettle and would now have amazing comic book crime-fighting powers that appeared whenever I got nettled.

The powers didn’t materialise. So. I started googling for remedies. Not just any remedies but things that I might have in the cupboard at a time when any nearby shop is shut. I’ve recently been buying antique household chemicals in yet another ludicrous attempt to make my life more ecologically pure. So I was hoping there would be some solution that involved borax or bicarb (having got the borax when I remembered that it is supposed to treat wasp stings, this being dying wasp season.)

I was more than happy to accept a placebo effect treatment. I’d already channelled Dr Hibbert from the Simpsons (“Anything I can give you would only be a placebo.” “Where can we get these placebos.”) As long as my legs stop burning, I’d suspend disbelief in almost anything.

WikiHow gave me answers that nettled me some more.

  1. Move away from the nettles to a nearby area, otherwise you could get stung again.
  2. Clean any mud and dirt from the affected area of the sting using clean, cold water on a clean cloth, towel or rag. Do not rub too hard or you will agitate the sting more.
  3. Look for a plant called the “dock plant”. This plant usually grows low conveniently around nettles. It has large leaves and a thick stem. Snap off a leaf with a stem.
  4. Chew on the end of the stem for about 3 seconds to soften the fiber (or rub with your forefinger and thumbnail), then rub the end of the stem on the sting.

Number 1 is comical. If you don’t have the sense to respond to a nettle sting by moving away from a nettle, you are probably a leper. In fact, unless you are actually standing in a nettle patch with your laptop using a wifi connection, you are almost certainly not getting actively stiung as you read it.

Anyway, the dock leaf advice that we all grew up with is almost certainly the very model of placebo effect advice. I doubt anyone on earth ever got real relief from a dock leaf. Searching for one does fill in time that you might otherwise spend whining and obsessing about the stings. And they are likely to be a bit cold and damp when your skin feels burning. But I bet that’s about it.

(Not that I wouldn’t have tried to find a dock leaf, but the offending nettle has forced itself through a slab of concrete and no handy docks have done the same.)

Anyway, rather than distracting myself in a futile dock leaf hunt, I got distracted by weird links that appeared in response to my Google search. Notably a link to natural pet care for stings. I was hoping it would say “smear sting with cream of tartar, cover with vinegar and brown paper,” or something reassuringly medieval like that, that I could at least try…

But, no. Even more off the wall. Some spray product that is a fair bit costlier than anything you’d buy in a pharmacy. Plus a link to Holistic pet consultation & Distance Energy Healing

Long Distance Pet Healing Service
Remote holistic energy healing for pet emergency, pet first aid, acute illness, chronic diseases, near death trauma, death-birth transition, physical symptoms, psychological & behavior cases. No shipping required.

Basically, you send money and somebody sends out holistic healing energy to your injured pet. (Or not, of course.)

The advertising blurb points out that, among its other advantages, this saves you wasting your time waiting for the express delivery service to bring you anything in exchange for your cash. The holistic healing is instant, as soon as your money is dispatched. 😀 You aren’t waiting for anything.

Does the placebo effect work on animals? Or just humans? If so, can I send you cash and you heal my nettle stings please?

Cunning new plan. I’ll pretend to myself that I’ve sent cash to holistic pet healers (placebo shopping) and just wait out the time I’d have spent failing to successfully pay for anything over tinterweb (if past form is any guide) and the stings should be miraculously healed.

Judges, 1

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Front page on today’s print Guardian was a story headed MI5 criticised for role in case of torture, rendition and secrecy about a judges’ ruling that some documents – as yet unspecified, as the ruling is secret – have to released for the man’s defence.

It’s hard to salvage any national pride from this disgusting story except:

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, the legal rights group also defending Mohamed, said: “The British government may have been accused of being Bush’s poodle, but the British courts remain bulldogs when it comes to human rights.”

Indeed. It’s wonderful that there are indeed still judges with respect for the rule of law.

However, the rest of the story makes me want to throw up. The details are so griim, I imagine that any man who reads it will be wincing.

It appears that Binyam Mohamed faces the death penalty, on the basis of admissions extracted under torture, in which the British government was, at the least, complicit. The Indepedent reported last year that there is photographic evidence of the torture.

Here’s David Miliband (whose father is currently spinning in his grave, methinks,)

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has provided the US with documents about the case, though the US has so far refused to release them. Miliband has declined to release further evidence about the case on grounds of national security, arguing that disclosure would harm Britain’s intelligence relationship with the US.

I fail to how “national security” would be threatened by the presentation of this evidence and the documents involved. Surely, this would only threaten our national belief in the veracity of the Foreign Office officials who’ve been assuring us that our hands are clean.

This story doesn’t appear on the BBC. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, because the BBC has reported the story in the past. But even the Daily Mail has a reasonable summary of the judges’ ruling, in a prominent place on their website. Even the Daily Mail.

The world news has been reporting terrorist atrocities all week. Some of these have taken place in exactly the sort of countries that use torture freely. Guess what? Torture doesn’t prevent terrorism. It breeds it.

And, to be honest, I could hardly think of more effective anti-western propaganda coup than the execution of people on the basis of admissions made under torture.