Microsoft Vista for home users was released this week. There remain concerns that it has security problems. E.g. the BBC headlined its Vista announcement as “Vista security claim challenged”. It reported the release as something of a damp squib for Microsoft – hinting at a leaky product with relatively few sales.

In fairness to Microsoft, this may be something of a kneejerk anti-Microsoft response. Windows operating systems have long had reputations for being leaky. However, it’s more likely that Microsoft products aren’t particularly vulnerable to intruders They are just much more widely dispersed and more likely to be on home users’ PCs that are wide-open to attack.

According to the Register, surely better informed than the BBC,

Microsoft launched its latest operating system – Windows Vista – on Monday, a move that will make finding easily exploitable vulnerabilities a lot harder, according to security researchers.

The Register points out that security was the main focus behind the development of Vista and Microsoft seem to have addressed most of the current security issues.

Other operating systems tend to be more secure the lower the number of users. Why would hackers bother developing complex intrusion strategies for operating systems like FreeBSD, that can be found on relatively few machines, unless the development turns out to be really easy? Attacks on Windows machines must bring much greater rewards in terms of numbers of compromised machines, even if it’s initially harder to find vulnerabilities and write the code.

Where Open Source software seems less vulnerable is in the fact that end-users usually have some control over what their operating systems are doing and how. If a Windows user’s anti-virus software doesnt identify an intrusion – pretty likely as lots of malware is designed to disable the AV and trick you into thinking it’s still working – it is well nigh impossible to identify it by looking at file changes.

All aspects of Windows drop files all over the hard disk, some of which are just taking up disk space (on the offchance you decide to install an obscure variant of a scanner that’s available only in Sumatra) and some of which are crucial system components. The registry can give the King James Bible a serious run for its money on size. An average user’s registry would not fit in the hard disk space of a PC from ten years ago. Entries are duplicated, imaginary users are created at will – have you ever had anyone use your PC as “guest”- do you really need an Admin user and Guest user, as well as yourself, on a single user PC.

All this guff mounts up. So when you have worm that burrows into the registry and changes a couple of obscure keys – how on earth do you tell? You have a random file, “diceymalwarefilename.exe”, in the Windows PreFetch directory, how on earth are you supposed to know that. You didn’t even know you had a PreFetch directory.

Install a reasonable number of apps – that’s why you have a PC, surely – and you have numbers of files that match the population figures for several European countries. Each one drops files wherever it sees fit. A goodly number start processes that run every time you start up, even though you may have forgotten you had even installed the thing months before.

These are all arguments for Linux, not because it’s intrinsically more secure, but because at least the end-user can identify some of the things going on on his or her own PC. The one you’ve paid for. You didn’t sign a licence agreement when you got the operating system or applications that said “I am happy for the manufacturer to do what ever they see fit on my hard disk and not to give me any information about what they are doing”

(Maybe you did, did you ever read one? Me neither.)

Otherwise Vista looks like it will be pretty good. The BBC’s vaunted Apple alternative is just a joke. Apple seems more like a toy manufacturer at the moment than a serious PC contender. They are making nice toys/fashion items, grossly overpriced.

A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings – our own not very remote ancestors – who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.

There are items about kids’ weight on the BBC website and The Guardian (G2 bit) today. They combine to add another ton of guilt onto parents, especially as parents are atavistically afraid of starving their children.

The Guardian has pages about how to stop your kids becoming overweight and the BBC is fretting about anorexia. They are both pushing the age boundaries downwards for concern over children’s eating, to birth in the case of the Guardian article; and to 8-years old on the BBC site.

I really have problems with this obsessing over weight and pushing our obsessions onto children. Ironically the Guardian article continually intercuts pages of obsessing over weight with the message that you shouldn’t stress your kids about dieting and their weight. That seems incredibly contradictory advice to me and some of the advice seems quite demented. Only allow one hour of TV a day, as kids gain a stone a year for every hour of TV that they watch. Argh. What possible evidence supports this? The writer refers to the food traffic lighting scheme – eat as much as you like of green foods (basically veg) a third of your palm size portion of amber foods (potatoes, bread, rice, dairy) and eat red foods once or twice a week (treats). This sounds exactly like the sort of rules people get from Weightwatchers or Slimmers World. There are lots of other injunctions about mealtime rules and what to put in a packed lunch and so on.

Do I have to use the pseudoscience word repeatedly? I’ll just use it once and leave you to apply it with Tourette-style enthusiasm at random.

There are justified complaints about advertising “foods” aimed at children but noone seems to complain about dragging kids into our insanely weight-obsessed culture, where food takes on infinite bizarre meanings.

The BBC goes to the other extreme, following the well-worn path of :

• Identify an issue that can be seen as a pressing social problem
• Stir up concern by claiming that kids are at risk
• You may have to go a year younger every couple of months when you trawl for victims, because anorexic thirteen year-olds no longer cut it as shock-horror stories
• It’s always a good idea to have some medical element. People are interested in health. It holds the possibility of a cure

The common point in both these stories is the issue of control. Both the Guardian and BBC writers acknowledge that food is an area where children seek control. The proferred solutions seem to consist of imposing controls, whether in the home or in hospital Anorexics or Obesity Units. The anorexic kids are being subject to control by being force-fed the very foods that other kids are supposed to be deprived of.

She has to eat a daily diet of about 2,500 calories consisting of all the food she hates most – chocolate, chips, cream and cheese. It’s a prospect she dreads.

Common sense seems to suggest to me that food shouldn’t become a control issue. Adults’ anxieties over food and fatness and thinness are being transmitted to children. Who insist on learning from reality rather than words – picking up all the things about us that we don’t want them to acknowledge and treating our hypocritical words with contempt. Maybe generally negotiating controls could actually move the conflict into other areas of the relationship between adults and children and might serve some purpose.

Also, maybe we could stop fighting biology. Kids love sweet things – it’s a survival mechanism. They naturally eat when they are hungry and their bodies store excess to grow from. They naturally burst with life and enthusiasm for running and climbing and exploring – all the things that burn their food and build their bodies. As adults, we generally don’t live like this – being constantly active, eating when we are hungry – which is why we can’t regulate our own hunger. We bring up kids to live as we do then get confused when their body mechanisms respond. Or their minds respond to their own hunger for control and the social obsessions with weight by exerting control over their bodies through starving them.

As a society, we can’t bear to see our own attitudes to our bodies mirrored so mercilessly by our offspring. We get obsessed with forcing them to show us a pretty mirror and we distract ourselves from living like human beings by trying to make our kids look as if we do.

It’s five minutes to midnight on The Doomsday Clock, kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since shortly the atomic bomb was first used.

In case you don’t know, the clock represents how close the world is to annihilation (midnight). Some confusion here because I assumed it had been at five to midnight since it was invented, but apparently, it hasn’t been this close since the height of the cold war.

When BAS scientists met to assess the current threat level, they targeted climate change due to carbon emissions as the new villain. They don’t mean that climate change itself will trigger doomsday but that its impact will lead to wars, which combined with the proliferation of nuclear materials and technology will be likely to go nuclear.

This is a very important point and worth making over and over. And it’s a good use of an image that hits home the message.

All the same, I’m a bit sceptical of the assumption that they have an authority beyond their own field because they are nuclear scientists. Stephen Hawking is brought in to push the message home with his added mystical authority. The message is coming across as “we, as a group who understand the science, also understand the politics, so this is a scientific conclusion.” It’s not “science” but an attempt to make a point about the social consequences of science.

It certainly isn’t science. I don’t know the timescale they are using so it’s not clear if five minutes represents a year, a century or five standard minutes. It’s not possible to predict the social consequences of the mutually reinforcing interactions between atomic technology and environmental change. There aren’t a set of equations that can predict global politics. This lessens the impact of their very powerful “five minutes to midnight” image. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as anything other than a conceptual device.

They are obviously intelligent and have reached the obvious conclusions from the evidence. Maybe people will pay some attention. I certainly hope so, although I would rather they didn’t have to set themselves up as secular popes to get the message across.

Tags: Science, Bad Science, doomsday, climate, Carbon Emissions, Global warming, Nuclear Science, Doomsday Clock, Philosophy, society

OK, most ID blogs are beyond parody but this is quite a stunning archive of tosh uncommondescent.com.

One post that took my fancy says:

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches outer space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A scientist.
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches inner space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A religious nut.

His argument is that SETI fall into the first category and his fellow religious nuts into the second. On the offchance that this isn’t blindingly obvious to you, SETI aren’t searching for “an” intelligent superbeing, who planned everything in the universe. They are searching for mortal beings with enough similar technological knowledge to ours to match our broadcasts. Maybe the name, SETI, confused him. I think I can speak for SETI, having once had its program installed on my computer, when I say that no one would be more surised that the SETI people if they get a response from an Egyptian god living in the distant reaches of the galaxy.

The grasp on reality shown in the second half of that comparison is even slimmer. I thought that meditating on one’s inner god-nature was a Buddhist thing. Certainly, anyone who examines their inner nature in search of some sense of transcendence is experimenting with their consciousness. I can’t really see what that has to do with Intelligent Design. I mistakenly thought that ID involved teaching kids that the theory of evolution was irreligious nonsense.

It appears to be a search for “unseen intelligent being” that lives inside you. Well, I must respect Dave Scot’s and Roddy Bullock’s (the perpretrators of this tosh) attempt to find one, but I think that, on the evidence of the blog, the search is doomed to failure.

It’s probably gilding the lily here, but

(a) the comments show that other ID supporters have failed to locate intelligence inside themselves either. One GilDodgeon says

“This is one of the best essays on the topic I have ever read. It should be framed, and should be required reading in every junior high and high school science class.”

2 paragraphs make an essay? One of the best defences of ID? (Speaks volumes about the rest) Required reading in every school? Argh! Argh! Argh!

(b) There is a line in the article

Darwin would be disappointed to find his eponymous ism has driven such a venomous schism..”

that just screams “Ned Flanders” to me.

Karl Popper’s classic characterisation of scientific thought as providing hypotheses which can be falsified provides a pretty unarguable definition of science as far as I can see. There used to be much debate about this in A level sociology courses (which is where my limited knowledge of epistemology comes from) and there are other valid descriptions of how science works.

However, what distinguishes science from other types of thought is that scientific theories can be tested.

Intelligent design cannot be tested. I can’t really bring myself to say that the Theory of Intelligent Design can’t be tested. I don’t think it constitutes much of a theory, in that it doesn’t explain anything. I can’t even understand why believers feel threatened by evolutionary theory, which basically comes down to –

An organism that is best fitted to its environment is more likely to survive and reproduce than one that isn’t. It is likely to pass on the characteristics that helped it to survive to its offspring. This means that, over time, groups of that organism will tend to show more of the traits that favour survival and the characteristics of the population will change.

I know this is a simplistic interpretation (due to my limited understanding) but it is a theory that can be tested. Quite simply, if populations of organisms didn’t adapt to changes in their environments, it would be easy to spot this.

But, Intelligent Design? It is an “explanation” that cannot be tested. Anyone is entitled to believe whatever they like about the unknowable. I believe hundreds of eccentric things myself. Even I would have a problem if someone suggested that my ideas should be taught in schools as alternatives to science.

This was sparked by TW’s posts intelligent-design-in-the-uk and blogwar.

The good (in an odd way) funny Korean monster movie, “The Host,” sparked this post. The villains in this movie are all Americans. (I did say it was Korean, didn’t I?)

It’s certainly not a political movie, but it has an occasional wry political subtext. Part of which is that the villains – the pathologist who dumps the chemicals that create the monster; the doctor who lobotomises the ineffectual and narcoleptic hero Gang-du; and the military team who dump “Agent Yellow” on the monster and on the demonstrating students – are all Americans.

You don’t need a degree in Media Studies to work out that there’s something being communicated here.
Obviously, the Koreans have a long history of US involvement that’s left at best some ambivalence. You might expect them to cast American actors as villains. But it got me wondering why the villains in US TV and movies are always English men. It may be that the US public expects the Queen’s redcoats to turn up at any moment and demand all that unpaid tea tax plus interest. (After all, they have laws allowing each citizen the right to bear arms, on the off-chance that the UK will suddenly remember it used to be our most lucrative colony.)

Far from posing a threat, England has been uniquely co-operative – some would say slavish at points – to the US for well over 200 years. So why do they hate us so much that any male actor with an RSC-style delivery will never be out of work if he moves across the Atlantic? There is such a thing as bearing a grudge too long, surely.

Ah ha! They don’t hate us. They hate Europe. And we’re the only Europeans who speak a language they can understand.

Europe is big. It’s rich. If it stopped its internal squabbling long enough to look out for its continental interests, it would be the global superpower. Obviously, the European continent is, and has always been, a squabbling mass of tribes. We hate each other much more than the Americans hate us and we’ve had LOADS of practice.

Europe doesn’t act as a global ruler, so other countries don’t hate us much any more. In fact, we can project a sort of cuddly moral high ground image as the continent that has the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross and the International war crimes courts.
Other continents usually don’t speak English and would provide villains that might really feed on the anger of Americans. If every villain were Chinese or African or South American or Indian, there would be some reasonable questions raised about stirring up a nationalist frenzy. Europeans are OK because they aren’t going to war with us any time in the foreseeable future. That was “with” as in “against,” of course.

Aside: Why use British actors, at all? We all know that the average American 10- year-old can out act almost any British Shakespearean actor. In fact, our current TV and movie productions are generally so teeth-grindingly poor that we couldn’t compete against an evening’s HBO schedule with the best from a year’s worth of UK output. (You may be arguing “What about Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or the Office or whoever?” I said “generally.” ) Our films are so bad that we even infected Samuel L Jackson. He usually has the capacity to make even movie excreta watchable (e.g The Man) Put him and Robbie Carlyle (also a pretty good actor) together in a British movie and you have The 51st State. Need I say more? (OK, if I must then, Brad Pitt in some execrable London gangster movie where he was a gypsy bare-knuckle fighter) Point taken, I think.
Why do they hate us and yet let us humiliate their best actors? That will have to be another blog.