I am resisting my overwhelming compulsion to discuss the Wire until my hands seize up from RSI.

However, I have recently resurfaced from complete immersion in a few episodes at once and can’t put a stopper on this altogether. The last time that I was swept up into a world populated by so many diverse characters, who are true-to-life and extravagantly over-the-top at the same time, was when I read Charles Dickens as a child.

Especially in Series 4, the Wire’s world of hypocrites, self-serving officials, cheats, villains, child criminals, abandoned urchins and flawed heroes is a modern mirror for Dickens’ depiction of the world of the Victorian underclass.

A Carnegie Mellon University study of anti-phishing toolbars has concluded that they are all pretty pesh.

Reports produced by  SmartWare & 3sharp –  companies that turn out to have been funded by Microsoft and  Mozilla – had claimed that Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 were great at detecting fake urls.  No prizes for guessing which company funded the report that came up with which finding. 

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh – in a study funded by  rather more disinterested organisations including the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office - looked at ten browser toolbars: Microsoft Explorer 7, eBay,Google, Netcraft (Mozilla), Netscape, Cloudmark (Mozilla), Earthlink,  Geotrust’s TrustWatch, Stanford University’s Spoofguard and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor.
The best performers were – Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Cloudmark, and Explorer 7 – but these found only 85 percent of fraudulent websites.  This is a good score but far from paerect and coul;d give you a false sense of security. None of the others found more than 50  percent. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ignominiously failed to identify any phishing sites.(Source:  TECHWORLD)

From the Register-

The police and Home Office demanding legal powers to insist that every CCTV camera in Britain (of which there are supposedly over 4 million) be upgraded so it can provide good enough footage to be used as police evidence and be able to host technologies to identify people automatically

Scary.

Adding to some of the odd things about technorati, I am going to revisit some complaints that have been made previously. Are blogs dying under the weight of spamblogs?

Let’s take lomography as an example. This is an interesting topic and you would think there were more than a handful of people who were obsessive enough about this that the blogsphere would be well populated. As a counter weight “Lomography” returns over 30,000 hits on flickr, with lomo generating over a hundred thousand hits. People are obsessive about it 🙂

A search on technorati (http://www.technorati.com/ tag/ Lomography) turns up some interesting results. Sadly, you have to wade through some real dross until you hit an actual page about lomography. When I did the search just now, only four of the first ten were not single page advert blogs (eg Pinhole lomography.com) which appear to serve no other purpose than try to get you to buy something (or worse are just an inbound link farm).

Of the four which were legit one was the previous post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/19/digital-storage/), which although it is excellent ( 🙂 ) it isn’t really about lomography – it just has a link to Technorati search on the topic.

Well the web 2.0 may well be the social networking phenomenon to change the web, but so far it is a marketing scam of massive proportions.

Technorati tags: Lomography, Cameras, Digital Photography, Editing, Effects, Technology, Technorati

Flickr tags: lomography, lomo

This is getting repetitive. Technorati, once more, is being weird. The last post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/19/digital-storage/) has shown up on technorati within 2 minutes of the post being made. Previous ones took more than two days.

It makes less than no sense to me. If anyone has any idea how technorati decides which pings to honour and which to ignore – please, please, please let me know.

Well, as my recent interest in digital photography has taken off lately I have found myself reading some of the “idiots” guides available on the net.

While, generally, these have been helpful – before reading them I had no idea what the different f-stop values meant and the like – there are some odd misconceptions being bandied around.

I really get the feeling that these books are written by people who are actually wetfilm enthusiasts but are trying to convert themselves at the same time.

The main thing which interests me are when they have a list of “pros and cons” comparing digital with wetfilm. l love these! You almost always see some reasonable examples mixed in with what is (in my opinion of course) the nonsense.

Things like being able to take a bazillion photographs (effectively unlimited storage, you can just copy them off whatever memory card you are using and use it again) are a massive pro on digital cameras. Compare the utility of going out for the day with a roll of 36 exposure film compared to a 1Gb SD-Ram card!

Also, with digital cameras you get the chance to review your photos there and then. So when you take that memorable photograph you don’t have to wait until you get home to realise you had your thumb half over the lens and the image is lost for ever – you can check and reshoot as often as you want.

The pro of digital cameras which really gets me is the storage. Often books and articles will be filled with the benefits of using digital media to store pictures. They will go on about how the picture will never fade, you can make unlimited copies and all will be identical and how the digital copy will remain intact, with no loss of quality for ever.

This is nonsense. While it may well be technically true, it hides an underlying falsehood. In work, on the wall, is a picture taken in 1898. This picture is 108 years old. It is black and white, and a bit faded around the edges but I can look at it. Anyone who walks past it can look at it. I could copy it if I wanted, although the bright light may further degrade it. This is the wonder of wetfilm pictures.

Now take a digital picture. Imagine for the sake of argument I had a digital picture that was a mere ten years old (one tenth of the age of the photo on the wall). It is in the JPEG format which is good because we can still read JPGs but it was archived onto a 5.25″ floppy disk. Well that’s that then. I have nothing which can extract data from a floppy disk like that any more. No one I know has anything which will do it. I could take it to a specialist retailer and have it done for me – but what specialist equipment is needed to look at the hundred year old photograph.

Now moving close to the modern day, I have a digital picture which is only three years old. It is JPEG, which is good but for archiving purposes it (and some others) were zipped onto five floppy disks. Again this is a big problem for me as my PC has no floppy drive. My laptop doesn’t either – and my mobile phone certainly doesn’t. Once more I have no method of accessing this image – which is only one twentieth of the age of the one at work, without purchasing more, specialised, equipment.

This problem continues on many levels. For example, JPEG photographs are a “lossy” format so some picture quality is lost no matter how hard you try. As a result of this, some camera manufacturers allow you to take RAW pictures, but this adds a new problem. You then need specialist software to view the pictures (and convert them to JPG etc), which kind of defeats the point. Also, not all camera manufacturers have compatible RAW formats so there is little reason to be confident that the RAW data you have today will be viewable next week.

In addition to this, online storage services aren’t much better. You may think uploading all your date to Flickr/Google/Whoever is great and solves all your backup issues but it doesn’t. What happens if you lose your account details? What happens if your host decides to charge (or charge more) for its services? What happens if they fold and get rid of all the data? However you look at it, its gone.

In all, while there is good reason to think digital has advantages – I am not convinced long term storage is really one of them.

(note: The pictures here are just nice ones I found on Flickr – I did not take them myself)

The Guardian (Friday 17 November) reported that it had cracked the super-secure biometric passport in under 48 hours by using brute force password cracking and an RFID reader costing under £200.

This is, of course, the technology that will be used on the ID card, except that the ID card will have infinitely more personal information that can be be read by anyone with enough cash to buy a reader and a copy of a password cracker. Not that anyone with hostile intent will need to go to that trouble when everyone’s most private information will be available to a quarter of a million health service employees at the touch of a keyboard.

To be honest, the passport reading wasn’t quite as much of a victory over the password encryption technology as the Guardian presented it as. They said there was no capacity to change anything on the embedded chip but the article pointed out that it left the passwords open to cloning, as demonstrated by a German a month ago.

The Guardian article made the excellent point, which can’t be repeated often enough, but which never seems to get through to government – these ID technologies will be a godsend to identity thieves. They will be no major obstacle to terrorists or organised crime – in fact they may represent a revenue stream. They will threaten the liberties of everybody else.

Stourhead Lake in Autumn Sunlight,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Fantastic weather for this time of year.

Well, Technorati is up to its usual tricks. The interesting links post (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/16/interesting-links-3/) is still not visible on Technorati, two days after it was posted.

Bah.

I wish someone would write a better blog-indexing service. Still, if I really hated it that much I would write one myself…

Well, sooner than normal, some links which are well worth visiting:

• New Scientist Podcast
• Beyond Belief (new scientist subscription required)
• New Scientist Podcast (iTunes link)
• Wild Chronicles (iTunes link)
• Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast (iTunes link)

If you don’t have access to the full “Beyond Belief” article a lot of it is included in the podcast. I can not honestly say I am convinced that a conference looking at how science has “supplanted” God is a good thing.

Apart from anything else, this begins to create the impression “Science” is a replacement for Religious belief. Hopefully this is not the case but with more than a few of the people who contributed to this conference I am not sure. It is, as I see it, like saying bananas are a replacement for camera film. The two are totally different things.

Creating a conflict between the two is not a “GoodThingâ„¢” and simply provides more ammunition for the Religious Right to demonise science.

Oh well.

In a recent post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/16/more-fan-stuff-on-the-wire/) heather writes “I’m still not 100% sure how to get to the podcasts…” – well the solution is at hand.

Assuming you are looking for quality science and technology podcasts the place to look is:

Science & Medicine or Technology

If for some reason the iTunes store URL doesn’t work then try these steps from the iTunes store..

According to Wikipedia, the Wire has been called “the best show on television by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian , the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and the Philadelphia Daily News (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series))

No argument there.

You might think I’m over the top in my enthusiasm for the Wire but on I-tunes there are some really fanatical reviews. I’m still not 100% sure how to get to the podcasts but you can go there from HBO’s site http://www.hbo.com/thewire/ The best way seems to be to click on the HBO podcast links on http://www.hbo.com/thewire/downloads/ and so on.

The customer reviews say things like

“Light years ahead of everything on television. If you’re not watching you’re missing out on history”

I was going to blog here about why the Wire is so special, but I’ve been distracted by the wealth of material from HBO and in podcasts. This material ranges from really informative discussion (e.g. David Simon discusses how it is rooted in real-world Baltimore society and that it’s more about class than race, for instance, which seemed pretty obvious to me but I’m not American) to blatantly silly (buy Jermaine’s – supposed – pick of classic hip hop.) It will keep you engrossed for hours if you like the Wire.

However, it appears that not many people do. The viewing figures are supposed to be poor. I suspect it may be too demanding of a lot of the audience. Granted, thinking about social relations doesn’t normally make for very good escapist entertainment. The genius of the Wire is to work as crime show at the same time as (not so ) popular entertainment.

New Scientist “special report” (titled: Home-schooling special- Preach your children well – us – 11 November 2006 – New Scientist) looks at how Home Schooling in the US has become a new tool in the religious right’s campaign to remove non-biblically-accepted teaching.

The scary part is the bit about how the Patrick Henry College benefits it’s students because “Government-schooled children have spent their time constructing their own truths” – obviously PHC don’t have to learn what is and isn’t truth, they are obedient enough to be told and must accept it.

Scary that this is the worlds superpower…

Technorati tags: Home Schooling, Intelligent Design, Discovery Institute, Patrick Henry College

del.icio.us tags: Education, Religion, PHC, Patrick Henry College, Conservative, Christianity, Right Wing

Following on from the last post about .Net magazine, I thought I should add in a few comments. Not about the magazine, which despite the initial optimism caused by the first few issues of the new format is still fairly poor but about the website.

www.netmag.co.uk

This is actually fairly good now. The layout is drastically improved and the content is getting better all the time.

All I can say is, well done .Net.

Will wonders never cease! Today’s issue of .net magazine arrived and for the first time in a LONG time I found myself “nodding my head” in agreement with some of the editorials.

On page 17, “Gary Marshall’s Big Mouth” has an article titled “Idiot Wind” and, coming from a net magazine it is certainly a breath of fresh air.

After reading so many articles, online and in print, about how great community powered websites are (including some wikipedia fans and not so fans here… :-)), reading Gary Marshall comment on how these sites highlight the herd mentality and generally descent to the lowest common denominator is very good.

The .net pull quote reads:

Show me any social powered website and I’ll show you the people who are dragging it down.

Not the best possible quote but he has a point! My personal favourites are his comments on the “naive optimism of the web 2.0 cheerleaders.” Personally, I wouldn’t have been so polite.

Sadly, it doesnt look like www.netmag.co.uk has put the article on line yet – If they do, I will link to it here.