So Google are in a bit of trouble because they captured a bunch of data from open wifi access points using their Street View cars.
Personally, I’m going to apply Hanlon’s razor to this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
Google were collecting wifi data for the purposes of performing rough geolocation without the aid of a GPS module; if you collect the approximate position of a wifi access point (identified by its SSID and MAC address), then you can later calculate the location of a mobile device by cross-referencing with what wifi access points it can see. This is perfectly legitimate — all this data was being broadcast in the clear into public areas, it’s not personally identifiable, and Google were never going to disclose it directly anyway; only the results obtained from the use of the data.
The contentious bit is that they hoovered up payload data as well as just SSIDs and MACs. This means emails, web pages, downloads etc. etc. This isn’t too horrendous as anything actually important and sensitive e.g. financial stuff, is encrypted at the transport layer by SSL anyway. The collected data could potentially be compromising and embarrassing however, and it is legally very dubious to collect and store.
Given that it’s a PR disaster and potentially illegal, I think the most plausible explanation here is cock-up. Somebody on the Street View team got sloppy and used some code from another part of the company without asking too many questions about what that code did, over and above what they were going to be using it for; said guy is now probably getting one hell of a bollocking.
I can smell blood in the water, and it ain’t Nick Clegg’s.
The debate and the Lib Dem surge it provoked have thrown this election campaign wide open, and it’s scaring the Fourth Estate shitless. I can’t blame them; they’ve been witness to an event which aptly demonstrated their own irrelevancy.
A Liberal Democrat was allowed to speak – unmediated – on equal terms with his rivals directly to the public, and the public liked what they saw. They didn’t need pundits or commentators to view events and decide what to think on their behalf (although various papers did try to sell conclusions totally at odds with the evidence; despite what the Mirror thought, Brown was not the winner). The journalists are used to setting the narrative, creating the structure of events as much as reporting them, and the story they wanted, expected, to tell us was of Dave, the compassionate Conservative, brushing Brown aside on his inevitable ascent into power.
But that hasn’t happened, and the papers are crapping themselves.
The current smear stories are laughable; one is an out-of-context quote from 8 years ago, the other is a non-story: Clegg received money from donations into his personal account, the money was declared with the relevant authorities, and the donors are satisfied that their money was used for the intended purpose. The worst case scenario you could claim, I suppose, is that he pocketed it. That would be a pretty serious allegation, and one the Telegraph is studious to avoid; likely because such an allegation would probably attract a libel suit that they would almost certainly lose.
If anybody had any real dirt on Clegg, they would have used it by now. Toppling a Lib Dem leader makes a pretty good story even when there isn’t an election. No, this latest behaviour just reeks of desperation. If this is really the worst they could dig up, you have to wonder what weak stuff they didn’t print.
They’re throwing whatever they can at Clegg to try and recapture their narrative for this election; to try and spin the Lib Dem surge as a temporary blip, a blip that will be corrected back to story we’re supposed to be reading, the story of the triumphal coronation procession of David Cameron, finally taking his rightful place behind the famous black door of Number 10.
Fuck that.
I think this election can be different; we finally have a chance here to smash two-party politics that we haven’t had in decades. Power doesn’t have to shift from Labour to Conservative and Conservative to Labour as sure as the swing of a pendulum; we can vote for something different. We can have something different. Words can’t quite express how happy I am that in my first General Election the choice isn’t just between the lesser of two evils.
I’ve had this discussion possibly a million times with various people, so I think I ought to post once what I think, and then never again get drawn into this argument. So, here goes.
Trident missiles are incredibly sophisticated, unimaginably destructive weapons; they enter low-earth orbit before releasing multiple 80-100 kiloton warheads onto their preprogrammed targets, utterly obliterating them within half-an-hour from the initial fire order. Each of these nukes is 4-5 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. There’s a submarine armed with a few dozen of these bombs constantly on patrol somewhere in the world. We have phenomenal, near instant, world-wide destructive power at our fingertips.
Trident, and its predecessor systems, were designed and built for an extremely specific purpose: to nuke the crap out of Soviet cities in the event of a Soviet first strike against Britain. As soon as we detect the Soviet launches, we issue the order to fire back, and then a few minutes later everybody dies. Well, the lucky ones, anyway.
That threat is gone. Here is the unassailable fact: we have no geopolitical enemies with the will or finances to build ICBMs. We can’t even build them ourselves; Trident is American technology. There are no such enemies on the horizon. People argue that we might not know who our enemies will be in 50 years, but look at the past: it wouldn’t take a genius to realise that the Russian Revolution and the rise of Soviet Communism would become a problem. There is not even a hint of a credible emerging threat on that sort of scale.
Sure, Iran or North Korea might well be developing nuclear weapons, but they have no method of deploying them to our shores, and certainly not in any kind of scale, or on timescales of less than an hour. Nor are they ever likely to! Trident is overkill for insurance against Iran. Similarly, the idea that Trident is a deterrent against China is laughable; they honestly have no reason to attack the West, and they have more than enough conventional firepower to fuck us right up anyway.
I’m not advocating Britain’s total unilateral disarmament. I agree that that would probably be a mistake. We should maintain a store of nuclear weapons, albeit probably reduced from our current stockpile, with some alternate deployment strategy, e.g. short-range missile or air drops, in order to counter any future threat.
We should, however, be comitted to a multilateral process of disarmament. How can we take the moral highground against Iran, telling them to not develop the bomb, when we’re replacing Trident? It makes us hypocrites, frankly. There’s nothing that hurts our diplomatic standing more.
To sum up: I don’t believe that there is a single possible reason why we would need to spend £100 billion to continue to be able to utterly annihiliate any location in the world in 15 minutes. We could easily maintain an ability to deploy bombs – we did a fairly good job of participating in shocking and awing Baghdad – while scaling back the ludicrous overkill represented by Trident. We should do a proper Strategic Defense Review to validate these ideas, but I find the idea of dogmatically sticking to a straight replacement for Trident unsettling.
And that’s all I have to say about that; comments are disabled on this post because I’m not really interested in discussing this topic any further. If you want to present your own views, please make your case on your own blog. Thanks.
I’m about to express an unpopular opinion, so I’m just going to come out and say it: I really want an iPad.
Yes, yes, I know, early adopters always get screwed, it’s locked down, doesn’t multitask, there’s no camera, there’s no Flash, etc. etc.
Sorry, I just don’t care. It’s thin, it’s light, it’s a goddamned multi-touch tablet that’s going to have awesome third-party app support on launch (not only running legacy iPhone apps, but I bet there are going to be dedicated iPad versions of the best apps, e.g. Tweetie) and with a UX that’s pretty much second to none.
The web-browsing experience on it looks phenomenal. I already browse a lot on my iPhone, and being able to do the same on a screen that size? That’s the stuff tech dreams are made of. I’ve been wanting a device like this for over a decade, and now it’s here I’m not going to get sniffy because it doesn’t have a camera. Can you even imagine taking a photo with an iPad? It’d be horrible!
Honestly, I can see something like the iPad quickly becoming my go-to computing device. Need to look something up on Wikipedia? Want to book some train tickets? Quickly checking email? Want to show a friend a YouTube video? You bet you’ll be reaching for an iPad rather than trudging to a desktop or even a laptop computer. It’ll also be great for stuff like iPlayer, Facebook, Twitter… The experience on offer here is already worth the price of entry, no matter what features they’ll put in the second gen.
The one thing that seems like a missed opportunity with the iPad is that even if you get the 3G version, which presumably has all necessary radio-gubbins, it doesn’t support making phone calls or sending SMS messages.
Now, I can almost understand the justification for not supporting phone calls; there’s a real risk of looking somewhat like a 21st Century Trigger-Happy TV sketch, holding a giant iPhone up to your ear.
That problem could be entirely avoided though if it was mandatory to use some kind of hands-free kit to make calls.
The perfect scenario would be Bluetooth; your iPad could sit in your bag, month-long standby life only somewhat curtailed by being connected permanently to a phone network with the Bluetooth radio powered up. All the necessary interaction with the iPad required to make and receive calls could be made wirelessly via a Bluetooth headset. Heck, it would finally validate the existence of the bloody things.
Then I wouldn’t need an iPhone any more; the only time I’d miss it would be those times when I really need portability, like looking at a map while walking about on foot – mostly using iPhone apps while walking is a bad idea anyway (not that’s stopped me walking and tweeting, I might add). This is entirely counteracted by the much better battery life and superior usability afforded by the larger screen.
It seems like such a good idea I’m surprised they haven’t done it.
Today is the three year anniversary of aiusepsi.co.uk, which is a hillariously frightening span of time.
I hope I’ve said things you people out there have enjoyed reading, I hope that I’ve become a better writer, a better thinker, and an all-round better person. Who the fuck knows, really, though.
Here’s to three more years, anyways.
The Union is currently in the midst of a plan known as Phase 3 to modernise the Union’s bar and nightclub areas in place of the existing dBs and da Vinci’s to make them, y’know, actually decent places to have a night out. I will concede that da Vinci’s is alright, but dB’s is sorely in need of a refurbishment.
Anyways, the Union recently ran a competition to rename these new bars as part of the Phase 3 development, and they’ve just released the final shortlist of names, along with the opportunity to vote which names will be adopted for the new nightclub and bar.
Shortlist for the nightclub:
- Iris
- Lab
- Metric
- Neighbourhood
- Theory
Shortlist for the bar:
- Consort
- Crown & Shield
- Library
- Quad
Now, I will be the first to admit that I did not submit any possible names; mostly this is because I’m ludicrously terrible at naming things. If I ever have children they’re probably going to be named by pasting pages from a baby name book onto a wall, then chucking darts until one strikes a name I like the sound of.
However, somebody at the Union seriously screwed up when they picked this shortlist. Some of the names are just plain terrible and others have the rather more significant problem that the collide with names of places already on campus; the most egregious example here is “Library”, which will have the rather unfortunate effect of making the sentences “Let’s meet at the Library” or “Let’s eat at the Library” ambiguous. I cannot possibly fathom how the brief enjoyment of a moment of irony derived from drinking in a bar called the Library could possibly outweigh the continuing irritation this could well generate for years and years.
“Quad” is broken for the same reason, although to a lesser extent. “Crown & Shield”, presumably drawn from the crown logo of the RCSU and the shield of the CGCU, is basically a massive fuck-you to the miners and the medics, the latter of which needs no further alienation from the rest of IC; it also makes it sound like a pub, which the new bar will not be, the pub niche is filled very well by the Union Bar.
The only half-decent name there is “Consort”, presumably drawn from the Prince Consort Road on which the Union sits, which possesses the fairly unique quality amongst the rest of actually sounding like a bar as well as being vaguely appropriate.
The names for the nightclub are mostly just plain awful. “Lab” is another unfortunate collision. The only decent one there is “Metric”, as you can tell by it being the runaway leader in the polling up to this point.
Speaking of the polling, it is rather severely flawed by the lack of an option to vote RON (re-open nominations) , something which is usually a central part of Union democracy. One wonders if President Ashley Brown‘s experience fighting the battle for election against RON left him with a grudge.
I jest, I jest. He’s been very good in engaging with the dialogue about this on Twitter, and that’s pretty damn admirable.
Anyway, I would suggest scrapping this poll altogether and starting a new one from scratch before this one is allowed to run on too long. Most people I’ve spoken to about these names share my opinion that they’re terrible. All I can say is, I don’t want to see this become a presidential election issue when the presidential candidates publish their election manifestos for next year. I can’t imagine anything quite as ignominious for the current president as to have his successor immediately strike down the voted-for Phase 3 names chosen under his stewardship.
Anyway, as the poll probably isn’t going to be called off, go here and vote for the least bad options. Thank you.
This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.© aiusepsi.co.uk 2010
The iPad
As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know, I took the plunge and bought myself an iPad, as a kind of post-exams, post-degree celebratory splurge.
I have to say, so far I’m really rather enjoying it. It feels like this slab of glass and metal has just arrived from the future; it has this sense of violating usual expectations simply by existing.
The screen is glossy and beautiful, and it feels dense and sturdy. It’s heavier than you’d initially expect, but certainly not uncomfortably so. I’m not exactly a bulgingly muscular he-man, but I don’t find it uncomfortable to hold. They’re not wrong about the keyboard being large, it’s actually pretty comfortable to type on with the iPad in your lap, and you can get a pretty respectable typing speed with a little practice.
Pages load fast, browsing is fluid, and video on sites like the iPlayer work great. I started watching a Bettany Hughes documentary on Atlantis earlier on here, and it was a very pleasant experience. YouTube videos too look great, and I just last night found a service (although I now remember being told about it by Will Otter) called TV Catchup that allows me to stream live TV directly to my iPad, which is pretty cool.
As apps go, iPhone applications look flat-out ridiculous on the iPad. There’s not really a way around that one. They run, but you have the choice of running them at normal size, isolated in the middle of your display, or blown-up to fullscreen where they really just look appalling, pixellated, only having the iPhone keyboard rather than the superior iPad one, etc. You’ll want to use dedicated iPad apps wherever possible.
The catalogue of available iPad apps is comparatively smaller than its iPhone stablemate but there are already some pretty impressive apps available, and the number will only increase as more developers make iPad optimised versions of their existing apps. For instance the brilliant Google Reader client for the iPhone Reeder should be releasing and iPad version soon, and I can only hope that the Twitter for iPhone app formerly known as Tweetie will too receive an iPad version.
The in-built apps all look and work great, and one thing that surprised me was that even on the wifi-only model, location still seems to work fairly accurately, if not pin-point. I thought there was no GPS hardware, so I suppose it’s doing a trick using wifi hotspots to figure out my location. Whatever it’s doing, that’s quite cool.
I have a feeling that i’m going to change my habits quite a bit having this. I’ve already been tempted to impulse-purchase a movie from iTunes, and the iBook store would look terribly appealing if I didn’t already have a backlog of physical books (currently going through Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman) and I can see a lot of sitting in bed, browsing, tweeting and reading email in my future. Apart from high-powered hard-core gaming and writing code, there isn’t a huge amount of reason to go turn on my PC any more.
Anyways, I really like it, so there. This post was entirely written on the iPad.
Tags: Apple, iPad, tech