andylockran’s blog

David Davis - The Digital Debate

Posted by Andy under BBC, Chaos, Conspiracy Theory, Control, Debian, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Linux, Marketing, Political, Python, SBLUG Planet, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

Too many D’s for my liking… but a fantastic marketing point.

After David Davis resigned from the Commons today, the speech he gave focused on where technology and policy collide.

We will have, shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictator should have with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

We witness and assault on jury trial - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary abuse by the state, short cuts to our justice system will make our system neither firm nor fair and the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

It’s definately time for the debate to happen.  Just because we can do things with technology doesn’t mean we should.

Time to learn GPG

Posted by Andy under BBC, Conspiracy Theory, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Personal, Political, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

I think it’s about time that people became aware of the advantages of the GnuPrivacyGuard.

Why?

According the to BBC the government are considering keeping a database of every phone call made and every email sent. Now, it’s already possible to do this with your current email communications - and very few people bother to encrypt their mail to make sure that only the recipient can read it.

Email passes over a network in plain text - thereby anything sent in a email is easy to ’sniff’ out and read. With gpg - you encrypt the mail with a password - then the only person that can read the mail is the person that knows that password.. the recipient of the email.

It’s a clever system, so here’s a link to Red Hat Magazine’s article on GPG.

For a Windows-based solution, try WinGPG.

If we can’t change the system, then we at least need to protect ourselves from it.

Stop Tracking Me!

Posted by Andy under Conspiracy Theory, Control, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Hypothesising, Political, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

I’ve just read an article on The Register which detailed a system that Shopping Centres are now using to track people’s movements around a shopping centre using their Mobile Phone.  When a phone registers with a network, it gets a TMSI address (a bit like a dynamic IP address) - and this PATH software is able to locate a handset to within a couple of metres - good enough to track which shop punters are going into.

Even though the makers say that each individual TMSI is refreshed at each phone reset - with more and more people leaving their phones on for sustained periods - it’s not particularly outrageous to say that if I worked out my own TMSI, then the data is no longer anonymous.

Anyway - that’s a little beside the point.  When I walk into a shopping centre, there are plenty of CCTV cameras.  I believe the mandate for putting them there is for my protection, rather than tracking my consumer habits.  Imagine some ‘hoody’ walking into a shopping centre, stealing something - then getting his phone confiscated by Police to work out the TMSI to see where the ‘hoody’ has been for the last few hours.  It’s technically possible with this new system.

With the advance of technology, there are loads of completely un-sexy but massively important questions that need to be answered.  At the moment the government and authorities are simply seeing £’s.  There’s technology being put together and used that infringes far more on our civil liberties than someone owning a copy of a terrorism handbook.

So, let’s get un-sexy and start discussing what we want from technology.  Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

OLPC - Is advocacy a profitable business model?

Posted by Andy under Africa, BBC, BECTA, Conspiracy Theory, Debian, Digital Freedom, Freedom, Linux, Marketing, Microsoft, Personal, Political, Projects, Python, SBLUG Planet, Software, Tech Geek, Ubuntu

Having just read Rory Cellan-Jones article on the BBC News Website about the OLPC choosing to use the Windows XP operating system, I felt it sensible to put forward the reasons why I think it may/may not be a bad thing, and who’s going to benefit from the deal.

Education versus Training

Unfortunately, I think the UK IT Education System passed under this bridge so far up river, that it would require getting out of the river, and a hard trek upstream to ever get back to fixing the problem.  Since 1997 (the year I started secondary school, and the year the Labour government came into power), there has been a worrying trend toward using the education system as a training system.  I enjoyed my first couple of years IT lessons - we played with things like Logo - and used some very simple database software (key-plus?) to understand the power of databases.  We also used MS Excel to enter data into spreadsheets, and learn some basic formulae - as well as being told how to write the same formulae on the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software I had at home.

The difference that occurred in Year 9 (when RM ‘upgraded’ the IT suite at school) - was that we were now using MS Office.  Sure, we’d had Word and Excel on the PCs before, and I guess the financial costs of upgrading to Office rather than having the two separately are minimal, especially once you take into account the “educational discount” that schools are entitled to from Microsoft.

This meant that everything we did was MS based.  The simple database has gone, we were using MS Access.  In essence, IT lessons involved being trained in how to use basic productivity tools for our future office careers; which, in my opinion, is not something that the Education System should pay for.  I’d prefer to see people have an understanding of the difference between the ‘web’ and ‘email’;  the difference between what a Spreadsheet can accomplish in comparison with a Database; and hopefully a way for people to be taught on looking after their data, online and offline.
Advocacy as a Business Model

I recently watched a lecture given by Nicolas Negroponte in 1984.  In it he discussed his ideas for the future of Computer Interfaces.  It was an interesting talk, as he spoke about experiments he was doing in some African Countries on UI design.  However, he also noted that he’d done a dry-run of these experiments in New York previous to heading out to the African Continent.

In the school in New York, there was a child of around 14.  He didn’t know how to read and was seen as needing Special Needs treatment.  However, he was simply left to fend for himself in the IT rooms.  One of the days, a local council worker came to visit the school, and happened to notice this child in the library, so asked him what he was doing.  He showed him what he’d created on the screen using the ‘LOGO’ program.  The council visitor was suitably impressed, and asked him if he could do a little variation on his work.  Rather than simply say ‘no - I don’t know how,’ the child reached for the manual, worked out how to do it - and did it - clearly pleasing the visitor.

The visitor then went to the Principle’s Office (his reason for attending the school in the first place) and happened to mention the child.  The principle was certain that the visitor was the victim of some kind of ’set-up,’ therefore took the visitor down himself to see the child demo his abilities.  Lo and behold the child was able to do a further variation on his work by looking through the manual.

When asked why the child could read the manual, yet could not read the books provided to him in class, his answer was akin to the following: “What the teachers give me in class is boring, and I don’t get anything out of it.  However, when I’m on the computer and working, I can see the results of my efforts straight away and get rewarded for them.”

OLPC - Sugar UI

The Sugar UI for the OLPC project, for me, was a symbol of the ‘LOGO’ program for this child.  Someone that the teachers has written off as a massive underachiever had been able to produce ingenuity and learning independently - given the resources to do it.  Encouragement wasn’t necessary, as the learning process is something organic to the human mind.

The Sugar UI isn’t about being Free and Open Source (thus cheap) - it’s about so much more than that.  However, it’s also not the be-all and end-all of the OLPC project.  There are thousands of Open Source applications that can run on top of Windows XP that the OLPC users will be able to access.  It will also open up their opportunities for developing for FLOSS software on Windows Desktops - and thus be able to access the Windows Market in developed countries.

Why did OLPC do the deal?

For those of you that have been following OLPC, you’ll know that the ‘Intel Classmate’ has played some underhand tactics in order to get their processor on the OLPC - and then pulled out once they’d hijacked the relationships that OLPC had with important African leaders.  There’s so much corruption in Africa, that XP was probably an (unofficial/off the record) requirement.  Sometimes you’ve got to get in bed with the bad guys to help the small guys.

Where does this leave OLPC in the future?

OLPC ‘Ltd.’ will always be the pioneers to the concept of OLPC.  The aim is a noble one, yet in what is essentially a commercial market - pure advocacy fell to the power of multi-national marketing.  However, it has opened up a new market in the developed countries too - of Ultra Mobile Personal Computers - many of which run Free / Open Source Software.  This can only be a good thing in the long run, with more and more people using FLOSS and seeing the benefits.  Coupled with the coming-of-age of Ubuntu, and the fantastic marketing effort that’s coming with that, Nicolas Negroponte can be confident that where his company may have compromised - his idea is still being pushed by those supporting him.

Torsion Physics & BA038

Posted by Andy under Conspiracy Theory, Funny, Richard c. Hoagland, Space, Stupid, enterprisemission

*Disclaimer - this is a spoof article..

When I first started using the internet I came across a site called www.enterprisemission.com. Despite being quite a reputable source for conspiracy theories, something always made me go back and look over the site. I used to check it regularly as it had some good photos of the mars explorer mission back in ‘98 and some interesting takes on the millennium celebrations. Luckily the world hasn’t yet fallen into enemy hands (as predicted).

For some reason, unbeknown to me, I found myself back on the site this week. It’s changed from being a collection of articles to Richard C. Hoagland pushing as much merchandise as possible. Whereas before you could read a nice article - now you can only get a nice DVD. Progress. I scrolled down and found there was actually an article there I was able to read. This one. I’ll summarise to save you having to go there.

The article covers the anomalous sensors in the Shuttle Fuel Tanks. The big orange tanks contain supercooled hydrogen. There are four sensors in the bottom of the tank that tell the tank to detach when the fuel gets below a certain level, to prevent it blowing up whilst still attached to the rocket. NASA had noticed that regularly a sensor would fail - however, they’d also come back up randomly. Despite literally millions of dollars of engineering checks, the same anomalous results still occured when the supercooled fuel was in the tank.

Richard C. Hoagland cited some ancient maths know as torsion physics to explain the situation. Most of his work comes from applying ancient techniques. This one is from Soviet Experiments. At least the fundamentals have roots there anyway. However, this latest one is quite interesting. I quote:

“”"There is a REAL fifth force — the so-called “torsion field.”

The theoretical foundation of this new science was laid out by Einstein and Cartan over eighty years ago. In the original theory, these fields were ’static,’ meaning they could not move from point A to point B — only appearing as the basic ’spin forces’ within the atom.

Other Relativity theoreticians later proposed the possible existence of dynamic torsion fields — meaning that these ’spin forces’ can propagate through space, creating “action at a distance” effects.

Soviet laboratory experiments in the 1950s, conducted by the pioneering scientist Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, found irrefutable proof of these ‘dynamic torsion fields’ in action.

Kozyrev, and others after him, found that the “torsion field” can indeed affect electrical phenomena under certain circumstances. Electrical resistors can experience substantial changes in how conductive they are, especially when made of denser metals such as tungsten. Quartz crystal oscillators can have notable changes in their vibrational frequency. Photocells demonstrate measurable discrepancies in how much ‘work’ they can perform.

Electrical anomalies are a classic sign of torsion-field interference, as can be routinely seen in the well over 10,000 published scientific papers on the subject. This appears to be due to a unique coupling of electromagnetic energy and torsion fields — hidden away in Sir Edmund Whittaker’s original 200-plus “scalar potentials” before Heaviside eviscerated them down to the four we now use.

Given this scientific background, when we see disruptions in the electrical currents flowing through a platinum-based “ECO sensor,” buried at the bottom of a tank filled with super-cold liquid hydrogen, we have to expand our investigation.

Here’s the critical point: the shuttle’s almost equally-cold liquid OXYGEN tank “ECO sensors” have been TOTALLY UNAFFECTED by “whatever” this recurring problem is!

This indicates that it may be, in fact, some type of “torsion phenomenon” — uniquely associated with “ultra-cold, liquid HYDROGEN.”

Super-cooled hydrogen is already known to mysteriously crawl up the sides of a test-tube in a laboratory. This may be another anomaly explained by torsion-field activity. The utterly simplistic structure of the hydrogen atom, with just one “proton” and one “electron” — plus the lack of molecular vibration (temperature) in a super-cooled environment — may present the perfect antenna or conduit for torsion fields to move through.”"”

Now surely if the Air Engineers can’t work out which sensors caused the engine thrust to fail - and there’s no proof.. it could be torsion physics to blame..

The thing that caught my attention was in a BBC article entitled “The Mystery of Flight BA0318” where the journalist notes:

“But they will also be examining the fuel. It might have been contaminated. Or fuel ‘waxing’ may have occurred. This results from partial freezing, and pilots say the outside air temperature at some altitudes en route to the UK was down to minus 70 degrees that day - some of the coldest readings they could remember.”

Fascinating stuff I think you’ll agree. It could just be a coincidence.