Blondie’s Parallel Lines — top class album

Posted on Thursday 29th August 2019 at 16:10 by Gordon Ansell. With Categories: Review. Tags: Music, Entertainment. 217 words, reading time: less than 1 minute.

I've been musing about music again, this time it's the Parallel Lines album by Blondie.

Why can't the government overestimate a project for a change? HS2 is already allegedly going to be £30 billion over budget.

Google is proposing a way to build a more private web which suggests a reclassification of cookies amongst other things. From a user's perspective I think Google are coming at this from the wrong angle.

Zen Internet review after 9 years

Posted on Thursday 22nd August 2019 at 10:15 by Gordon Ansell. With Categories: Review. Tags: Tech, Products. 782 words, reading time: 3 minutes.

I've been using Zen Internet as my ISP for 9 years now and I always recommend them to people, so I thought it was about time I did a proper review of the broadband package I use.

If you’ve been blogging for a while — or even just following blogs — you’ll most likely have come across Tumblr. For those of you who’ve never experienced Tumblr, it’s a microblogging, pseudo-social networking site that’s known for its outré content.

It was launched in February 2007 and had 75,000 users within a fortnight. In 2013, it was bought by Yahoo! Inc. for $1.1 billion and in 2017 Yahoo! Inc. was itself bought by Verizon Communications.

Tumblr has recently been sold to a company called Automattic who are best-known for their Wordpress, open-source blogging software and their upmarket Wordpress services via wordpress.com.

Automattic reportedly paid $3 million for Tumblr, which is a bit of a drop from the $1.1 billion it was once worth, but I believe it’s found a good home with Automattic as blogging is where their expertise lies.

Tumblr currently hosts some 475 million blogs and attracts 400 million visitors every month, so it’s a significant chunk of internet real estate.

I link to a recent article on The Verge that carries an interview about the Tumblr acquisition with Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg. I found it interesting, anyway.

Cloudflare recently made a decision to stop protecting the reprehensible 8chan forum after 8chan was seen to be actively supporting many of the ultra-right wing, white-supremacist shootings we’ve seen recently in the US.

Cloudflare doesn’t publish any content itself, it just provides protection for content published elsewhere by ensuring said content can’t be taken offline by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

As soon as Cloudflare’s protection was withdrawn, hackers launched a DDoS attack against 8chan that took it offline and it’s still offline as I write.

As far as I can tell, no particular law compelled Cloudflare to make the decision to take 8chan offline. It would not be considered a publisher of content, to which some related laws would apply, but rather a distributer of content, to which fewer (if any) laws apply.

I can see the distinction between a publisher and a distributer. You wouldn’t expect a newsagent to be responsible for the content of the newspapers they distribute.

Cloudflare used its discretionary powers as a private company — able to choose to whom it provides services — to end its arrangement with 8chan. Cloudflare did not make this decision lightly but I think it was the correct decision in the circumstances.

But 8chan only remains offline due to the consistent DDoS attacks it’s suffering from hackers and this is an illegal activity itself. It’s hardly an ideal form of censorship and I suspect 8chan will eventually find another, suitably protected home anyway.

This all raises the issue of how we effectively go about dealing with censorship on the internet. I can’t imagine anything would work in the global sense because we can’t force laws on Russia or China, for example, but maybe Western democracies can come up with some some sort of consensus.

It has to be done carefully of course because there’s often a fine line between free speech and hate speech.

Ben Thompson has an interesting and well-thought out take on this.

I was recently reading an article about the expansion of the universe and how recent data suggests the figures we've been using might not be quite correct. This led me to look at how we measure this expansion - and, more generically, how we measure any cosmic distance - and I thought I'd write an article about it.

Of the things you need to know in life, this is a biggie. Anything that helps protect my consumption of the venerable potato is worthy of study.

Boffins at Exeter University have determined that herring gulls are more cautious about stealing your chips if they’re being watched. Alas they are career criminals and will most likely still steal them, but they’ll take 21 seconds longer on average to do so than those gulls that aren’t being watched.

As is typical of the criminal fraternity, a lot of them were uncooperative:

The scientists tried to test 74 gulls, but most would not participate.

Only 19 of them of them actively participated in the “looking at” and “looking away” test. I’d suggest they were just the lackeys and those higher up in the criminal network — the Godfeathers perhaps — avoided being linked to any crime.

The University of Exeter researchers said the study, conducted in coastal towns in Cornwall and published in the journal Biology Letters, shows how people might be able to reduce food-snatching by modifying their own behaviour.

Indeed, if I find myself in locomotion with a potato I now constantly crane my neck so I can lock eyes with these bewinged reprobates. This buys me 21 seconds to employ the “arm-over defence” as taught to me by Master Po during my stay at the Shaolin temple.

I had a problem with macOS's Mail app getting stuck 'moving messages' via my Microsoft Exchange account. This is how I solved the problem.

The article I link to is specifically related to bipolar but the sentiment is true of film and TV representations of all mental health disorders.

The why, though, is easy.

People who don’t suffer from mental illness just don’t understand it. That’s true of most illnesses of course, mental or otherwise, but mental illness isn’t afforded the same respect as other illnesses. It just isn’t.

Despite all the science pointing to mental illness being a combination of biological, genetic and environmental causes, just like many other illnesses, you’re more likely to be blamed for your mental illness. Many people don’t see you as “ill” and assume you should just be able to think yourself better.

The short supply of empathy for these conditions is why so many sufferers find themselves living on the edges of society, either physically or emotionally.

Sadly such opinions are often prevalent even in medical circles, so it’s not surprising TV and film gets it wrong too.

Priti Patel is pushing for weakened encryption in the UK as part of the so-called Snooper's Charter. She wants tech firms to provide backdoors in end-to-end encryption so intelligence services can access it at will. There are many problems with this idea.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is what we use to describe gravity and it has passed many experimental tests since Einstein devised it in 1915.

One of the things Einstein postulated is the pseudo-force we feel when we’re accelerated, such as being pressed back into our seats, is equivalent to the gravitational force.

He said that:

Inertial Mass x Acceleration = Gravitational Mass x Intensity of Gravitational Field

This explains why astronaut David Scott’s hammer and feather fell at the same speed on the moon during Apollo 15. The inertia of a hammer (i.e. its resistance to movement) is greater than the inertia of a feather to a degree that cancels out the differing gravitational attraction of the masses due to gravity, hence they fall at the same speed (in a vacuum — we see differences on Earth due to air resistance).

To be fair, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and many others all had ideas about the Equivalence Principle long before Einstein, but Einstein brought it all together, reframed it and expanded it in his General Theory of Relativity.

One bit that Einstein expanded — and is hence called the Einstein Equivalence Principle — is:

The outcome of any local non-gravitational experiment in a freely falling laboratory is independent of the velocity of the laboratory and its location in spacetime.

This basically states that all the laws of physics are the same everywhere. It’s easy to say “of course they are” because that’s our everyday experience, but these things need to be tested under extreme conditions to be certain a theory holds true.

The details of Einstein’s theory also highlight differences to Newton’s theory of gravitation and many of the proofs for General Relativity set out to find these predicted differences, which are often only apparent in extreme circumstances.

So the article I link to describes an experiment to test things by looking at the light from a star orbiting a black hole, which is a fairly extreme set of conditions.

The experiment found the redshifts of the light it observed are 43,000 times more likely under Einstein’s theories than they would be under Newton’s.

Einstein wins again but scientists still expect his theories to break at some point when they come up against Quantum Mechanics in even more extreme conditions.

One sexy aside to this experiment — for anyone who hasn’t nodded off by now — is the situation with gravitational redshift. An object attempting to climb away from close to a black hole (or any mass for that matter) should lose energy and slow down because the gravitational forces of the black hole will be pulling it backwards.

This applies to light photons too. But the speed of light is constant, so how do we slow it down? Well, we don’t and Quantum Mechanics comes to the rescue. Light can be either a wave or a particle (but not both in any given experiment) and we need to see it as a wave here. The energy of light is related to its frequency, so by stretching out its waves, the frequency drops and so does its energy. This energy is what’s lost to the black hole, and stretched out light waves move from the blue end of the spectrum to the red end, hence ‘redshift’.

So Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity combine to provide the solution, which is ironic given that the theories spend much of their time at loggerheads these days.

I'm a bit fed up with 'robot tests' that websites ask me to pass before permitting me access. Half the time I simply don't bother and visit another website instead. Is there no better way to do this?

I’ve always thought 12 was a good number. I slightly prefer six because it’s great with eggs. I can eat any number of eggs from the six and still maintain some sort of symmetry — or at least a pleasing pattern — with the eggs that remain in the box. Even removing one egg isn’t too bad, although it leaves the least pleasing remainder.

Twelve isn’t quite so good because removing one egg leaves things unbalanced, which is why I always have two boiled eggs for breakfast. But it’s still better than 10, which, as the BBC video shows, is often hard to divide up into useful parts.

If you’re in IT you’re probably used to working in bases different to ten, most notably hexadecimal and of course binary, but I like the idea of a dozenal base.

It’s just me that cares about the symmetry of eggs in a box isn’t it?

I think the group photo from the 1927 Solvay Conference is iconic and possibly the most brainpower the world's even seen in one picture.

I'm not a big fan of Python but it has been so long since I've used it that I wanted to refresh my memory about the language. This is how I went about installing Python and Django on macOS 10.14 via Homebrew and pip.

5G is something that happens to other people.

I’ve recently noticed quite a few articles along the lines of the one I link to here, where organisations pay out ransom fees to hackers in order to recover their data.

Of course these are only the ones we hear about and I have no doubt many companies have paid off ransomware hackers in secret.

It is selfish to the extreme because you’re simply supplying funds that will help the hackers exploit other organisations.

I’d argue that the paying off of hackers ought to be illegal. In fact I thought it was already illegal to aid and abet a criminal.

It seems insurers are often at the root of these payouts:

The town's insurer was contacted by the hackers and negotiated ransom payment of 42 bitcoins, or roughly $500,000. Officials felt that paying the ransom was the most efficient way of regaining computer access.

This is very much a case of “I’m alright Jack” and they’re missing the bigger picture or, most likely, simply don’t care about it.

Kevin Beaumont, a cyber-security specialist, sums it up in the article:

Organisations are financing their attackers to be better than them - and sooner or later that situation may snowball for everybody else trying to defend their networks.

I have been following the misfortunes of a US company called Prenda Law for some time now.

Basically, they were copyright trolls targeting people who downloaded porn. They’d send such people a demand for $3,000 in order to settle their copyright infringement case and avoid the embarrassment of having their porn proclivities exposed in court.

But Prenda Law thought they could maximise their profits if they uploaded the copyright infringing porn to pirate sites and file sharing networks in the first place, thus baiting people to download it.

Paul Hansmeier, the lawyer in charge of Prenda, was estimated to have made $3m from this scam in three years.

The courts however took a dim view of Prenda’s activities. The judge said:

It is almost incalculable how much your abuse of trust has harmed the administration of justice.

Whereupon she sentenced him to 14 years and told him to pay $1.5m back to the victims he’d scammed.

Hansmeier was rumbled many years ago but he has since been spouting all sorts of nonsense to various courts in order to try to evade justice, which didn’t help his case at all.

Why are many sites' privacy policies so long? Laws have changed regarding online privacy recently (GDPR, for example) but I'm not sure your typical user is any better informed and I think complexity prevents many people from asserting their rights and options.

I was doing some thinking, which is always dangerous, and decided the insurance industry needs reform. If you exclude nonsense like 'peace of mind', most people get very little for their premiums.

Having been unimpressed with a lot of Apple's announcements in the last year or so, WWDC 2019 has much more I like. I take a look at some of my favourites here.

No, that’s not the opening to a joke, bats really do live a long time.

Typically, a mammal’s longevity falls broadly in line with its mass. As mass increases, metabolism slows and lifespans get longer. We humans are a species that bucks the trend because we live considerably longer than mammals of similar or even greater mass than ourselves, but the formula holds in general.

There are 19 species of mammals that live longer than us relative to their body mass and 18 of those are bats.

So what gives? It turns out bats are very good at maintaining their chromosomes.

Just yesterday I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about how the last two weeks seem to have flown by and my friend asked if there were ways we could slow time down a bit.

I suggested he could consider jumping into a black hole or accelerating himself to light speed and that the tools for these endeavours might be purchased cheaply via one of Amazon’s ‘Deals of the Day’.

Then an article pops up on Quanta Magazine that talks about the origins of time and the universe itself, particularly in relation to Hawking’s Shuttlecock Universe proposal.

When I look at what’s going on in the world I quite often have a downer on humanity in general and certain individuals specifically, but I think it’s astonishing that our thinking has advanced to the stage where we can consider the origins of an entire universe.

In their view, the only sensible contour is one that scans through real values (as opposed to imaginary values, which involve the square roots of negative numbers) for a variable called “lapse.” Lapse is essentially the height of each possible shuttlecock universe — the distance it takes to reach a certain diameter. Lacking a causal element, lapse is not quite our usual notion of time.

Get your head around that.

OmniFocus 3 for macOS - tags make everything better

Posted on Thursday 6th June 2019 at 05:55 by Gordon Ansell. With Categories: Review. Tags: OmniFocus, Tech, GTD, Software, Apple, macOS. 641 words, reading time: 3 minutes.

OmniFocus has been my task manager of choice for a number of years now and, with the release of OmniFocus 3 for macOS, I thought I'd jot down how I think things have improved.

I've always like Panic's software and I was amazed to fine out that they plan to break into the hardware market too. They're making a handheld games console called Playdate and I quite like what I see.