Green Thing is Website Of The Day

Green Thing has been selected by the Steve Wright programme on BBC Radio 2 as their Website Of The Day. I did that! (well, part of it -the real hard work was done by Tom and Colin…)

Getting passworded RSS feeds in Mail.app working

Password-protected RSS feeds in Mail are a royal PITA to set up - basically Mail.app doesn’t support password authentication natively (or at least it doesn’t support entering the uid/passwords natively.) Here’s a sneaky work-around:

* Add the feed into Mail.app as normal, and let it whinge about not having a password
* Go to Safari, and set it to be the default RSS reader if it isn’t already
* Drop the feed URL into the address field, and respond to the authentication challenge - and allow the details to be saved into your Keychain
* Go back to Mail, where the feed will have automagically updated using the Keychain settings.

Apparently the “make Safari the default reader” step is optional, but your 1.609344 kilometerage may vary.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx

More cat changes

Ack. Another Leopard change that’s cost me half-an-hour of messing around: lookupd is gone, replaced instead by dscacheutil.

So now flushing the DNS cache is done by dscacheutil -flushcache.

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, unix

We’re all going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s all the fault of <insert minority here>

The Daily Mail pretty much sums up every I *don’t* stand for - a never-ending stream of petty “oh-woe-is-me-the world’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-and-has-been-since-the-60s-and-I-blame-the-immigrants-and
-single-mothers-and-the-BBC” spluttery conservatism. Apart from anything else, it’s the home of wingnut-in-chief Melanie Phillips, although I’m never quite sure how she manages to get to a keyboard to write her pieces - to read them you’d assume that she spends all her time cowering under her bed waiting for the Islamic fundamentalist apocolypse that’s supposed to be on the way.

(Incidentally, it’s worth checking out the Melanie Phillips link, if only to see the choice of stock photo that’s been chosen to illustrate the article: happy - and very white - family with perfect teeth and dimple-chinned children cavorting in the park, while the captions suggests that “for years we have watched the undermining of the traditional family - resulting in a rising tide of juvenile misery and social breakdown”. I can’t help but think the point of the article would have been better reinforced with a photo of a pram-faced Kappa-wearing teenager dragging a snot-nosed toddler towards a dole office.)

Having said all that, the Daily Fascist Mail is also a source of huge entertainment value thanks to the comment boards. The actual columns themselves get subedited, which tones down the invective a bit, but the comments are the work of the readers - bashing out their diatribes from behind spittle-flecked screens while humming a chorus or two of “Jerusalem”. Which means you get absolute gems like this, from John F (who surely must reside in Tunbridge Wells?)

“Its a shame the Military Chiefs are not parking their tanks on the Whitehall lawns. They would have my full support if they did plus I would be more than willing to help them string up Brown, Darling, Browne and all the NuLab thugs at Traitors Gate.

In addition we can also throw the Guardianistas and the Left wing BBC in the Towers Dungeons to rot for 10 years.”

Dear god, can they be *more* stupid?

I’m still shaking my head over Datagate. Mainly over the sheer incompetent idiocy that personifies Alistair Darling. Here’s the exchanges in the Commons yesterday, courtesy of Hansard and They Work For You:

In reply to George Osborne, he said this:

The last point that the hon. Gentleman makes is in relation to identity cards. The key thing about identity cards is, of course, that they will mean that information is protected by personal biometric information. The problem at present is that, because we do not have that protection, information is much more vulnerable than it should be.

Then later on, a Tory backbencher, Douglas Carswell, asked this:

If the Government have managed to lose 25 million confidential personal records in this way, how can we possibly trust them to run an ID card scheme nationally?

Darling replied:

As I said, one of the problems is that the information we have at the moment can, in certain circumstances, be used for fraudulent purposes by people who have no right to use it. The point about ID cards is that because they will introduce biometric information they will mean that one can be more certain that the person asking for or dealing with that information has a legal right to do so.

That puzzled me - whether the ID card has biometric information or not tells you absolutely nothing about whether the person asking for information has any rights to do so. The biometrics are related to the ID card holder, not the inquirer.

At first, I put this down to the fact that standing at the Dispatch Box probably isn’t the best place to be devising cogent answers to questions, although skill in debating is allegedly one of the success criteria of a politician. But then later another Tory, Andrew Rathoban, asked another question:

The Chancellor has given my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) reassurances that any personal information stored for ID cards will be safe. However, after this astonishing display of incompetence, why would anybody have any faith in the Government or trust them to be able to keep personal information secure?

Darling replied:

For the reason that ID cards match up biometric information with the information that is held, so that the person holding the information knows that the person asking for it is legally entitled to it. That is the difference between many other systems, which do not have that biometric lock, and the ID card system, which would have that biometric lock. It seems to me that that would give me and the hon. Gentleman, as individuals, far more protection than there is at the moment.

Same answer. Which I find astounding. Darling would have been extensively briefed before walking into the Commons chamber, and you can be damn sure that ID cards and their whys and wherefores would have been part of that briefing. So either he’s fundamentally misunderstood the nature of biometrics as they relate to ID cards, or the briefing he’s received is completely wrong. Either way, the second most senior member of the Government doesn’t understand something that is going to get upwards of £20 billion hosed at it. For fuck’s sake…

And you seriously expect us to trust you with ID cards?

This story just gets better and better. First it was 7 million, now it’s 25 million - the names, addresses and dates of birth for every child in the UK, and bank account and National Insurance numbers of their parents burnt onto two CDs and sent off in the internal post, only to be lost in transit.

A few things strike me here. First is that there’s one person stupid enough not to realise that this might not be such a good idea, and that self-same person has the admin privileges to be able to dump 25 million records onto a CD. Or perhaps there’s a whole management chain of command who were just cool with the whole idea, and felt that this was perfectly normal and OK. Then there’s the fact that the data wasn’t encrypted in any way - the press reports talk about the CDs being “password protected” rather than encrypted, which I would lay good money means a password-protected zip file. And that’s before you think about that much data being casually flung around in an internal mail system - brown transit envelopes with scribbled-out names in boxes. Two CDs is just over a gigabyte of data, which could be transferred in minutes over an SSL-encrypted private line.

Being a cynical type, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the discs *had* arrived, and had just got lost - they’re probably sat in the bottom of someone’s in-tray right now, assuming that the recipient hadn’t turned them up after the shit hit the fan and immediately dropped them into the bottom of the nearest canal to avoid the bollocking of their career. After all, it’s not every lost envelope that results in the abrupt end of the chairman’s career, is it?

The actual risk to anyone’s data, let alone their bank account, is pretty low. But this couldn’t have come at a better time - ID cards are becoming more and more of a hot topic, then there’s the Spine onto which all our medical records are supposedly going to be loaded. The sight of Alistair Darling standing on his hind legs behind the dispatch box and attempting to make out that somehow, ID cards would be the answer to this problem because they are *biometric* means one of two things - either he’s even more stupid and cretinous than I would otherwise have believed possible (and given that he’s a NuLabour cabinet minister, that’s not entirely ruled out); or he’s the kind of cynical power-grabbing control freak whose hands should be nowhere near the levers of power. Actually, he was more likely to be regurgitating a briefing from his civil servants - and given that the drivers of the database state have all had and continue to have conflicting interests in devising these kinds of monumental IT projects (Private Eyes ad nauseum if you don’t believe me) we can be pretty sure that this particular reassurance is utter, gold-plated bollocks.

It’s made my mind up - there’s no way I’m giving implied consent for my medical records to be uploaded onto the Spine. And I’m upping my donation to the Open Rights Group and No2ID, because the next time shit like this happens it’s likely to be a whole lot more serious than names and addresses and bank account numbers. I’m less worried about tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theories about how ID cards are a tool of the New World Order than I am about simple, time-honoured bureaucratic cock-ups - if my ability to exist in a civilised society rests with the integrity of a record that has had EDS and the Home Office anywhere near it, then I’m scared.

Coffee, wifi and OS choice

There’s a row of shops just down the road from the office which is over-populated with coffee shops and eateries - within a line of three units, there’s an outpost of the ubiquitous Starbucks, a Portugese-run greasy-spoon-style cafe and a Sicilian coffee bar. What fascinates me is the despite the manifest superiority of the coffee, the food and the whole retail experience in the independents, people still queue up for the drek that is Starbucks.

And then this morning I was struck by something else - both of the coffee outlets offer wifi, so there’s always a small gaggle of people sitting behind laptop screens. In Starbucks it’s the usual £££ T-Mobile offer, whereas the Sicilian cafe has prominent “free wifi” signs in the windows. In Starbucks, the laptops are invariably running Windows, but in little Sicily they’re more often than not Macs. Is there some kind of causal relationship going on here?

Inside out IT

This post from Andrew McAfee hit the nail right on the head for me, in summing up the attitude of many corporate IT functions to the world outside their empires:

“Among the least kind terms I hear used to describe IT organizations are ‘priesthood’ and ‘empire.’ These words imply a belief that corporate IT departments consciously exclude outsiders and outside influences, and are concerned primarily with expanding themselves.”

That’s certainly been my experience - in fact, in a previous life the IT function went as far as housing itself in a separate building, and restricted access to the rest of the business - the customers - to a few senior managers and the service desk function. And consequently, the attitude to changes in the world around them could best be described as indifference, if not outright denial.

In the end, you’ve got a choice if you’re a corporate IT shop. You can either go with the flow, or watch impotently as your customers vote with their feet and service themselves outside the firewall.