I am going to try and put down my thoughts and feelings about things more often. Mainly using this blog for when they don't fit in the post sizes of microblogging platforms. I find just being generally grumpy cathartic, but it does tend to annoy people other than the ones I want to annoy and can lead to misunderstandings.
As such I have started creating some general purpose footnotes for replies and arguments in response and will use this post to collect them.
I don't get told "Do your research" as often as a lot of other people on the internet, the advantage of not having a wide reach and being a white man I suppose.
But in the case that someone does use this ever so classic non-argument my response is "no".
Basically I am not a researcher, but then neither are they, I am however happy to spend time and the understanding of how research works to evaluate what other people have put out on a subject and rely on that. Now, it maybe that I am posting a video or article about the results of some science rather than the publication itself, for reasons of accessibility. But that doesn't mean that I think all YouTube videos are equal in terms of accuracy, or that a newspaper article is by definition scientific.
I am happy with my position, mainly because I have listened to and read experts on the matter, if you want to change my mind you will need to use actual arguments. I am aware of google[ref] and other search engines but I'm pretty sure that their indexing isn't peer reviewed. So if you are expecting me to take you seriously then saying that I can just search for things that support your point of view, rather than give me citations, I am going to refer you to the answer I gave a few moments ago.
Sheffield University Drama Studio Shearwood Rd, Sheffield S10 2TD
The show runs from Wednesday 14th to Saturday 17th February 2024 starting at 7:30pm. Doors open at 7:00pm and there will be some pre-show action from 7:15pm so don't be late!
A Discworld™️ play. Adapted by Stephen Briggs. 14th-17th February. Presented by Midland Players at the Sheffield University Drama Studio.
As ever a combination of factors are at play in how they are progressing, not least that I am not really concentrating on any one of them. Other things include remembering to have local copies of stuff before getting on trains, trying to do things in languages/ecosystems I am learning as I go along (the greatest lie kotlin ever told was sprinkling "fun" through the source ;->) and my star-sign being the opposite to completer finisher (with mercury in retrograde). Drop a comment if you have any questions.
Terrance Eden has written a blog post entitled “Silence Isn't Consent” it is a tale of someone hammering one of his sites with a bot and the writer of that bot being quite a bit of an arse.
The post left me with two strong things I wanted to say. The first is easy to express, that the use of the term “enthusiastic consent” and the specific linking to a PSHE post on the subject made me feel quite icky. To quote the post explicitly “I know what they meant and, it some contexts, it's an understandable shortcut.” but having your content scraped should not even as a metaphor be equated to sexual activity without consent.
The second was that this the issue of what people can and can't do with your content is important, and we have a framework for this, licences. Now Terrance doesn't say which of his sites the tool went after. If it was the blog he wrote the post on, he actively claims as much control over the copyright as he can, but if it was openbenches.org that is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. So it isn't (I don't think) possible to spot breach of that just by the content being scraped.
Thousands of tools are released every day. Am I expected to play whack-a-mole and shut down every new one that appears?
Terrance Eden - 'Silence Isn't Consent'
This 100% shouldn't need whack-a-mole, this activity should be covered by licences, this may need extra work, especially if we want to include rate limits in those agreements. And licencing needs to become as much covered by standard machine readable ways of highlighting as search engine inclusion (something in theory you specify once with headers, or meta-tags, or a text file, and everyone obeys.
However this is as much a “Nice to have” at this precise point as Terrance's ask to have an “opt in” to bots, and as for consent, even if you don't make icky equivalences about the web and the really real world, there is a ton of evidence that the vast majority of people on the internet don't understand it, even if reams of guidance are issued. just look at how badly most people implement it for cookies.
Under the cover of beating in-person voter fraud, a problem that simply just does not exist, the Tories have introduced a requirement for ID to vote. This will disenfranchise a lot of poor and marginalised people.
If you do not have one of the following:
Ten years after I wrote a story about sub-sub-contractors causing reputational problems for the BBC because the public will look at the big household name on the sign, not the logo on the badge there is another classic example.
After a night of riots in Swansea, someone with access to post to the HIGNFY twitter feed from the VIth form common room, tweeted a joke so old even the Goon Show probably decided they couldn't get away with it even if they lampshaded it. I won't repeat it here, but if you have welsh heritage you can probably guess with a fair degree of accuracy if I say it isn't about sheep or rain.
It's not by the BBC. It's not even by anyone working on HIGNFY. Hat Trick farms out the content of much of the HIGNFY Twitter feed to outside 'content providers'. I'm not a fan of much of it, and have said as much to producers.
— Ged Parsons (@GedParsons) May 21, 2021
The distance this person is from “Sitting in an office at Television Centre” is well known to those in the know, but to the vast majority of people on twitter “the sign above the door” says BBC and i don't really think they need any more reputational damage right now for the hypocrites in the rest of the media to latch on to.
This is something I have written for a project I am currently writing. Any corrections/suggestions gratefully recieved.
This is a selection of advice on setting and managing password when signing up to a site on the internet. The idea is that anyone who doesn't have a lot of experience with the world wide web isn't just thrown in at the deep end.
If you just want the short version: use a password manager and take advantage of not having to remember all your passwords to set a different complex password on every site. Also take especially good care of your email account password.
If you take nothing else away from reading this then I hope you start using a password manager. You may have heard that they are a risk. Yes they are, like all software it is incredibly difficult to ensure they are entirely free of errors however I subscribe to the view that Password managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one[1]. There are three main options for you:
When people talk about password managers, they invariably mean 3rd party software that you use to store your passwords. The full run down on how to pick on and why that one will be the right one for you would take a very long article itself but there are three main questions to ask yourself.
A few that you might want to look into are: Lastpass, 1Password, Bitwarden, Enpass, keepass.
If you use the same web browser whenever you use the internet then you can just use that to store passwords (it is probably nagging you to do this already). This can even work across multiple computers/devices if you are signed into the browser and it is syncing your data. All the major browsers offer this, although it can run into issues if you don't use the same brand of devices as your main computer. These built in password managers offer encrypted storage and complex password suggestions.
If you have ever worked in an office you have probably been told that writing passwords down is a terrible thing to do. And they will have been right, when thinking about the risks that exist in an office, which are mainly other employees and those attempting to get private company information to sell to competitors[2]. In your home life the risks are very different, and for most people that is online ne'er-do-wells trying to get your personal information and bank card numbers, in this situation passwords, written in a book, locked in a drawer is a sensible choice.
Now you have been convinced to use a password manager, you can just use the “generate password” feature and away you go (although you may need to fiddle with the settings to deal with different rules sites have about what needs to be in a password).
If you are not using a password manager, or yours doesn't come with a random password generator, try one of these ideas:
Otherwise known as Correct Horse Battery Staple after a cartoon, Three random words or #thinkrandom is a way to generate passwords that are both strong and memorable. This is the method the “Generate Password” button uses. I would actually advise against using this function if you have to remember the password as it will always be more memorable if you come up with the words yourself. However if you need inspiration or are using a password manager to remember the password, go right ahead. If you are on a site that wants numbers or punctuation characters, you can add some at the end or swap out letters i or l becomes 1, a becomes 4 and so on, or make up your own.
Another way to create memorable passwords that are difficult for someone else to guess is to take a phrase, saying, quote, song lyric or similar and use the initials. So “I see a little silhouetto of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, Will you do the Fandango?” becomes “IsalsoamSSWydtF?” if the password rules require numbers or punctuation characters you can substitute them in, or just use a phrase that has them in to start with “There are 106 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses!”
For a start, different risks need different levels of protection, this advice is good enough for most websites but might not fly for systems containing large amounts of sensitive, personal, or financial information. It also benefits from not having to line up with lots of external rules and regulations. If you want a good all round read on passwords try “Password policy: updating your approach”.
Even if they have other steps involved like security questions (don't forget you don't have to tell the truth for these, three random words works especially well for them if you might need to use them over the phone) most self-service password reset systems rely on the idea that your email account is secure and you are the only person who has access to it (or at least you trust everyone who does implicitly) so use a strong and unique password for your email (and if you can think about turning on 2 factor authentication).
One of the reasons to not remember passwords yourself is that best practice is to use a different one for every different login. Why? Because when someone gets hold of a stolen database of passwords, they will often try those passwords out on other sites, if people have used the same details there then they can get in. This is especially a problem these days where most sites don't ask you to set a separate user-name, but just use email addresses. There is a service called “Pwned Passwords” that will allow you to check if a password has appeared in one of the many databases that has been stolen and posted on the internet[3]. This is what we use to check your password before we will accept it. This functionality or similar is now being built into several password managers and similar products. If you are wondering about the name, then just understand that like any group nerds have their own jargon.
It depends. If your password is Fido2018 then it might not be your password but someone else's that is in the list and they don't have the association with your email address. After all how many hundreds of people will have got a dog in 2018 and called it Fido. You should probably still change it just in case it is your actual password (and in this case it is a very poor password). On the other hand if it is unlikely that anyone else has the same password and you have used it on multiple sites then it is probably best if the first thing you do after getting your new password manager is spend an evening changing all your passwords.
[1] There are of course people working in high security jobs for whom this doesn't hold true, but I don't expect them to be reading this advice.
[2] Your company risk profile may vary, but whatever it is, it is unlikely to be the cat trying to order Dreamies in bulk which is a multi-million-pound issue in home information security.
[3] There is a companion service called “Have I Been Pwned” that will take your email address and let you know if they appear in any stolen databases that they know of.
[4] This section of a very long blog post about the system explains how we can check a password is or isn't in the data set without either revealing the password to the service or downloading 650 million passwords to search ourselves.
Say you have decided that the way in which white people decide they are the default and don't bother to do any work to see how the technology they sell affects people with different skin colours is a lesser evil than actively joining the clan.
Say you also accept that not a single one of the companies that makes pulse oximeters managed to see a copy of Effects of Skin Pigmentation on Pulse Oximeter Accuracy at Low Saturation (April 2005) or similar.
In order to forgive oversite in this matter you also have to believe that collectively the companies manufacturing these devices and/or integrating them into more complex products have at no point seen any coverage of the controversy around Apple Watches on dark skin, which to be frank was everywhere five years ago.
I don't know about you, but as someone working in the technology product space, my first reaction whenever there is a story about a product failing in a similar space to mine is to go and ask the specialists "are we vulnerable to the same problem" because (and shamefully so) in terms of reputation damage, worse than being called out for racism, worse than being in the papers/Private Eye/The Register for your product being broken, is being the company whose product is still broken in a way that everyone noticed five years ago and fixed. After all while learning from your mistakes is very important, learning from other people's mistakes is better.
So either there are loads of product types in medical technology that are failing people because they don't engage with the wider technology space, or they spotted this and decided to keep their head down to avoid costs, or worst of all pulled on white hoods and decided that non-pale-skinned people weren't worth R&D time.
As I said at the beginning, there are those that are happy to dismiss accidental racism as acceptable and I'd be lying if I said I was confident I'd never done it myself, but in this case people are actively not doing their job.
P.S. If I have failed to spot someone more appropriate to make this point posting on it, please get in touch and let me know and I'll promote their writing instead.
Alongside all the other reasons to be watching the American elections I have been looking at how they implement the actual voting part. In previous years a lot of the coverage in this area has been about voting machines, from hanging chads to hacking. But a number of things this year seem like they are both good ideas in general and implementable in a UK general election.
This is the easiest to endorse, it has even been trialed in the UK (I'll see if I can find the report later). The way the trial worked, a centralised location, marking off voters on the actual paper copies of the electoral roll that would then be issued to polling stations to prevent repeats, fitted in with the british electoral esthetic that in general thinks the most complex piece of technology in use should be a peg.
One of the really big issues with polling stations in the UK is accessibility. So providing an alternate option that improves access to voting has to be a good thing. Given that there would be limited venues available in order to not require pre-registration it would probably need to also be a pre-election day activity. Also if we were going to stick to the idea that there is "one true copy" of the register then there would need to be a system to avoid allowing people to use both forms of early voting. Off the top of my head, the "inner envelope" part of postal voting, so until the voting lists can be cross checked the ballot can be linked to the voter and destroyed if a duplicate.
A tonne of the commentary running up to the election has been that the postal service has been used as a political football. As a consequence of this there have been a lot of articles around the subject of "What to do if your postal ballot doesn't arrive or is rejected". I was intrigued that being able to check up on this was a thing. And while this would require the use of technology, it is an enhancement (assuming a general low level of ballots missing/rejected) that if broken wouldn't halt the election so it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. So a simple website that tells people their ballot has been received, signatures matched etc. would allow people to spot rejections and do something about it.
"One way of explaining to somebody why it could make a significant difference if you can do things faster, is to provide a counter example. So, I had them write with a brick taped to their pencil , because it's only a matter of happenstance that the scale of our body and our tools and such lets us write as fast as we can. What if it were slow and tedious to write? A person doesn't have to work that way very long before starting to realize that our academic work, our books - a great deal would change in our world if that's how hard it had been to write."
The Augmented Knowledge Workshop
This quote and photo was posted today by a friend who was talking about the NLS workstation. It immediately resonated with me as a metaphor for how I feel when writing and I wondered if it worked as generalised metaphor for accessibility in digital tools. We have ensured everyone has access to and can use the pencil, are we trying to measure the relative performance users are getting out of the pencil.
One of the things that hands the pencil to me[1] is a spell checker. What removes the masonry is it actually being any good. This is surprisingly difficult to find trait, for example it is top of the list of things that keeps me paying to use MS Office over some otherwise excellent free alternatives. For those wondering, the difference is in how good they are are trying to work out what the jumble of letters I have input is supposed to be, excellence is the right word being suggested for all but the most egregious errors. Bad is I have to switch to googling to find the right answer. Terrible (and here I am convinced that the one built into Android has got markedly worse recently) is not getting the obvious one letter mistakes.
I know that this is hardly radical and in terms of my accessibility and usability expert friends I am not so much preaching to the choir but humming Bach to the organist but I feel it is a good reminder for us generalists. I'll now sit back and wait for someone to find a typo.
"Take down statues of people who murdered and enslaved people." Response from some people[1] "They take one of ours, we take one of theirs, pull down the statues of Muhammad[3]"because somehow there needs to be balance in statue removal, or
"Please consider looking at the names of your pubs and beers and remove racist names and iconography" "They'll be banning 'The White Horse' and 'The Red Lion' next"I don't want to dilute this post with examples from other situations. But it is amazing how often privileged people think someone else getting treated like a human being, and efforts being made to ensure they get the same rights as everyone else, as a loss of some of their rights.
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people who will attend the conference call. This will vary during the course of the first three emails, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after another meeting, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the start time of the conference call, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the call will log on. Recipriversexclusions now play a vital part in many branches of maths, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of actions in the minutes, the number of people in the conference call and what they are each prepared to be responsible for. (The number of people who actually have any responsibility is only a subphenomenon in this field.)
Numbers written on emails about conference calls do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other communications in any other parts of the universe.
With huge apologies to Douglas Adams.
The other thing that strikes me is how often the railway debate is seen as binary. As-is verses monolithic state owned-and-run.
This isn't just when talking about the future of the British railways but when citing the best and worst bits of the situation in other countries.
No small changes or mixed models allowed. All mentions of "and this happens where they have a nationalised system" talks of separation of running trains and infrastructure or that private companies can still run services or use of private contractors (I know lots of people are chiming sonorous dirges about outsourcing due to Carillion, but I don't think it will, or should, be going away).
What if a government stopped letting franchises for local services at first? Or transformed contracts to be a different sort of private operation like TfL do with the Overground etc? Has anyone done a comprehensive independent analysis of the options showing the pros and cons?
Is the all or nothing a straw man awaiting the flame or somehow the only two options?
and being me stepped in to suggest yes it probably would be that hard. If not much, much harderThe issue is that WhatsApp (Facebook) have a desire to monetise what goes through its servers in the US and that should concern us if using confidential information. Platforms like Signal might be the answer, or building in house wouldn’t be that hard.— Daniel McGuinness (@dannymcg) November 12, 2017
No, it is a routine level of difficulty for people who are available.— Adrian Midgley (@amidgley) November 12, 2017
Start with GNU and Ross Anderson's department.
“However, in the absence of such a rule, the willingness of an employer to take account of the wishes of a customer no longer to have the employer's services provided by a worker wearing an Islamic headscarf cannot be considered an occupational requirement that could rule out discrimination.”
