I was searching around on the peer-to-peer networks yesterday, looking for a new copy of Microsoft Office to download. What I found instead was a whole load of letters and documents on someone’s hard drive. He had obviously set up his client wrong and was accidentally sharing everything on his computer. I had to get off to work so I downloaded a couple of interesting looking things to read later. When I did read them I was amazed, I won’t go into the details because I think it might turn out to be a rather interesting story but I was very keen to see what other stuff I could find on his computer today.
So I was doing a very specific search today for the name of one of the documents I found yesterday. I knew that nobody would have a document with the exact same name apart from that one computer. Once I’d found the computer I could then try and browse around for more interesting stuff. So I was very surprised when the program found more than a hundred matches. I was after something called “442 Kharzid SENT”. The matches were called things like “442 Kharzid sent.zip”, “442 Kharzid sent DEMO.zip”, even “442 Kharzid sent_Teen_Porn.jpg”, and they were all the same size and all available on the same computer. I suspect that these files must all be viruses, maybe designed to allow spammers to use other people’s machines to send their spam. I downloaded one (most viruses don’t affect Macintosh computers) but Norton Anti-virus didn’t recognise anything wrong. Maybe this virus is too new for them to be aware of it.
This is a very scary idea for file sharers. If you were searching for the normal kinds of things that people look for, something that would return loads of results, you’d have no way of knowing if some of those results were actually being created on purpose in order to get you to download a virus. I have a feeling this story may be appearing in the mainstream media in a few month’s time.
I’ve always found the idea that gay people are born that way a little depressing. Gay men are usually more stylish, funnier, cooler dancers and better at empathising with people than straight guys. They have a much wider range of sexual partners available to them and casual sex is much more acceptable to those partners. It just seems like more fun being gay. Unfortunately I have a very hard time finding any man sexually attractive and I’ve always believed that I was simply born this way; there was no cure.
However help may be at hand. The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality says that people become gay because of things that happen to them in their childhood; they’re born with the same sexual preferences as anyone else. And they believe that people’s sexual orientation can be changed by the use of therapy. The site is rather biased towards people who want to stop being gay, presumably because they want to become right-wing politicians or live in a really small town, but obviously the therapy could be used to enhance the patient instead of restricting his desires. I couldn’t find any sections on heterosexual reorientation in the site but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
I was listening to an interview with the boss of the brewery conglomerate SABMiller, Graham Mackay. His multinational company is one of the world’s largest producers of alcoholic drinks. He was talking about their expansion into China. Currently they are the second biggest operator in China with 37 breweries. He says that their production there is increasing faster than in anywhere else in the world but that it’s not making much money for him at the moment because the profit margins are so small.
It amazes me that reporters never seem to consider that alcohol is a drug and that in some ways Mackay is rather like a ‘Drugs Baron’. The only way that breweries can increase their profits is by taking business from other breweries or by getting people to drink more alcohol. We’d all be hearing a lot of consternation and condemnation in the media if these expansion plans were aimed at increasing and profiting from the number of heroin or cocaine addicts in the west.
There are almost no social benefits from more people drinking or from the same people drinking more. There are obviously plenty of disadvantages; domestic violence, child abuse, car accidents, addiction, illness, anti-social behaviour, decreased productivity… the list could go on for a while. Western societies spend a lot of time trying to deal with the problems that people like Mackay profit from. I don’t think we should be so uncritical of his plans for expansion.
Isn’t it strange how the people who murdered Margaret Hassan couldn’t bring themselves to behead her? In moral or in strategic terms it just doesn’t make any sense. Surely they didn’t believe that any of the people they killed deserved to die, they must have reasoned that those people were simply innocent victims of the conflict, what the Americans would call collateral damage. In which case I can’t understand why they killed Margaret Hassan by shooting her, but videoed it anyway. If the film they released is supposed to cause shock and terror then why not make it as gory as possible? If they wanted to come across as good guys, merciful and kind, then why not just let her go? I am really puzzled by this. Surely they don’t imagine that their mothers will be saying “There, see, my boy’s not so bad” down at the market today.
I want a print Gocco kit. I read about this machine on Mark Pawson’s site and it sounds brilliant. It lets you do screen printing onto all sorts of things and it’s really simple and cheap. The PG-11 kit is less than £150. Apart from anything else I’d finally get to use the colour separation features in Illustrator. Who doesn’t, in their heart of hearts, really aspire to being a print-maker?
NEHOCdirect - On-line Catalogue and shopping
I was looking at the ingredients list on a “Pro-Flapjack Bar” my girlfriend bought at work. It had some weird things in it, including Hydrolysed Collagen. I had a vague idea that this might be some weird animal by-product so I had a look around. It is really hard to find out how this ingredient is made but as far as I can tell it’s a bit like Gelatine, i.e. it’s made out of boiled down animal carcasses. A vegetarian site had this to say about the places where this process is carried out; it’s funny to think that people who buy something as wholesome sounding as a flapjack bar might actually be eating cat or dog!
Caring Consumer: “Rendering plants process the bodies of millions of tons of dead animals every year, transforming decaying flesh and bones into profitable animal ingredients. The primary source of rendered animals is slaughterhouses, which provide the ‘inedible’ parts of all animals killed for food. The bodies of companion animals who are euthanized in animal shelters wind up at rendering plants, too. One small plant in Quebec renders 10 tons of dogs and cats a week, a sobering reminder of the horrible dog and cat overpopulation problem with which shelters must cope.”
Constance Linder’s book reports are marvellous examples of concise writing. Sure she comes up with the occasional malapropism and she uses some words in quite weird contexts, but I like her straighforward approach and her optimism.
The film studios have been experimenting with technology that is supposed to detect when someone is using a camcorder to pirate a film. They’ve got this gadget that sits at the front of the cinema and looks around for camera lenses; if it sees one it takes a photo of the naughty pirate and calls the cops. Let’s leave aside the discussions about whether this will work or if it invades people’s privacy - the idea’s insane because it means that they are spending money on quality control for the pirate DVD industry.
At the moment if someone offers you a cheap DVD of the latest blockbuster you’re probably not going to buy it because you’ll assume it’s a crappy copy made with a camcorder with terrible sound quality and someone’s head in the way. If the film moguls could stamp out all pirate camcorders overnight then you’d know for sure that the pirate DVD you were being offered must have somehow been copied from the cinema release. Even if it was quite expensive the chances are that it would be decent quality.
So the studios are embarking on a plan that will increase the value of pirate DVDs and thus the profit margin for the pirates. Why are they doing this? Either I’m a genius for seeing the implications or they are seriously stupid for not. Or maybe they are a bunch of frustrated, bitter old men who can’t stand the idea of losing even the slightest bit of control over their ‘product’ and who don’t mind if that means that the people who work in their industry will lose out, in other words just the same as the record industry.
The Lancet report that the ‘liberation’ of Iraq has led to the deaths of 100,000 people was denied by Tony Blair. He said that “The Iraqi ministry of health have put out figures for the six months up to October of just over 3,000 deaths, but that includes people who are either terrorists or insurgents themselves killed or alternatively people who are the victims of terrorist attack.” The Prime Minister is wriggling out of the fact that those people would still be alive now if there had been no invasion. He is also suggesting that some human lives are worth more than others and that some deaths are not undesirable.
According to an article in the Economist he is also just plain wrong. The Economist says that it is reasonable to say that 60,000 have been killed violently since the invasion, it also says that the total of confirmed deaths in press reports is 15,000. Blair must know that the current regime in Iraq has a real interest in under-reporting the casualty figures. He doesn’t seem to have lost his habit of believing even the most suspect evidence when it suits him.
The Independent newspaper has an editorial, which says that the current US attack on Fallujah hasn’t been very widely criticised because many people consider that it was inevitable. They are right because if one accepts the logic of this war then it is obviously necessary for the occupying army to have control over the whole country, rather than just pockets of it. And it is commonly accepted that despite the rights or wrongs of the invasion, once a country has been invaded it is right to stay and clear up the mess.
I find it hard to imagine that if the ‘coalition’ were to leave Iraq today there would be more people killed in the chaos that would follow than there will be in the battles that America will have to fight in order to carry out elections. And then once those elections have been held and the US withdraws, it seems impossible that the government that they leave will be strong enough or have enough credibility to prevent the country collapsing into civil war anyway. When Bush decided to go to war, and Blair decided to support him, the fate of these men, women and children, some probably not even born yet, was already decided; they were going to die one way or the other. And those of us living in the US or UK share the responsibility for these miserable deaths. I can’t begin to imagine the price we may have to pay for this guilt.
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