March 18, 2010 · 9:15 am

Given enough eyeballs, all politicians are shallow

Alert readers may have perceived the thundering cloven hooves of an approaching General Election. Thousands of women are even now bearing down heavily to ensure sufficient raw materials for baby-smooching photo ops with slobbering, faux-chummy moat-owners and mortgage flippers. Between now and – most likely – May 6th (curse my predictive non-skills!) – pols of all flavours, none of them particularly lickable, will promise the earth while secretly planning to deliver a couple of inconsequential sods.

It’s a familiar, draining process. Manifestos full of smiling multiracial faces, hero-posing alongside commitments that mysteriously become aspirations for the n+1th term as soon as the ballot boxes go back into the ballot box box. Those smiling faces, like the swirling angels at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, melt and burn into evil spirits sucking the souls of the electorate into a Westminster-based heaven allegory. Er, spoiler alert.

During the campaign we’ll see interview after interview where the usual reporters ask the usual questions and get the usual non-answers: “I’m glad you asked me that, Krishnan, let me answer something else”; “Look, the real question you should be asking is…”; “You should be focusing on the things the public care about, like…”; “Typical of the left/right wing BBC to…”. And my favourite double act: “The only poll that matters is the one on…” vs “Our internal polling is showing something entirely different”. Over, and over, and over…

This happens because complete honesty tends to be a career-limiting move for a politician. To climb the greasy pole – to even grasp your hands around its base – you need to become one with the grease. You don’t so much climb up the pole as oleaginate via osmosis and rise by capillary action. Dare to level with the electorate – by which I mean truly level, not say “Let me be clear here” because that’s code for “I am saying words to fill dead air while I formulate my non-response” – and you risk a roughing up by the whips, the party Dementors, and possibly defenestration.

Voters hate the evasion, distraction, rhetorical tricks, petty squabbling, dishonesty, finger-pointing, underhand tactics, etc, etc, used by politicians. They also hate it when broadcasters let politicians off the hook. Jeremy “Did you threaten to overrule him?” Paxman’s apparently accidental stuffing of Michael Howard in 1997 is a beautiful, shining, oh so rare exception. Discos and triscos typically degenerate into playground arguments over Top Trumps moderated by freshly graduated teachers eager to please both sides, when what’s really needed is a grumpy old soak not afraid to administer a good, old-fashioned clip round the ear.

I fear there is no great desire amongst broadcasters to fix this problem. It’s mostly all about the news cycle, the trivia, the access. I fully expect this time to see Sky News broadcasting live from David Cameron’s freshly waxed anus. There’ll be breathless reporters deployed like paratroopers at Arnhem to chase after any suit with a rosette, and eager to magnify the tiniest fluff or mullet-related punch-up to grotesque proportions, vomiting Westminster twittle-twattle to a British public thoroughly, self-throttlingly bored of the whole thing by day two.

I’m atypical; I love elections and TV election coverage. Indeed I have an honorary degree in Swingometry from McKenzie College of Psephology and Knitting, Vancouver, BC. And yet even I get utterly sick of the same old faces spouting the same old stories and getting away with it. I’ll be shouting at the screen – while stabbing my politician-shaped voodoo doll with a selection of the very finest cutlery – as reporters move swiftly down lines of suited twerps bleating their non-responses, then wrapping them up because they’ve only got twenty-five seconds before the next update from Jeremy Thompson wedged firmly up Cameron’s bumcrack.

But this election is, I think, going to be different and a little disruptive. This election will be the first bottom-up election.

Linus’ law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. This works just as well in politics: given enough eyeballs, all politicians are shallow. We’ve now reached critical mass. Someone outside the mainstream media, at some point during the campaign, will discover something important. It might be one of the ‘celebrity’ political bloggers, like Iain Dale or Guido Fawkes, already breaking stories; it might be an unknown. It could be a street urchin or ragamuffin of some kind who YouTubes a candidate twatting about. There are signs of bottom-up already: look at www.mydavidcameron.com.

Twitter will spread the key stories – true or not – twice round the world before rolling news has cut back from the weather. It’s going to be a shock to the political system, and everyone will be fair game. It might even change a few results.

None of this can prevent manifestos full of self-destructing promises, interviews as enlightening as the test card, and 24-hour CamAnusCam. And the Westminster of tomorrow won’t look that different to the Westminster of today, whoever ends up kissing hooves with Queenie. But it’s a start.

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March 8, 2010 · 12:51 am

A Single Lady

Two contrasting films. One made in 21 days, set in the 1960s; one costing upwards of $200m, set down a rabbit hole. One with a red queen, one with a dead queen. Oh shush you, I’m allowed to say that, it’s here on the membership card in black and glitter.

A Single Man shows one day in the 1962 life of George, a British professor of English at Random College, CA. A closet puddle-jumper, George lost his verygoodfriend Jim in a car crash a few months before. We see him coping, or not, intercut with occasional flashbacks to scenes with Jim.

I predicted in January that Colin Firth would win an Oscar for his portrayal of George. I’m doubtful now since the Academy went gay in this category last year via the medium of Sean Penn. Firth’s still in with a shot; we’ll find out in the next few hours. If he wins, I anticipate headlines punning ‘Firth’ with ‘first’. ‘Firth Among Equals’ perhaps.

Nicholas Hoult, child in About A Boy, yob in Skins, greek in the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake, plays Young Totty Kenny, a student with ambiguous desires. Hoult spouts what seems to my ears a pretty decent accent. Then again I guess Americans loved Dick van Dyke’s, so what do I know?

A few critics have huffed about excessive artiness in what is haberdashergay Tom Ford’s directorial, screenwriting and producing debut. Well, yes, it’s true there’s no Bruce Willis in a grimy vest leaping between exploding buildings, no caped spandex-encased do-gooder righting wrongs with a flick of his jaw. This is a good thing. The camera lingers a little, there are periods of calm. There is what I might haughtily call a conceit: at certain times Ford nudges the colour saturation up to 11. I generously forgive him this; overall it’s an impressive achievement. Production designers nicked from TV’s Mad Men portray that early sixties wood’n’nukes feel convincingly enough.

Artiness aside there is a story to tell, a touching one of loss and heartbreak. Sexuality is pleasingly subdued to a smidge above irrelevance. Not that it’s absent: it’s central, but in the way that heterosexuality is central to a million romcom yawnfests. Heteros won’t be tainted with gay by watching it.

I finished reading the original Christopher Isherwood novel the night before seeing the film. There are one or two noticeable differences plotwise; tweedy litnerds might be all pipes a-quiver at this. The changes improve the story as a film: shockingly, books aren’t films. I enjoyed and recommend both.

Avaragado’s rating: one Twinkie bar.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is, uh, a slightly different kettle of pigs. It contains in some venues at least one extra dimension and an audience of Ronnie Corbett lookalikes. Stars include the Burton Regulars and – marginally boggling – Barbara Windsor as the dormouse. Shame Sid James is dead, he could have played the Mad Hatter. Hattie Jacques as the Red Queen. Kenneth Williams as the Knave. Bernard Bresslaw as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Charles Hawtrey as the White Rabbit. Anyway.

As well as the usual cast, all the expected characters are present with full, faithful, bonkers Burton polish. Depp is as Depp does. The stand-out for me is the Cheshire Cat, Stephen Fry purring his way lugubriously through the film. As the Red Queen Helena Bonham Carter isn’t entirely unadjacent to Blackadder II‘s Queenie; a shame that milord Fry doesn’t get to purr a Melchettesque “Majesty”.

The visuals are stunning. From the Red Queen’s bulbous head to interaction between the real and the CGI, there’s barely a join visible. A couple of shots involving the Knave have a mildly fishy aroma, and Matt Lucas’s dual Tweedles sometimes veer away from skin towards plastic; otherwise it’s all entirely believable. CGI people are notoriously tricky thanks to the unique way our brains are funded: CGI mice can prance about with waistcoats and we lap it up; but one dodgy movement from a CGI human and we’re swooping into uncanny valley with klaxons blaring. The flying spaghetti monster gave us this talent so we could spot aliens. IT IS MY FAITH AMEN.

As a story it’s fine. Unlike A Single Man this is no faithful adaptation of the original, more a weird combination of sequel and re-imagining. A few climactic elements don’t feel entirely right; a little jarring, too mainstream perhaps given the surreality of most of the film. Not ruinous, and I’m sure perfectly acceptable for the main target audience.

Worth seeing just to be dazzled by the production.

Avaragado’s rating: cake.

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February 28, 2010 · 3:56 pm

“Hurrah for the deniers!”

Publications such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express are eager to portray almost any event as proof of the end of civilisation as we know it. The sky is constantly falling. Around every street corner lurks a hooded paedo with a cancer-causing cucumber, employed by the BBC but with a hidden agenda to raise petrol prices to fund Muslim lawyers intent on forcing Britain to adopt Sharia law.

Standard, if depressing, stuff. They’re trying to sell newspapers and their tactic is to prey upon the fears of their target demographic.

But what this demographic doesn’t fear, it seems, is climate change. This demographic doesn’t believe in such a thing: it’s old enough to remember previous predictions by “so-called scientists” that failed to materialise, such as electricity “too cheap to meter” and space hotels by 2001. It also remembers how “science got it wrong”: thalidomide, Chernobyl. “Large Hadron Collider broken by bird dropping a baguette”. Those scientist fools. And French too, I bet.

When a scientist says that the evidence is clear, that there is strong consensus for man-made climate change and that we have little or no time to prevent its effects, they hear Charlie Brown’s teacher: “wah wah-wah wah wah”. They joke about how nice it’d be if Britain were as warm as the Algarve. They point to our coldest winter for thirty years as damning evidence against “global warming”.

And the newspapers, scenting sales, follow. The Daily Express now denies man-made climate change on its front page. It recently published a list of “100 reasons why climate change is natural” that has been strongly debunked by New Scientist and others. A few days ago its lead story ridiculed a report that claims the world’s had its warmest winter ever (nicely dissected at Enemies of Reason). And it presents small errors in huge reports, or general scientific rivalry, sloppiness and stupidity in email, as the entire house of cards collapsing.

Newspapers prey upon prejudices as well as fears. They feed, digest, multiply by ten, throw in a dodgy foreigner or two, and print. And the readers believe. And the cycle repeats, reinforcing those beliefs.

What does it matter? It’s the papers, not real life. Where’s the harm? The problem is that newspapers are stupidly influential. Newspapers get people on the streets hunting down paediatricians. Newspapers change government policy. In 1992 The Sun claimed It’s the Sun Wot Won It. Rupert Murdoch has the ear of David Cameron, and The Sun might win it again this year.

When a paper claims that X causes/cures cancer, for various values of X, the reader either disengages/engages with X or not: whether the claim is true or not, the world spins on. When a paper wants to Ban This Sick Filth, the reader harrumphs and turns the page, or tries to do something about it. Whether that week’s sick filth is banned or not, the world spins on. When a paper rattles its sabres at the imminent prospect of Sharia law throughout the land, they’re scare-mongering – it’s not going to happen. The world spins on.

But when a paper takes and promotes the position that climate change science is wrong, that we’re seeing natural change, that we have nothing to worry about, the consequences are serious. Politicians stop acting on climate change as it becomes a vote loser – “throwing money at something we don’t need to do while cucumber-wielding immigrant paedo bankers are on the loose”. I fear we’re seeing the start of this already: climate change is not one of the Conservative party’s “six key themes” for the election, and it isn’t front-and-centre on their web site (though there are details in the Policy section).

Broadsheet newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent do still follow scientific consensus on climate change. But even they cannot resist the allure of the error, promoting a piss in the ocean of evidence to an acid rainstorm in a drought.

I don’t dispute that climate change scientists are on the back foot right now. But just as one fake fossil doesn’t disprove evolution, a bunch of egocentric scientists (pretty much tautological) and a couple of errors in a 2800-page report don’t undermine the remaining evidence. “I’m sorry, Miss Austen, although we very much enjoyed your manuscript Pride and Prejudice, I’m afraid we found a spelling error on page 53. REJECTED.” Small errors break space probes and computer programs: not climate science.

Perhaps the science is fundamentally wrong; perhaps not. But this is not a coin-toss. The odds are not 50-50. If you want to play the percentages, the odds are strongly in favour of the scientific consensus. There’s a distinct possibility that the sky really is starting to descend, that life as we know it will soon begin to change, and change significantly.

My belief is that, fifty years from now, the current crop of Daily Express headlines will look as bone-headed as the Daily Mail‘s 1934 Hurrah for the blackshirts! But by then all the politicians and newspaper editors involved will be long in their graves – and those not yet born will be living with the consequences of their decisions.

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February 9, 2010 · 7:08 pm

Old men, cretins and elephants

If ever further proof were needed that football is run by old men and cretins, I give you two recent items of news. And I’m not going to even mention John Terry.

First, the Confederation of African Football (Caf) bans Togo for two tournaments for the heinous crime of being ambushed by gunmen while travelling between venues at the recent Africa Cup of Nations. This ridiculous punishment was imposed because, apparently, the Togolese government “interfered” with the team: it told them to pull out of the tournament as a result of the attack.

Government interference in sport is, of course, a bad thing and not uncommon. But this letter-of-the-law kneejerk by the Caftwats betrays a bumbling level of crass insensitivity rivalled only by Kay “the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack” Burley on Sky News. It’d be like the International Olympic Committee kicking out Israel for trashing their rooms in Munich in 1972.

Second, the vague wafting of arthritic hands that supposedly constitutes action against homophobia by the Football Association. A campaign has been in development for two years. Two years. What are they doing, breeding elephants? Two years is about 49 different owners for Portsmouth. How much money has the FA spent in two years generating, approximately, FA?

Ah. The budget was ten grand. Take that, homoph- too late, all gone, spent. Ten grand is approximately half a day’s hard-earned for that fine, upstanding, former England captain John Terry (whoops, I did mention him after all). Roman Abramovich could drop ten grand on a platinum-iridium toothpick, and then drop the toothpick.

And what have those many, many thousands of pounds bought? A “hard-hitting” video – intended to go viral rather than actually, you know, get shown anywhere, because that would cost money – that the FA intended to launch this Thursday at Wembley. This launch has now been cancelled: apparently the FA wants to consult more widely and talk to focus groups before releasing it. In other words it’s got cold feet and wants to pretend the video never happened.

This video, according to John Amaechi who’s seen it, consists of 90 seconds of unchallenged homophobic bigotry in an office and at a football match, with the tagline: “This behaviour is unacceptable here [in the workplace]. So why should it be acceptable here [at the match]?”. And that, my friends, is what ten grand buys you these days. Dialogue the bigots would gleefully recite verbatim to hur-hurs from their thicko mates, and a tagline the length of Brighton pier that doesn’t even have the balls to tell people to stop doing it.

Football: where old men and cretins give peanuts to idiots to make counter-productive videos that nobody will see anyway. Ah, the beautiful game.

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January 31, 2010 · 11:49 pm

Berets and trench coats are fashionable these days

For me the acronym DIY conjures up visions of Frank Spencer, gurning his best Frank Spencer gurn, scurrying away from smoking rubble while Dave the barman from Minder shakes his fist and a piccolo solo plays.

You see, I have a dripping tap. I should be able to fix something like this without invoking the spirit of Mario, but so far I’ve avoided getting my hands too dirty in household maintenance. This is what you get for renting all your life. No, not that kind of renting.

Right, what do I do? My first thought: I suppose I need ingredients, like tools and some flavour of washer. I inspect my drawer of things – mainly packs of post-it notes, elastic bands, and flotsam and jetsam hoarded from random packaging, and all of only marginal use when repairing a dripping tap. It’s true that one section of the drawer is devoted to assorted screwdrivers, but that’s it; I feel uneasy that I haven’t yet accumulated multicoloured plastic cabinets brim-full of categorised pointy things in a dedicated room for my handyman antics. I should, at the very least, own a spanner.

OK. I suppose I should go to a hardware store. Hmm. Do they even exist outside of The Two Ronnies? No, I should not like four candles, I should very much prefer two washers. And a spanner. Or do I have to buy a specific tool, some kind of tap delouser the knowledge of which was supposed to osmose magically into my head during my difficult teenage years?

I google dripping taps. Ah, there are videos narrated by bored women. Yes, I should turn off the water, I can probably do that: one of the 18,000 cupboard-based taps I seem to have is undoubtedly the correct one. I can even label it with a post-it note, thus justifying the existence of my entire drawer of things.

However, just in case, I practise my Oliver Hardy expression: the one he does when he looks down the end of a hose and Stan turns the tap on, causing Ollie’s bowler to spin twenty yards into a 1930s pram which plummets down some steps into a 1930s eight-lane freeway where James Finlayson narrowly avoids hitting it by driving into a 1930s lake and going d’oooh!

Ever the optimist I can see where it’ll all go wrong. Every time the bored woman on the video says “simply”, that’s where it’ll go wrong. “Simply pop the top of the tap off to access the screw.” Translation: “Simply slice the tip of your index finger off with a slip of your tap delouser and bleed vigorously into the handy sink below.”

Actually, you know, maybe I’ll just move. Yes, that’s a better idea. Like Bruce Banner leaving town after his inner green has had a bit of a barney with the locals. WHY NOT SINK HAVE MIXER? HULK BURN FREEZE BURN FREEZE WITH TWO TAP. HULK SMASH! Taxi! Cue doleful music!

No, it has to be done. I visit Nasreen Dar, Purveyors of All Known Tat, wherein I find two different types of washer. More lore passed from generation to generation through secret rituals I skipped while hacking Jet Set Willy. I buy some black, rubbery items labelled “tap washers.” Disturbingly they also have a size. Wait… so I’m supposed to take my tap apart and measure the size of the poorly washer first? Is this some kind of sick joke? Isn’t there any API documentation I can skim?

This is all doomed. Now the tap has stopped dripping – undoubtedly an ominous sign. I’ll just ignore it I think, yes, that’s best. Hmm. I can hear music. Sounds a bit like a piccolo.

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January 11, 2010 · 1:39 pm

Avaragado’s 2010 predictions: bonus ball

Astrology is, of course, bunkum. However, my mum has furnished me with the following prediction – precisely tailored for me and the millions of others born between two arbitrary dates – from the pages of, I imagine, the Daily Express.

Despite a slow beginning to the year, career matters pick up speed in mid-January.  From then on, there’s no looking back.  The eclipses in January and June target your work ambitions and point to important changes on the horizon.  What you’ll be looking for in 2010 is quality not quantity and by mid-year you could reach a watershed period in your life when you’ll want to take stock.  As revolutionary Uranus stimulates your curiosity for matters unconventional, you will be drawn to subjects that have fascinated you for years.  Whether it’s developing your own website, going freelance, learning about alternative healing or immersing yourself in research, as long as you watch your finances in April and May, what begins with small steps this year could well become a giant – and lucrative – leap into a successful new career.

I’m crossing my fingers.

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January 11, 2010 · 12:26 am

Avaragado’s 2010 predictions

To make this year’s predictions I watched a few episodes of the little-known 1980s Jimmy Perry sitcom Oh, Doctor I Ching! (starring Paul Shane made up as a nineteenth century Chinese fortune-teller from Rotherham) and matched the patterns generated from the resulting vomit to the wallpaper in John Lewis. Then, treating the price of each roll of wallpaper as a page number, I wrote down the first letter on each corresponding page of Dan Brown’s latest magnum o’pus The Lost Symbol (discarding the inevitable second wave of vomiting this induced). I used this sequence of gibberish (the letters, not the book) as the identifier part of the URL for a YouTube video: this turned out to be a montage of lolcat images set to a Rick Astley track. Playing this track backwards at half-speed revealed the address of a milliners in Covent Garden, wherein an elderly lady whisked me through a secret door to a spiral staircase leading to a disused underground station. Here the King of the Rats welcomed me with a garland of cigarette butts and his Rat Army carried me aloft to the Rat Parliament (changing at Leicester Square). The secrets revealed to me there by the Prime Ministrat were world-shattering and scandalous but ultimately all about rats so I just knocked up any old rubbish as usual and here it is.

The Oscars

  • Best Actor: Colin Firth, A Single Man
  • Best Actress: Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia
  • Best Original Screenplay: District 9
  • Best Director: James Cameron, Avatar
  • Best Picture: Up in the Air

UK General Election

  • The election takes place on March 25th
  • Predicted share: Con 39%, Lab 32%, Lib Dem 21%
  • Predicted seats: Con 296, Lab 267, Lib Dem 56
  • A Green party MP is elected
  • Esther Rantzen wins Luton South

Entertainment

  • ITV closes down ITV3 and ITV4 to save money
  • Britain’s Got Talent contestants include a trio of drag artistes collectively known as The Fleurettes
  • Robbie Williams rejoins Take That for at least one concert
  • The final UK Big Brother is won by a lesbian

Science

  • The Large Hadron Collider does not find the Higgs Boson this year
  • Exoplanet GJ 1214b is confirmed as a water ocean planet with an atmosphere

Sport

  • Winter Olympics: Great Britain win one gold medal, one silver medal and zero bronze medals
  • World Cup semi-finalists (in no particular order): England, Brazil, Denmark, Argentina
  • Cambridge win the University Boat Race
  • Andy Murray wins a grand slam singles tournament
  • A fatal accident occurs during the construction of Olympic Park in Stratford

Celebrity Deathwatch

  • The Duke of Edinburgh
  • Jimmy Young
  • Jimmy Saville
  • James Garner
  • Lady Gaga
  • Ian Paisley

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January 1, 2010 · 3:11 pm

The main news again

To begin the glorious decade nobody in their cotton-pickin’ mind is calling the unities, I present a brief but cryptic summary of my noughties. Worthless prizes if you understand them all.

  • Employed, redundant, freelance, employed, (employed), employed, redundant, freelance, employed.
  • Sciatica, gallstones, glandular fever.
  • Alpe D’Huez, Courchevel, Co. Kerry, Chamonix, Malta, Verbier, Agde, Les Arcs, (Frankfurt), Rome, (Hong Kong), La Plagne, Las Vegas, Les Arcs, Rimini, Dublin, Andalucia, Gibraltar, Tuscany.
  • Practical Guide to Making Money on the Mobile Internet. Detox Your World, Evie’s Kitchen. Raw Magic. Ecstatic Beings.
  • One, briefly.
  • One, surprisingly.
  • Two.
  • 572.
  • 1,213.
  • 8,182.

Incidentally: it’s twenty-ten, and the tens. Yes it is. Because I say so.

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December 31, 2009 · 11:10 am

Avaragado’s 2009 predictions – results

With the clock ticking down to the end of what Pacific Islanders are already calling last decade, it’s time to reveal the results of my 2009 predictions. I have again enlisted the assistance of the glamorous Chris Walsh to make the official adjudication. The next voice you hear in your head will be his.

Here are the scores on the doors miss ford, come on dollies do your dealing….

It looks just like my uncle Oscar

  • Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger [Still no reaction on winning from the ingrate, 1 POINT]
  • Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler [Went to SEAN PENN, Nil POINTS]
  • Best Supporting Actress: Taraji P Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Nope, Penelope Cruz, Nil Points]
  • Best Actress: Kate Winslet, The Reader [Nazis or nuns equal oscar success — 1 POINT]
  • Best Picture: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Nope, it was SLUMDOG, NIL POINTS]
  • Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire [GOAL! 1 POINT]

TOTAL: 3 / 6

I’m glad you asked me that question, Jeremy

  • Peter Mandelson loses his job as Business Secretary. [Wikipedia says not only has he kept this post, he has had his powers “enhanced” (adamantium claws?) while also being appointed first secretary of state. Nil points]
  • Alistair Darling loses his job as Chancellor. [Nope, still there. Nil points]
  • Ed Balls becomes the new Chancellor. [Nope, Nil points]

TOTAL: 0 / 3

Wonderful World of Nature

  • Yellowstone does not explode and turn much of North America into (even more of) a wasteland. [Truth! 1 point. Was this ever anticipated though??? In other news, London was not devastated by a tidal wave of custard…]
  • A global flu pandemic starts. [True! This is a proper impressive prediction, so 2 points!]
  • There will be two earthquakes of magnitude 8 or above on the Richter scale. [Gah! Obsolete unit alert! Nobody uses the Richter scale anymore, apparently. It’s all “Moment Magnitude Scale” now. Well, Samoa was the worst earthquake of 2009 and that scored 8.3 on the Richter scale, which equates to 8.0 on the moment magnitude scale. 2009’s second largest earthquake was in Fiordland, with a moment magnitude of 7.8. But I can’t find anywhere that tells me what it scored on the Richter scale. It looks like it should be either just above or just below 8 exactly! I’m giving the benefit — 1 point!]

TOTAL: 4 / 3

Tedious Town of Tech

  • SCO finally throws in the towel. [Looks like they are still going, despite filing for liquidations??? Nil points]
  • Microsoft buys Palm to get the Pre. [Nope. Nil points]
  • A statement posted to Twitter causes a publicly traded company’s stock to drop dramatically. [Google didn’t throw up any likely stories, so I’m going Nil points. Looks like it’s the only thing Twitter didn’t do this year, after exposing Carter-Ruck/Trafigura and bitch-slapping Jan Moir]

TOTAL: 0 / 3

I’m 800, you know

  • Cambridge win the University Boat Race. [Nope. Nil points]
  • The Guided Bus does not fully open to paying customers this year. [Truth! 1 point]
  • In the 2009 May Bumps, Caius finishes first in the Men’s First Division. [Jeezuz, I couldn’t even understand the results page I found. Results to me means 2 numbers, where the bigger one is the winner. If I need a graph to understand the results, your sport is too complicated. Wikipedia says “1st & 3rd Trinity 2009 Head of the River” which means nothing to me, but this stupid sport has already wasted too much of my life … NIL POINTS!!!]

TOTAL: 1 / 3

Des or Dickie? Des, obviously

  • Usain Bolt takes the 100m world record to 9.60s +/- 0.02s [9.58! spot on! 1 point]
  • England is the only home nation to qualify for the football World Cup in South Africa in 2010. [Looks like it. 1 point]
  • Andy Murray loses in the men’s singles final at Wimbledon. [Loses yes, finals no — out in the semis. Nil points]
  • Australia retains the Ashes. [wiki says current champion England. Nil points]
  • Lewis Hamilton wins more grands prix than any other driver in the 2009 F1 season. [Lewis Hamilton won 2, Jenson Button 6. Nil points]
  • Felipe Massa is 2009 F1 world champion. [Massa hospitalised after Hungarian Grand Prix. Nil points]

TOTAL: 2 / 6

Celebrity Deathwatch

  • Patrick Swayze [dead! 1 point]
  • Margaret Thatcher [alive! Nil points]
  • Norman Wisdom [alive! Nil points]
  • Peter Sallis [alive! Nil points]
  • Steve Jobs [alive! Nil points]
  • Britney Spears [alive! Nil points]

TOTAL: 1 / 6

FINAL SCORE: 11 / 30

And this is me again. I have returned Chris to his childproof box until this time next year. I especially liked that he had to look at Wikipedia to find out whether I’d got the Ashes question right or not; that takes impressive dedication to sporting ignorance.

I impressed myself with a couple of correct predictions: the flu pandemic, the unopened guided bus (which was supposed to start service no later than September, I think, when I made the forecast) and Usain Bolt’s incredible world record. Some others were naturally massively wrong: the Formula 1 stuff for instance. The political predictions were nearly right, since there was a moment when it looked as if Darling was out. And if only I’d gone for a different pop star/nutcase in the deathwatch. Ah well.

I still haven’t thought of any 2010 predictions yet. But I’m sure I will at some point.

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December 29, 2009 · 8:17 pm

GSM and holes in the ground

Exciting news from the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin this week: the A5/1 stream cipher meant to ensure privacy on GSM mobile phone calls has been weakened. Security researcher Karsten Nohl and his team have created an attack table – two terabytes of it – so you can look stuff up rather than be forced to calculate it yourself. They’ve saved processing time at the expense of memory. You can see the gory details in Nohl’s 26C3 presentation.

This kind of thing is not a surprise to anyone interested in security systems: a given system never becomes more secure, only less secure. New attacks and weaknesses are found. Supposedly secret keys turn out to be not-so-secret. No amount of pixie dust or PR can change this. For those designing security systems the game is to stay one step ahead of the attackers, to be Road Runner against Wile E Coyote.

But there’s a third player in the security game. Alongside our meep-meeping hero and Acme’s best customer (a black-hat hacker) is the white-hat hacker. His job is to find Road Runner’s vulnerabilities before Coyote does: because that way Road Runner can introduce effective countermeasures before Coyote can do any damage. White-hat hackers are needed in part because, as security guru Bruce Schneier says, anyone can create a security system they cannot themselves break. You need some attackers on your side to point and laugh when you make a basic error, because the black-hat hackers won’t be so kind.

In this case, Nohl’s team are wearing white hats: they’re the good guys. And don’t forget that Nohl’s team might not be first. We don’t know. Suitably savvy crooks might have already exploited the weaknesses in A5/1.

An appropriate response from the GSM Association – the mobile operators and hangers-on who promote GSM – would have been: “Yes, this was always going to happen at some point. That’s why we’re doing blah blah blah,” where the blahs would describe some change that strengthens the system. That would give people confidence that the association were thinking ahead, working to improve security.

But when I heard the news of this new attack I laughed. I knew what the response would be. The GSM Association would find the nearest hole and wedge its head firmly inside, while issuing pooh-pooh PR from its prominent buttocks. And that is precisely what has come to pass.

A spoke tells us, “We consider this research, which appears to be motivated in part by commercial considerations, to be a long way from being a practical attack on GSM.” Pooh! “To [develop this attack] while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.” Pooh! Nohl’s activity was “highly illegal.” Pooh!

Let’s take those points in order:

  1. What’s impractical now will be practical soon: it’s the way technology works. If you wait until it’s a practical attack you’ll be too late. The GSM Association are probably just hoping that GSM will die before this happens.
  2. Nohl’s team call GSM “the most widely deployed privacy threat on the planet” and don’t believe the GSM Association is taking its weaknesses seriously. That sounds like concern about privacy to me.
  3. Cretins. White-hat hackers must use black-hat methods or it’s game over.

But, you say, Nohl could have taken his attack to the GSM Association privately. I don’t think this would have had any effect. From his presentation it seems as if they were well aware of his work, and the default behaviour of associations like this when presented with undesirable information tends to be to either ignore it or try to suppress it. The unfortunate truth is that it is only through transparency that anything changes. See also: MPs’ expenses.

Surely, you continue, the GSM Association contains some people who aren’t dumb. They must know that security systems get broken all the time. Of course they do. In fact they were perfectly capable of issuing the response I suggested above because a stronger replacement cipher is available, KASUMI or A5/3, that I believe handsets already support. (Nohl’s presentation suggests A5/3 has weaknesses of its own, but let’s not go there.)

This new cipher isn’t in widespread use simply because not all operators have upgraded their systems; they’re trading off the increase in security against the expense of upgrading.

I’m guessing this was not a message the operator-packed GSM Association wanted to send out in their condemnation of Nohl’s work.

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