Monthly Archives: May 2011

The politics of the Windsor-Middleton Merger

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Terrific column by Nick Cohen.

As if to distract us from the thought that Kate Middleton will discover that love is a thing that can always go wrong in the House of Windsor, Buckingham Palace added a Balkan touch to its “fairy-tale wedding”. A man it called “King Constantine of the Hellenes” was in Westminster Abbey. “Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia” and one “King Simeon II of Bulgaria” were included on the guest list, too. And, as if to make Dorothy Parker’s point for her, they were joined by “King Michael I of Romania”.

But while there was a Marie of Romania – queen from 1914 to 1927 – there is no King Michael I. Greece, Bulgaria and Romania all deposed their monarchies, and even after the brutal experience of fascism and communism, no one could persuade their citizens to take them back. Meanwhile, the Palace’s “Alexander of Yugoslavia” not only has no throne, but also claims the title of a country that no longer exists except on old maps of cold war Europe.

The royal family’s willingness to ban Labour prime ministers from the wedding has already told us much about the monarchy’s ideology. After that cheap snub, I hope to hear less self-deluding babble from Labour leaders about the Windsors being “above politics”. If they cannot see that royal rule is a justification for conservatism, surely they must now realise that royals are Tories and their political opponents.

The Windsors’ decision to address deposed monarchs as if they were sovereigns rather than private citizens is, if anything, more revealing. A king is still a king in their eyes. Even if “his” people don’t want him, divine right or dead tradition gives him a presumptuous and ineradicable claim to be head of state…

Great stuff. I wondered as I read the guest list why the descendants of the Tsar had been excluded.

Privacy: the perfect storm of surveillance

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From an Editorial in today’s Observer.

A pattern is emerging. A researcher discovers that a product or service offered by a large (generally US-based) company contains a security flaw or a feature that compromises the privacy of internet users. The revelations are confirmed by other experts across the internet. The company responsible then goes through a predictable series of steps: first, “no comment”, followed by indignant denial, then a PR-spun “explanation” and, eventually, an apology of sorts plus a declaration that the bug will be fixed or the intrusive practice terminated.

A recent example was Apple’s extraordinary contortions over the discovery that its iPhone was covertly collecting location data and storing it in unencrypted form. But last week also saw the revelation that devices made by TomTom, the leading manufacturer of GPS navigation systems, had effectively been spying on Dutch users and that the aggregated data had been sold to the police in order to guide the location of speed traps…

Journal of the cyber-plague years

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My piece in today’s Observer.

In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the "creeper" on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the "reaper".

Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world…

Trumping Trump

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As the Donald Trump “candidacy” for the presidency unfolded, most people in the UK must have been astonished that such a buffoon could be taken seriously. Part of the reason is that an idiotic proposition on the scale of a Trump presidential bid would never have survived the unruly British media. But American journalism is either irredeemably partisan (e.g. Fox News and talk radio) or obsessed with strange notions of ‘impartiality’ that allow absurdities to flourish. (The old “balance as bias” problem.)

Anyway, after a bad few weeks in which one watched with incredulity as Trump raised the ‘birther’ fantasy to new heights, it was just lovely to see Obama, for a change, take the idiocy on. And what made it really delicious was that Trump was in the audience, as a guest of the Washington Post, no less. Which makes one wonder what the hell an allegedly serious newspaper is doing having him as a guest. It’s a strange come-down for a paper that once brought down a crooked president.