Keys Corner

Now, why am I not surprised? And this is the government that is preaching democracy to the rest of the world…

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today...

... President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects – considered by many to be in defiance of international law – an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh…

The above report is based on information from Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story in 1969 of the cover-up of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war.

This leaflet is designed to inform you about what to do in the case of a terrorist attack.

For God’s sake stay calm.

It’s all right.

Firstly, there is no chance of terrorists using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Let’s take each of these in turn…

(via Nick Barlow)

At the moment, my Apple G5 is suffering from the OS X 10.3.5 update – it refuses to go to sleep. Which means that I am rebooting once a day, if not more often. The loud system chime on startup had been driving me round the bend – I have been looking for a way to turn if off. In the last day or two I have found several ways to kill the chime:

• on an ad-hoc basis, you can mute the sound output before shutting down – the sound remains muted when you boot next time
• use TinkerTool System (shareware, but you can run it 4 times for evaluation before having to licence it). Licence fee is a reasonable $7.
• you can also use StartupSound.prefPane (freeware), which adds a preference in the system preferences pane to allow the sound level to be controlled.

Because the startup chime is effectively part of the startup self-diagnostics, I feel happiest remembering to mute before I shut down, rather than messing with the software solutions.

A couple of months ago I mentioned the real time traffic monitoring / forecasting site for Nordrhein-Westphalen, which has good forecasts of delays and jams for up to an hour ahead of time.

There are quite a lot of real time traffic services on the web. Did you know, that you can also get a real time view of the disruptions on the London Underground? (Although why Transport for London feels it is necessary to show the date last updated in American format is a mystery to me.)

Goody, goody: my favourite Office software implementation for the Mac has been upgraded to use the latest OpenOffice.org release. So far it’s an alpha release, but nonetheless, first reports are positive. No major issues so far, just keep an eye on the patches as they become available (at a pretty amazing rate) in the forum in the previous link – currently Patrick has issued five patch files in some 10 days. Issues are getting fixed almost as soon as they are being reported.

Have you ever searched on the internet for your own credit card number? (Better – search for only for the first or last 8 digits or so. You don’t want to put your whole card number into Google’s search cache).

David Heath did – he is an internet security consultant. What he came up with was a list of 292 orders, complete with credit card numbers, expiry dates, email addresses and other identifying information published on a web site owned by a person or company which he hasn’t been able to identify and as the hosting company for the site is also unknown, the web site is still online. But where the numbers come from was easy to identify – a florist’s web site in another country.

The story of what happened after he contacted them is reported here, and makes interesting reading – also for non-techie users of the web.

Update (2004-09-10):
David Heath, the author of the original article that we linked to, let us know today that the web site with the credit card numbers has now been taken down.

After the Hudson visit here last week, we got home last Tuesday to find that the pond had been finished off – plant bags around the sunny side to provide shade for the plastic liner and the edging stones all replaced. So last weekend we went off the the local garden center and bought plants for the edge. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1912, Wilfrid M. Voynich, an antique book dealer, bought a number of mediaeval manuscripts from Italian Jesuits. Among these was an illustrated manuscript codex of 234 pages, written in an unknown script. The manuscript contains many illustrations of herbs and plants and a number of pages show naked women bathing. It was thought that the book might have been a medical book containing information about herbal remedies with recipes in the second half of the book, which contains no illustrations. The plants remain unidentified to this day and appear to be imaginary.

The text contains features found in no known language: for example, some common words may be repeated two or three times in succession. It also contains complex, subtle regularities which appear beyond the scope of any ancient hoaxer, which is why it was thought that the manuscript was written in code. However, almost 100 years later, despite numerous attempts by experienced cryptologists, the script still has not been deciphered.

The volume appears to date back to the 15th century and it now reposes in the Beinecke Rare book library of Yale University, having been donated by the previous owner, H. P. Kraus, in 1969.

The latest theory, proposed earlier this year by Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist teaching at Keele University, near Manchester, England, is that the book could be a clever hoax. He proposes that the book could have been produced at the rate of a couple of hours per page, using a Cardan Grille, a device first described in 1550 by Girolamo Cardano, which can be used to produce nonsense from tables of words, prefixes and suffixes.

You can view all the pages of the Voynich MS at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – just enter “Voynich” into the search machine. The images are available in several resolutions, click on the one you wish to see. It is worth a look.

In the UK, the Halifax house price index indicates that house prices are starting to drop. At the same time a discussion about how the house price trends should be calculated has broken out in Australia after data from state governments was used by two organisations – one reported that property prices have risen and the other that prices have fallen.

It just goes to show that you should never trust a statistic you haven’t fudged yourself. How the Halifax price index is calculated is explained at a high level here.

The German education authorities are struggling to move from morning-only schools – primary and secondary schools don’t provide midday meals or tuition in the afternoon – to ones which are open for something approaching a normal working day, so long as enough parents request it at a specific school. In many cases where schools are now open longer, there is only unqualified supervision for the children, rather than lessons or the extended school day is not effective on every day in the week.

Meanwhile, the British government has declared the goal of having all primary schools open from 08:00 hrs to 18:00 hrs five days in the week.

The government wants to have the first 250 schools implemented by 2006, and 1000 schools within 4 years. The schools will offer extra sports and art activities, family learning and parenting classes as well as childcare and extra study support for pupils. The goal is two-fold: to help working parents, and to get the children doing more sport.

The move comes after suggestions that the 300% increase in obese pupils over the last 20 years has been largely caused by selling off schools’ playing fields, cutting sports lessons and installing sweet and drink vending machines in schools. The Education Secretary will be announcing further measures aimed at improving the pupils’ knowledge about healthy eating next week.