Keys Corner

Ruth has always been a great believer in using paper maps to navigate when she drives anywhere. Yesterday evening she set off the Cologne to attend the EuroSTAR 2004 conference on software testing, where she is presenting a paper on setting up a test lab. As usual, she declined to take our portable navigation system and set off with a printout of the directions and a road atlas.

She reached Cologne in a couple of hours, but then spent over an hour driving round, and round, and round, near the Cologne Exhibition Centre, which is only 800 meters from her hotel – which she couldn’t find. Eventually, she stopped a taxi and followed it to the hotel!

I think she may have finally changed her mind about the usefulness of navigation systems…

The Independent makes me realise how lucky I am to not have been born in 1887 – if I had been, I would have had to sit an entrance exam to get into grammar school. Their article includes part of an examination paper recently found by someone whose father passed the test. Education experts say that today most A-level candidates (that puts them at about 18 years old) would struggle to pass the papers – and the entrance exam in question was taken by 11 year-olds in 1898.

To get an idea of the difficulty, try this question – the answer is in the Independent:

Where are Omdurman, Wai-Hei-Wai, Crete, Santiago, and West Key, and what are they noted for?

The World Health Organisation has issued a stark warning on the possibility of a global flu pandemic, which would probably kill over 7 million (2004-11-30: see below) people world wide.

The breakout could occur any time from the next few weeks to several years from now, but unless there is close cooperation between nations around the world, containment of the virus will be impossible. The reason for concern is the fear that the asian bird flu virus may have recently infected humans for the first time, in Asia. A human vaccine for the bird flu virus is not expected until March 2005 at the earliest.

The worst recent outbreak of a new flu strain is the Spanish flu in 1918-19, when up to 50 million people are thought to have died – nearly half of them young, healthy adults.

Update (2004-11-30): I thought the figure of 7 million sounded low, the WHO has just been quoted as saying that the upper range is a lot higher – over 50 to 100 million could die when bird flu breaks out. The 7 million is, as stated in the original article, a low end-of-the-range figure.

It’s good to see that the Kyoto Protocol is to come into effect on February 16th next year, despite the American government’s decision not to back it.

America decided not to back the treaty in 2001, because the cost of meeting its targets would be too high for the US economy, which is massively dependent on the fossil fuels that are at the source of the problem. The US contains 4% of the world’s population but produces about 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions (Source: BBC).

Russia has ratified the protocol, although her industry can much less afford the extra costs in the short term, than the American companies.

Ruth and I enroled a couple of months ago in Spanish evening classes – as you might have guessed, if you spotted the link we added in our general links section (on the right) – and are struggling to keep on top of the homework and learning all those new words. So these tips from kuro5hin are both interesting and helpful, and the comments left by others are also worth reading.

Oh dear, I know what Ruth is going to say when she reads this. A study by Toho University School of Medicine (in Japan) has shown a possible connection between heavy computer use and getting glaucoma.

Glaucoma currently affects half a million people in the UK, and can cause blindness if not treated.

MSN/Slate are running an article on the battle for Fallujah, which is in full swing at the moment. The author of the article, Fred Kaplan, takes a critical position, surmising that Bush will use any half-way convincing “win” to justify pulling the US troops out of Iraq as soon as the Iraqi elections have taken place – assuming the elections are not a complete fiasco.

But what is interesting, is that according to the US National Public Radio, the often cited combined US and Iraq troops which are involved on the current assault are composed of some 10-15 thousand US troops and a mere 170 Iraqi troops. It seems that originally, 500 Iraqi troops should have been deployed alongside the US troops (which is a pretty low number too), but the remaining 330 deserted before the operation started. These were members of the 36th Special Operations battalion – the elite of Iraq’s new security forces. Obviously the Iraqis will not be in a position to take over responsibility for their own security any time soon. It looks pretty clear to me, that the most important role of the Iraqi troops is as an alibi for the USA, so they can imply it is not unilateral US action.

The other interesting point in the article was a link to the New York Times, listing the countries that have now pulled out of the Coalition of the Willing or announced plans to significantly reduce or withdraw their troops completely within the coming months. Quite a long list, leaving the US looking increasingly isolated in Iraq.

At the same time, the Guardian reports that since the Iraqi war started 19 months ago, 57 journalists have been killed in the fighting. This compares with 60 journalists killed in the whole of the Vietnam war (approx 17 years, depending on exactly how you define the period of war).

Hundreds of Canadians are taking pity on the Americans who didn’t vote for Bush – there is a site where they can offer to marry an American so that they can move across the border to escape another 4 more years of cowboy conservatism in the USA.

The Register has a report on a new, dangerous type of phishing attack that has just emerged:

Fraudsters have developed phishing emails capable of automatically stealing bank log-in details without requiring users to click on a website link, email filtering firm MessageLabs warns.

Over the last two weeks, MessageLabs has monitored a small number of these dangerous new emails, which are capable of sidestepping the need for user intervention in phishing attacks. Users who only open maliciously constructed emails to be exposed to risk. These emails contain scripts that rewrite the host files of targeted machines. This means that next time a user attempts to access their online banking account they will be automatically redirected to a fraudulent website instead, enabling their log-in details to be stolen. So far, MessageLabs has only intercepted copies of emails targeting three Brazilian banks, but if the technique catches on it could have potentially serious consequences…

From the spam that we get at home, it is noticable that the quality of phishing exploits is continuously improving – better grammar, less spelling mistakes and quite plausible mails requesting you to log on to (fake) bank websites. Although banks in Europe generally claim that successful phishing attacks have been stopped before money has been transferred to phisher’s accounts, it looks as if they urgently need to introduce more secure methods of online banking.

Update (2004-11-05)
More links on phishing and spam:
The Guardian, reporting the same story with a little more detail
Again, the Guardian reporting on spam – 82% of e-mail is now spam and a spammer in the USA has just been jailed for 9 years for sending some of that e-mail.

Update (2004-11-09)
Eudora adds “ScamWatch” – The popular e-mail client from Eudora has been enhanced to flag potential phisher-links in mails:

How ScamWatch works:
Locating the cursor over an embedded email hypertext link produces a URL check. If the link served in email is different from the landing page URL or is an IP address rather than a hostname, a yellow pop-up window points out the difference…

Having had quite a lot of comment-spam on the blog in the last 2-3 weeks, (none of it has got through to the blog, thanks to Kittens Friendly Comments (migrated into the core of WP 3.0, but necessary for earlier versions), but dealing with the mails informing me about new postings and moderating the comments that were put on hold was becoming a hassle). Yesterday I closed all comments older than 21 days and installed an additional plug-in – Three Strikes as well – this should stop most of the spam even hitting the moderation list.

If you have any problems now commenting on the blog – and you are not posting spam – drop me a line, to let me know, and I will see what I can do to help.