Tories, ‘hacking’, Twitter and #cashgordon – Look, I Just ‘Hacked’ Mark Reckons’ Site Lib Dem Voice!
ETA: Actually Mark doesn’t use the Lib Dem Blogs RSS feed – just features the RSS feeds of various Lib Dems, under a ‘lib dem blogs’ header, so I thought he did. Feel free to substitute in the name of $prominentlibdemblogger below
Yesterday, a website run by the Conservative party, cash-gordon.com , got redirected to various supposedly-offensive (if you consider elderly people engaging in consensual homosexual acts offensive, which I personally don’t) websites. A lot of people are claiming that it was ‘hacked’ by ‘Labour stooges’.
Now, the Conservatives are claiming that this was people ‘hacking’ their site – and people have been getting threatening ‘phone calls at work about their alleged part in this ‘hacking’ – and arguing that this means there should be more regulation of the internet. In fact all that happened is the Conservatives were incredibly, ridiculously stupid.
The Tories set up a new website, to try to make the Labour party look bad for taking money from unions, to deflect from their own problems with funding from non-domiciled billionaires to whom they gave peerages, though exactly why it’s meant to be bad that the Labour Party were given millions by a union I have yet to understand (and I am no supporter of Labour, as you know). To promote this site, they started a #cashgordon hashtag on Twitter, and got excited when it started trending – even when it turned out that most of those using the hashtag were making fun of the Tories, because they said ‘all publicity is good publicity’.
They even had an unmoderated ‘twitterstream’ on the website, displaying every single post anyone made to Twitter using this hashtag. Can you see the problem yet, boys and girls?
They should have learned from the Torygraph, which last year during the budget had a live twitterstream which very quickly turned into a stream of abuse against the Telegraph, jokes, and general anarchy (a couple of my ‘tweets’ then actually got quoted in Private Eye at the time, because mine were some of the few printable ones). If nothing else, they should have realised that as soon as a hashtag starts ‘trending’ (showing up in a list of popular hashtags), spambots start posting using that hashtag, so very quickly a large proportion of the tweets using that hashtag – and thus showing up on their website – were by that popular Twitterer Ms Britney Fuck-Vids.
However, some people wanted to experiment a bit more, and started posting little bits of JavaScript to Twitter, along with that hashtag. Now, Twitter is a properly-designed website. If you post random bits of JavaScript to it, it displays them as text. However, cash-gordon.com was designed (for $15,000 ! ) by people who literally don’t know the first thing about web design. So it ran this JavaScript in the browsers of people visiting the site.
Those people are *very* lucky that the JavaScript in question merely redirected their browsers to lemonparty ( a site which, I am given to understand, having never visited it myself, shows three elderly gentlemen engaging in mutual oral sex) or, far more offensively, the Labour party website. That shows, if nothing else, that this was people playing around and having fun, not doing anything malicious – allowing for execution of arbitrary JavaScript code from unknown sources could very easily lead to much, much worse (and it’s lucky this was noticed, and the site pulled, before someone put in a link to a Windows virus or phishing site).
But looking at what’s happened, it’s absolutely obvious that nothing was ‘hacked’ (in the vernacular sense of someone ‘breaking in’ to someone else’s website, rather than the sense used by computer people – in that sense it was quite a funny ‘hack’) at all – people posted material that was *perfectly safe* to *their own twitter streams* – their own websites. The fact that the Conservatives – in attempting to use that material for political gain – did incredibly unsafe and stupid things with that material is fundamentally neither the Twitterers’ fault nor their problem.
For an analogous situation, many Liberal Democrat bloggers include a feed from Lib Dem Blogs on their page, showing the titles of the most recent blog posts by Lib Dems. Were I to title a post “Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers”, that title would show up on Mark Thompson’s site. I would not, however, have ‘hacked’ Mark’s blog. I wouldn’t even have visited his blog, or necessarily even known that my post had showed up there (I read Mark’s blog through a feed reader). I hope you are all suitably impressed with my ability to get profanity onto the site of the 20th most influential blogger in Britain. F33r my 133t h4x0r 5ki11z!
However, there are a few differences. Firstly, were I to title my post ” <script type=”text/javascript”>window.location=’http’ + ‘://lemonparty.org/’</script> ” it wouldn’t turn into executable script that redirected Mark’s blog to geriatric porn, because neither Mark nor Ryan who runs Lib Dem Blogs are the kind of complete imbecile who would let that sort of thing happen. Secondly, all blogs whose RSS feeds are aggregated at Lib Dem Blogs have to be manually approved, and can be removed if they start doing that sort of thing, so it’s a relatively trustworthy source. And thirdly, these feeds only go on people’s personal blogger accounts, not on official party sites that cost tens of thousands to build.
So no-one was ‘hacked’, and this was nothing regulation could or should have stopped (though were there some kind of ‘internet roadworthiness’ test along the lines of an MOT, that site would have failed it, and likewise all those responsible for its creation just failed their ‘driving test’). Quite simply, if you put up a giant billboard and a free supply of marker pens, along with a sign saying ‘please draw whatever you want on here’, and you come back a while later and see someone has drawn a great spunking cock on it, that should be *what you expected to happen*, not a shocking discovery. If you don’t want people to graffitti your site, *DON’T ASK THEM TO*
And one final thing – the Torygraph have been claiming that this ‘hacking’ – which we have now proved was nothing of the sort, was by ‘Labour stooges’. As I was following events as they happened, I happen to know that the lemonparty redirect was courtesy of ‘liberal provocateur‘ , who tweets as @hashbangperl (and whose description of himself as a ‘hacker’ on Twitter should definitely be taken in the sense I linked above, and *NOT* in the sense most people use it…)
So, in total, what we have learned today is that if you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an exciting whizzy social media site for your political campaign, you should give it to somebody with the first clue about what they’re doing. An expensive lesson, and one I suspect the Tories won’t actually have learned…
Triple-jacked over a steeplehammer and jessop jessop jessop jessop jessop
Before I start writing this, I just want to point everyone in the direction of the comments to my Joe The Barbarian post. There’s some fantastic stuff there, and I’m just sorry I’ve not been online enough to engage in that discussion more. It’s comment threads like that that make the ridiculous amount of time I spend on this worthwhile.
A couple of days ago, two teenagers died. This is, unequivocally, a bad thing. It’s also not, unfortunately, that unusual.
These two teenagers were, by all accounts, taking methadone, a highly dangerous opiate. They were also, apparently, drinking a large amount of alcohol – which is not only dangerous in itself, but which when combined with methadone can lead to respiratory problems and even death. They were also taking a substance called mephedrome (4-methylmethcathinone) but which the press, for God only knows what reason, are referring to as ‘miaow miaow’ (a large number of people have as a result also been asking if they’d been taking yellow bentines or clarky cat) – an amphetamine-type stimulant. It is suspected that one or more of these substances may have contributed to their deaths.
So far, so reasonable. It’s the kind of thing that happens all too often, but it *does* happen, and there appears very little we can do about it.
The press, however, have been stating that ‘miaow miaow’ – and that alone – *definitely* killed these two people. This is entirely possible – having spent a couple of years working with mental patients with substance dependencies, I am all too familiar with the damage amphetamine-type stimulants can cause (even caffeine, in sufficiently large doses, can do some alarming things to you, as I discovered myself about eighteen months ago – caffeine is an amphetamine-type stimulant too). However, given that as far as can be discerned only one other death has ever been caused by use of the substance, which is used by (at least) thousands of people, I would suggest the burden of proof is on those making this claim.
The response of the Conservative Party to this has been instructive. It hasn’t been just to suggest criminalising mephedrone (I wouldn’t agree with this, but given the drug’s pharmacology it would at least be consistent with current drug policy), but to say they will criminalise ‘all legal highs’.
This has led to many jokes on Twitter about coffee and chocolate being banned, but to be honest I don’t think we should be giving them ideas. Just because something sounds insane and unworkable doesn’t mean that the current political classes won’t try to do it anyway, as the history of the last thirty years should show anyone. Just because it’s pretty much impossible to formulate a legal definition of ‘legal high’ doesn’t mean they won’t pass such a law.
Now, I’m voting for the Liberal Democrats this election, because I agree with the majority (though far from all) of their policies, because I think their elected representatives are generally doing a good job, and because the other two major parties are, frankly, evil.
However, given that the Lib Dems are unlikely in the extreme to form the next government – and I’d be very surprised if we even get in in my constituency (which has, allowing for boundary changes, had the same MP for forty years, and apart from a four-year period in the thirties has had a Labour MP since 1922 or 1906, depending on which of the old constituencies that make it up you look at) – here’s something that could make me vote for either of them.
If they’d just promise to *DO NOTHING* for five years.
I would gladly vote for a government that I knew was – unlike every government of my lifetime – not going to actively make things worse. Even if things stayed just as bad as they are, just *NOT MAKING THEM WORSE* would be good enough for me. No new legislation passed, no big organisational changes, just let everyone get on with it for five years.
A government that would say “We’re not going to start any more wars of aggression, or torture any more people. We’ll keep the current ridiculous drug laws, but if someone discovers a slightly different method of getting off their tits, good for them. If the DEBill gets passed before the election, we’ll keep it, but not criminalise all the trivial technical ways round it that will become popular two days after it passes. We’ll keep all the laws against ‘extreme pornography’, but if someone somewhere discovers a new way of getting themselves off, we won’t stop them. The schools and hospitals will continue to be crap, but we won’t, for example, get rid of two more mental health beds every single day on average, like Labour have since 1997, so they won’t get any crapper. The BBC will keep producing crap that you don’t watch, but it’ll still be there for at least another five years and its executives won’t have to grovel to us and chop bits off in order to keep the service going. We won’t deliberately inflate any massive economic bubbles that take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘growth’, and if any bubbles happen and then burst, we won’t take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘recovery’. Things will still be bad in five years – but they won’t be *WORSE*”
If either of the two main parties were to say that – and mean it – they’d get my vote.
But as it is, I’ll be voting for a party which not only won’t make things worse, it might even make things slightly better if it’s given the choice. Why not join me?
Linkblogging For 03/12/09
Blogging will be a little light for a while as I’m writing my essay for the Mindless Ones, editing PEP! and writing about 15,000 words for that, and proofreading a book for my uncle. That said, I’m going to do a pop-drama and a Beatles review in the next couple of days…
Meanwhile, links:
The Association of Chief Police Officers think it’s women’s responsibility to not get raped, rather than men’s not to rape them. Laurie Penny disagrees.
Roz Kaveney is one of several people annoyed that the CofE is not protesting about the law in Uganda which criminalises homosexuality (with the death penalty for a second offence) – a law which the Ugandan branch of the Anglican church supports.
Millennium wonders about the timing of the revelation of Zac Goldsmith’s non-domicile status. Alex has opinions on this too.
Chris Bird wonders why we’re at the stage when ‘OK’ is considered a high standard in superhero comics.
And Jon Blum gives the only somewhat-positive review of the new ‘Prisoner’ I’ve seen – in part because of its use of Brian Wilson’s Smile…
Euro Elections And MP’s Expenses
Well, I’m nothing if not topical…
I wanted to write something on this more than a month ago, but my lack of net access pushed it on to the back burner until now. However, this month’s Liberator contained several articles on these things, which have brought everything back to mind.
The first thing to say is that the BNP’s success in the Euro elections was *very* easily avoidable. The fact is, the only parties that actually treated the Euro election as a serious one were the BNP, racist UKIP, and the Greens. They’re the only parties that did *any* campaigning worthy of the name.
Which is not to say that individuals in those parties didn’t do anything – they did. But I could probably name every single person in South Manchester who did any campaigning at all for the Lib Dems – I would be *shocked* if it was more than thirty in total – and what was done was remarkably half-hearted.
Now that makes sense in a party with a limited budget – you have to choose your battles – but the fact is that despite what people like Rupert Reed (who complained vociferously that the Lib Dems said in a leaflet that he couldn’t win, and then he didn’t win) think, the election wasn’t a contest between parties, but *should* have been an attempt to get out any voters at all. Something like a third of the country voted, and if the proportions of support are broadly the same throughout the population as they were among voters, any of the big three parties could have had a landslide had they got out *all* their vote (and the smaller ones could have got many more MEPs if they had). The problem was we didn’t try hard enough to get out our vote.
But also, one thing I heard time and again when calling people or door-knocking was that people weren’t going to vote at all, because of the expenses row.
Now, like a lot of people I was not actually all *that* bothered by the MPs expenses row, because compared to getting us involved in two unwinnable wars for no good reason, destroying rights that have lasted centuries , destroying the welfare state, encouraging racism for political gain, torture, the wholesale funneling of billions of pounds of public money into the hands of incompetent private contractors, mismanagement of the economy on an epic scale and the continued existence of David Blunkett, fiddling the expenses seems such a trivial crime that to complain about it would be like telling the Elephant Man his new haircut didn’t suit him.
I also didn’t think it really affected the Lib Dems in this election, because Chris Davies, the incumbent Lib Dem MEP, had a cast-iron record on fighting corruption in the European Parliament, while John Leech, the local MP in the area I was canvassing, is in the bottom 10% of MPs on expenses claims (he certainly doesn’t have an expensive car or anything like that, as I discovered when he gave a lift to four of us in his tiny car – I nearly pulled a muscle trying to get my large frame out of that confined space).
But the problem is, the expenses row had affected people more than I thought possible. Firstly, because it had been so prominent in the news that people who knew nothing of those other events knew it (and there are a *lot* of people who don’t pay any attention at all – one of the people I called thought I was calling for ‘the Social Democrats’ – a party that disbanded twenty years ago – while another said ‘Oh yes, I’ll vote for Liberal Democrats – Mr Cameron’s lot’) – and those people weren’t going to distinguish between parties. But more importantly, it knocked the will to care out of a lot of people because it *hit home*. It was something they could relate to.
Time and again I heard the same thing from people – that they didn’t begrudge legitimate expenses at all (and most people recognised the need for reasonable expenses) but that what got them was that these people who were gaming the system for all they could were in power and making it almost impossible for people at the bottom end of the income scale to claim what they were entitled to.
One poor woman, a lifelong Lib Dem, said she just couldn’t bring herself to vote at all because of the expenses row, because after her husband died, she’d been turned down for benefits. She couldn’t work, because she stayed at home to look after her disabled daughter, but the benefits office had insisted that she couldn’t get benefits because she had a partner. “I kept telling them, she’s not my partner, she’s my daughter! But they wouldn’t listen!”
People like that see a wall of bureaucracy put in place just to stop them claiming the essentials for survival from a state they’ve paid taxes to all their life, and see the people at the top able to take what they like without consequence, because pretty much everyone in Parliament comes from the upper-middle or upper classes, and have no real understanding what difference forty quid a week can make to people at the bottom. (Boris Johnson calling a quarter of a million a year “chicken feed” is an example – it’d take me nearly ten years to earn that, and I’m comfortably off). And those people voted the Tories out in 1997 because they were sleaze-ridden, corrupt, and victimising those at the bottom of society. They were told that “Things Can Only Get Better”, and are now seeing that Labour are no different at all to the Tories. If your only two options for government are identical, then giving up on voting makes sense.
And that, even more than the unnecessary deaths of millions, even more than the torture, even more than the economic collapse, is the *real* crime of the New Labour ‘project’ and this government. It’s taken away from millions of people the hope that anything could ever be any better.
Linkblogging for 08/07/09
Now that the evil burning day-star is finally being chased away a bit the writers’ block of the last few weeks seems to be easing slightly for me. I’ll hopefully be reviewing Wednesday Comics tomorrow, doing a Spotify playlist on Friday and a BFAW on Saturday. And I’m hoping to make quite a big announcement in the next week or so.
In the meantime, here’s some links.
For some reason, almost everyone whose blogs I read has been talking about Torchwood this week, including Jennie and Millennium, and they’re talking about it as if it’s somehow got good – I’m beginning to suspect some kind of (ahem) Liberal Conspiracy going on to try to get me to watch a truly terrible piece of TV. That said, even Lawrence Miles seems to like this one, and his ‘review’ is probably the most interesting, though also worrying (Miles doesn’t tend to leave these up very long though, so read it while you can)…
Chris Bird is still talking about why he should write Doctor Strange.
Amypoodle at the Mindless Ones has one of the best takes I’ve read so far on Batman & Robin 2.
Costigan Quist explains why the Tories are wrong about using Google for storing our health records. That this needs to be explained to anyone ever is one of the most incredibly depressing things I’ve ever heard.
In less depressing Google news, they’re planning to release their own free-software Linux based OS for web app users, using their Chrome browser as a basis for the UI (and I’ve been using Chromium, the fully-free version of Chrome, for a while now – it’s very nice). I use Linux-based there advisedly, as from the sound of it there’ll actually not be many GNU components if my understanding is right.
And a lot of people on Twitter all simultaneously noticed for the first time that the UK citizenship/residency test is an obscene, pointless waste of time and money that dehumanises all who come into contact with it and has no bearing on reality. I knew that already, as my wife is an immigrant, but most other people apparently didn’t. Charlotte sums up the views of those who have looked at it.
Private Finance Initiative – Or Why We’re All Broke
I’m trying to get back to posting at least something here every day… as my comic shop still has no League, and the Star Trek film doesn’t have much to say about it, you’re getting a politics post.
Before I start, as with many of my posts, this will be wrong in detail. I’m trying to give a broad overview here, so it’s full of sweeping generalisations. If you don’t want sweeping generalisations, don’t read my stuff, look at the wikipedia page for PFI instead…(that Wikipedia entry is being accused of bias at the moment, and I can see why, but it’s just because there really is only one side to this…)
Those of you who are, like me, fans of 1980s Thatcherite sitcom Yes, Minister, will remember one particularly funny episode. In it Sir Humphrey is trying desperately to keep the fact that he made a cock-up thirty years ago hidden, because it was such a momentous blunder that, were it found out who was responsible, he would face instant dismissal.
What he’d done was get a private firm to build an army barracks, so the initial expense would be less, agree to pay the costs over thirty years, then let the private firm own the buildings at the end of that time. A stupid decision, of course, but that satirical decision has for the last couple of decades been the basis of British economic policy, under the name of the Private Finance Initiative.
Now PFI is a boring name, and many people thus gloss over the details of this when it’s mentioned in newspapers, so perhaps a better name for it would be Greedy Boomers Stealing From Their Children. Certainly it would be a more accurate name.
What PFI essentially means is that if you want, say, a new hospital, the government makes an agreement with a private company to build and maintain it. The contract goes over thirty years or so, and then at the end of that time what happens depends on the contracts. The earlier ones, implemented 17 years ago, had clauses which say ownership reverts to the private company I believe, while later ones tend to more sensibly say the government owns them. But we can’t be sure, because the contracts are often ‘commercially sensitive’.
In itself, this isn’t too dreadful in principle, even though it adds a huge (30% or so) overhead to the cost… but principle and practice are two very different things. In practice the PFI is a fast-track to complete economic destruction. Here’s why:
The reason PFI is attractive to governments is that it doesn’t appear on the balance sheets – it’s not money ‘borrowed’, so doesn’t count towards the national debt, but you also don’t have to pay it all at once. It’s like being given a credit card that somehow doesn’t impact your credit rating, no matter how much you spend, so long as you make the minimum payments. This means the government can announce massive amounts of spending without putting tax rates up. I’m sure you can see some of the problems that can come from that.
But that’s not the only problem – PFI often becomes the only method by which funding happens for services, and this can be catastrophic. Take this entirely-hypothetical-and-nothing-to-do-with-any-organisations-I-used-to-work-for-honestly example:
Say you’re an NHS trust, and you have a unit with four twenty-bed wards, but it’s becoming run down – it’s forty years old or so, and it needs work doing. But you haven’t got enough money to do all the work – it’s serious business, after all, renovating hospital wards, and requires serious money. So you ask the central government for funding.
Now, you can’t use PFI for renovations, only for new builds. So the government say “No, we can’t give you money for that, but we can give you an entire new unit as part of a PFI scheme. Of course, you’ll still have to pay a few million up front, and make the rest of the payments on time, but you’ll get a new unit along with a service contract.
So the trust agree to get a totally new building, but they will have to give all their staff a pay freeze for a few years, not even giving them legally mandated raises, to raise the few million they have to pay themselves. And the new unit will have to be smaller than the old one, of course, because the PFI funds don’t stretch that far. But they go ahead because they’ve got no choice…
And two years later huge cracks are appearing in the walls, the lift doesn’t work, the air conditioning’s broken and staff are going off sick, never mind the patients. But you can’t do anything because the company that built it (usually one of the very big construction firms who are very litigious, so I won’t name any, but I’m sure most of you can think of one or two that fit the bill) are also the maintenance people, and they get the money regardless of quality of service.
Meanwhile, while patients are having rain dripped on them from leaky roofs, the government boasts about how much money it’s spent on the NHS. This is why no matter how much money the government claim to be pumping into things, services constantly get worse – the money isn’t going anywhere where it could be useful, but just to enrich already bloated businesses.
And then to make matters worse, the government ‘has to’ keep those companies afloat so they can continue to provide their ‘service’ (because the hospitals belong to the company until they’re paid for), so now, because of the recession, the government is paying billions in bailout money to keep those companies going so it can keep paying them money for providing an expensive, substandard service.
And all this is just because ever since Thatcher got in, just over thirty years ago, the most spoiled, narcissistic, greedy generation ever to have been born in human history has insisted on having the best possible services for itself without paying. Whether this means pulling the ladder up after them for charging for services they don’t need (like saddling the younger generations with debts for attending universities that they attended for free), or just racking up mountains of government debt and postponing paying it off until they are retired or dead, political culture for my entire lifetime has been based on the idea of getting anyone born after about 1956 or so to pay for the rest of their life for whatever their elders want.
We need, urgently, to get rid of the idea that you can have good services and not pay for them – if nothing else because actually being honest about the payments is vastly cheaper and more efficient in the medium-to-long term. Government projects should only be paid for either by direct taxation or by money borrowed and added to the national debt in a proper, above-board manner. Anything else is inviting the kind of financial catastrophe we’re going through now…
Linkblogging for 18/11/08
Sorry I’ve not posted much for a couple of weeks. I’ve had various bits of life-related bits to attend to, and some work stress (can’t talk about that publicly, but I will say “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!” as a very subtle hint…)
Anyway, got a comics post mostly written which will be up in the morning, and BFAW tomorrow night, but for now, here’s some links. And if I go a day without posting on here in future, please feel free to leave abusive comments calling me an idle tosser…
Alix at the People’s Republic Of Mortimer has a great post about the Tories’ cargo cult tax policies.
Over at The Independent, they seem to think that… women don’t have ideas… or something? Apparently if Richard Dawkins, Malcolm Gladwell and Christopher Hitchens write ‘big idea books’ (though what the big idea is for at least two of those I don’t know, frankly – Dawkins is a third-rate thinker at best and Hitchens has let alcohol and a forty-year-old grudge against Bill Clinton ruin a once-sharp mind) they’re being typically male, whereas if Naomi Klein or Lisa Jardine or whoever do, then they’re ‘outliers’. Piffle, inspired by the increasingly-reactionary Germaine Greer, and dangerous piffle at that – though the article is so badly written one can’t tell if the writer is arguing for or against the proposition; or if she is merely, in the American ‘journalism’ style, laying out a bunch of quotes from random people with no coherent thought as to a larger context or argument behind those quotes.
Is it me or is the Independent getting really, really sloppy in recent weeks? I only read it online, but the writing’s getting almost as bad as the Guardian, and they appear to have sacked all their sub-editing staff…
Pillock has a really good post on post-Crisis DC Comics, one of many things I want to write about myself, soon…
The Mindless Ones have a great post up on Edward Gorey
Fred Clark, having finished his several-year-long dissection of the first Left Behind book, now turns his eyes to the film version.
And another post from the People’s Republic of Mortimer to finish off, to remind everyone that the so-called ‘tax cut for the lowest paid’ that Brown was touting last week was actually the fudge he introduced to try to fix the problem he caused by *raising* taxes for the poor to cut them for the rich – and this ‘fix’ makes the poorest of the poor still worse off. Don’t let him get away with it.
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