I’m getting increasingly disturbed by the Police’s keenness to use SWAT-style tactics for executing search and arrest warrants. I note that in the recent case in Christchurch they even used ‘incendiary devices’ as they stormed the place. Therefore:

Police National Headquarters
PO Box 3017
Wellington

Dear Sir/Madam,

Under the Official Information Act I request the following information:

1. Which people, positions or ranks within the NZ Police are authorised to deploy squads of armed police (such as the Armed Offenders Squad, anti-terrorist squads or similar). To clarify my request, I am referring to all squads or teams using SWAT-style tactics and equipment.
2. The number of times these squads have been called out in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
3. The percentage of those call outs that were in response to an incident (e.g. a shooting) as compared to a planned deployment (e.g. to execute an arrest warrant). Any other statistical breakdown of reasons for deployment recorded by the Police.
4. The policy used to determine whether to use these squads to execute arrest warrants.
5. The policy used to determine whether to use these squads to execute search warrants.
6. The policy used to determine whether these squads will make an unannounced forced entry when executing search or arrest warrants.
7. The circumstances in which these squads are authorised to use incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades when making an unannounced forced entry.
8. The number of times incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades have been used in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
9. The number of injuries caused by the use of incendiary devices such as flash-bang grenades in each of the past 10 years (1996-2006) and in the current year to date (2007).
10. Details of any oversight procedures performed either by the Police or any other body (such as the Police Complaints Authority) to review the use and activities of these squads.

Regards,

Thomas Beagle

I love the secretive smile that people get when they’re having an enjoyable conversation by text message in a public place.

Are there any IT sites with more than a few servers that don’t have at least one named after a Simpsons character? I’m writing up the servers at my current job and the names are a wonderfully typical cross-section of geek culture. Here’s a list of some of the names along with what I believe the reference is to (corrections welcome):

AGENTSMITH - The Matrix
BASIL - Fawlty Towers
BLUESTEEL - Zoolander
BORAT - Ali G/Borat
CORLEONE - The Godfather
CYBERTRON - Transformers
DRGONZO - Hunter S Thompson
MAGGIE - The Simpsons
PEDRO - Napoleon Dynamite
RAOUL - The Addams Family
RATCHET - Transformers rather than the Ratchet & Clank video game
REN - Ren & Stimpy
RIVENDELL - Lord of the Rings
SHELOB - Lord of the Rings
SHOCKWAVE - Transformers rather than The Shockwave Rider
STARSCREAM - Transformers
STIMPY - Ren & Stimpy
VERBAL - The Usual Suspects

Notable omissions:

• Star Wars
• Star Trek
• Buffy/Angel/etc

(I did consider whether there were any confidentiality or security implications of posting this and I couldn’t think of any.)

So, Fairfax Media have released the “Terrorism Files” - a summary of the facts from the evidence the police submitted to get the search warrants that led to those over the top Ninja-Police raids a few weeks ago.

I’ve read through this cherry picked summary and so far my response consists of “Is that it?” The two main thrusts appear to be:

• a lot of talk about what they want to do but no actual evidence of plans to do any of it
• a bunch of people doing paramilitary training in the Ureweras

There are two main questions that come to my mind:

1. Should what they were doing be illegal?
2. What is an appropriate response to people engaging in such behaviour?

Planning Crime

On the first count I’m going to give a qualified no. In general, the Police are claiming that these people were preparing to commit terrorist acts and the quotes definitely indicate that they were discussing them and even training for them. However, there seems to be no evidence that they had gone to the stage of planning these acts, let alone doing them.

I’m wary of “crimes of intention”, where we arrest people because we think they’re going to do something but they haven’t actually done it yet. There’s a huge gap between talking about doing something and actually doing it (otherwise we’d all probably be healthy, fit, successful and rich!) On the other hand, I don’t think that it’s necessary to wait for the bomb to go off before we arrest the people planning to plant it. Where should we draw the line?

I suggest that a good line would be where people cross from planning in the abstract to planning in the concrete. Or, to put it in an example, I don’t think it’s actionable to say “We should kill John Key with a sniper rifle” but I think it is actionable to say “I’ve booked a room with a good view of the target. X will deliver the rifle to you the day before, we expect the official party to be at the target spot from about 10:05 for approximately 15 minutes.” On the evidence published by Fairfax there’s no sign that they were anywhere close to that.

What About Paramilitary Training?

As well as this talk, it appears they also engaged in paramilitary training in the Ureweras. This involved camping, exercises and weapons training. These are all perfectly legal activities and engaged in by tramping clubs, gun clubs and paintball gamers across the country. I’m not sure I see a difference just because they were wearing balaclavas while doing it.

As for the firearms charges, sure, go ahead, but if your only crime is not having the proper license to own a gun that you could otherwise legally own, it’s really pretty trivial.

Appropriate Response

However, just because something isn’t or shouldn’t be illegal doesn’t mean that you should just ignore it. In general I’m against the idea of the state spying on people without reason, but in this case I believe that the evidence we have seen so far does provide sufficient justification. The police were right to be keeping them under surveillance.

Overall, I think it was a mistake to arrest them now. It was wrong as a breach of the civil rights grounds of the accused, and it was wrong on pragmatic grounds because it has brought the police and the state into disrepute.

I think that the appropriate response was to keep monitoring them to see if their plans did start getting more concrete. If they did, only then would charging them with criminal or terrorist conspiracy offenses seem appropriate.

Hallelujah, it’s only another week until we move and get real internet again! Since moving to Auckland we’ve been relying on Vodafone’s 3G data service (UMTS up to 384kbps) accessed through our phones.

The Good Bits

• Sweet, sweet internet, how I love thee (or, the internet you have is always better than the internet you don’t have).
• No on-site installation required.
• You can take it with you. We’ll probably be travelling over summer so this’ll be very useful.
• Receiving and making phone calls didn’t interfere with the data connection.
• Having paid for a proper data plan on the phone means that I can happily use it for internet access while out and about, without having to pay the horrendous casual data rates of $10/MB ($10000/GB!). In particular I’ve liked uploading photos straight to Flickr, navigating using Google Maps, and just general web browsing.

The Bad Bits

• We had some issues with the USB/phone connection on Kim’s computer. Rob kindly lent us a bluetooth adapter and this fixed things up.
• Bluetooth itself can be more ‘fun’ to configure than it should be.
• Windows Vista doesn’t cope with internet coming and going as well as it should.
• The speed is just good enough at best, and it often drops well below best.
• Take your phone away from the computer (bluetooth range of ~5m) and you lose your internet connection.
• Providing access for other people and devices, while possible, is too much of a pain. (I could use internet connection sharing on the laptop but really, having your internet tied to your personal phone means that it’s a personal connection.)
• We’re paying $60/month each for 1GB of traffic.

Using the newer HSDPA data standard would have been better for performance, but I didn’t want to spend the money to buy a Vodem or a phone that supports HSDPA (although the Sony Ericsson k850i has finally come out in New Zealand - parallel imported only, of course). And, as posted earlier, I found using the Vodem to be quite frustrating at times.

Conclusion

Of course, someone in South Korea or other civilised countries would probably sneer at me equating Telecom’s ADSL service with real internet. “What? It’s not even 10Mbit!” That said, I’m still looking forward to being able to:

• Watch videos from YouTube and similar sites.
• Get back into my eMusic subscription and download some more music (although I’ll miss Oink).
• Download the latest TV shows.
• Browse the web at a reasonable speed.

In summary, Vodafone’s 3G data service is definitely good enough for roaming use and as a backup service for transient people, but it doesn’t really substitute for a real internet connection for general usage.

There’s been a few articles in the paper recently about patriotism. In particular, some people have suggested that we should be trying to increase the sense of patriotism in the young by flying the national flag at schools and encouraging the singing of the national anthem. I find this issue interesting because these arguments completely leapfrog two important questions:

• Is patriotism good and should we be encouraging it?
• Will flying the national flag and singing the national anthem instill patriotic feeling?

Is Patriotism Good?

As is normal in these arguments I’d like to draw a distinction between pride and patriotism. The New Zealand nation is a construct that we are all working on, and I believe that we can feel pride in what we have achieved together and the general success of the project to date.

But the word patriotism doesn’t make me think of this simple pride, instead it brings to mind jingoism, war, stereotyping and the division of people based on trivialities such as birthplace and location. Patriotism is a negative emotion that should be discouraged, and trying to promote it makes as much sense to me as promoting hate or violence.

But even being charitable and accepting that “simple pride” is the meaning that people are talking about when they say they want to encourage patriotism, what does it mean to promote it? Is it the state’s place to promote emotions such as love and pride? What other emotions and attitudes should we be genuflecting towards, should schoolchildren also sing odes to the greater glory of the family or motherhood? I think that we should be letting people decide for themselves and not compel them to indulge in nationalistic rituals at school.

The Effectiveness of Nationalist Symbols

Then we come to the second question, the effectiveness of using anthems and flags to promote patriotism, something to which I am opposed to on philosophical, aesthetic and practical grounds.

Firstly, flag-waving and the singing of national anthems seems far closer to the negative jingoistic version of patriotism. I know it’s a simple-minded comparison but they conjur up the Nazi’s use of imagery and ceremony to bind people together into barbaric fascism. (I find it interesting to note that the modern democracy I most associate with flag-waving and patriotic feeling is also the one that seems to be flirting with fascism.)

Secondly, while I don’t want to refight the flag issue in depth, I find the current flag to be ugly, obsolete, and too close to the Australian flag to be an effective symbol for the nation. And the national anthem is a dreadful dirge with a strong religious element that is innappropriate for our secular society.

Thirdly, would venerating the flag and singing the national anthem actually build feelings of patriotism? My Nazi example above obviously implies that I believe it can be effective, but that was in the context of a society dedicated to reinventing itself and I don’t think this applies here. Rather I suspect that it will just another meaningless ritual that we force children to suffer because it makes a few people feel good about themselves. I’d prefer that the time be spent learning about New Zealand history (the good and the bad) and letting them make their own minds up about how they feel towards the country.

Once again another Guy Fawkes where the squawks of the fearful and timid are louder and more annoying than the booms and shrieks of the fireworks. Once again we have to put up with ever more restrictions, stern warnings from politicians and the whining of the Fire Service. I unashamedly support the Guy Fawkes celebrations and the fireworks that go with them.

• I like the beauty of a roman candle shooting into the night.
• I enjoy the community aspect as people flock to the big public displays or have a few friends around to the back yard BBQ/party.
• I like the anarchic feeling as people indulge in the pseudo-dangerous activity of playing with decorative explosives.
• I appreciate the absurdity of celebrating something so irrelevant to our modern lives (neither the Catholics nor Protestants seem like much of a threat to our society).

Some might argue that fireworks are dangerous and can cause people to be hurt. While this is undoubtedly true, I think it’s important to note that the number of injuries is generally low (and probably lower than other mass activities) and most are very minor. We don’t need the safety nazis interfering, for our own good, with another pleasure enjoyed by the mass of New Zealanders.

Last night Kim and I went for a walk. It was a still clear night and the sight of the fireworks sparkling in the sky against the lights of the city was quite beautiful. Parties were everywhere and people were having a good time. I thought it was wonderful.

In years gone past I had an extensive collection of bookmarks (aka favorites), stored links to a variety of pages and websites all over the internet. They were hard-won spoils from the search for useful information and I looked after them, backing them up and carefully moving them across whenever I got a new PC.

These days? These days I don’t even use them and my carefully maintained collection is lost amongst the digital detritus somewhere on my storage server. So far I’ve managed to come up with the following list of reasons (technological and behavourial) that caused this change.

• Domain names are easier to remember (there’s a general consensus on the grammar and patterns of domain name choice) and because I use them so much I’m better at remembering them. It reminds me of how I used to be very good at remembering phone numbers because I used them so much, but then I lost that ability when I started storing them in my mobile phone.
• I recently spent 8 months travelling around Central America without a laptop. Internet usage was reserved for internet cafes so I just got in the habit of not having my bookmarks available (I never got into using any of the sites that store your bookmarks for you).
• Searching on Google is a good substitute. Don’t bother remembering the site, just google for the relevant search terms and there it is.
• I use an RSS aggregator (a fancy term for website reader). This not only makes it easier to keep track of news from multiple sites, it also means I don’t have to enter their URLs.
• My web browser remembers the names of sites I visit a lot so I only have to type in the first few letters and then choose the relevant site from the drop-down list.

Of course, there is one exception to my rejection of bookmarks, and that’s my mobile phone. Using a standard phone keypad to laboriously type in long URLs is definitely something you try and avoid!

I imagine we’ve all been annoyed by spam selling viagra, watches, penny stocks and penis enlargement creams, but at least they make a certain sort of sense. Spammers send out millions of ads, get tens of sales, and make some money while annoying everyone else.

But what about the spam that isn’t selling anything? What is the point of sending out spam with a string of unrelated words that doesn’t even mention a product name, let alone claim that it will make your stock portfolio larger and more satisfying? To understand this kind of spam we need to think about the entire spamming process and how it has developed over the years.

Sending Spam

Originally spam used to be sent fairly directly. You’d sit (virtually at least) at your internet server or PC and send out your ads to unsuspecting mail servers all over the world. This approach didn’t work for long - blacklists were created to block known spam servers, anti-spamming clauses were written into internet service providers’ contracts, and anti-spam laws were passed in a number of countries. The spammers had to go under the radar.

At the same time this was happening, PCs all over the world were being infected by spyware, trojans, adware and other malware (a catch-all name for ‘malicious software’). Some of these were just annoyances that generated popup ads everywhere, but others would take over your PC and hand control of it to someone else.

The spammers saw this happening and realised that they could write malware that would send out spam - what could be stealthier then getting someone elses PC to send your spam for you? You’d infect their PC with spam-bot software, the spam-bot would connect to the spam server to get the latest ad campaign, and off it would go merrily sending spam out to all and sundry. If you could infect thousands of PCs with your software it didn’t matter if some got shut down, there were always plenty more to keep pumping it out. Spam was not only back, it was back in enormous volume.

Blocking Spam

However, the battle against spam wasn’t solely concentrated on stopping spam being sent. The other major front was stopping spam getting in by blocking incoming email that met certain rules. Originally these rules were fairly simple, looking for key-words like “viagra” in combination with links to websites. These worked somewhat, but they weren’t very effective (”Hey, let’s spell it as v1agra!”) and blocked too many real messages.

The anti-spam filters had to get more sophisticated and the new technique was something called bayesian filtering. Simply put, this technique works by taking a large body of email that has already been sorted into spam and non-spam. When a new email arrives, the bayesian filter is used to ask a simple question - does this new email look more like the emails in the spam group or more like the emails in the non-spam group? This method proved to be much more effective at filtering out spam and the anti-spammers were once again winning the battle.

Naturally the spammers fought back, this time by adding extra bits and pieces to their ads. A typical spam message would have the ad followed by a few paragraphs of pseudo-random generated text, with the hope that the email would look more like a real email and therefore get past the bayesian filters. (The pseudo-random text was quite surreally pretty at times and some geek-literateurs got quite excited and ran off to write learned papers about it.)

Tying it All Together

So the pieces are in place now but how does this explain the nonsense spam? Simply put, the spam-bot software isn’t very well written. It works something along these lines:

1. Infect PC.
2. Connect to spam-server and download the latest ad campaign.
3. Add nonsense text and other anti-anti-spam measures.
4. Start sending spam.

I believe that the nonsense spams happen when step 2 fails, either because of a bug in the spam-bot or because the spam-server has itself been shut down.

Well written software would just stop at this point, but spam-bots don’t have to be good and the software just marches on, adding the anti-bayesian text to the non-existent ad and sending the resulting ad-free nonsense spam out to the world.

And, for a final ironic twist, because the nonsense spams don’t have ads in them they’re more likely to get through the bayesian anti-spam filters and end up in your inbox!