We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Arthur Seldon, one of the founders of the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a think thank that has played a crucial role in the fightback against collectivism, has died. Even though he was heading towards his 90th year – he was born in 1916 – his death is still a sad shock to me. I met him several times, both at IEA receptions at the organisation’s offices and at numerous conferences. He was a lovely man.
Every time I met him, Arthur always treated you with respect and kindness. He had the ability to make his arguments without implying that people who disagree have base motives, which is a sensible strategy. He regarded the prophets of Fabian socialism, who have wreaked so much havoc in this country, as well intentioned fools rather than knaves (with the possible exception of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whom he loathed). Arthur was, to use an old fashioned word, a gentleman.
His contribution to the re-birth of liberal ideas (to use it in its proper sense) cannot be exaggerated. Many friends of mine, including such fellow bloggers as Brian Micklethwait, have been touched by Arthur’s influence.
I shall raise a glass to a great classical liberal writer tonight. May he rest in peace.
Compared to this disaster in Pakistan, that has killed tens of thousands of people, this story is pretty tiny in the big scheme of things, but by god, it still sucks:
A fire has destroyed the Bristol warehouse containing the theatrical props for the plasticine film characters Wallace and Gromit.
Fire at factory
The news comes at the same time figures show their latest movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, topped the American box office over the weekend.
The story does not contain any suggestion as to what caused the blaze, although on a BBC 6 pm news item I saw, it was suggested that arson might, just might, be a factor. If so then I hope the perpetrators suffer some very unpleasant outcome indeed.
We seem to be talking rather a lot about cool movies at the moment and jolly right too (as the film critic Barry Norman used to say). I intend to see this film in the company of some fellow Londoners as soon as possible.
This is the un-edited version of an article sent in by Diana Quaver, which we published earlier in a reduced form. Diana has been closely following this story, which should be of great interest to the on-line community:
I have recently followed the trial of Daniel Cuthbert. This was the gentleman who was accused of “hacking” into the website of the Disasters and Emergency Committee. He was recently found “regretfully” found guilty under section 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He never even lived in Whitechapel. This was the BBC story a few months ago:
Charge over tsunami ‘hacking’ bid
A man has been charged over an alleged attempt to hack into a website set up to raise funds after the Asian tsunami.
Daniel Cuthbert, 28, of Whitechapel, east London, has been charged with one offence under the Computer Misuse Act.
Scotland Yard said the charge followed an alleged unauthorised access of the Disasters and Emergency Committee site on New Year’s Eve.
Mr Cuthbert is due to appear at Horseferry Magistrates’ Court next Thursday.
The disaster fund has raised an estimated £250m to help victims of the tsunami.
Tens of thousands of people used its web pages to offer money to those caught in the Boxing Day tragedy.
Today, Daniel Cuthbert was found guilty.
Daniel Cuthbert saw the devastating images of the Tsunami disaster and decided to donate £30 via the website that was hastily set up to be able to process payments. He is a computer security consultant, regarded in his field as an expert and respected by colleagues and employers alike. He entered his full personal details (home address, number, name and full card details). He did not receive confirmation of payment or a reference and became concerned as he has had issues with fraud on his card on a previous occasion. He then did a couple of very basic penetration tests. If they resulted in the site being insecure as he suspected, he would have contacted the authorities, as he had nothing to gain from doing this for fun and keeping the fact to himself that he suspected the site to be a phishing site and all this money pledged was going to some South American somewhere in South America.
The first test he used was the (dot dot slash, 3 times) ../../../ sequence. The ../ command is called a Directory Traversal which allows you to move up the hierarchy of a file. The triple sequence amounts to a DTA (Directory Traversal Attack), allows you to move three times. It is not a complete attack as that would require a further command, it was merely a light “knock on the door”. The other test, which constituted an apostrophe( ‘ ) was also used. He was then satisfied that the site was safe as his received no error messages in response to his query, then went about his work duties. There were no warnings or dialogue boxes showing that he had accessed an unauthorised area.
20 days later he was arrested at his place of work and had his house searched. In the first part of his interview, he did not readily acknowledge his actions, but in the second half of the interview, he did. He was a little distraught and confused upon arrest, as anyone would be in that situation and did not ask for a solicitor, as he maintained he did nothing wrong. His tests were done in a 2 minute timeframe, then forgotten about.
He was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which was signed in 1989 when perms were just going out of fashion and mobile phones were like bricks and cost £1000 and we were still using green type on a black background. The word “ Computer” was not even defined as they realised that this area was moving at light speed so they wanted to keep it open. Sadly, it has become open to willy-nilly interpretation and the magistrate decided there was intention to access data as stated in section 1(a), although I may be biased, it is an incorrect interpretation.
Cuthbert was prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and convicted under Section 1 (a) of this Act. The relevant section of the Act is:
Section (1) of the Act states:
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if –
a. he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
b. the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
c. he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
As an expert, if he had true intent (as the judge deemed he did, which is an incorrect analysis) he would have been more than capable of “hacking” and gunning that door down with a digital version of a point-blank range AK47, but he did not. He maybe should not have done the tests that are beyond the knowledge of a regular user and a caution would have sufficed, there was no need for a trial and certainly not 10 months of waiting time. The policeman was smug as he got his browny points and the CPS prosecutor was what one can expect of a CPS prosecutor, patronising, pedantic and uninteresting but sadly successful.
The ../ sequence triggered of the alarm which was set up as “high” for this sort of “attack” at the donate.bt.com website that was set up by the DEC website. This alerted someone that there was something potentially suspicious, this was then passed up to someone who reported it to the police. They found their suspect through the IP address and were able to trace it to his laptop. Well, the Computer Crime Unit (known in the industry as “Muppets”) were very happy they got their man.
Mr Cuthbert was convicted under S. 1 (a) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. It will be almost impossible for him to work in IT, the security industry being totally based on trust and reputation, as they are all freelancers and rely on contacts. That simply is not right. Justice is not always synonymous with legality.
When someone tells you, “whatever you do, do not press the red button” and you are almost compelled, in just that way, I am feverishly tempted to type in the ../../../ sequence in the Ministry of Defence website, and see what happens. Maybe not.
This may not be the most exciting story of the day, but it caught my eye as an example of how, despite its fine words, the present government has allowed our education system to crumble:
Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the “unsupportable” decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.
Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, representing leading boys’ and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.
“Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed,” he said. “Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status.”
India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.
Superficially, it may be a smart move to make it easier for parents to send their children to private schools. My only problem is that if the current Labour government were to embark on such a course, it would demand, as part of such a deal, greater control over what is left of the non-state education system. (That remains a key drawback of education vouchers). Do we really want the half-educated dolts and knaves running this government to get their hands on Eton, Harrow or Winchester?
Update: a commenter disputes whether British state schools are so lousy. Perhaps he should study this OECD report, which contains damning data on illiteracy in Britain. I should also remind readers of the terrific work being done by Professor James Tooley to debunk the shibboleths of statist thinking on education.
Update 2: Here is another link to a site about literacy issues in Britain and other countries. If you scroll down there are dozens of stories, from as recently as September 2005, expressing employers’ concerns about the skills of the students they take on. A couple of commenters persist in claiming that our state education system is better than it has ever been. If so, why the company complaints? I presume that CEOs are not making this stuff up.
Yesterday I went up to Blackpool for a couple of off-conference meetings.
In one of these meetings (a joint meeting – debate with John Redwood) Mr Richards of the ‘Independent’ newspaper spoke.
Mr Richards stated that everyone should forget about the EU because the Euro was not going to be introduced into Britain and the Constitution had been voted down.
Various people (such as a member of the European Parliament who was at the meeting) carefully explained to Mr Richards that EU was taking more power (in all area’s of people’s lives) all the time and that even the voted down Constitution was in fact being implemented a bit at a time (for example the EU Defence College is being set up even though its legal basis, the EU Constitution, was not enacted).
Mr Richards simply repeated what he had already said.
So more specific examples of the growth in the activities of the EU, all of which the European Court, committed as it is to “ever closer union”, claims, possibly quite correctly, are allowed by the existing treaties. The growth in power is in all areas of life and is going on all the time, specific example after specific example were all explained to Mr Richards.
And Mr Richards simply repeated what he had already said, plus stating that it was “dangerous” not to vote for someone to be leader of the Conservative party on the grounds that they did not oppose the EU taking these powers unto itself. The Conservatives “would not win the election” if we thought like this (as if winning an election to what was becoming a powerless Parliament would interest anyone apart from the most corrupt).
The only other thing (on this area) that Mr Richards said was to mumble about the needs of “enlargement” of the EU – even though nothing that had been said to him, by anyone, had anything to do with the EU having more members than it used to.
What was depressing was not that (as some might think) that Mr Richards was a dishonest crony working for his master Mr Clarke (who sits on the board of the ‘Independent’). No, I suspect Mr Richards honestly meant every word he said. It was a matter of his being unable to understand what was being said to him.
Now not everyone who spoke to Mr Richards was on top form or used the exact words they should have done (for example, I was not on good form at all) – but most people did well enough. However, it was clear that argument and evidence simply could not reach him.
Now Mr Richards is an intelligent and well educated man, and so if argument and evidence can not reach him, what about the rest of the population? And remember, Mr Richards was exposed to evidence and logical argument for quite some time at the meeting (most people are not exposed to such things, in matters of public affairs, for very long at all).
Reasoning (not just on the EU – on every matter) depends on evidence and logical argument (in some subjects, perhaps, just on logic).
If most people (even the intelligent and well educated) can not be reached by evidence and logic then libertarians (and other people who try and use reasoning in public affairs) are wasting their time.
Perhaps most people really are at the level of being little above dogs or cats – “I like him, he has got a big belly and a nice voice”.
Few here have a deep faith in democracy so they may say “so what, we knew that anyway”, but if most people really are at this mental level it undermines rather more than democracy.
Actually it was a much cheerier gathering than I expected: usually the Tories have a leader who embarrasses them, but this year they have no leader and everyone’s full of beans.
– Eamonn Butler at the Conservative Party Conference
One of the things we quite often tell each other here at Samizdata is that if a new government department is created, then whatever it is of, so to speak, is now in much deeper trouble than before. Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Social Security. Department of Trade and Industry. Those all mean that defence, social security, trade, industry, are all going to be in permanently short supply and in a bad way from now on.
So it was with considerable sadness that, in Victoria Street this afternoon, I encountered this:
Constitution look out. And be anxious also about justice, rights and democracy. Click on the above little snippet of the photo I took to get the bigger context. I do not know why exactly, but I particularly dislike the lower case letters for the acronym. How long has this particular acronym been in existence? Since June 12th 2003, apparently. I had never noticed it before. This dca resides in an office block of impeccable tedium called Selborne House, 54 Victoria Street, the boring side and towards the boring end, which is why I had not noticed it before.
As soon as I started snapping, and in fact after I had only taken the one rather blurry photo that I have here displayed, a security guard emerged to remonstrate with me. Do you have permission to take photographs? No, of course not, I said. You need permission, he said, to take photographs of this building. Is it illegal, I asked, to take photos of this building from the street? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Why? You need permission to take photographs of this building. Okay, got you the third time, but it seems very strange. You need permission to take photographs of this building. Yeah got you mate. I’m just telling you that you need permission to take photographs of this building. He was an African with a very African voice and an impressive physique, and frankly you do not want to get into complicated arguments with people who work for the government. One of my rules. So I did not press my case.
But I press it now. Is it actually illegal to take photographs of government buildings from the street? Probably, these days, it is, sort of, depending on which lawyer you talk to. But how, in the age of zoom lenses, do they propose to stop people doing this? And what will they do about photos like mine? Perhaps, if some aspect of the government sees this, we will have to take these pictures down. It is the vagueness and the intimidation of all this, as much as the rule itself, that I object to. There was a sense of lawlessnesss about the whole situation. I did not collide with the will of Parliament, just with some government diktat that went round Whitehall in about 1999.
Surely, before telling someone out in the street that they may not take photos, the security men should have known their legal rights and been able to assert them explicitly, instead of just repeating that you have to “get permission”. If it was fear of terrorism, why could he not have said?
Something about all this makes me think that my suspicions about how little protection the people in this building will actually provide for such things as justice, rights and democracy are all too justified.
I mean, what kind of a building has a sign at the front saying what it is, which it obviously wants you to read and be impressed by, but then says you can’t take photos of it? And in the case of this building, it seems particularly odd.
No, another one quite separate to the festivities in Iraq…
Chief Inspector of HM Prisons Anne Owers has declared that the national symbol of England, the Cross of St. George, is racist and must not be worn by prison guards in case it upsets Muslim prisoners.
And it seems Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, agrees, saying that the Red Cross of St. George was “an insensitive reminder of the Crusades”, adding: “…that it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with.”
Who is “we”? Perhaps Chris Doyle and his Council for Dhimmitude should spend more time getting Arabs to understand the British rather than the other way around.
I wonder how this organisation would react to calls for Muslims to abandon the crescent moon, the green flag and all other overly Muslim symbols as being offensive to some English people who may associate them with slavery? I mean, if it is ok for Muslims to be offended by English people in England wearing English symbols that remind some people of a series of wars that ended in 1300, how can anyone mind if I object to Muslims in England wearing Muslim symbols that I choose to associate with Muslim atrocities against English people which ended practically yesterday… i.e. when Lord Exmouth destroyed Algiers in 1816?
Completely daft of course but if we accept the logic of the likes of Anne Owers and Chris Doyle, it seems inevitable. Are they sure they want to go down that path?
I cannot tell you how happy this makes me:
Ms Spelman, who is shadow local government minister, said the public were increasingly taking their cue from Mr Paxman when dealing with politicians. She said the reception she received from the public while out canvassing in her West Midlands constituency was the most unfriendly she had ever experienced. The public had clearly lost trust in politicians and thought they were only “in it for themselves”, she added.
No, really? I wonder what gave them that impression…
Perhaps you think I am talking about Venezuela under the thuggish Chavez?
Nope. I am talking about Britain.
Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:
Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?
I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed – key qualification – to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker’s coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don’t demand that people remove expressions such as “For God’s Sake” or “Heaven Help Us” from their vocabulary.
This story by the BBC lays out how public sector jobs have outpaced those in the domestic private sector for some time, a statement that is hardly likely to surprise regular visitors to Samizdata.
The public sector is creating new jobs at a faster rate than private business, according to the latest official data.
At the same time, UK productivity is now at its lowest level for 15 years, further figures from the Office for National Statistics showed.
Analysts have long argued that the government sector trails behind the wider economy in terms of productivity.
Overall productivity grew by 0.5% in the year to July, the lowest since 1990 and down from 2.5% a year earlier.
The ranks of the public sector expand and of course, the government is quite happy about this state of affairs, since people who work on the taxpayer’s pound are unlikely to be keen on a drastic rollback of said state. Every additional worker adds to this ratchet effect.
As the public sector balloons, the cost frequently falls on those least able to bear it, such as this retired lady who went to gaol rather than pay a council tax bill that has risen far faster than inflation.
People like this lady probably voted for that nice, vaguely Tory-looking Mr Blair back in 1997 and who knows, gave him a second and third chance in the subsequent elections. But the question for the Tories, now gathering for their annual conference in Blackpool this week, is how to credibly halt and roll back the public sector juggernaut and thus make room for sweeping tax cuts. If they cannot do so, then frankly there is no point to them.
UPDATE: Noted libertarian author Sean Gabb gave an excellent talk in Westminster tonight. One of his central themes is that we will not be able to push back the onslaught on our traditional institutions until we understand the nature of what the “enemy” is. A key point is class. Class analysis is not and should not be a tool only of collectivists. The NuLab “project” can be thought in class terms, and the relentless expansion of public sector employment can be seen as a way of entrenching that class and its hold on society.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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