Category: General

Courage and Cancer

Not many people are brave enough to go pub­lic with intim­ate details of med­ic­al prob­lems, espe­cially can­cer, and to start going pub­lic when the prob­lem is dia­gnosed, not just when it’s cured. Ken Hol­man is one of those rare people who have done so, and in email with him shortly after he came out of hos­pit­al he wel­comed my doing my small bit to pub­li­cise what he went through, in the hopes that it will help oth­ers (from Ken: “I know that I would have appre­ci­ated read­ing actu­al testi­mo­ni­als from patients rather than just cor­por­ate med­ic­al reports”). 

For those who don’t know, Ken has been a stal­wart in the SGML/XML com­munity for many years, tak­ing part in vari­ous stand­ards com­mit­tees as well as being a well-regarded teach­er and speak­er. He’s had a bad run health-wise recently, cul­min­at­ing in a bout with pro­state can­cer (which now appears to be effect­ively cured, though some side-effects still remain). The details are at Aware­ness of Male Can­cers – my per­son­al stor­ies; what may be start­ling is that even test res­ults with­in the nor­mal range can indic­ate can­cer that needs to be treated. Here’s hop­ing that few people need to go through what Ken just has, but if you do, I hope you recov­er well and quickly.

Phishing Sophistication

I’m start­ing to be impressed by the (almost) soph­ist­ic­a­tion of phish­ing attempts. The latest one in my inbox today con­tained a mes­sage from someone pur­port­ing to have bought an item via eBay that they had­n’t received and unless they heard back they were going to com­plain to eBay and then the police — I can quite see some nervous seller who thinks there might be a mis­take in the sys­tem click­ing on the “log in to eBay mes­sage cen­ter” link (which of course does­n’t go to eBay at all) to try to rec­ti­fy it. 

Mind you, the spam fil­ters are also start­ing to become soph­ist­ic­ated — my ISP adds head­ers to the email mark­ing poten­tial spam and this one tripped a num­ber of meters, adding up to quite a lot of red flags. Some of them are, on their own, quite legit­im­ate of course, but not all:

    1.0 FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS      
        From: ends in numbers
    1.3 RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO      
        Received: contains a numeric HELO
    1.0 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS        
        Message-ID =~ /^\s*< ?[A-Z]+\@(?!(?:mailcity|whowhere)\.com)/
    0.1 HTML_TAG_EXISTS_TBODY  
        BODY: HTML has "tbody" tag
    0.4 HTML_70_80             
        BODY: Message is 70% to 80% HTML
    0.1 HTML_FONTCOLOR_BLUE    
        BODY: HTML font color is blue
    0.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY         
        BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
    0.2 HTML_MESSAGE           
        BODY: HTML included in message
     0.3 HTML_FONT_BIG          
        BODY: HTML has a big font
    1.1 MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET   
        RAW: Message text in HTML without charset
    0.2 MIME_QP_LONG_LINE      
        RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 chars
    0.4 NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP      
        URI: Uses a dotted-decimal IP address in URL
    0.1 FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD2   
        hotmail.com 'From' address, but no 'Received:'
    3.0 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK     
        Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook
    0.6 MISSING_MIMEOLE        
        Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
    1.1 FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML    
        Outlook can't send HTML message only
    1.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI   
        Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts
    1.1 FORGED_OUTLOOK_TAGS    
        Outlook can't send HTML in this format
    3.0 SARE_MSGID_YAHOO       
        Message-ID is forged, (yahoo.com)
    1.1 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  
        HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag

After I saw this I promptly went and got the latest ver­sion of Pegas­us Mail, which I use for my per­son­al email. Pegas­us has always had good anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, has had decent spam fil­ter­ing for some time, and shows the real URL that is being linked to on HTML emails, but it now advert­ises anti-phish­ing checks as well. It will be inter­est­ing to see how well they work in practise. 

Crochet Danger

I had to laugh at Eve’s link to the story of the weenie who was scared of knit­ting needles (while admit­ting I first saw the link at whump dot com from fol­low­ing XML 2005 Aggreg­at­or links). I have a bet­ter story than mere knit­ting needles or even nee­dle­work needles, since all of those have really blunt ends.

When the TSA dir­ect­ives first came out after Septem­ber 11, ban­ning knit­ting needles, I, along with a lot of oth­er people, was struck by the arbit­rar­i­ness of the bans. No knives, but forks were still allowed, and so were glasses made of glass. Per­son­ally I’d rather have someone come at me with a blunt knife that’s not cap­able of cut­ting any­thing than a broken glass. So I read the list of banned items and noticed that crochet hooks wer­en’t on the list. Giv­en that in terms of crafts I bounce between knit­ting, nee­dle­work, crochet, and lots of oth­ers, I have a good sup­ply of crochet hooks. I picked one out to take on my next set of flights. Not just any crochet hook though, one of my fine 1.25 mm crochet hooks that at the time I was using for filet crochet. So this is a hook, with what can only be described as a barb on one end, with a total dia­met­er of 1.25 mm (I have smal­ler, but had two of the 1.25 mm hooks so could eas­ily risk los­ing one).

The first secur­ity per­son checked the hook, looked wor­ried, asked her super­visor, the super­visor said “crochet hooks are allowed”. And that was it. On board I went, with my filet crochet and my crochet hook. These days knit­ting needles are expressly allowed, as are crochet hooks (although the TSA calls them “crochet needles”) so I will still be able to carry around my filet crochet hooks and scare unsus­pect­ing knit­ting needle phobics (yes, there is such a thing as a needle pho­bia; most people who suf­fer from it have pho­bi­as about vac­cin­a­tion and blood test-type needles, not knit­ting needles, although the pho­bia is appar­ently bad enough in some people to be set off by any needle-type object). 

So if you see someone with what looks like a viciously thin, barbed object and thin yarn, just remem­ber the TSA per­mits it. Mind you, read­ing that list does raise oth­er ques­tions, such as “if you can­’t smoke on board, why do you need a cigar cut­ter?” and “why are toy trans­former robots expressly per­mit­ted but not oth­er toys?” but that’s just me being picky.

Katrina

Like so many oth­ers, I feel com­pelled to add to the blog­flood of words about Hur­ricane Kat­rina (and I pity any child of that name!). My own words seem inad­equate; I don’t have Shel­ley’s lyr­i­cism, or Cecily’s per­spect­ive, or con­sist­ency. I’ve nev­er even been to New Orleans, so I have no pho­tos to add to the store of what was there. I have no idea wheth­er New Orleans will be rebuilt, although it’s obvi­ous it will nev­er be the same again. I appre­ci­ate people who say that now build­ing codes can be developed and enforced to with­stand hur­ricanes, but worry about what the costs of those build­ings will do to the poor who already can­’t afford reas­on­able accomodation. 

It seems large parts of the dam­age and destruc­tion were pre­vent­able, much of the pain and hor­ror could have been ameli­or­ated. What does this do to the people who have seen it, exper­i­enced it? What sort of night­mares will they relive in their dreams and pass on to their chil­dren? And what sort of les­sons will be drawn? Will the sys­tems to hold back the water be designed and built with the same determ­in­a­tion as in Hol­land after the massive floods in 1953 that killed almost 2000 people? (60% of the Dutch pop­u­la­tion lives on land that is under sea level). I can­’t help think­ing of that old song that some­how still seems to ask many of the right ques­tions — “The answers, my friend, are blow­ing in the wind, the answers are blow­ing in the wind”.

Visibility Online

One unex­pec­ted but totally wel­come side-effect of blogs and instant mes­saging these days is know­ing that people you care about are ok. Just being able to see their names and their post­ings while the effects of what happened in Lon­don sunk in made a big dif­fer­ence to my day. My con­dol­ences to all those for whom that could­n’t help.

London

The bombs in Lon­don have proven again that Lon­don­ers are resi­li­ent, that they have learnt from the WWII blitz and the years of IRA attacks, how to cope with ter­ror that would bring oth­er cit­ies to a screech­ing halt. And yet, I can­’t help but worry what the reac­tions will be. Will the gov­ern­ments of the world now insist that every­one get­ting on a bus or train go through met­al detect­ors, or worse, be scanned by the incred­ibly pri­vacy-invad­ing backs­cat­ter X‑ray scan­ners? (See Bruce Schnei­er­’s blog for more dis­cus­sion on this). I don’t care what any­one says, I don’t believe that mak­ing people go through X‑ray machines is healthy, even if the amount is low — hav­ing trained as an exper­i­ment­al nuc­le­ar phys­i­cist, I’ve learned that even low dosages are cumulative. 

Screen­ing pub­lic trans­it pas­sen­gers would slow down pub­lic trans­port and force more people into their cars; it’s just not prac­tic­al in Lon­don rush-hour traffic to com­pletely screen every per­son get­ting on to every train or bus at every stop and sta­tion without bring­ing the sys­tem to a com­plete halt. And the traffic con­ges­tion in Lon­don is so bad already that encour­aging people to drive won’t solve any prob­lems either!

Tony Blair insists that the ter­ror­ists won’t win — but then why is the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment try­ing to push through legis­la­tion on ID cards that has sig­ni­fic­ant pri­vacy and cost implic­a­tions (thanks to Robin Wilton for the link) ? The attacks on Septem­ber 11, 2001, proved that sui­cide ter­ror­ists will go to extreme lengths to ensure that their iden­tity papers look right, and that they have built up a reas­on­able his­tory (the hijack­ers had val­id ID and were fre­quent fly­ers, in part in order to plan the attacks metic­u­lously). Mak­ing people carry iden­tity cards will just make life dif­fi­cult for ordin­ary people, not for the ter­ror­ists who will be pre­pared with all the iden­ti­fic­a­tion (fake or real) that they need.

I don’t know what can be done to solve the ter­ror­ist prob­lem but mak­ing life more dif­fi­cult for ordin­ary people try­ing to go about their lives without a def­in­ite bene­fit (for example, the x‑ray machines men­tioned above can­’t search in body cav­it­ies so it’s also of lim­ited use) really seems to me to be let­ting them win. Yes, there are def­in­ite things people can do — the clas­sic advice to not leave lug­gage unat­ten­ded and to avoid sus­pi­cious pack­ages, for example. And some amount of secur­ity check­ing when you board air­craft is reas­on­able — I would­n’t want someone with a gun on board or a long knife, even if they’re not ter­ror­ists, in case of acci­dents. But the more dra­coni­an parts of the vari­ous Acts that many gov­ern­ments rushed to pass after 2001 are not neces­sary. There’s an old say­ing that the police gen­er­ally tend to treat all people as crim­in­als who haven’t been caught yet (and giv­en that they usu­ally deal with crim­in­als all day, one can for­give their per­cep­tion as to the rel­at­ive pro­por­tions of crim­in­als and hon­est people in the pop­u­la­tion). We need to ensure that we’re not all treated as ter­ror­ists-in-wait­ing, while bal­an­cing the secur­ity needed to catch the real terrorists.