The Daily Mail and Lord Dacre appeasing again

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11 August 2013
3 min read
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In World
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But there’s form here. The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything — large and small — from Picasso to equal pay for women. Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.

Most notoriously of all, they loved Adolf Hitler when he came to power, and as the Czech crisis arose they were the appeasement newspaper. And woe-betide any liberal-minded anti-fascist who warned that the man was unstable and that consistently satisfying his vanity, greed and ambition was only storing up trouble. The whole liberal left, not to mention Winston Churchill, were mocked and scorned for their instinctive distrust of Hitler. The Daily Mail knew better.

In January 1934 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, younger brother of the paper’s founder Alfred Northcliffe (the 4th Viscount Rothermere is chairman of the company that still owns it) wrote an article called Hurrah for the Blackshirts. He was sending congratulatory telegrams to My dear Führer as he liked to call him, right up until a few months before the outbreak of war. For more details read this article by Richard Norton-Taylor.

Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Bugger

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11 August 2013
3 min read
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In Politics, Rights
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The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they — and all the reactions to them — had one enormous assumption at their heart.

That the spies know what they are doing.

It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.

But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

I want to tell some stories about MI5 – and the very strange people who worked there. They are often funny, sometimes rather sad — but always very odd.

The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the secrets became weirder and weirder.

They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning — journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn’t — via redwolf.newsvine.com

When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart

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11 August 2013
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In Health, Science
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Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You’ve probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they’re a little less friendly to the people beneath them.

So here’s a question that may seem too simple: Why?

If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don’t have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.

But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.

Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a showing evidence to support that claim — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Man who created own credit card sues bank for not sticking to terms

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11 August 2013
2 min read
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In Business, Rights
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When Dmitry Argarkov was sent a letter offering him a credit card, he found the rates not to his liking. But he didn’t throw the contract away or shred it. Instead, the 42-year-old from Voronezh, Russia, scanned it into his computer, altered the terms and sent it back to Tinkoff Credit Systems.

Mr Argarkov’s version of the contract contained a 0pc interest rate, no fees and no credit limit. Every time the bank failed to comply with the rules, he would fine them 3m rubles (£58,716). If Tinkoff tried to cancel the contract, it would have to pay him 6m rubles.

Tinkoff apparently failed to read the amendments, signed the contract and sent Mr Argakov a credit card.

The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client’s terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form, his lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant. The opened credit line was unlimited. He could afford to buy an island somewhere in Malaysia, and the bank would have to pay for it by law.

However, Tinkoff attempted to close the account due to overdue payments. It sued Mr Argakov for 45,000 rubles for fees and charges that were not in his altered version of the contract.

Earlier this week a Russian judge ruled in Mr Argakov’s favour. Tinkoff had signed the contract and was legally bound to it. Mr Argakov was only ordered to pay an outstanding balance of 19,000 rubles (£371) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Design

Synagogue for the Arts / William Breger

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10 August 2013
46 second read
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In Design
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i could go take a picture of the seagram’s building or the chrysler building, but i figure i’d rather search out something a little bit weirder. and today’s building is one of my favorite odd-ball buildings in nyc. it’s tribeca’s synagogue for the arts, as designed by William Breger (who was a student of Walter Gropius, the bauhaus bigwig) — via moby los angeles architecture

Study finds online commentards easily duped, manipulated

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10 August 2013
2 min read
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In Technology
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Internet forums often use reader moderation to determine which comments are the best, but new research suggests that tallying up and down votes for online comments is a poor measure of those comments’ actual quality.

Oh, you may think you know who’s brilliant and who’s a troll in our forums, dear Reg reader — but according to a paper published in the journal Science on Friday, the so-called wisdom of crowds can often be misleading.

When you rate things online, you are often exposed to others’ ratings (either aggregated or listed individually), Sean Taylor, one of the paper’s authors, wrote in a blog post describing the research. “It turns out that this does impact rating decisions and creates path dependence in ratings.”

Specifically, forum comments that receive positive votes are disproportionately more likely to be up-voted again, while comments that receive negative votes usually have those votes negated by positive ones shortly thereafter.

In other words, when people see that a comment has been up-voted, they tend to go along with the moderation in a herd-like fashion. When a comment has been down-voted, on the other hand, they tend to want to correct the moderation, producing an asymmetrically skewed snapshot of opinion — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Albino Skunk Kit / Five Sisters Zoo

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10 August 2013
1 min read
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Albino Skunk Kit / Five Sisters Zoo

Caretakers at Five Sisters Zoo in Scotland weren’t expecting any baby Skunks — but one turned up in their Skunk exhibit on 4 June. Later that day they found an even bigger surprise: the second kit to appear was an albino. They believe that the parents are Stella, one of two regular black and white females, and the father is Strachan, an albino. The albino kit has been examined and identified as a female; the other kit has been a bit more elusive and hasn’t been checked out yet. The kits are pictured here at three weeks old — via ZooBorns

Email service thought used by Edward Snowden shuts down amid fight over customer information

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9 August 2013
1 min read
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In Business, Technology
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An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden has shut down abruptly, amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit, Lavabit owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter posted on the Texas-based company’s website.

Mr Levison said he has decided to suspend operations but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.

That matches the period since Snowden went public as the source of media reports detailing secret electronic spying operations by the US National Security Agency.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States, Mr Levison wrote — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Blogs with weakest of the weak passwords hijacked for bot army

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8 August 2013
1 min read
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In Technology
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Cybercrooks are running a wide-ranging password-guessing attack against some of the most widely used blogging and content management systems on the net.

The so-called Fort Disco cracking campaign began in late May this year and is still ongoing, DDoS mitigation firm Arbor Networks warns. Arbor has identified six command-and-control (C&C) systems associated with Fort Disco that collectively control a botnet of over 25,000 infected Windows servers. More than 6,000 Joomla, WordPress, and Datalife Engine installations have been the victims of password guessing.

Four strains of Windows malware are associated with the campaign, each of which caused infected machines to phone home to a hard-coded command and control domain — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cute Dumbo Octopus Earrings / indolentjellyfish

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8 August 2013
42 second read
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In Craft, Wildlife
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Cute Dumbo Octopus Earrings / indolentjellyfish

A pair of incredibly adorable octopus earrings! Grimpoteuthis, also known as the dumbo octopus, have fins on their head which look like floppy little ears. This is a detail which makes them much more endearing to you. Made from translucent polymer clay these earrings catch the light and look candy-like with their cotton candy colouring. Each octopus sits at 1 cm tall — via Etsy

Police investigate crash and shooting – Parramatta

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8 August 2013
57 second read
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Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding a crash and alleged shooting incident in Sydney’s west.

About 7.50pm yesterday (Wednesday 7 August 2013), emergency services received reports of a multi-vehicle crash and shots being fired at the intersection of Hunter and Marsden Streets, Parramatta.

Officers arrived a short time later and found two vehicles had collided, with two men trapped in one of the vehicles.

A 22 year-old male pedestrian was also injured as a result being struck by the vehicles involved in the crash — via redwolf.newsvine.com

End of an era as Firefox bins blink tag

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7 August 2013
1 min read
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In Technology
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The blink element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox.

The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C even went so far as to add a Blink-killing requirement to its web accessibility guidelines.

Your correspondent has fond memories of using blink in Front Page 95, and may therefore join other blink nostalgia freaks by downloading this Chrome extension that restores its functions to Google’s browser. Or perhaps this code on GitHub that does the same job is a better choice — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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