I stayed up too late last night reading the oft-mentioned-of-late safecracking for the computer scientist (PDF format) (via Crypotgram), which was interesting.

I’ve always been fascinated (at a distance) by locks and safes, particularly after reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!, which includes Richard Feynman’s experiences of amateur safe-cracking when working on the Manhattan project. I always wanted to learn safe-cracking and lock-picking, but general apathy stopped me from actually trying it out (a good thing, probably).

Although it has pissed off the locksmith community, in the same way revealing computer security flaws can get software vendors’ hackles up, all it is doing is keeping people informed; in this case, most off-the-shelf safe locks aren’t really any good. I doubt it’s going to turn anyone into a safecracker (although I expect some lone idiot will think he will be an expert after reading it and get caught in the act).

Even if you don’t want to read through pages of details of fences and gates and locking wheels, it’s still worth a flick through, to see the similarities and differences between physical and computer security, especially seeing how often the fallibility of humans is the easiest way of exploiting them. It is nicely revealing to see how a computer scientist would approach another realm’s problems - some other papers for other fields could also be interesting.

Though it was never really going to be a shining beacon of modern democracy in action, I’m still alarmed at the candidate chosen by Vote For Me, politics’ answer to Pop Idol. The successful candidate, Rodney Hylton-Potts, it seems, holds distinctly right-wing views. Unlike Pop Idol, where the public pick the blandest and most inoffensive of acts, with politicians, it seems, we like them obnoxious and loud.

He is a man with some experience of the legal system, not only as a former solicitor (and if you doubt that, just look at the hilarious Terms & Conditions on his website), but also as a prisoner, having spent a couple of years as Her Majesty’s guest at Brixton prison, after a spot of mortgage fraud. While trying to pass himself off as a man who has been punished and has since repented for his own crimes, citing “only prison works” as a solution to crime, he then changes tack and states his vehement support for the castration of paedophiles.

He also advocates cutting the population by a third in the long term, through stopping all immigration (unless they’re immensely rich, in which case they’re more than welcome, presumably as they’ll then be able to invest in offshore tax havens, like Rodney advocates) and reducing the birth rate by removing all family-related tax incentives, which will be just dandy, until the number of young people of working age becomes so low it becomes impossible to fund or even staff the additional social security and healthcare needs that our rapidly ageing population would demand.

Most bizarrely of all, he advocates scrapping the Human Rights Act - not even watering it down or replacing with something lesser, but binning it completely. In fact, there is not a single word of support for human rights in his manifesto. For a man who claims to represent “the people” and is against those in the political elite, it’s a tad hypocritical for him to be scrapping a key piece of legislation that protects people from the excesses of those in power.

Maybe what he lacks in intelligence, he makes up in experience, though I’m not sure whether being involved in a deal to buy up cemeteries on the cheap, then flogging them for millions, in association with Westminster Council (when it was led by that most honest of politicians, Dame Shirley Porter) is the right grounding for a politician claiming to be “man of the people”.

There’s a lot of hoo-har about Prince Harry dressing as a Nazi. We’ve had years of the Royals doing stupid and crass things like that, you’d think people would start to realise there is very little point to maintaining the Royal Family by now.

I’m not going to talk much on the incident itself, but instead on the taboo nature of the swastika. It was the home-made armband that stands out most on Harry’s arm has been played up the most - in virtually every report, picture or not, the swastika is mentioned as the item that qualified the outfit as truly ‘Nazi’.

In our society, the swastika is a single, succinct symbol of Nazism, the closest definition of evil we have in the modern world. Whenever it appears today, there is almighty panic to remove it; when it appeared in a Microsoft font pack, a patch to remove it was hastily released; in Melbourne, a cockup on the part of the city’s gardeners left the city council grovelling when flowerbeds were accidentally laid in swastika patterns. From my own experience, when I was at primary school, I recall how some teachers were horrified that the Hindu kids in school would have (perfectly innocent) mehndi swastikas on their hands.

Wikipedia has an excellent article about the swastika, which is worth reading, as a reminder of its benign origins as a good luck symbol, in not only Indian cultures, but also in Ancient Rome and the Navajo nation. It features in historic Christian and even Jewish architecture, and in the early years of the 20th century, before the rise of Nazism, featured in logos in Britain, and on the merchandise of Coca Cola and Carlsberg.

This is not a call for the prompt rehabilitation of the swastika; to try to redefine it now would be an insult to those victims who are still alive, those to whom the swastika can only ever be a reminder of the Holocaust and other horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. But could it be ever taken back as a benign symbol? Perhaps we do need the taboo, as a continual and everlasting reminder of the evil the Nazis prepetrated. As long as Nazism remains the lowest ebb of humanity, then the swastika will retain its negative connotations. Society will be happy to pay the cost, that of perpetuating ignorance, and continuing to tarnish other cultures’ symbology.

Update: Oh dear…

Apple iProduct - Your life, in a small, plastic case.

Apple-mockery aside, I really do like the look of the new, exquisitely tiny iPod Shuffle.

Waterstone’s sack member of staff for blogging (via everywhere). First person in the UK to have been fired for their blog; all for the odd anonymous flaming of his PHB, and one mention of “Bastardstone’s”. A worrying turn of events, since all his writing was done in his own free time and was by no means libellous or part of an overtly malicious campaign - it was just one guy sounding off about his job occasionally.

The branch in question is my local branch of Waterstone’s, funnily enough. I’ll endeavour to spend my money solely at Blackwell’s in future.

The scenes of what appears to be an almighty cock-up are playing out in Edinburgh at the moment. There are proposals for a congestion charge being laid out, and there is to be a referendum in the city on the matter.

However, for a highly stupid reason, not everyone who has registered to vote will automatically be able to. If, like me, you have registered, but opted for the Edited Register rather than the full one (16% of the city have done so), to avoid getting junk mail and other rubbish sent to you, then you won’t be able to vote straight off. Unfortunately, the “do not pass on my details to other organisations” bit means that Edinburgh City Council are unable to use your details for the referendum, which is ridiculous - I ticked the box to avoid junk mail, not to have my right to vote diminished.

The council have provided a registration form for any Edinburgh resident on the Edited Register who wishes to take part in the referendum; it’s a fairly painless form to fill out, though I wonder what checks the council are actually able to perform, given the limitations they are under; if there are none, it could be a really easy way to create fake aliases and attempt fraud.

Mozilla Thunderbird’s address book has a handy “Get Map” button, if you have the address of a contact, which will, er, get a map of the area. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well for UK addresses, as it uses Mapquest, whose maps are a bit ugly (e.g.), and often Thunderbird throws too much information in the URL, so it doesn’t get the map anyway.

Luckily, Thunderbird is infinitely configurable, and so you can muck about with the map request URL to your heart’s content. I have managed to get my one to fetch Multimap maps based on the postcode in the address, with a wee bit of tinkering.

First, open the user.js file. These are not created by default, so if you haven’t created it already, you’ll have to for this. In Windows XP, the file is located in the directory C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ default\[random number].slt\ While in Linux it’s: ~/.thunderbird/default/[random number].slt/ (For other OSes, or non-standard installations, there’s further details about the location).

When you’ve opened or created the user.js file, add the following line:

user_pref("mail.addr_book.mapit_url.format","http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?pc=@ZI");

Save the file, and start (or restart) Thunderbird. And it should work. Bear in mind this is only useful if the addresses you’ll need to look up are UK-based.

Mozilla.org have more information about configuring the map URL, if you want to play about with the function further.

This is cool. Skinning Gmail with custom stylesheets (via Ben Hammersley). Might have a crack at a stylesheet myself…