Giving up on blogger: trying something new

I am moving my blog to wordpress to see if I find that any less frustrating.

The new site is over at oolonrantingintothevoid.wordpress.com and hopefully has all the current posts (except this one) and comments copied over.

See you there.

New season predictions

Arsenal will get a top four finish.  We will be top at the new year. We won't win a trophy.
A team from Manchester will win the league, with Chelsea second. The other Manchester team third.

I think it might be City this year.  The FA Cup will be won by someone from the middle of the Premier League.

Arsenal will continue to lose matches they dominate and won't sort out our defensive frailties.

England will have at least two Champions League semi-finalists, but won't win the trophy.

Spurs will continue to be annoying.

Cabinet Office Briefing Room... eh?

There is something very dramatic about the name COBRA! The centre of the United Kingdom Government's response to any crisis is a committee made up the PM and other people as needed.  It has co-ordinated responses to crises for as long as I can remember: foot and mouth, terrorism, and of course the recent riots.

On twitter @Puffles2010 retweeted a silly quiz question by @TheBigShow1976:

"Easy," said hundreds of people, "Cabinet Office Briefing Room A." As did I when I woke up this morning and read the tweets.  But apparently not... @DavidAllenGreen (blogger Jack Of Kent) replied...

There then followed several discussions, and he issued the challenge to find an official source for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, as opposed to just COBR. I joined in and had a look round t'interweb.

The official cabinet office website says

In the most serious cases, the central government response will be co-ordinated through the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBR).

and other official sites all refer to COBR (try searching for "COBRA site:gov.uk", all hits are local government and refer to business advice, whereas "COBR site:gov.uk gives emergency response details).

A rummage did turn up an archive glossary which suggests that COBR is pronounced Cobra, so this might not be a media fabrication. However I do wonder how the letter A got attached. I imagined an exchange between a journalist and a civil servant.

CS: The committee is called COBR
J: COBRA? What does that stand for?
CS: Cabinet Office Briefing Room
J: and the 'A'?
CS: eh?

and the rest as they say would be history. Sadly another illusion bites the dust. The question what does COBR B do is no longer alive.

PS Blogger is an awful piece of software. Is Wordpress less bad?

Worrying news from Scotland

This is a story that wasn't exactly high profile but is worrying.

Scotland is trialing a new electronic vote counting system for local elections. On the face of it this might sound sensible speeding up counts by moving to a centralised electronic system at 32 centres across the country.

Of course even with the best will in the world it isn't as simple as that.

I start from the premise that elections are very important.  It is also important that every candidate is able to track the progress of the count and be satisifed that it is fair.  This is the strength of manual counting, you can watch each step and challenge the mistakes that inevitably occur and overall if everyone (including observers) does their job we can be fairly confident of the result.

The issue with electronic counting is it removes the ability of those at the count to challenge and check.

One nice feature about hand counts is you can see the stacks. This is clear in single member FPTP, but even in a STV elections you can see the stacks as they are broken and resorted.  You can get a feel that the result is correct.

If this is done electronically then you have to trust the software and hardware.  There are two key reasons not to do this with the software:

1. Malice
2. Incompetence

To get round allegations of both the code and tool chain would need to be open to scrutiny as widely as possible.  Certainly every political party must have access to the code.  But even this is not enough, if you don't believe me have a look at the results of the "obfuscated v" competition. If you know C have a look at one of the entries, and explain why it adds votes for Kerry and Nader to Bush's total  on November 2nd but not on November 1st! Also explain why it works differently on different operating systems. Even ignoring the possibility of malice, bad coding is not unknown to result in bugs that could do similar things. (Many of the entries in the contest use buffer overruns, the same sort of bug that is behind most web site hacks -- not an uncommon event.)

The code itself is also not enough as other entries show: you can use the build process to change source files, and this can also be hard to spot in a large enough software project.

Finally will the system be secure enough to withstand a malicious agent. I presume an air gap will be mean you have to be at the count (but that may not be certain), but how secure will the system be to someone trying to break into it?

A secondary, but also important issues is access to the count.  I don't know if the 32 locations will be a reduction in the number of locations, but if it is then it needs to be handled carefully.  Whilst Scotland and England have very different populations, and so more travel is inevitable than would be usual in England it has to be possible for candidates and activisits to get to the count.  They also need to be able to cope with the number of observers needed for reasonable scrutiny. If this change reduces the number of scrutineers it is undesirable for a robust democratic process.

Elections are too important for this.

(As an aside, clearly the big news story at the moment is the London riots, but I think letting the dust settle is the best idea at the moment.)

Another new website can't cope.

The newly launch website to handle petitions for a parliamentary debate is suffering from overload:

You didn't really want to sign did you?

I think those first two lines sum up a lot really.

High demand in the early days was predictable of course. The problem is if it can't cope with petitions with publicity as they come up.

PS I got this as I was trying to sign one of the petitions against the reintroduction of the death penalty as advertised over at LibDem Voice.

Update: Sorry for an update so soon after posting but the site started working (briefly).  I think there must be more fundamental problems than usage levels given the low number of signatures on the petitions.  The highest is about 1800 (at the time of writing) for Martin Shapland's anti-death penalty petition above.

A random selection...

Mr Beckwith from Bad Machinery

Inspired by Mr Calder of Liberal England's post concerning the drop in links in blogging (see Is the blogroll dead?) I shall collect a random selection of posts that have interested me recently that I have yet to link to.

First off James Graham has posted a story questioning gushing praise of new technical innovations that neglect the considerable privacy implications post-NotW.

Jerry Haye's piece on capital punishment may not be as good as Jack of Kent's, but it is funnier.

And a plug for my favourite webcomic: Bad Machinery by the wonderful John Allison. Go and look. And buy books and t-shirts.

Capital punishment: why libertarians can believe in death penalty

Before going any further: I deplore the death penalty for many and varied reasons. I urge anyone who doesn't to read, for example, Jack of Kent's moral argument against it, which includes an overview of some of the other arguments.
However one idea that has come up again and again in twitter is that you cannot be philosophically libertarian and support the death penalty.

For example I've done a quick search and lifted a few tweets:

The incoherence of supposed libertarian @GuidoFawkes supporting the death penalty (which costs more than life imprisonment) is hilarious 

I'm a pro-death penalty libertarian! I'll let the state kill me, but God forbid I give them any money

Genuinely don't understand this death penalty campaign from @guidofawkes. If you don't trust the gov to tax you, why trust it to kill you?

(I've left off the names, but searching on twitter should find them if interested.)

This seems based on a fundamental misunderstanding of libertarianism.  A strawman is being constructed that a libertarian doesn't trust the state to do anything.

Libertarianism is about maximising some measures of liberty.  I think these measures are limited and ignore other limits on freedom, which is why I am a Liberal and not a Libertarian.

However these measures of liberty include restrictions on the actions of others: they cannot act to reduce your liberty: for example by stealing your money.  I imagine very few libertarians would say that freedom to murder is a freedom they want to protect.

Libertarians do not want abolition of state (that is a form of anarchism), but the minimising of it.  From those I've read bits of this would include a military and a justice system.  Once you accept the need for a justice system, including courts, then you accept the need to punish people by restricting their liberty in some way.  This is entirely consistent with Libertarianism.

For example the US Libertarian party platform says

Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property. Criminal laws should be limited to violation of the rights of others through force or fraud, or deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm.

Acknowledging the need for some government, albeit a minimal one.

Once you have courts the decision to execute or not can be entirely orthogonal to the size of the state you want.  If you believe (wrongly in my view) that executing reduces the murder rate then executions could be justified to maximise liberty of others.

The top one is especially silly: Libertarianism doesn't have to be about doing things on the cheap for the sake of it, and besides capital punishment doesn't have to be more expensive then life imprisonment.

So can we leave off the misplaced personal abuse of Paul Staines: play the ball and not the man. Lets win the debate. It is too important.

Actual Idiocy from the Royal Mail

Firstly thanks to the Royal Mail press office for a response at 10.30 this morning, which for a query sent on Saturday is pretty good going.
A clear unambiguous answer was given to me, I asked:

The simple question is: if a household puts a notice above their letter box saying "don't deliver to neighbours", will it be honoured?

and was told:

In answer to your specific point, the trial does not involve an "opt-out" facility.

So, secondly, apologies to Consumer Focus for suggesting they might be after cheap publicity.

The consultation document is available online,  and makes interesting reading and raises some of the key points but not all.  I'd urge you to read it and respond to the address included in it. (I won't put it in the body of the post, but it is on page 13 of the PDF document along with the questions.)

It is clear that the choice of neighbour would be up to Royal Mail:

Royal Mail proposes that its delivery staff will have a degree of flexibility to identify a suitable choice of neighbour who is willing to accept delivery of an undeliverable item at the time of delivery. If a suitable neighbour is identified the item will be left with the neighbour and a card will be placed through the letterbox of the addressee notifying them that an item has been left with the relevant neighbour. Royal Mail proposes that: "a neighbour can be defined as a person who lives within close proximity to the stated delivery address on the item. They may be a next door neighbour or someone who lives in close proximity."

There is no guarantee that any wishes expressed by the addressee would be respected, and the response to my question indicates the intention to ignore such expressions.

Without an opt-out this raises all sorts of problems. Even without malicious or incapable neighbours receiving packages you have issues with confidentiality: neighbours would note a signed for letter from a lawyer say, or a package with interesting return to address.

Then you have problems with neighbours acting with good intentions.  With good-will I could accept a package as you are at work.  If I work shifts it isn't inconceivable that it could be many days before we are both awake and in at the same time.  This however isn't a killer blow: you'd learn to refuse packages and it will probably still be quicker than finding time to go to collect a package for many.

The killer is the malicious neighbour: the neighbour who takes the package and opens it, or denies receiving it.  The violation of confidentiality is one problem: There is scope malicious outing of someone's political or religious views or sexuality. Consider a signed for legal documents or replacement credit card going to such a neighbour.  Then there is outright theft: I've always wanted a copy of that DVD, and no I never received it.  The hassle in sorting that out would be considerable, and in the meantime it could be repeating, moreover Postcomm's consultation says:

If the changes proposed by Royal Mail are ultimately accepted, whether as a contractual matter and/or in the context of revised regulatory conditions under the regime established under the Postal Services Act 2011, it appears to us to be a consequence that Royal Mail will effectively have limited its liability for any loss or damage to relevant postal packets from the point at which the item is left with the neighbour selected by Royal Mail. From that point, liability for any loss or damage to the relevant item will rest with the neighbour. The implications of that , in terms of contractual liability, liability under Royal Mail schemes, responsibility under any "essential conditions", or in the context of the relevant offences under sections 83 and 84 of the Postal Services Act 20008 are acknowledged by Royal Mail in its application.

Put simply: go to Royal Mail and they might tell you to go away. (Original draft had a ruder expression here.)  Again even for a neighbour with good will this raises issues that could be considerable: do you have accidental damage insurance? How do you establish it was or wasn't broken before delivery to the neighbour?  I should make clear Postcomm are asking about this issue in the consulation.

This is simply resolved by making it opt-out, or better yet opt-in.

So kudos to the Royal Mail press team, and brickbats to whoever thought this was a sensible approach.

Now to write a version of this to Postcomm.