Apathy Sketchpad

I sent this to Newsjack. They didn’t use it. Given the reception Newsjack got I’m not sure how annoyed I really ought to feel about that. That’s not to say it was all bad by any means, but if it’s worse than the worst thing in Newsjack then I really shouldn’t show it to anyone ever. In any case, it’s sufficiently topical that I presume if I sit on it any longer it will cease to be any use to anyone, so here it is:

Another batch of NewsBiscuit submissions. As ever, one above the fold, rest below it. These are rather old, so the topical ones obviously no longer qualify as such. I think they’re all from March: I’ve not been writing much of this stuff for weeks now, mostly due to business, not being in the mood, and various other distractions. (And let’s face it: nobody ever won a mug by writing two items a month.)

Microsoft running ’secret database program’ on millions of computers

There were fresh fears raised this week about online safety and privacy, as it emerged that software giant Microsoft had secretly installed a database program on millions of computers across the world, many in homes and businesses. The mysterious program, known only as ‘Access.exe’ is installed when the user first uses Microsoft Office, and hides among the regular components of Office. Although the program only came to light recently, it is thought that it may have been present on even early versions.

The program was found when Sarah Armstrong, a teacher in London, asked a friend for help with Excel and was shown the extra software hiding in the start menu. Immediately, she called other friends, who confirmed that they had ‘the Access program’ installed. Fearing the worst, she contacted Microsoft technical support and demanded to know why the program had been secretly installed on her computer. According to Armstrong, the support representative candidly told her ‘That’s our database program.’ Armstrong then asked ‘could you use Access to store people’s personal details and track their behaviour?’ and the representative said ‘yes’.

The Daily Express described the revelation as ‘just more evidence of what life is really like in Database Britain’. Microsoft has insisted that the public should not worry about Access, and that the program exists to help users control their own data, however when Armstrong contacted Microsoft demanding to see the information Access databases had about her, she was told that this was ‘impossible’.

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Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for the last month. First, one that made the front page:

• Government Agrees Rescue Package For Snowmen (original submission)

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

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Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for January 2009. There are quite a few, so I’ve put one to start off with, then the rest after the fold (i.e., a link at the bottom of the post). They are in no particular order, but they are shuffled to try to keep the Atheist Bus ones separate. (Atheist buses are a goldmine of comedy, I think, so I repeatedly tried different angles on it. I never came up with anything this good, though.)

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

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From time to time I submit stuff to Newsbiscuit. More occasionally they use it. Their submission board is pretty awkward to work, though, so I thought I’d post my favourites on this blog also, where I can keep an eye on them. First, the ones they used:

• Large Hadron Collider ‘may destroy universe’, say stupid people (original submission)
• Department for Children, Schools and Families to ‘give up on schools’ (original submission)
• Labour to use ‘guest leaders’ (original submission)
• Halloween update; local youths ‘less frightening than usual’ (original submission)
• Book of phone numbers ‘left on doorstep’ (original submission)

(I do like my headlines-with-quotes-in.)

Next, some of the ones they didn’t. I’ll put most of them after the fold, since there are a lot of them. Also, some might be offensive if you’re easily offended. First, though, my favourite, from early to mid October:

Gordon Brown has new kitchen sink installed under anti-terrorism laws

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had his kitchen refitted under laws brought in in the wake of the September 11th and July 7th terrorist attacks.

The refit was proposed in August, as part of a larger reorganisation of Number 10. Brown’s wife Sarah raised objections to the plans at an early stage, saying that the new system would make cooking difficult and that she didn’t like the colour. It seemed that the deadlock was unresolvable until September 17th, when the Prime Minister realised he could use existing anti-terror laws to push the installation through without first gaining his wife’s approval.

Critics have claimed that this is “a clear abuse” of the power handed to the PM’s office by these new rules. One backbench MP said that while he understood the need to have special new measures to deal with the new kind of threat faced today, the government had taken advantage of the fear to pass laws granting themselves more power than they had ever been elected to. Other recent applications of the anti-terror laws include freezing the assets of Iceland UK, resolving the double-booking of a conference room in Parliament, and the emergency resolution on Tuesday which mandated it was James’ turn to do the washing up.

Brown has insisted that neither he nor the government has abused the trust placed in them by Parliament, saying that there are “other kinds of terrorism” besides violent attacks on civilians, and that these might be said to include refusal to wash dishes or bad taste in kitchen units.

The House of Lords is expected to overturn the decision, but James Brown has said that as he’s already done the washing up, it’s too late to reverse the damage and a system must be put in place to prevent these situations from arising in the first place.

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Yesterday, The Times reported that the Labour party had taken donations which had come to them via. a proxy to conceal the donor’s true identity. Aside from containing this fantastic sentence:

Donations made via third parties are illegal unless the person behind the donation is also declared or there is a “reasonable excuse”.

…it also explained this email I received in March but had always assumed was a scam:

DEAR BELOVED URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL

I am DAVID ABRAHAMS, an impotant businessman here in LAGOS, NIGERIA and I have sum of $600,00 USD  (SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLAR) which I want to donate to THE LABOUR PARTY. I would like a trust worthy partner to act as a donor. The money will be transfered into your account and then into THE LABOUR PARTY. The fund will be split as follows: 15% for your expenses, 10% for contingency/emergency and 75% for THE LABOUR PARTY.

Yours in Christ,

David Abrahams

LAGOS NIGERIA

No, really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Also I read that Santa has lost the disks on which he stored the lists of 25 million naughty and nice children. So, er, let’s hope that doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

At the front of the line was a man in a sharp suit. When he got to the gate, the guard, an angel, agreed that he had lived a good life, but asked him why he had not followed some of God’s laws. The man shuffled, embarrassed, before finally admitting that he’d been an atheist. He felt a bit stupid.
“Oh,” said the angel, “fair enough, then,” and opened the great gate before him. The atheist was surprised to be entering Heaven. The line advanced by one, and another man reached the front.
All in all, he was beginning to feel pretty confident. He’d lived a good life, and believed, and he’d followed all of God’s rules. He was a shoe-in.
“Ah,” the guard said, reading his name from the list and recognising it immediately, “Blaise Pascal. Yes, we’ve been looking forward to this.”
“As have I,” Pascal said, proudly.
The angel’s face twisted into the expression a mother might use to quiz a boy who thought she’d be pleased that he’d painted the sofa. “Really?” Pascal paused, confused, and the guard continued, “Only it says here that God thinks you’re trying to pull a fast one on him.”
“What?”
“This ‘wager’ of yours. God isn’t a mind-reader, you know. Free will and all that. He doesn’t know if you believe or not, not really, and your little numbers game is really just an argument to say you believe. You’re trying to con God into letting you in.”
“I’m not! I really, truly believe!”
“How do I know you’re not just saying that to get in, that you haven’t been saying that all along. That’s what you’re little wager would advise, isn’t it, if you didn’t really believe?”
“I never said anything about pretending to believe. I said you should believe!”
“To believe as a choice, disregarding evidence?”
“Yes!” Pascal said, relieved that the angel understood.
“Yes,” said the guard, “we thought you might say something like that. So we’ve prepared a little test…”

“Atheists?” said the demon, “there certainly aren’t any atheists in Hell.”
“But,” he started, starting to question his beliefs now, on his first day in Hell, when one might reasonably argue it was a tad on the late side, “all they had to do was believe! How hard is that?”
The demon made a noise somewhere between “oh?” and “hmm,” in the patient manner of one who’d been going over this for centuries and didn’t imagine having to stop soon. “But they didn’t believe in Hell either. It would seem a bit harsh to expect them to follow rules set out by someone they thought was fiction, with a punishment they thought didn’t exist.”
“So what you’re saying is,” he said, watching with trepidation as the demon selected a pointy looking object from a leather roll-up pack and held it over the flames, “that all we had to do to get carte blanche to sin as much as we pleased was to stop believing?”
“That’s right,” the demon said, as it walked behind the lost soul and plunged the instrument into his back (not that he really had such a bodypart any more, of course). “But you’re in luck. God’s laid down a special rule, just for you. To test your little wager. You can go to heaven, if you want to.”
“How?” Pascal shouted, above the pain. Right then and there there was nothing he wouldn’t do to escape the pain.
“Simple,” the demon replied, moving the instrument savagely, “just believe I don’t exist.”
And for a thousand years he tried.
After that he rather gave up. By that stage his tortured soul didn’t seem worth saving anyway.

BUSH ANNOUNCES SUCCESS OF NEW “HIGH-RESOLUTION” DOLLAR

President Bush hit back against critics of his economic policies in a press conference last night. He claimed that he had made good progress towards his goal of “a higher-resolution dollar”. Under previous administrations, he said, rounding errors crept into all business done with overseas partners. By reducing the size of the unit of currency, Bush explained, he had enabled it to be far more precise. “Imagine,” he said, “if the dollar was worth so much that you could by five beefburgers for a cent. How would you buy one beefburger? You’d have to buy five and throw four of them away. It’s like that. Now we can buy one beefburger and avoid having to give four of them back to other countries.”

THOUSANDS QUEUE UP IN OWN LIVING ROOMS TO BE FIRST TO RECEIVE LATEST XBOX LIVE ARCADE RELEASE

On Wednesday, gamers got their first look at Alien Hominid on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service, which allows users to download games directly to their Xbox 360 for a small fee. In anticipation of the release, many gamers had queued up beside their Xbox since Monday evening. One such person said “in our house you can never be sure when people will be using the TV. This was really the only way to be certain of getting the game as soon as I could.” He added that he had previously queued up for both the Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii console. “This is better than that,” he said, “because my Mum brings me food here.” Other gamers queued up in this way because they were worried about Microsoft “running out” of stocks of the game.

AMERICAN SOLDIERS ISSUED WITH SPECIAL “HARRYCARD”

The US military has issued all its troops with a credit card-sized photograph of Prince Harry, to make sure he is not harmed in any “friendly fire” incidents. The card carries a photograph of Harry in full battle uniform, which was chosen over a competing photograph of Harry at his passing out ceremony on the grounds that soldiers might be “unlikely to recognise the Prince in uniform based on a ceremonial photograph”. Some British soldiers have commented that it is unfair for Harry to get such special treatment, but most American troops have welcomed the move. One soldier told us, on condition of anonymity, “I think this is a good idea. Normally if we accidentally kill the odd British soldier we’re alright; the army protects us. But if we killed a Prince then the s**t would really hit the fan. We might even get demoted for that.” Producing and distributing the card has cost the US military over $5.4 billion.