There are many human stories associated with the quake – the best being that no-one died – and it’s not my purpose here to go through those. I will say, though, that I was touched to discover that the thoughts of many Christchurch folk, after the main quake struck, were toward Wellington which they feared had been wiped from the map.

There are many people who have lost their houses or are living in homes with no sewage facilities. There are those who have lost businesses, and there is pretty much everyone in Canterbury who just wishes the endless aftershocks would stop. If that describes you, you have my sympathy and my respect. I’m not going to write more about the human cost, though. It just seems too early.

This post is a lament for the beautiful old buildings in the CBD, many of which have been lost already or will be over the next few weeks.

I went to Christchurch this week to visit work colleagues, and I sent a couple of hours wandering around taking photographs of commercial, civic and ecclesiastical buildings. I’m told that many parts of suburbia are as bad, with shops having fallen and, of course, people’s houses being damaged.

The previous time that I went to Christchurch was a few weeks before the quake. I marveled at the architecture in the city centre. I walked along Manchester Street several times drinking the views of arched windows and decorated brick facades.

Post-quake Christchurch CBD is very different. Manchester Street is blocked by razor wire to keep people away from Manchester Court, New Zealand’s first ever high-rise, which now seems certain to be demolished.

We are told that Manchester Court is too badly damaged to save. It’s hard to get a really good picture of it now because of the barriers. This one shows a diagonal crack running through the brickwork in an upper story.

This picture shows how many windows, frames and all, have fallen out of the structure. It also shows a typical modern Christchurch CBD building – a hideous 1970s box made of exposed concrete and smoked glass. Every other building on the intersection that Manchester Court dominates is as ugly as this one.

Lots of buildings have lost windows, even relatively modern ones. Broken panes are everywhere. Some quite modern buildings have upwards of half of their windows broken. This modern tower shows damage to its concrete pillars, although it’s still in use so presumably the damage has been assessed as not structural.

Shops have collapsed throughout the city leaving rubble-filled holes in street frontages. Riccarton High St has three in a hundred metres or so. This one is in the CBD.

Everywhere in the CBD there are beautiful old buildings with red stickers on their doors and fencing around them. This one is next to Edison Hall. It seems likely to meet the same fate as many others.

Even walking around the streets is challenging at the moment. Although the rubble has mostly been cleared, pavements are in many cases closed off, and in some places whole streets are closed. Shipping containers are being used to shield the public from possible building collapses. In this picture you can see how a piece of a cornice has fallen, probably in an aftershock, to a place marked by a toppled traffic cone.

A zoomed-in view shows how badly the facades of some buildings have fared.

This grand old pub has lost some of its cornice, parts of which have been lovingly stood up on the pavement below. Perhaps they didn’t fall but were removed by the crane just out of shot to the right, as these workers are doing to the cornice on a church:

I don’t know what this building is – perhaps someone can enlighten me in the comments. UPDATE: It’s St Paul’s Trinity Pacific Presbyterian Church. You can see the damage it has sustained. The stone and plaster work is cracked right through and bracing rods have been strapped to it.

This is Oxford Terrace Baptist Church with its classical pillared entrance. It has been badly damaged and is red-stickered.

Here’s a zoomed-in view of some of its facade.

In her 1970s environmental classic Big Yellow Taxi Joni Mitchell sings “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. Christchurch has been allowing the demolition of heritage buildings for years – there’s a really ugly hole in Cathedral Square where the Tivoli Theatre was pulled down last year. I can only hope that, if one good thing for Christchurch’s heritage comes out of the earthquake, the Council wakes up and fights to preserve what remains.

After that, if there’s any time, we’ll have a brief look at a new theory of physics that may integrate gravity and quantum theory. Gosh. And, of course, steam cars.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. If you don;t want to listen live, shortly after the programme, you’ll be able to get it as a podcast or just download the audio as ogg or mp3.

There are various measures available to Internet censors. China, for instance, runs the so-called “Great Firewall” – a single point of access for all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country. Centralized national firewalls offer a high level of control, but they find it hard to deal with traffic which is encrypted (as a lot of Internet traffic is, routinely). Almost invariably, they have to block a lot of material which is wider than their intended purpose, just to be sure. You can’t allow free access to Google if you don’t your population to even be able to search for specific concepts. Another issue is that the engineering for the great firewall gets quite problematic. It needs to be able to pass a great deal of traffic very quickly while filtering out the “bad” stuff. Finally, there needs to be a staff who are dedicated to controlling the filter, adding new sites to it, perhaps removing old ones, and generally dealing with issues it throws up.

A more limited technical measure is to control the Domain Name System (DNS) in the country. This means that people typing the address of a “bad” site into their browser would instead get a page saying “naughty naughty” or some such. In fact, if they knew the IP number to go to – and it wouldn’t be hard for a determined person to find this – they will evade this form of censorship altogether. This technique would involve its own engineering challenges as well as the problem of managing the list of bad sites.

And deciding what gets blocked is the core of the problem with automated, technical measures like the two described above. There’s no way for the general public to inspect the list of what gets blocked – if you publish the list, you are just publishing a list of sites that you don’t want people to go to. If you don’t publish the list, there is no accountability that governments will only block CAI (or whatever they have said they will). The list can and will expand for several reasons: incompetence, in the case of the Queensland dentist’s site blocked by the Australian filter; a desire to protect the filter itself (Wikileaks); and an extension or what we regard as repugnant or harmful, but don’t necessarily want a public debate about.

There is another technique that governments use to control what people do on the Internet. That is, simply, to watch what is going on within their country and apply real-world sanctions to people breaking the law. All countries do this to a greater or lesser extent. In New Zealand, for instance, the Department of Internal Affairs looks for images of child abuse (i.e. child pornography) and prosecutes people involved in making or trading them. The recent charges brought against a blogger for allegedly breaking a suppression order are another example. This approach seems the natural one for an open society like New Zealand to take. It relies on humans to detect and discern illegal activity rather than machines. That’s how our court system works. It’s also how law enforcement works. We don’t require people to have licences for cameras; of course not, cameras are widely used for a variety of entirely legal purposes. We prosecute people who use cameras to break the law. It should be the same for computers and the Internet.

To summarise: filtering the Internet is problematic technically, but most of all it is incompatible with a democratic open society. Prosecute the wrongdoers but leave the Internet alone.

I’ll talk about his case today on Radio New Zealand National after the 11am news, as well as handing out a brickbat and a couple of bouquets. After the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Gary McKinnon – British computer programmer – the facts

• Early 40s, originally from Glasgow although grew up in London
• Accessed 97 US government and military computers in 2001/2, from Britain
• Why: Claims it was to uncover evidence of UFOs – his activities in the computers seem to back this up
• McKinnon doesn’t dispute that he accessed the computers. He says that they were open (i.e. default passwords) and that he just left messages saying how bad their security was.
• US claims that he deleted some critical operating system files on some and caused $700,000 of damage
• Tracked down to Britain, arrested in 2002
• US announced it wanted to try him in the US “biggest military computer hack of all time”
• In 2006 the Brits decided to allow extradition to the US
• In the US could face 70 years, perhaps even in Gitmo
• Since then a series of legal appeals including to the House of Lords and the European Court, and the UK Home Secretary
• Wants to be tried in the UK. In the UK, still illegal but a far lesser penalty.
• Has been diagnosed with Aspergers by none other than Simon Baron-Cohen or Cambridge
• Still appealing but his chances look slim.
• A lot of public support – 80MPs calling for prison to be served in UK. List of luminaries, Sting, Boris Johnson, Bob Geldof, Terry Waite, the LibDems. Daily Mail running a campaign. Some people believe he was entrapped.

Opinion

• Do not tweak the military’s nose. Even if you think they are stupid. They have a lot to lose by being made to look stupid.
• The guy is clearly not on the same planet as the rest of us – UFOs, “Free energy”
• That’s what this is about and the UK government shouldn’t be letting the US military get away with it. Let’s have a bit of humanity
• Compare with Knox / Kercher case – 26 yrs for murder.
• Change law if necessary
• By all means try the man but do it in his home jurisdiction

Links

Gary McKinnon – evil hacker or confused Asperger’s sufferer?

But that’s not what I want to write about today. Like everyone else, I’m horrified by the way an airliner has disappeared over the open ocean, with apparently nothing more than a storm to blame. None of us who fly will feel safe until we understand how that happened, and how we can stop it happening again. The information about what happened to the aircraft is contained in two so-called “black boxes” (although they are actually orange) which are held on board the aircraft, presumably now in some 4,000 metres of water. They are going to be pretty difficult to find and recover. And it’s not clear that they would survive a fall from 10,000m cruising altitude in the first place.

What I’m proposing here is that the flight information that the boxes record in civilian airliners be continuously transmitted back to land. The black box becomes a server at, maybe, Boeing or Airbus Industries. Information in transit would be encrypted and subject to the same controls as the black boxes are. When the worst happens, and an airliner crashes, we will always be able to reconstruct the flight information and cockpit voice.

Reports in the papers suggest that some telemetry was taking place, mentioning a “burst of automatic messages”. That’s some clue, perhaps, to what befell the aircraft and those aboard, but it’s nothing like as complete a record as the black boxes should hold.

Let’s hope that aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and safety regulators can make this happen.

Last weekend this all broke wide open. Video rental shops in the larger chains tried to get their customers to sign a petition demanding that S92A be retained. In one of the United Video shops around Hamilton, at least, video shop staff were telling customers that this petition was all about stopping child pornography. They were told to say that, they said, by their manager.

Of course, everyone now denies telling the store staff to say this. The head of NZFACT, an organisation that fights the infringement of video copyrights, said that the petition had nothing to with child pornography and that he had sent out an email to correct this. United Video’s general manager Lindsay Hall said on Radio New Zealand on Monday “at no stage has anyone in head office told to them to use the child porn angle”.

Let’s just get this clear. There is NO child porn angle. I don’t think for one moment that the copyright holders are claiming copyright in child pornography. That’s what S92A is about – whether copyright holders have the right to kill your Internet connection on the basis of an accusation that you have infringed their copyright. So for Mr Hall even to refer to ‘the child porn’ angle is, at best, misinformed. Linking S92A to child porn is a despicable lie. It’s a smear, plain and simple.

The Internet poses a threat to the rental video business. It’s going to be interesting to see how it responds. There are legal ways to download movies or watch them online, such as Apple’s iTunes. And there are DVD rental services that use a website to choose and order films. Unfortunately the brick and mortar stores seem determined to try to do their bit to kill the Net rather than embrace it. I’d be surprised of many of their customers agreed with them.

I wonder how many of those who have signed the video rental stores’ petition did so because they were told the lie about child porn? The petition is not going to be particularly credible as a result, if it ever sees the light of day.

I’d like to finish with a quote from Hollywood’s main lobbyist of the late 20th century, Jack Valenti. He got very worked up about the availability of home video equipment which, he said, would threaten the viability of the movie industry. He told Congress that ”the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

If he’d been right, United Video wouldn’t exist.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about this and how it works. Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3.
Today what I really want to talk about is the technology around airline check-ins.

Q: Air New Zealand has just changed to a fancy new system.

A: Yes, it has, and I came through Auckland domestic on the first morning of the new system the Sunday before last.

Q: How did that go?

A: A few teething problems, I’m afraid, but lots of staff on hand to sort them out.

You’ve been able to check in online at Air New Zealand and lots of airlines for some time. You go onto their website, you choose a seat, and you print a boarding pass. Of course, this relies on you having a printer, which I generally don’t when I’m away, and the check in only works a few days before the flight so for the return leg it’s not much help.

But why do you need a paper boarding pass at all? What Air New Zealand has done is to provide a mobile phone application, so that a suitably equipped phone can download a boarding pass and display the pass on its screen. Then you just need to show the phone to the pass reader at the aircraft gate.

Q: Does this actually work?

A: It’s supposed to. I wasn’t able to check it because – wait for it – doesn’t work on the iPhone, which is easily the fastest selling smart phone in New Zealand. I think it may be the fastest selling phone of any kind in this country. Air New Zealand assure me that it will be available on an iPhone, but probably not until early next year.

Q: If you’ve got the right kind of phone, what happens?

A: If you don’t have bags, you are supposed to be able to just go to the gate at the airport and get straight on the plane. That’s one new way of getting on the plane – by using your mobile phone.

But wait, there’s more: Air New Zealand have also sent a lot of their customers a small electronic pass – called an RFID, or Radio Frequency Identifier, that they are encouraging us to glue to our mobile phones.

Q: So they can track you around the airport?

A: Air NZ is at pains to say no, that’s not what it’s for. They say it can only be read at short range, and it doesn’t contain any personal information – although it presumably contains some kind of unique identifier, probably your air points number, otherwise there’s no point in it.

Q: Are you going to stick one to your mobile?

A: No. I like my phone too much. But if I carry it, it will make all the check-in stuff much easier – just go to the gate and wave the RFID at the reader there.

Q: What if you have bags?

A: You have to go to the check in area and there’s a machine which prints your bag tags. I don’t know whether you have stick your bag tags on your self or whether there are staff to help you.

Q: This all sounds like a lot more self service.

A: That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. This way, you get what seats you want. Before, all we did was queue for a check-in clerk to key our details into a computer system and give us a boarding pass. Now we deal with the computer system ourselves. That’s part of an overall trend, not just in airlines. Think banking, for instance.

So, I think it’s overall a positive move. But there are still some fishhooks to come out of it. I believe that security regulations still require you to have a paper copy of your airline ticket on you. That’s an Aviation Security requirement, not an airline one. That partly defeats the point of the system because you still need the paper. Even so, though, I think the Are New Zealand changes sound like a great idea and congratulations to them for having the guts to do it.

Links

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Air New Zealand on its electronic boarding passes, and a technology blogger’s take on it. Read the comments if you are interested in how the technology works.

A good article in the New Zealand Herald about the changes.

Kim Davies of IANA has written a very readable account of the problem in DNS security. It makes for scary reading. The bad guys will get control of the Internet unless we deal to this problem.

I have bitten the bullet and agreed to have a new roof on my house. Just patching the old one won’t keep the water out any more – it just comes through another place every time it rains. The DNS needs a new roof as well, and it’s called DNSSEC. It will involve lots of Internet folk in real work, but we need to get on with it.

This is highly likely to be illegal, both on telecommunications intercept grounds, and on the “anti-hacking” parts of the Crimes Act. The article doesn’t mention that, or any downside at all.

I’m amazed that anyone would think this is a reasonable thing to do. If you are reduced to spying on someone, why are you in a relationship with them? And, if someone spied on you like that, would you want anything more to do with them?

Update: Apparently the person concerned isn’t even a proper private investigator – check the second comment below. Looks like the Sunday Star Times was more than a little credulous.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier’s excellent blog about security for the link.