Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
Heard on BBC radio Parliamentary report this morning. At question time a Member of Parliament stated that the Police at Hillsborough based their decisions to open a gate on the computerized tally from the turnstiles that indicated the ground had ample space to take more people. The government's plans to make computerized turnstiles compulsory increases the risk that a computer failure or error could result in another tragedy in the future. The government where asked to reconsider their plans in the light of recent events. Brian Tompsett. Spider Systems Ltd, Edinburgh.
Excerpted from "MP demands probe into burglaries," by Tim
Harper, _Toronto Star_, We 19 Apr 89, p. A13:
OTTAWA - A New Democrat MP has asked for an investigation of a series of
"high quality break-ins" at his office and those of 4 environmental and peace
groups. Jim Fulton said yesterday the break-ins preceded the grilling of a
senior defense department scientist in a probe to flush out the person who
leaked information about nerve-gas testing in Alberta ... No one was
arrested and the RCMP have rejected any link.
Kirk Roberts, a spokesman for the Ontario Environment Network on Spadina
Ave., said thieves who ransacked the office Jan. 13 stole equipment but
ignored a personal computer valued at $3500. The thieves, Roberts said, were
interested in stealing data tapes that included correspondence among some 100
Canadian environmental groups ...
In a letter to Fulton about the break-ins, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster
wrote, "Our enquiries into this matter have not uncovered any evidence to
suggest the incidents were linked or conducted by any organized group of
individuals."
I spoke with Kirk Roberts this afternoon. "I've got to get hold of this
article," he said. "I don't know what the thieves were _interested_ in, but
they in fact did steal all of our backup tapes, except for the ones we keep
off-site."
OEN uses a WEB system, which provides dialup connections to 47
countries and affords full email/messaging functions. The system utilizes
120MB tape cassette backups. "The system does afford an encryption option for
users who want to use it," said Roberts. "But the thing is, none of the stuff
on those tapes was what you would call particularly sensitive. If any
reasonable request had been made for items on those tapes, we would probably
have supplied them. As an environmental organization we do things, and _want_
things done, publically. That these tapes were stolen says more about the
thieves' paranoia than about the tapes' contents."
OEN has only suffered the one break-in so far, said Roberts.
Jim Fulton's Parliament Hill office has, however, he hears, been
burgled four times.
Hugh Miller, University of Toronto
This year, for the first time, students voting in the student elections here at Stanford University aren't using paper ballets or voting machines. They're using Macintosh computers. People have been making quite a big deal out of this. The papers report that state officials are observing the process. Past student elections have been plagued with administrative bungles, which the computers are supposed to help prevent. The whole thing is quite important to the people who are administrating it — one would think that they've been extremely careful.... I went to vote today. After I had cast all of my votes, a window appeared asking me if I now wanted to make my selections permanent. Seemed reasonable enough. But there was only one possible response to click on: "No". As this wasn't the response I was hoping to make, I hit return and clicked a few times and the window went away and then it came back again. This time there were two possible responses: "Yes" and "No". I selected "Yes", confident that my votes were being accurately recorded. (I'll leave it to others to report on the numerous machines out of service, and the long queues at the ones in service, and the complete lack of privacy, and ....) [While this system is a nice advance in letting the voter review the ballot, the problems of system integrity, assurance of nontampering, ballot privacy, etc. are largely ignored. It is certainly a worthwhile experiment, and will provide challenges for system penetrators and authorized programmers who want to rig elections. Some of the problems that will need to be overcome have been discussed extensively in the reports by Roy Saltman, Lance Hoffman, and others mentioned in earlier RISKS. PGN]
We had one in our high school, similar to a combination of the above [described in RISKS 8.57]. Each student had an 8 digit number (birthday, plus 2 digits for repeats; never mind the RISKS in that!), and the 2nd period class would fill out a little bubble sheet, which had `present,' `excused,' `absent,' and `tardy.' These would then be scanned, processed, and an absent child would have his (or her) parents called that evening. A child who was tardy for more than 3 days in a row, or for more than 20 days in a semester, would also have her (or his) parents called. I should mention that I grew up in a largely hispanic neighborhood, and they never did figure out how to handle the cases where the parents understood only English or Spanish (they tried English only, didn't work; tried Spanish only, my mother threw a fit 8-)). Nor did they take answering machines into account... Oh, of course, an obvious RISK: the computer originally was called up by a central computer in LA (Los Angelos) to send various reports. It took me and my cohorts 2 weeks to find out the number of the computer, after which we demonstrated how much we could screw up the system merely by calling repeatedly (keeping it busy) (yes, we told people what we were doing; they didn't believe us till we showed them [they were present when we were doing it, ok? 8-)]). Shortly after that, they changed to having the computer call LA, which was a number we never did figure out... Sean Eric Fagan (408) 458-1422
In response to the recent post on the dangers of automatic seatbelts: One day, while my father and I drove along in a rental car (I believe a Subaru) with automatic seatbelts, he saw that he'd caught his coat in the car door. Of course, being me, I dared him to open it and see if it fell out. He opened the door, and much to our surprise, the seatbelt opened, all while happily motoring along at about 40. Later that day I looked it over and saw that the seatbelt-opener used a simple pressure switch that could have been lifted intact from any refrigerator-light mechanism. Needless to say, this is VERY dangerous. Scenario: John and his buddies go for a ride. Being saftey-concious, He owns a car with auto-seatbelts. Unfortunately, they need them. They are sideswiped by a giant Mack truck. More unfortunately, the driver's side door _pops open_. This triggers the seatbelt-release mechanism, John hits the windshield and... Not fun, huh? Well, at least it looks like such seatbelt improvements may be obsoleted by the new $30 airbags... I hope. Thor Simon
I found this is a SunSpots Digest we received today (v229). [How do you stick
your thumb in to check how full a file system is? :-) ] Walter Roberson
> Date: Tue, 28 Mar 89 07:45:08 CST
[...]
> I know that once I was unpleasantly surprised when I planned on a 512 MB
> file systems size and calculated what that should be in terms of sectors
> and cylinders on my disk. I figured that 512 MB = 512 * 1024 * 1024 =
> 536,870,912 bytes. When I made the file system, I found out it was not 512
> Mb (from the output of newfs). Working backwards, I found that Sun used
> 512 Mb = 512 * 1000 * 1000, which makes [sense] to me since I am a
> mechanical engineer, but we all found it confusing.
>
> Dinah Anderson
> Shell Oil Company, Information Center (713) 795-3287
> ....!{sun,psuvax,soma,rice,ut-sally,ihnp4}!shell!dinah
[An old problem. But since we haven't had it in RISKS since
volumes 2 and 3, it might as well resurface once again. PGN]
> From today's Hi & Lois newspaper cartoon strip:
> Clerk [to Hi]: I'm afraid we're out of stock on that item, sir.
> Hi: I found it on the rack. I just want to buy it.
Too bad they didn't follow that with the obvious:
Hi: Well, since you don't have this, this can't be yours. It must be
mine. [Walks out of store with item for free...]
[But they'd probably be searching Hi and Lois. PGN]
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