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The silicon.com Weekly Round-Up
Ashcroft on Rizzlas, ATM security, Tunbridge Wells and mobile masts...

By Graham Hayday

Published: Friday 28 February 2003

Is it possible to fight crime without infringing on the right to free speech? It's a fine line sometimes, but the US authorities seem to have bowled a very big 'no ball' this week (note the topical cricket reference there).

The federal government has cracked down (if you'll pardon the pun) on the sale of drugs paraphernalia online. Eleven websites have been indicted for retailing articles such as bongs and pipes. Not the people buying them or actually using narcotics you'll note - just the people selling objects which may be used to take them. Are they the real criminals?

US Attorney General John Ashcroft for one knows. "Quite simply, the illegal drug industry has invaded the homes of families across the country without their knowledge."

We can expect thousands of cockroaches to be incarcerated in the coming months then. Keith Stroup, the director of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, has a problem with this new policy as well. "Ashcroft is a right-wing zealot," he said. "Now I'm not a fan of the Bush administration, but I have to think that President Bush and most of his serious advisers have far more important work to focus on right now than whether someone's selling rolling papers."

Mind you, if you take Ashcroft's words literally, there may not be that big a problem after all. "With the advent of the internet," he proclaimed, "the illegal drug paraphernalia industry has exploded."

Staying in stoner territory, the actor who plays Steven in Dell's US TV ad was arrested earlier this month for the possession of marijuana. The story, which first appeared on the Smoking Gun website (and came to us via the Register), has it that the direct PC seller is yet to make a decision on the Dell Guy's future. Presumably Mr Ashcroft would have a view on that (and would probably like to know where he got his Rizzlas from).

The esteemed Attorney General isn't the only one capable of slightly bizarre quotations. Take Scott McNealy, no stranger to bombastic soundbites. On Monday, he was soberly telling analysts about Sun's processor roadmap... but he couldn't stay sane throughout his introductory remarks. He thinks that as the price of radio frequency identification (RDIF) chips falls, so they'll become ubiquitous. "They're going to slap that baby's bottom," he declared, "[and] then slip an ID chip in their neck or between their shoulders so you can keep track of your kid. That's not Big Brother, that's dad."

No, that's scary...

Speaking of which, you'll be delighted to know that you can now go to a US website and send telegrams to the dead.

Cartoonist Paul Kinsella launched his www.afterlifetelegrams.com site recently to "facilitate contact between the living and the dead", as Ananova told us this week. It'll cost you about £3 per word to post a message, which is then passed on to a terminally ill person who memorises it and, er, takes it with them into the hereafter. The messengers employed for this task all have less than a year to live, with Kinsella saying they are tested to ensure the message is memorised properly. Did someone say macabre...?

Kinsella doesn't know something we don't, however - he can't guarantee the delivery of the messages. "Truthfully, nobody knows what happens when someone dies," he said. "Since we cannot guarantee the delivery of the telegrams, our clients only pay for the delivery attempt and not for the delivery itself."

That's alright then...

Cash machines may not be as secure as we thought. Although if CitiBank gets its way, we may never know. Around $80,000 was taken from the joint account of two South Africans in March 2000... but they deny having removed the cash themselves. Indeed, they claim they weren't even in the same country that the withdrawals were made from.

Could it be that someone has managed to break the security of the bank's ATM system? Professor Ross Anderson, a cryptography expert working within Cambridge University's computer labs, thinks so. His researchers have been called to give evidence in the case - but CitiBank is trying to impose a gagging order on what's discussed in court.

Anderson said this week: "My student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines. It now looks like some of these vulnerabilities have also been discovered by the bad guys. Our courts and regulators should make the banks fix their systems, rather than just lying about security and dumping the costs on the customers."

We got some interesting feedback to that story. We'll leave the writer anonymous in case he's speaking from personal knowledge, but here are his words...

"Many large corporations are guilty of supporting a facade of security, without actually investing in improvements to it. They calculate the cost of fixing a security loop-hole (x) and multiply it by the likelihood of it being exploited (y). They then make a decision to either spend (x) to fix the problem, or more commonly, reduce (y) by the old cloak and dagger method (z). Security through obscurity can be very effective. There is no doubt about this and indeed our military and other services rely upon it. This, however, is never a good long-term strategy. If an exploit to a system is identified by a good guy, then it's just a matter of time before the same exploit is discovered by a bad guy."

Good stuff. And here's some more - all written by your fair hands. The Round-Up's not being lazy, honest, it's just that this clutch of emails are far more entertaining than anything we could come up with.

They're all from people responding to last week's piece about the latest government survey giving mobile phone masts a clean bill of health. We imagined the people of Tunbridge Wells would be angry. We got that wrong...

"I live in Tunbridge Wells and would like to point out that we are by reputation 'disgusted' not 'angry'. The two are quite different things. As you observed when visiting the Royal borough, we are a civilised bunch rarely given to temperamental outbursts. We reserve the right to be 'disgusted' at signs of our society's immorality, but would never allow this to manifest itself in anything so unbecoming as 'anger'. Hope this is enlightening. Incidentally, a good friend of mine lives adjacent to a mobile phone mast in Tunbridge Wells and while one of his heads is prone to 'tutting' the other just stares mournfully at the ground." (Andy Thomson).

But that's not all you had to say about mobile masts.

"My sister was approached some years ago by One2One about having a phone mast on a field she owns in Inkberrow in Worcestershire. She agreed - but only if they made it more attractive. She dashed off a few sketches of what she wanted and now she has this 'medieval' turret in her field. It amazes me why this hasn't happened more often." (Ed Newton).

But not all the feedback was so cheery.

"Sorry, you've missed the point again. Government studies, and subsequent claims of safety, only concern themselves with the heating effects of the radiation which, as you correctly point out, are far too low to cause concern. The real health risk is the resonance effects of the radiation - particularly marked in young children (because of size and softness of the skull - hence objecting to them near schools) - and it is that that campaigners are concerned about.

"In fact a growing number of doctors and other scientists (co-incidently not funded by the telecoms industry) are concerned about such risks and a number of studies have shown increased speed of multiplication of cancerous cells under such conditions. Check out The Lancet for a multitude of articles/studies which cast doubt over the safety of such installations - they outnumber those that claim safety (and consistently ignore resonance effects as they don't fit the picture they want to show). Campaigners are not uneducated extremists but intelligent people who recognise the lack of certainty and just wish to ensure more sensible sitings. Why take the risk (however slight you may think it is - BSE anyone?) of putting them by schools when there are more sensible sites available?

"I don't expect a reply to this, as you ignored my last mailing on the subject, but I am (again) disappointed by your biased, extreme and, quite frankly, uninformed attitude on this matter." (Robert M McNeil, BSc Hons.)

That told us.

We love getting your emails, so keep 'em coming. We can't publish them all, but we do read them, honest.

Til next week, here's some of our own stuff...

Nigerian scam update: The crackdown continues

MPs register rural broadband concerns

'Hack attack' flaw exposed in Nokia phones

Netherlands set to become haven for illegal file-sharing Comic Relief: The technology behind Red Nose Day