The General Discussion Thread

[Publish Date updated to restore to front page]

Okay as an experiment here it is. Discuss your favourite generals here!

Well perhaps… Really this is simply the place to post news-items, fun-items or whatever takes your fancy. In short just post what you want here.

It’s just another wee experiment – comments welcome.

Squonk.

[Image: General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry)]

17,285 thoughts on “The General Discussion Thread

  1. In this case a software robot which crawls the web. For instance the google search indexer is probably the most famous legitimate bot. Any busy web site with thousands of pages will have bots accessing the site every minute of every day just to check that some random article from 2007 hasn’t changed since it last looked at it. In fact the resources to serve bots can exceed the resources to serve real humans.

    The real problems start with badly behaving bots which say suddenly flood the site with requests for hundreds to thousands of pages simultaneously. Or just sequentially start retrieving data as fast as the server can send it. At best this will slow down the site for real users – at worst take the site offline.

    Bots for hire are widely available as web-scraping bots. These are among the worst offenders and totally ignore a sites “robots.txt” crawl-delay setting and just suck the site down as fast as they can. If a bot is just coming from a single IP address it is easy to block. If it is coming in on hundreds of IP addresses it is much harder.

    It can be very difficult to tell if a bot is intentionally malicious or just has bad manners. However unusually high bot traffic for no apparent reasons are well known problems on popular sites.

    Recently, I believe, at least some of the bot activity on Craig’s blog matched a known attack vector against WordPress blogs running older themes (design/layout etc) as Craig’s blog does. I understand that has now been patched. The only known cause of the symptom was malicious action.

    Couple of Wikipedia articles
    .
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

  2. I should also mention botnets which infest millions of PCs all over the world usually unknown to their owners. Those with criminal intent can hire time on these bot nets to launch high powered distributed denial of service attacks which can only be mitigated with large resources and the help of a service provider with very fat internet pipes to absorb the traffic. No mistaking if you get hit by one of them. but that’s much rarer and is usually only for a limited time period until said criminals time slot on the botnet runs out.

  3. Squonk, thanks for that, most interesting.

    Habbabkuk, so neither unions nor management, it seems. I wonder who’d pay to have Craig’s blog attacked? Couldn’t be any of those you listed; they’ve barely any money and former diplomats aren’t in their sphere of interest at all. Oh wait a minute…

  4. Interesting, Squonk.

    Can PCs be taken over so the content of intended posts is deliberately changed, so that they say just the opposite of what is intended?

    Too many times I see words changed in coherent but hard to spot ways which are just what I am not trying to say.

  5. Squonk

    thank you !

    Clark

    I was being funny (well, trying to be..) 🙂

  6. Trowbridge, yes, changing the text you typed to something else is technically possible. Pretty much anything you could do intentionally on your system could also be done by malware, and a whole load of things that there’s no facility for in your software. An appropriate piece of malware could operate your computer by remote control across the Internet.

    But there are measures you can take. For instance, you could open a text editor (Notepad on Windows systems), compose your comment using that, then copy-and-paste into the comment field on your browser. Post your comment, and then compare the posted version with the version in your text editor. You would thereby see if your text had been altered.

    Of course it would be possible for malware to also alter the version in your text editor, but it’s unlikely that the original piece of malware affecting your browser would be set up to also modify text in your text editor. Such malware has to be tailored to the software it’s intended to interfere with, so even if this malware was affecting, say, Firefox and Notepad (unlikely), you could always install another, different text editor; there are hundreds to choose from.

    Another way you could check whether your comments are being altered would be to take a screen-shot. In the top row of keys, right of F12 and above Delete is a little-used key marked “Print Screen / SysReq” or maybe PrtScn or similar. On Windows and most GNU/Linux systems, pressing this key causes everything on the screen to be saved as an image. On GNU/Linux, the image is either saved in the Pictures folder under an automatically generated filename consisting of the word “screenshot” followed by the date and time, or a dialogue window opens so you can name the file yourself. On Windows it’s a bit more complicated; the image is saved to the Clipboard (the temporary storage area used by copy-and-paste) and has to be pasted into an image in an image editor such as M$ Paint.

    So to check your comment on Windows proceed as follows. Open Paint and click “File > New”. Write your comment in your browser. Press the Print Screen key. Bring Paint to the front and click “Edit > Paste”; you should now see an image of what was on your screen in Paint’s image window. Post your comment. Now compare the posted version of your comment with the picture of it taken just before you posted.

    This second method requires more steps, but it would be almost impossible for malware to trick you. Computers store text as a sequence of numbers representing the alphanumeric text characters, whereas an image is stored as an array of triplets of numbers representing the brightness of red, green and blue in each pixel of the image. It would be easy to design software (in this case malware) to detect every instance of “yes” in text and replace it with “no”. However, to do the same in an image would require image recognition software and automated image editing; a formidable task. And “yes” is wider than “no” on the screen, so either a gap would be left by the substitution, or the whole image would have to be cut up into strips each containing one line of the text, and then all those strips shuffled left slightly, bits cut off the left end and shifted to the right end of the strip above – a programming nightmare, and way beyond what normal malware can do.

    Of course appropriate malware could enable an attacker to make a replacement image from the modified text manually by remote control across the Internet, but it would be labour intensive, needing one operative for each person whose comments were being modified. It would also take time, so you’d likely notice the moment at which the replacement image was switched in.

    To get some idea of what’s possible, what the difficulties are and how you’d notice if it was happening, network a couple of Windows PCs together and enable “Remote Desktop”. There are several steps to getting it all set up. You’ll then be able to operate one system remotely from the other. I knew of one abusive husband who was freaking out his wife and frustrating her work by controlling her PC from his laptop in another room.

  7. Thanks Clark for your most detailed response to what I was wondering about.

    For the time being, I shall just be more careful in reading what I apparently write to make sure it is what I wanted.

    Sounds as if my laptop suddenly shutting down, my server suddenly claiming that a page cannot be shown because I am no longer on the internet, etc. can be done by some malware.

    Have you ever noticed words that cannot be typed? I particularly mean s+t+u+x+n+e+t (the virus intended to wreck Iran’s centrifuge program) which cannot stay as what I want, always coming out as the word student?

    Are there special spook programs which cannot be discussed in regular English?

    Thanks again for your efforts.

  8. Trowbridge: Turn off the spelling auto-corrector, and you’ll be able to type Stuxnet as often as you like without it being changed. Along with all other non-common words. Outlook (which I’m obliged to use in work) helpfully auto-corrects what I’m doing all the time, and it ticks me off to a not inconsiderable degree!

  9. Thanks Glenn for expelling how to spell these unusual words, but think I better keep the spell check going as I have trouble spelling most of the common ones.

    Thanks too for saying what you did about Chomsky. Got me to read bits of Failed States again.

    He really was vile on JFK, making out that he deserved to be assassinated.

    Makes Chomsky a FAILED SCHOLAR.

  10. Tried to add a p.s. about the word expelling appearing when I certainly tried to post the word explaining as an example of what I was originally complaining about, but my effort was not accepted in correcting the post.

  11. Trowbridge, Glenn

    I’ve been following the little spat about Chomsky.

    When oh when will people finally understand that genius in one field (Chomsky – groundbreaking work on linguistics) is absolutely no guide to the soundness of that genius’s views on matters outside his field and does not confer any superior knowledge or insight in those other fields?

    I would go further – one can be a genius in one field and an idiot in many others.

    I do not believe that Chomsky’s eminence in the field of linguistics makes him any more qualified to pronounce on politics, economics, international affairs and sundry linked subjects than any well-informed, thinking man in the street.

    I wish I could remember the name of that eminent British physicist at the end of the C19/beginning of the C20 who alongside doing groundbreaking work in physics….believed in fairies.

  12. Habbabkuk: I do not believe that Chomsky’s eminence in the field of linguistics makes him any more qualified to pronounce on politics, economics, international affairs and sundry linked subjects than any well-informed, thinking man in the street.

    Indeed, couldn’t agree more. What makes Chomsky qualified on the subjects you mentioned is his enormous study and activism in the same fields going back many decades, together with his astonishing ability to memorise details, facts and references, so that he produces a solid linkage of facts – heavily backed with sources – instead of mere opinion.

  13. Eye halve a spelling chequer
    It came with my pea sea
    It plainly marques four my revue
    Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

    Eye strike a quay and type a word
    And weight four it two say
    Weather eye am wrong oar write
    It shows me strait a weigh.

    As soon as a mist ache is maid
    It nose bee fore two long
    And eye can put the error rite
    It’s rare lea ever wrong.

    Eye have run this poem threw it
    I am shore your pleased two no
    It’s letter perfect awl the weigh
    My chequer tolled me sew.

  14. Why shouldn’t a physicist believe in fairies? If you’ve seen them, you’ve seen them. To pretend otherwise would be like faking your data.

  15. Jullo All

    Much Excitement about the new Ninth planet.. A Blue Giant Much like Neptune they say….In a paper released by researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown

    It orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun

    ” If the planet happens to be close to its perihelion, Brown says, astronomers should be able to spot it in images captured by previous surveys. If it is in the most distant part of its orbit, the world’s largest telescopes—such as the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Subaru Telescope, all on Mauna Kea in Hawaii—will be needed to see it. If, however, Planet Nine is now located anywhere in between, many telescopes have a shot at finding it.” –

    https://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523#sthash.kF1ijV1B.dpuf

    P.S Unicorns… And Nessie For Me…. And of Course Mermaids 🙂

  16. What’s so wrong with believing in fairies, compared with believing in some giant sky-spook, an angry old man in the clouds sending down lightning bolts, talking snakes, trees of knowledge, virgin births, visiting angels, devils, hellfire, people turning into pillars of salt, the first man giving birth to the first woman, rising from the dead, walking on water, performing miracles, talking in tongues…. belief in fairies sounds positively sensible compared with all that.

    Yet all that horse-shit is given a polite nod if a person declares themself a True Believer, and for some incredible reason it’s not supposed to detract from their credibility in the slightest. On the contrary – it’s taken as evidence of what a thoroughly decent person they must be!

  17. Glenn

    “What’s so wrong with believing in fairies..”
    __________________

    I don’t recall saying there was anything “wrong” with it.

    As you know, my point was that people’s eminence in their own field is no safeguard against them having foolish views on subjects in other fields.

    Disclaimer – the above is written in the belief that Glenn does not believe in fairies himself. 🙂

  18. Posters should be more surprised by Rutherford’s claim that science is composed of physics and stamp collecting.

    Don’t know about physics but he was spot on about stamp collecting.

  19. I should first declare my interest in Rutherford in that my great-grandfather who visited from abroad did research with Rutherford some one hundred years ago. I believe Rutherford is known to be the first man to split the atom.

    Next, I don’t know about fairies, but I had an angel in my bed the other day, I can swear.

    Then: Energy is all their is in the Universe. And this energy can manifest itself in different ways on Planet Earth. Quantum mechanics facilitates that. It also suggests that there are an incremental 6-7 dimensions in operation all at the subatomic level. My dog may be better at perceiving them than I am. I DON’T KNOW (important to acknowledge).

    Also important to acknowledge Einsteins words:
    There are only two ways to live your life — one is that nothing is a miracle, the other that everything is a miracle.

    We forget that we live in Space. It’s an awesome Universe we inhabit.

  20. Can anyone tell me what ‘nm’, used generously at The Lifeboat is supposed to mean? Not to be confused with NOM.

    Thanks.

  21. Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches, but has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to Man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

    nanometre?

  22. Don’t you love reporter Jonathan Freedland complaining in The Guardian that The Donald and his Parrot Palin are no joke when he makes no mention of the media’s vast failures in the whole sick comedy.

    He should spend his time by doing serious journalism like explaining why the judicial inquiry into the vicious murder of Alexander Litvinenko was not done by Putin, American spy Robert Levinson in Iran will never reappear, why the Pentagon tried to provoke a bloody showdown with Iran’s Ayatollah in the hope of quashing the nuclear arms agreement , and who really assassinated poor Gareth Williams and why.

    Today’s media is not even a joke but the crucial component of our rambo police states.

  23. Good to see a Russian researcher writing an article about what space debris can cause, a Chinese journal, Acta Aeronautica, publishing it in its December 2015 issue, and the DM having an article about it.

    The article showing that a serious mishap could happen, like when a piece of debris from a Chinese one brought down in 2011 brought down a Russian one two years later, though no confrontation occurred.

    The aim of the disclosure is to show that no country should jump to conclusions about losing one of its own.

  24. Bill Browder has written a letter to David Cameron, demanding that he impose at least the Magnitsky sanctions on Russian officials because of the brutal murder of Alexander Litvinenko by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Browder guaranteed the verdict against Putin by meeting with Guardian reporter Luke Harding without any protection when the Owen Inquiry started a year ago, stating that the Litvinenko murder was just the leading item in a list of Russian victims, most likely to include himself too.

    This most provocative article assured that no suspects, especially those two Russians suspected of carrying around most dangerous polonium-210 until they got Sasha, in their right minds would come to the UK to prove their innocence.

    The murder by British agents Tolkachev and Sidelnikov was completely covered up by the torrent of anti-Putin propaganda.

  25. Don’t you love maths Dr. David Grimes having a method of proving if conspiracies occur, and then applying it to ones that I have never considered – i. e., the moon landing was faked, climate change is a fraud, vaccines cause autism, and drug companies have suppressed cures for cancer!

    Of course, never consider all those assassinations, assaults on innocent countries, ‘false flag’ operations, etc., ad nauseam.

    And Stephen Hawking having a theory his pills will perfect the human brain!

  26. BrianFujisan, hello, good to see you here….
    (Trowbridge, I wish I knew what to say to you.)
    …cos’ it’s been awful quiet here lately. Quiet at Craig’s, too.

    Mary, if you’re reading, I do wish you’d drop in. I hope you’re OK.

  27. Not been quiet, Clark, trying to get the media to take a real look at who brutally murdered leaker Alexander Litvinenko, why MH370 has not been found after two years of expensive looking, why Yale senior Suzanne Jovin was murdered for what she was writing about renewed attacks on the WTC almost three years before 9/11, and why the Pentagon tried to provoke a showdown with Iran which would destroy its nuclear facilities.

    And Brian, you are right about governments constantly spinning the news, and paranoid about people in the know, like Edward Snowden, spilling the beans.

    Just read about the WH, for example, refusing to give tech expert Ashkan Soltani a security clearance, though he had previously worked for several US agonies, and the FBI had not even completed its security checks. He previously worked for The Washington Post, the most spy infiltrated outlet in the media, making sure that it didn’t post anything serious from Snowden, and it didn’t. For the WP’s connection to America’s covert government, look at the lengths it has gone to in order to hide reporter Jason Rezaian’s spying.

  28. “Mary, if you’re reading, I do wish you’d drop in. I hope you’re OK.”
    _____________________

    Clark, that is a sign of your inner weakness. Mary is happier at her new place, where her views and posts are never challenged and, conversely, Craig’s blog is a cleaner, healthier place without her constant negative carping.

    It’s a win-win and here you are, attempting to introduce the worm into Squonk’s apple……!

  29. Trowbridge

    When did you say you were going to disappear off to Thailand for a whole month?

  30. Ah, here we have the petri-dish of democracy eliciting the comments of the disgorged and partitioned segments of society, lacking all credibility due to former associations with damaged politicos, making everyone else pander to their already discredited past.

    This is the politics of Murray. It’s the politics of ungrateful and entitled refugees who most closely mimic the entitled attitude of trolls. Murray’s trolls.

  31. Thanks for the Primer, squonk. I didn’t know who Andy was, but I believe you know which Murray I was referring to. Thanks for the response as well.

  32. Lot’s of Murray’s. Andy’s brother just made history as well.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/35449190

    Jamie Murray became the first Briton to win the Australian Open men’s doubles title in 82 years, as he and Bruno Soares beat Daniel Nestor and Radek Stepanek 2-6 6-4 7-5.

    However an episode of Family Guy on BBC 3, as I was reading the thread, had them visiting singer Anne Murray to discuss the meaning of Snowbird so I’ll go with the synchronicity.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5hm5p5fyQI

    Scotland’s Andy Murray up against Djokovic (yet again) in a few hours.

  33. The nonsense of politically correct speech and velvet-glove social policies lead to the prophetic alarms sent by movies like Children of Men. Cast aside those theories which vent some conspiracy notion without rock-solid science of mainstream acceptance. Don’t ask if I can prove self-awareness. If that is the metrics of reality; the let’s have something measurable by scientific method firmly embedded in the integrity of those professionals who occupy the highest echelons of catbird-seat and such should provide hard data for their predetermined conclusions if they have anything other than skepticism for an argument. Let their cul-de-sac thinking be their epitaph written to satisfy anyone who can’t reason outside the box. Natch ! It’s so easy to wait until someone, somewhere tells you it’s ok to think outside the mainstream.

  34. who occupy the highest echelons of catbird-seat

    WTF is a cat-bird seat? I looked it up.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catbird_seat

    Joey Hart, explains that Mrs. Barrows must have picked up the expression from Red Barber, a baseball broadcaster, and that to Barber “sitting in the catbird seat” meant “‘sitting pretty,’ like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.”

    I am none the wiser. It’s just not cricket.

    President Jimmy Carter set two alternative paths in front of the US voters in a series of televised broadcasts. They rejected his plea and consciously picked the course he said would eventually lead to disaster.

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