Fitting the battle of life

Well, the pwn to own contest has come to an end, and after the early exit of the MacBook Air, the Vista laptop was the second to go, leaving the Ubuntu machine still standing at the end.

It’s not a particularly scientific contest - I’m sure the Air went first because it was a more desirable prize than the Vista laptop, but the fact that the Ubuntu machine ‘won’ doesn’t surprise me, and probably doesn’t surprise anyone else either. The Mac succumbed to a flaw in Safari, and the Vista machine apparently a flaw in Adobe’s flash player.

There are security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu - or there would never be security updates - but for the moment, we’re safe.

Yes, terrorists are so rife within society these days - much more prevalent, much more organised, much better funded and equipped than the IRA ever was, of course -  that we need a draft of new legislation to protect us poor, vulnerable and innocent citizens from them, by which we mean giving up all our privacy and subjecting our private data to the security services so they can analyse our movements around London using Oyster cards to determine that we are indeed poor, vulnerable and innocent, not nasty horrible terrorists.

As for ‘cyber war’, surely they could come up with a better moniker than that? I’ve not heard the term cyberspace since reading Neuromancer, I swear.

Source: MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

(For those who came to the debating workshop on Thurs 10/1 and wanted a refresh.)

We talked about the fact that most debates can be reduced to a broader topic, and went over what the main issues in some of those debates are. I’ve added a little more here since we were running out of time. This should serve as a reminder of what we said, rather than being exactly what we said (my memory serves me only poorly, even if I can remember 52).

Democracy
    THW give the vote to <group>
THW limit Prime Ministers to one five-year term of office.
These debates are about what’s best for democracy, not whether you can be ‘too old’ to be PM.

Security vs Liberty
    THW allow the use of torture/evidence gained by torture etc
Human rights of a few individuals ([suspected] terrorists) versus the liberties of the majority (the innocent public).

International Relations (IR)
    THW invade Zimbabwe
Best route to ’stability’; sovereignty vs internationalism; the moral duty to intervene or not.

Rights generally/benefits, harms
    THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners
THW ban music that promotes criminality
Balance of rights and harms, e.g.freedom of speech vs the harms it might cause; discussion of rights generally (how do you get them, can you lose them?).

We debated THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners. I’ll get some of the feedback about arguments etc up about that over the weekend.

My thanks especially to Stanzie for the cake, and to you all for coming. Until next Thursday, goodnight.