Quotes of the month
There are two quotes this month, both from our esteemed leader, John Howard.
JOURNALIST: “[A]re you likely to have anything to say
imminently on emissions trading?”
JOHN HOWARD: “On emissions trading, I don’t have
anything specifically in mind, but something may occur
between now and when I might say something on it to cause
me to say something on it. But I don’t have anything
particularly in mind at the present time.”
- Speaking at a press conference, Parliament House,
Canberra, 24 January 2007
John Laws: “Sure, but why don’t you change it so it doesn’t happen again?”
Prime Minister: “How can you write a law that says a company must do the right thing?”
- Responding to a question on 29 January over whether the federal industrial relations laws should have prohibited Tristar’s refusal to give a terminally ill employee voluntary redundancy
Every cloud has a silver lining
The primary losers from the plans to tax carbon emissions – which look more than likely to go ahead in some form or another – appear to be the coal industry. Add that to the costs of investing in renewable sources of energy, and if they’re not to shed jobs and profits, the big polluters are likely to want to pass the cost onto consumers.
If so, in line with the jump in service station fraud since petrol prices went through the roof, will we see big increases in people defaulting on their electricity bills, or renters doing a runner?
A report commissioned by the New South Wales Government has revealed that every 10-cent increase in the price of petrol per litre results in an extra 120 incidents of petrol theft each month. Released by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR), the report predicts that if the price of petrol reaches $1.70 per litre, the number of people doing a runner from the bowser will climb as high as 1,600 incidents per month. Over the two years until June 2006, service station fraud rose by 33 per cent.
So given that energy companies expect the extra investment required will see not extra cents added to electricity bills but up to a whole $2 dollars per week (damn, there goes the latte!), there’s got to be an opportunity for … sorry, danger of increased defaults there.
Crime may pay
Another convicted fraudster is following a well-trodden path going back to the likes of Frank Abagnale Jr and offering to put his ill-gotten skills into service for the public good.
Dubbed the “homeless hacker” due to his peripatetic nature (which included squatting in disused buildings), in February 2004 Adrian Lamo was forced to settle down after being convicted of hacking TheNew York Times computer network and retrieving the personal details of contributors to the paper such as Jimmy Carter, Robert Redford and former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler.
Instead of prison, he was confined to the Eastern District of California for three years until January 16.
According to TheSydney Morning Herald, despite maintaining the view that the IT security industry is in the business of spreading fear to build its business, last month he sent out a press release offering his services as a consultant.
"I continue to believe that the security industry is dishonest, encourages exploit-coders to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, and is not an ethical industry,” he wrote to the Next section of the paper via instant messenger.
“No project that is genuinely challenging and different will be turned down, provided it’s ethical, but my core constituency is the public and non-profit sector.”
Lamo maintains he never publicly distributed the data he acquired illicitly from companies such as Microsoft, AOL, MCI WorldCom and Excite@Home.
Instead, like ethical hackers before him, he would inform the operators of the vulnerability of their systems, and offer to help the companies remedy the bugs that granted him access.
“My record for integrity in dealing with every company I compromised is ironclad,”Lamo told Next. “Not one shred of that (compromised) data ever saw the light of day,” he said.
Profiting from fear
The makers of software that tracks movement on security cameras may do away with the need for security guards to monitor banks of cameras all night.
So called “intelligent video” combines motion detection technology with the learning capabilities of video game software, reports AP. These systems can detect people loitering, walking in circles or leaving a package.
New microphone technology can also apparently isolate the sound of a gunshot and direct the attached camera to swivel and zoom in on the source. Sensitivity may reach the point where microphones could pick out the word “explosives” spoken in a crowd.
Chicago emergency operations chief Andrew Velasquez told AP: “We are piloting analytic software right now ... where you can set that particular camera to watch for erratic behaviour, or someone leaving a suitcase on the sidewalk.”
The makers of this software, which include about a dozen companies, are set to grow their revenue from $US60 million ($77.6 million) to $400 million ($517.5 million) within five years, according to consulting group Frost & Sullivan.
One of them is ObjectVideo, which has helped the port of Jacksonville, Florida, to dispense with human monitoring of cameras altogether by sending alerts and live video to the personal digital assistant of the nearest officer on patrol.
Given that people are now monitored routinely at every hour of the day, privacy advocates are not pleased that potentially innocent movements are going to be scrutinized even further.
But Velasquez counters that many neighbourhoods actually ask for security cameras to make them safer, and cameras had contributed to a drop in violent crime in Chicago.