Tumbled Logic

DWP Benefits Cap Impact Assessment

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:08:32 +0000

If you look at nothing else, scroll to the charts.

Capped

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:31:54 +0000

A small note regarding the “£26k benefits cap”:—

Lots of people seem to be talking as though the benefits being paid are exclusively (or, at the very least, predominantly) to those seeking work. In other words, if they found work then these benefits would go away. This is the justification for capping to an “average” salary — pay too much in benefits to the unemployed, then you’re providing a disincentive to finding work.

First of all, it’s worth noting the fact that the number unemployed massively outstrips the number of vacancies. Even if everybody were trying their absolute damnedest to get “back into work”, the majority of those unemployed wouldn’t be able to.

Second, for those over 25, the amount paid as Jobseeker’s Allowance is £67.50 per week, and if you’re a couple over 18 both claiming, you’ll get £105.95 a week.

These two pieces of information alone are enough to tell you that the premise of the cap is flawed. The most you can claim as an able-bodied individual in unemployment benefits is £3,510 a year, or £5,509.40 as a couple.

This, by my reckoning, still leaves in excess of £21,000 which is being paid to some of these layabouts.

Let’s deal with the easy stuff: premiums. These boost Jobseeker’s Allowance payments if you suffer from a disability (premiums range from £14.05 to £55.30 for an individual, or £20.25 to £110.60 for a couple, depending upon the severity of the condition) or if you’re a carer. Even with this, we’re still some way off our target.

Other benefits — and this includes council tax relief — aren’t paid on the basis of being out of work, but on the basis of suffering from a debilitating medical condition, or having some specific status (i.e., being a carer, being a student), having children who suffer from a debilitating medical condition, or having a low income. There are caveats, deductions and caps in various places depending upon how much you (and your partner) earns, and whether you have any savings. Finally, Child Benefit is a (relatively modest) fixed amount.

The thrust here is that with the bulk of these “benefits” (which really shouldn’t be called that, as most of them are compensatory in nature) aren’t dependent upon unemployment at all, but on either disability or low income.

This shifts the goalposts somewhat. It’s not about “getting back into work” at all; instead it’s “don’t be disabled”, “don’t have disabled kids” — or kids at all! — or “get a better job”.

Is that really what you want? Really?

European court of human rights: which countries get the most judgments?

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:36:30 +0000

European court of human rights: which countries get the most judgments?:

The UK was found against for lack of effective investigation on five occasions, not to have offered a fair trial on three occasions, and to have failed its duty on prohibition of torture twice.

BMJ: Does anyone understand the government’s NHS reforms, asks senior professor

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:36:45 +0000

BMJ: Does anyone understand the government’s NHS reforms, asks senior professor:

In a Personal View published on bmj.com today, he writes: “I have tried very hard, as have some of my cleverer colleagues, but no matter how hard we try, we always end up concluding that the bill means something quite different from what the secretary of state says it does.”

Ariel: Learning to make competition-winning ideas

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:11:15 +0000

Ariel: Learning to make competition-winning ideas:

Nassé and BBC North director Peter Salmon also decided to commission Mega Bits, an idea from runner-ups Chris Tangye and James Parkin in Future Media, which encourages children to write computer code.

Excellent.

Islington Council admits tree sign 'error'

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:51:09 +0000

Islington Council admits tree sign 'error':

A council has warned residents not to attach objects to trees - in a notice attached to a tree.

This spoof is immensely well-done, so it is. Slightly NSFW —...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:10:00 +0000

This spoof is immensely well-done, so it is. Slightly NSFW — contains tits, guns, parody, cutting satire, some bad language and adult themes.

Church refuses boy with Down's syndrome Holy Communion

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:53:47 +0000

Church refuses boy with Down's syndrome Holy Communion:

In its letter, the diocese said Denum had “limited concentration, doesn’t really access the RE curriculum and does not enjoy going to Mass”.

It said if Denum took his first Holy Communion when he was “better placed to understand” it would “enrich his whole experience”.

Pretty sensible, I would have thought. Faith is (meant to be) a personal thing, and I’m not sure you can make a commitment to any sort of religion if you have little real understanding of what’s going on — anything else is indoctrination by definition.

The real WTF here is that following the outcry, if I read the subtitles on BBC Breakfast News this morning, Leeds Diocese have capitulated and changed their policy.

BBC names David Shukman as first science editor

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:35:07 +0000

BBC names David Shukman as first science editor:

Definitely a role which needed creating.

Rodong Sinmun

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:43:37 +0000

Rodong Sinmun:

North Korea’s official newspaper, featuring such headlines as S. Korean Traitors’ Group to Stop Playing Disgusting Trick, All Koreans to Open Gate to National Reunification, and Russian Organization Discusses Measures for Introducing Immortal Exploits of Great Men.

BASF to Stop Selling Genetically Modified Products in Europe

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:44:48 +0000

BASF to Stop Selling Genetically Modified Products in Europe:

leejarvis:

Hooray, Europe! Lesson to everyone - you can vote with your wallet - if it doesn’t make “business sense” then corporations won’t try and sell you crap!

So BASF is no longer doing the R&D in Europe, but will still import the products. The potato in question, incidentally is used… for… (wait for it) …making paper.

It’s difficult to see this as a victory for common sense.

What is WebID?

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:42:00 +0000

WebID is a W3C Incubator Group (soon to be, and possibly by the time you read this already, a W3C Community Group) specifying a mechanism for using X.509 End Entity (or “client”) certificates to identify yourself to online services, and for performing attribute exchange through Linked Data.

WebID works like this:

You generate, or obtain, an X.509 certificate for yourself. It doesn’t really matter to WebID-consuming services whether this is self-signed, self-issued, or issued to you by a third party.
Your certificate includes a subjectAltName extension containing a URI which can be dereferenced (i.e., you plug it into some software and get some data back) in order to obtain some machine-readable data about you — that is, a profile document.
That structured data includes a copy of the public key from your certificate.

Assuming the data could be retrieved and the keys match, this tells the consuming service three things:

You have access to the corresponding private key (the TLS protocol exchange would have failed if not).
Because the public keys in the certificate and profile document matched, any assertions made within the profile can be treated as being equivalent to if you made them as part of the certificate itself (and nobody else can make those assertions to you, because their public key wouldn’t appear in the profile).
Because the keys match, you have confirmed that you are able to publish information at the URI in your subjectAltName (you can’t pick somebody else’s URI, because you don’t have the private key corresponding to the public key in their profile).

Almost all identity systems designed to operate across multiple sites involve some kind of attribute exchange — that is, passing information between the identity provider and consumer. In WebID, the part of the “provider” is played by the profile document that you publish yourself. If you want to add new “attributes” for exchange (i.e., publish additional information about yourself), you just make sure that it appears in the profile.

The profile itself can take any of a number of forms. At the time of writing, you can publish it as RDF/XML or XHTML+RDFa, but there are moves to expand this list to include Turtle and HTML5 Microdata.

You might wonder, reading this, how you can trust the information in the profile if the individual has published it themselves — but in actual fact this isn’t really any different to what happens elsewhere: you don’t trust that a person’s date of birth really is their date of birth because it says as much in their Facebook profile; the only thing which Facebook Connect can definitively tell you is data exclusively managed by the service itself: principally, that the person is logged in with a particular Facebook account, but also their “friendships” with other people (and the same applies to OAuth with Twitter, and other services similarly).

WebID doesn’t solve the world’s identity problems (there remains unspecified plenty of stuff around long-term key management, selective access-control to the profile, and trusted attribute exchange — that is, relaying claims made by other people about you), but nonetheless I think WebID is going to form an important piece in the puzzle.

Now, for some Q&A:

Do I need to use a “hash URI” or 303 for WebID subjects?

If you’re using http: or https: URIs, then in principle, yes (but see the next question, too). The URI carried by the subjectAltName extension is meant to be the URI for you, not the profile document. The theoretical constraint is therefore that the URI you pick for yourself and the URL for your profile document should be different, but by dereferencing the former you end up with the profile document (i.e., the latter) but that it describes you using the URI you started with. Using fragment identifiers is a way to do this which requires the least moving parts, because it means using something which is automatically stripped out (according to HTTP) when you dereference a URI — but it is by no means the only way.

However, it should be noted that a WebID verifier can be completely conforming and not care, and nor should it: as a piece of software which simply needs to deference a URI and check that in the document it gets back there is the public key correctly associated with URI it started with.

However, in the world of RDF, a given URI isn’t supposed to refer to two different kinds of resource (i.e., an information resource — or document — and non-information resource — something which isn’t the document) simultaneously, and so although it’s a valid as far as WebID is concerned to use the same URI to refer to both you and your profile document at once, you may find that the applications which employ WebID aren’t so forgiving, depending upon what it is that you’re doing.

In any case, what’s to say that you haven’t devised a (semi-)autonomous kind of document which can both present its own public key in a certificate and describe itself?

Can I use an acct: URI as my WebID URI, for example?

It’s not yet been specified, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t in principle: an acct: URI which can be resolved to the URL of a profile document containing a description of the acct: URI that you started with certainly satisfies the constraint of “the URI you pick for yourself and the URL for your profile document should be different, but by dereferencing the former you end up with the profile document but that it describes you using the URI you started with”. At the moment nobody has written the specification detailing how WebID consumers should process acct: URIs in order to obtain a profile document.

Why is the public key material copied into the profile document? Why not anything else?

Copying the public key material into the profile is a close parallel to the “verify your e-mail address” e-mail messages which services send you when you sign up to them: it confirms that you really do have the ability to publish information at the WebID URI.

The public key is used for this because of the nature of asymmetric cryptography: if only you have the corresponding private key, then there’s no benefit or incentive for anybody else to publish your public key in their profile, and similarly because you don’t have the private key belonging to anybody else, there’s no benefit or incentive for you to put their WebID URI in your certificate.

In fact, the public key is the only piece of information which needs to match: WebID doesn’t really care about all of the other stuff in your certificate: consumers know that if there’s any information that you really want to publish, you’ll put it in your profile.

Why use subjectAltName and not the Subject Distinguished Name?

The subject DN is intended to be a composite key allowing location of information in the X.500 DIT, and designed to be plugged straight into DAP queries. Even the emailAddress attribute is a bit of an aberration in this respect.

More importantly, a subjectAltName extension is (on balance), more likely to be user-specifiable than the content of the subject DN, and the retrieval semantics of URI alternative names are relatively well-defined (although WebID does extend them by adding processing rules). Finally, it’s not at all uncommon for certificate issuers to put all manner of cruft in the subject DN.

The Rise of the New Groupthink

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:54:30 +0000

The Rise of the New Groupthink:

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

While this may be a study of the bleedin’ obvious, the message has yet to sink in for many designing working environments.

From BBC Two’s See Hear, a segment exploring how Red Bee...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:35:45 +0000

From BBC Two’s See Hear, a segment exploring how Red Bee produces live subtitles, and why they don’t have quite the fidelity of their pre-recorded brethren.

A polite request

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:25:05 +0000

Dear The Newspaper Industry,

I pay for your content—in electronic form, no less. I’ve tried a few different ways of doing this, but my present favourite is a Kindle subscription. I receive The News when I wake up in the morning and read it on my commute. Splendid.

What I’m unable to fathom is why the content which is delivered to my device and I have paid actual money for is a subset of the content available for free on your website.

Might I respectfully suggest that your value proposition might be described as “arse about tit”, as they say?

Love and hugs,

Microsoft hustled UK retreat on open standards, says leaked report

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:11:11 +0000

Microsoft hustled UK retreat on open standards, says leaked report:

The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.

Bunch of knobbers.

Home Office: The local labour market effects of immigration in the UK (PDF)

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:18:06 +0000

Home Office: The local labour market effects of immigration in the UK (PDF):

The perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, thus contributing to large increases in unemployment, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of data laid out in this report.

Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are hacked

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:02:39 +0000

Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are hacked:

Israel has said it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent “terrorist” acts after the credit card details of thousands of its citizens were published online.

Mac OS X: Adding a new Windows printer

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:39:20 +0000

Say you have a printer shared via Windows — and you want to add it as a new printing device in Mac OS X. You head to System Preferences, then either Print & Scan or Print & Fax depending upon your version, press the + button… and fail to find it in any of the sections. The Windows section doesn’t seem to provide anything useful.

There are two ways to do achieve what you want.

One is to use the CUPS interface, which you’ll find here, if you’re browsing on your Mac. From there you can pick the Administration tab, then Add Printer, and jump through the hoops.

The other is to control-click on the toolbar of the Add Printer dialog and choose Customize Toolbar…, then drag the Advanced icon onto the toolbar.

Once you’ve got an Advanced option there, the process is nearly identical to adding through the CUPS web interface.

For smb:// printers, the Type you want is Windows printer via spools.

Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:44:19 +0000

Teachers warned over Facebook and Twitter use:

Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, told BBC Scotland that teachers should follow his advice: “First thing is don’t bother telling anybody else about your social life. Nobody is interested about your social life and it doesn’t help.

“Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.

“There is always a possibility it will be misinterpreted.”

(Emphasis mine)

Apparently Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA and chief tosspot, is unfamiliar with the European Convention on Human Rights and its enactment in the Human Rights Act 1998.