Y Safle

A few weeks ago a local pub leafleted our Church car park on a Sunday morning to advertise some kind of immoral binge whereby one would be locked inside a hot smokey room swilling gallons of alcoholic beverages and doing stupid things that you will forget, but no-one else will! Morons!

It is bad enough having these people leave their litter on my vehicle, but to spend the money and time advertising to the one community in Aberystwyth that would return a zero response is just plain stupid!

I often consider inserting the leaflets left on my car in an unstamped envelope and posting it back to the sender, complete with a “you dropped this” message and a large chunk of masonry.

I have never quite been bothered so far, but one of these days…!

It’s that time of year again. Kids getting ready to demand money (or something) with menaces. Kids dressing up a broom with an old sock stuffed with paper and demanding money (without menaces). Kids throwing fireworks around and loud bangs in the night. Bah humbug!

So where does this all come from? Halloween, we are told, derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain, and heralds the end of the Celtic year, the night when the world draws close to the otherworld. Only it has often struck me as odd that the pre-Romanised Celts would just happen to end their year so neatly on the last day of a Roman calendar month.

And what is Bonfire Night? Isn’t that all about some Guy who wanted to blow up parliament and install a Catholic king? Why mention it on a page all about Celtic interests?

Guy Fawkes, it turns out, has very little to do with Bonfire Night. Yes, the gunpowder plot was foiled on November 5th, but this just happened to be the Bonfire Night already. Guy Fawkes was not burned at the stake, as some suppose. He was hanged drawn and quartered (the normal punishment meted out at that time to traitors).

The bonfires of the start of November were a much older (Celtic) tradition. The throwing of an effigy onto these bonfires was also an old tradition - the effigies were the Celtic green men.

Sir James Frazer wrote extensively about the fire festivals of Europe in his 1922 magnus opus, “the Golden Bough”. In this work he points out that the Celts, early farmers, timed the end of their year with the time when herdsmen would bring their cattle down from the hills to winter pastures, and after the harvest is gathered in and stored.

Since ancient times, Celts have reckoned the year to end on Bonfire Night, and as autumn gives way to winter, this world and the otherworld are indeed supposed to be at their closest point (an idea perhaps helped by autumnal mists which can turn to heavy fogs in early November).

The Bonfire celebration, and the burning of effigies covered in evergreen boughs, are a memory of a log forgotten superstitious past. Much of this is detailed in the Golden Bough, Chapters 62-64.

However, Sir James Frazer missed one point. He speaks, as so many of us do, of the Celtic New Year as starting on November 1st, and Samhain as being 31st October (see chapter 62, section 6). This is a mistake.

Long before the Roman calendar, the Samhain fires were burning year in and year out. We know that Celts based festivals on dates calculated from astronomical recordings, and it is worth noting that the night of November 5th is located exactly half way between autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. Beltain is half way between vernal equinox and summer solstice. Thus the significant date is indeed 5th November. The Celtic festival is 5th November - not 31st October.

Halloween derives from a Christian festival on another date that just happens to have similarities with Samhain, but the true Celtic festival is Bonfire Night. So when some child rings your doorbell this week, tell them to come back next week.

And while you are at it, you may like to point out that guising, of which trick or treat is a mere corruption, involves the recital of a piece of poetry, or the singing of a song for some reward. You can offer them such a reward at your bonfire celebration if you like… at least if they are really obnoxious, you can (however fleetingly) consider throwing them on it instead! On second thoughts, perhaps not… but at least the idea might give you a warm fuzzy feeling. :o)

I admit it. I am a pedant.

A pretty sloppy pedant maybe, but a pedant all the same.

Many a time I have had to stop someone mid sentence because they have just spoken of “gender awareness” or “the two genders”. And many a time have I been filling in a form that asked me my gender, when to my frustration I find there is no “non edible vegetable” box.

And it is not just the word “gender”. I am apt to speak of two or more octopodes whenever I hear “octopi”, and by extension, platypodes when I see more then than one platypus (admittedly not often). Wrong plurals drive me nearly insane.

If one has more than a single virus on a computer, then these are viruses, not viri (men!) or worse virii (The plural of viri)!

And there are countless more examples. Plural of hippopotamus? Hippoipotamus I suppose! (As in “horses of the river”).

But back to the gender example. For the uninitiated, the word “gender” comes from the indo-european root word “gen” meaning “kind” (via Latin “genus” which translates Aristotle’s grammatical term, “genos”). “masculine gender” refers to the noun category in many languages, and many of these also have “neuter” as well as “feminine”. Furthermore, in languages such as German, a maiden is neuter, even though certain vegetables, including turnips, might be feminine!

But it turns out that there are many languages with classes of noun (and indeed other parts of speech) which are not masculine, feminine or neuter. In his book, “The unfolding of Language”, Guy Deutscher mentions the example of an Australian aboriginal language where the classes of noun include “edible vegetable” and “non edible vegetable”. It turns out that transportation, such as aeroplanes, are usually classed as non edible vegetable. This is presumed to be because dug out boats would be made from wood, and the classification has stuck.

Now as I am frequently primary transportation for my youngest daughter, I believe that my gender should also be non edible vegetable.

Survey writers be warned - if you ask me my gender and don’t give me that choice, I will write it in. If it is an electronic survey, I will not complete it.

Of course, if you want to know my biological sex, then just ask!

Although I feel duty bound to add the caveat that Guy Deutscher’s book describes the evolution of language as an inevitable thing, and pedants like me have as much chance of preventing that evolution as king Cnut had of stopping the tide come in. (Although on that point, Cnut never actually believed he could stop the tide. He was demonstrating the limitations of his power… see, I told you I was a pedant).

I’m looking forward to the day when people start talking about having “genderal relations”… then we will have to find another politically correct word instead!

People are inclined to think highly of their nations. Patriotism is seen as a virtue, and nations that can instill a cohesive patriotism are generally far more successful than those that cannot.

But how much of this sense of patriotism is born in a modern day mythology of national greatness? The U.K. fosters a deliberate ambiguity in the name for its larger island: Great Britain. The Americans think of the U.S.A. as a great nation, and no doubt many more peoples are afflicted with such notions.

But what makes these nations great? What do we mean by the term? Do we mean to imply some kind of altruistic desire to bring peace to the world? Or do we simply mean that the coercive apparatus of the state are irresistable in these nations?

One thing is for sure: I see no sense of greatness in a nation that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths of civilians in countries they have invaded. There is nothing great about a nation that arms client states to wage war on women and children. There is nothing great about a nation that would sell chemical weapons knowingly to brutal dictators so that they can attempt genocide on civilian peoples and commot war crimes against their neighbours.

There is nothing great about a nation that refuses to reduce its monstrously high greenhouse emissions, condemning millions of people to poverty, suffering and death. There is nothing great about a nation that wants to hoard its wealth without sharing with others - keeping developing countries poor for thye sake of small lobbies of self interest What makes a nation great? What is the greatest nation on earth?

Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is least among you all—he is the greatest.” Luke 9:48

Steve Gibson is several years out of date in his Security Now podcast, episode 47. He says:

[The October 2002 DDoS against the DNS]  was directed at all 13 of the main DNS servers, the so-called “root servers,” which maintain the master directories of domain names. Nine of the 13 DNS servers were brought down. Only four of the servers managed to stay on the ‘Net. [...] There really is no defense. The only thing that can be done is that – and this is what some of the commercial anti-denial-of-service service providers have done, is they could have servers connected to very large pipes

Mr Gibson’s analysis is wrong. There is no need for very large pipes to the DNS servers, because since 2002 a program of anycasting has been rolled out for the DNS servers whereby a number of the servers are essentially cloned around the net, and special BGP routes are announced to routers at multiple points across the Internet, such that traffic from a client will be routed to the nearest (in networking terms) DNS root server. This works because packets will be routed to the lowest cost route. It provides failover, because if one server dies, then the next least costly route will be used (which may be another anycast clone).

October 2002 was not the only DDOS attack against the DNS, but of late no attacks have succeeded, because instead of just 13 root servers, we now have many times that number, and we have very successful over provisioning of the root servers.

Last year I wrote this post: http://safle.org/wordpress/?p=4. In particular I looked up the current locations of the root name servers and used the Google Maps API to create this map of where the root name servers are located. The smaller pins show anycast IP duplicate servers. (Note that these are not accurate all the way down to the street level)

The effect of this is that any DDoS against the DNS will be diluted amongst all name servers, and is unlikely to succeed. With every additional anycast clone server, the chances of a successful attack on the DNS are further reduced (and DNS resolution for the new geographic area covered is imporved).

Mr Gibson’s explanation of what the root servers do is also sloppy. These servers do not hold master copys of the domain names. They merely hold data for the TLDs (top level domains) such as uk., us., to., tv., es., ru., … as well as the gTLDs such as com., org.

They used to hold  the next level of edu. I believe, although a quick dig for the edu. name servers quickly reveals this is no longer the case.

Whilst we are talking about this podcast, Steve Gibson gets onto his pet subject - raw sockets in Windows XP. His argument was that raw sockets were a bad idea because they allow someone with admin priveleges (the default user in XP home edition) to run programs that can become worms and the like.

To an extent he was right - but the problem is not raw sockets. The problem is the brain dead decision of Microsoft to continue allowing technically illiterate users run with full admin priveleges on their network connected boxes by default. In Mr Gibson’s dialogue with Microsoft he claims that raw sockets were his one problem with Windows XP. But these were not the problem.

Yes its hard to have backward compatibility without admin priveleges - especially if you are using NT as your operating system. But look at what Apple did with OS X, and you can see how it is quite possible (for a little pain) to make an astoundingly good OS, with backward compatibility and security designed in (thanks to the use of UNIX).

So enough self congratulation in spotting a problem with raw sockets. The question Mr Gibson should be asking is when will Microsoft release an O.S. with security designed in? When will users no longer be logged in with admin priveleges?

 

It seems that every time someone complains about government waste and incompetence, some Joe Public will be quoted as saying “we could have spent that money on hospitals and schools”. Strange that we never hear anyone say “we could have spent that money on killing people in foreign countries” or “we could have spent that money on another tier in the civil service” or even “we could have spent that money on a government national identity computer system”.

No, we live in a utopian world whereby any spending we don’t agree with could have better been spent on health or education.

George Osborne did it yesterday. When interviewd about the hugely wasteful tax credit system, he said “we could have spent that billion pounds on schools and hospitals”. I fast forwarded the rest of his interview. I don’t suppose he bothered to add that the Conservatives never did spend any more on schools and hospitals.

Hey, at least the lib dems used to say “we will tax you more and spend the money on education”.

But honesty never won an election, and no doubt many people said “hear, hear George” as he trotted out the schools and hospitals mantra.

In this article, the magnanimous British Phonographic Industry tell us that we can copy songs from our CDs to our own digital music players so that we can listen to them without fear of prosecution. That is so nice of them!

But what annoys me about this and so many articles is the way it says that the BPI will favour targeting professional pirates.

Were the BPI dealing with piracy I would applaud them. Murder and pillage on the high sees is still a large problem, and it seems there are several ghost ships roaming the coasts of the world, acting as mother ships of piracy operations. This is a threat to merchant seamen, and even cruise liners - and the danger is very real.

But actually all the BPI are really concerned about is a legal doctrine of copyright theft. To say that the person copying tracks to his music player is a non professional pirate is a nasty use of hyperbole. Indeed, such a person is not stealing anything, and a law that could even suggest that this is wrong doing is frankly absurd. To suggest that inviting friends over and letting them hear our music (or lending friends the CD) is an act of piracy seems to be out of proportion with the alleged wrong doing.

Inasmuch as copyright theft really causes legitimate loss, we may be justly concerned about it. But call it piracy and everything else you say will pass over my head, as I disappear into a mental pciture of a pound of grape shot ripping through the flesh of the chairman of Sony corporation.

We should stamp out piracy. Yes indeed. But the BPI is not involved in that fight.

You would think that if the world was going to end then people would want to spread the world. Moreso if in so doing they might actually avert the impending catastrophe.

Not so, it seems, American “liberals”.

Okay - that is unfair. I am probably (hopefully) only talking about a small fraction of American “liberals”. No doubt my stereotype is wrong. But here is what I’m talking about.

There is a blog posting titled You just don’t want to die of starvation because you’re jealous I have a Hummer and you don’t, where the writer wishes to rail against the thesis of one Jonah Goldberg that people would question global warming science if it turned out that global warming was entirely natural (a strange counterfactual in any case).

The writer puts words into the mouths of conservatives thus:

[they want to continue] the conservative theme that people who like nature are so abhorrent that it’s worth it to fry the planet just to [tee] us off

And then goes on with an ad hominem line that suggests we can ignore the ramblings of conservatives because they are the same people that gave us the pro life movement.

You can check out the feedback on the site above. I pointed out that it is illegitimate to conflate these issues, whatever one thinks of them. I was immediately attacked on my views on what it means to understand humanity of a foetus, and at the same time for bringing abortion into a thread ostensibly about global warming! Worse, as I tried to give reasoned arguments, I was attacked by a string of ad hominem arguments of the form “you are too stupid to understand”, “All your country men are mad” and such like.

Now call me stupid (clearly many have taken me up on that already), but my point was that when an issue is as important as global warming - where the whole world is being affected, and where society consensus is required to effect a lasting and workable change, it seems to make no sense to me to snap and bite at someone who agrees with you, simply because they disagree on some other issue.

What seems to be happening is that American “liberals” are adopting a package of beliefs that define their community. If one is a “liberal” in America, one must be pro-choice, believe global warming is a problem, and who knows what else.

You may not pick one belief and be admitted. It is all or nothing. Accept the package or be mauled by the self professed sentry dogs to the ivory tower of “liberalism”.

But this is just nuts. If we really care about global warming, and we really care about our environment then it makes absolutely no difference what our other beliefs are. We can work together to effect a change. Indeed, one way that more advanced countries in this field are making progress is to use the market to control emissions. Right wingers have something to add to the resolution of this issue, and whatever our political stripe, we must accept that help gladly.

After the lack of engagement in the thread above, and the appalling string of ad hominem arguments, I find myself as just the kind of person who would like to go out and buy a Hummer just to annoy the woolly thinking self styled “liberals”.

Fortunately for the world, I won’t do this. Partly because I feel to strongly on global warming, partly because I probably can’t afford to do so, and partly because I have no idea what a Hummer is!

But what do I make of these “liberals”? Well I think they are downright dangerous. If a pro lifer, (or any other right winger) were wavering on the global warming issue, these people would push them right back into the comforting arms of the Jonah Goldbergs of this world.

Worse, they have misappropriated the term “liberal” here. That is why I have been applying it in quotation marks to them. An essential tenet of liberalism is respect for the freedoms of each other, including freedoms of belief and speech. These people have no respect for such freedoms. They demonstrate just the type of small minded human behaviour that makes global warming such a threat to us. They perpetuate the idea that communities of which one is a member are better than those of which one is not. They believe conservatives are all stupid and mad, and afford the same judgement to anyone who does not accept their designated package of “liberal” beliefs.

This is ghetto thinking.

If we want to save the world we need to step out of the ghettos and start shouting about what really concerns us.

I sent the following letter to the BT UK Correspondence Centre 3 times. I never once got an answer. I cancelled my BT subscription, but to re-use my efforts, I offer this sorry tale for your amusement.

Dear Sir/Madam

Re. Fault with BT SMTP Service Affecting Our Account

On or about Thursday 26th January 2006, BT Internet reconfigured their SMTP server service manually or automatically in some manner that caused a loss of service from our BT Internet account (xxxxxxxx.x.xxxxxxx@btinternet.com). We use a variety of laptops, desktop PCs and PDAs to access our account, depending on where we are in the house and what we are doing, and the failure affected all of these devices.

The symptoms of the failure were we could no longer send mail, because the SMTP authentication failed. However, we had not reconfigured SMTP authentication, and the password was clearly fine as we could continue to receive mail from the POP3 service, and use web mail.

Online Support

After waiting for a day or two to see if the problem would correct itself, my wife decided to contact technical support on Sunday 29th January, as she had an email she needed to send. She spent a couple of hours with the technical support to no avail. In this time, they made some suggestions that I think, as an ICT professional, were unacceptable, and you will want to review these issues:

1. At no point did the call centre take on board that this was a fault that had simultaneously affected multiple setups on diverse operating systems. When my wife asked if anything had changed on the mail server, she was adamantly told “no”, despite clear evidence to the contrary, and the fact that the call centre were clearly not in a position to know this.
2. On discovering that my wife was using Microsoft Outlook to read email, she was told that as this was not a supported mailer, she should take the issue up with Microsoft! Now this response annoyed me because
   1. the problem was very clearly not with the mail software,
   2. my wife could easily switch to Outlook Express if that is what was necessary,
3. If you say that you only support Outlook Express, and will not help with problems on any other mailer, then you lock yourself into proprietary Microsoft technologies. You are saying that users of other operating systems, handheld devices, text only mailers and mailers used by people with disabilities cannot access technical support. This is probably in breach of your duties under the disabilities discrimination act, and is certainly bad business sense, as you are saying that there is a huge user base that you do not want as customers. You do not seem to want users of open source software, for instance - despite the fact that your SMTP service is itself the open source qmail SMTP server.
4. Your support staff did not tell my wife what she needed to tell Microsoft. Certainly Microsoft have no interest in a sudden loss of service to the BT Internet mail service, and would send the problem straight back to you. This kind of passing-the-buck is not acceptable from a service that should be attempting to help customers resolve problems.

My wife, on my instruction, transferred to Outlook Express and refused to close the support call. After a while, the call centre asked if we had a firewall enabled. Quite sensibly we do run a firewall in our ADSL router, and the support centre suggested we disable it. I immediately disabled the firewall, and in the meantime established the further information that sending mail still worked from our dial up BT Internet account. However the call centre staff would not take our assurances that the firewall was disabled for granted, and informed us that we must contact our firewall vendor!!! Repeated insistence that the firewall was disabled eventually prompted the call centre to give us a telephone number through which we could escalate the fault.

Telephone Support

I called the support centre on Sunday evening to escalate the fault, and despite my telling the operator that we had been through online support, I was asked all the same questions. Yes, I had (grudgingly) booted my Linux laptop into windows and was running Outlook Express. No, we did not have a firewall running, and so on. At this point I was asked what ADSL modem we were using. I indicated that we had an ADSL router, and your call centre staff told me that the router must have a firewall and I needed to contact my vendor!

At this point, please bear in mind that (a) I had disabled the firewall, (b) the router had been working fine to date, and (c) the problem was failure of authentication, not failure to connect to the SMTP server. Again, this is a pass-the-buck attitude to support that must be dealt with. It is quite unacceptable.

I told your operator firmly (but quietly and politely) that the problem was with the BT SMTP server, and that he needed to escalate the fault - that the fault lay in a failure by the SMTP server to accept our fully resolved broadband IP address as a valid relay domain for our credentials. I reiterated that we had been through the online support process, and that the support centre had already been unable to help, and that the problem should be escalated to a suitable engineer. The operator refused to escalate at this point (some 10 minutes into the call) and continued to offer suggestions to fix the problem. I politely continued working with your staff to try various suggestions.

At one point your operator asked me to connect by hand to the SMTP service. This I did (I told him the port numbers as he started mentioning port 110, which is the POP service. Port 25 is SMTP). We quickly established that my communication was fine and I gave him my ADSL IP address. After many suggestions and many long periods of holding, your operator eventually agreed to escalate the fault some 50 minutes after I had place my call.

It seems to me that all companies I deal with who use outsourced support these days require me to speak to them for about an hour before they will eventually admit to pass on a fault to a technical contact. I am unhappy about this, and you really need to consider a means by which technical people can send technical queries to their peers, without this timewasting filter.

I indicated I would be going to bed at this point, and could the technical support engineer call me in the morning. The operator said he would pass on the message. No call was ever returned.

I would like a call credit for the time spent on this call - particularly as your operator refused to escalate the fault, and also because no call back was ever received.

Email Support

On the afternoon of Tuesday 31st January I used the BT web site to send an email about this fault. Prior to sending this email, on Monday night I spent some time investigating the fault, and discovered the following:

I connected by broadband and captured this SMTP session information: (I have obfuscated the base64 encoded password, but otherwise the session is exactly as seen on the SMTP server):

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP EHLO eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIMEAUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RsalcGdshabi2wLmtJJpzdG9u 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRmsqXQQ= 535 authorization failed (#5.7.0)

The WAN configuration for this connection was:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-Point Protocol inet addr:86.145.210.33 P-t-P:217.32.86.146 Mask:255.255.255.255

According to dig, the IP address 86.145.210.33 resolves as:

22.210.145.86.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host86-145-210-22.range86-145.btcentralplus.com.

I then repeated the experiment with the broadband disabled, and connected via dialup. Here is the chat, which you will note succeeds:

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP ehlo eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIME AUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RlcGsaqhlfdfbdi5wsqasLdsd672 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRdsjkXaQ= 235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0) ...

The dialup IP/gateway info was:

213.122.53.24/32 gw 213.122.53.24

This IP address resolves to:

24.53.122.213.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host213-122-53-24.in-addr.btopenworld.com.

I sent all of this information with various suggestions in the email. I noted that the problem could be in the way that qmail is building its authsenders file (or PAM equivalent), and pointed out that the problem was that the btcentralplus.com. domain was not being listed against my credentials as a valid relay domain.

I then gave you the key information that would have allowed an engineer to resolve this problem. I wrote:

” It may be that this is because my BT Internet email address pre-existed the broadband connection”.

Other than an automated acknowledgement, no reply was ever received to this email.

Eventual Resolution

As BT were not talking to me, I continued my investigations. I noted that there was no huge outcry on Usenet about the failure of BT’s SMTP service, so I presumed that this problem only affected me or a small user group. I considered what was special about my BT account.

One thing that was special was that we have had a BT dialup account for a very long time. Long enough that we retained the five free email address service from our BT anytime account. Recently BT have extended this service to all customers, but it was a service we already had.

However it occurred to me that the automated registration system may treat my account differently from newer accounts with this service, and that you may have reconfigured your SMTP service to disallow the older accounts, or maybe my credentials were simply damaged in your database and needed refreshing.

I thus “upgraded” my account from the existing “five free email address” service to the exact same service! This will have pushed new versions of my credentials around the BT Internet network, and sure enough after a short pause, the SMTP service started authenticating from our broadband IP address once again.

Conclusion

It is now Friday 3rd February. BT have not followed up on my original fault report, nor on my email query. I have managed to resolve my own problem, but only through an in depth knowledge of how these services work. If we had followed your advice, we would now be talking with Microsoft!

I am extremely unhappy with this experience, and have noted various lessons that I believe BT must learn.

As a BT shareholder I am unhappy that you appear to be turning away a large part of your potential user base through your “outlook express only” policy. I am also unhappy that your failure to address such support issues is presumably turning away other customers. I myself am now considering looking for an alternative ISP.

I would like the following undertakings from BT:

1. To refund my call costs for my support call on Sunday Evening;
2. pass on my resolution of your fault to your call centre as soon as possible, so that others affected by this fault can be told quickly how to resolve it;
3. To address the failures in your technical support centre, to ensure that in future, genuine technical issues can be passed onto someone more knowledgeable more quickly. I would like BT to tell me how they intend to achieve this;
4. To ensure that the failure to return calls and emails is addressed;
5. To provide support for cross platform mailers - e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, and also for text mailers and those used by people with visual difficulties.

I look forward to your considered reply.

Yours faithfully

Ministers must wait to hear whether an unfavourable High Court ruling on the use of control orders for terror suspects will be overturned.

One would think, listening to Tony Blair and his cronies, that the problem of terrorism is something new to this country, and that never before have we faced the problem of dangerous people willing to cause harm in the name of some idealism that masks the wickedness of their actions.

I suppose Blair has never been to a Guy Fawkes party. Although being a politician, you would think he had some understanding of the gunpowder plot.

There is nothing new under the sun, and Islamic terrorism is not really anything new. So why then are we subjected by attack after attack on hundreds of years of civil liberties that have accrued to the people on the grounds that the political government is itself less a terrorist than an essential means to govern a free people.

Why is their any debate over whether due process should be denied to people suspected of terrorism. If there is evidence of a crime, let them be prosecuted. If there is no evidence, then they are innocent until proven guilty, and should have their liberty.

If we do not accept this principle, how long until we start locking up some other part of our society in similar circumstances? We could start with paedophile suspects. The public will accept it, even if we cannolt prove that these people have done anything wrong. Then it could be animal rights activists, and then we could turn on Scots, say - or postmen. Maybe with a few more steps between, but once we compromise on due process we no longer have a safeguard against facism.

And that too is not a new problem

Get rid of the control orders. Innocent until proven guilty.