Y Safle

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.

Tyler wrote to me concerning a scriptural basis for the separate kinds of tongues. Tongues speaking in the Bible relates to a phenomenon seen in the New Testament whereby the apostles and early Christians could speak in languages that they had not learned. In at least one case – on the day of Pentecost – they were apparently understood.

Now controversy over tongues has periodically arisen in the Church as various groups have claimed to have rediscovered this gift. The argument made is that gifts from God are beyond recall, and until this world is replaced by the next, Christians may speak in tongues.

If you are not a Christian, why would you care about this? I suppose that if a miracle such as that on the day of Pentecost were to happen again then people ought to sit up and take notice. I’ll write more on that at a later date (use the “tongues” category RSS feed to pick it up).

But if you are a Charismatic Christian, as Tyler is, then the questions you will have are likely more over how tongues speaking should be handled in public church services. Tyler wrote:

As stated before, in 1 Cor 14: 27-28
27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the
most by three, and that BY COURSE; and let one interpret.

28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church;
and let him speak to himself, and to God.

These two types of tongues are distinguishable in the fact that a message from God that needs interpretation in a worship service is ordered by God BY COURSE. Thus messages in a worship service are prophecies when interpreted, but praying in tongues alone is different and is just prayer.

With respect, this passage does not state this. This passage says:

“if any man speak in an unknown tongue… by course”.

Man does the ordering, not God.

The question then must be asked: “what were Corinthian services like, that they warranted this instruction?”

The answer is complicated by our distance from the events and culture, but clearly to maintain that pentecostal understanding of the passage we must believe that God was giving people messages for the congregation one after another (more then three per meeting). These messages must have been going uninterpreted.

God, as we hear so often, is not the author of confusion. I therefore believe that the Corinthian error was something else.

It is apparent that the Corinthians had a huge problem with Spiritual pride. Pride pervaded their theological discussions and stand points, it invaded their morality and here it seems it had affected the church too.

It seems credible that Corinthian church services had fallen into a shambles that we would not recognise today, even in what we would consider “dodgy” churches. It would seem that the Corinthians held a service which disintegrated into a “I’m more spiritual then you” session of excesses.

One major excess was the issue of tongues speaking. The directions that Paul gives (quoted above) give us the largest clue as to what the excesses were, viz :

1. Tongues speaking was being practised widely amongst the “Spirituals”
2. There were multiple tongues (more then three we must presume)
3. Tongues were not happening by course (people were talking at the same time and talking over each other).
4. The tongues were going uninterpreted

Now Paul never says these tongues are merely human babble. He never disputes that these are authentic tongues. From this we can gather some important information about what tongues is and is not:

1. Tongues is under our control and not God’s. This is seen by the very fact that instruction is given. If the tongues are at God’s whim and under his direct control then no instruction would be necessary.
2. Tongues in a Church service are regulated, not because they are prophecy, but because they were being seriously abused by proud Christians.
3. The instruction to speak “by course” is given, not to describe a “holy hush”, but to make sure that two people do not pray in tongues at the same time together. I am aware that in some cultures, group prayer involves many people all praying at the same time. I see nothing wrong with this (it is a cultural issue), but it would seem that 1st Century Christian culture dictated that prayers be prayed one after another – the point of group prayer being that a communal amen could be said to any prayer.
4. The interpretation of a tongue is given for the sake of the community.

Now having gleaned these points from the passage, we might look at Charismatic worship and try and find comparable particulars.

One direct counterpart apparently is the charismatic practise of praying in tongues communally. Many tongues speakers pray aloud in their tongues together with no interpretation.

As usual, however, this is not directly comparable. For a start, most Charismatics pray in tongues not out of pride but out of concern. In this the motive is very different to that of the Corinthians.

Secondly, the prayer in tongues is not a fight to be the loudest, but more of a private prayer time spent in public.

For these two reasons I see no reason to directly censure the use of such praying in tongues in public, based on Corinthians.

The practise of giving a “message” in tongues in a church service (where the message is prophetic in nature and intent) seemes to have no counterpart in scripture and thus seems errant.

Where tongues speaking is carried out with a sense of pride it is clearly censured by scripture.