Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EUâUK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under âProtocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packagesâ, there is this:
The text:
The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has to be in compliance with X.509 standard. In order to ensure common standards and procedures with other PrĂŒm applications, the processing rules for s/MIME encryption operations or to be applied under various Commercial Product of the Shelves (COTS) environments, are as follows:
â the sequence of the operations is: first encryption and then signing,
â the encryption algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bit key length and RSA with 1024 bit key length shall be applied for symmetric and asymmetric encryption respectively,
â the hash algorithm SHA-1 shall be applied.
s/MIME functionality is built into the vast majority of modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x and inter-operates among all major email software packages.
Two things have always puzzled me about the UKâs approach to getting some sort of a deal with the EU.
There are two Davids, Davis and Frost, no relation to the TV producer and TV host. As far as I can tell, despite knowing that the transition period would end on January 1, 2021, failed to do anything toward advancing a deal with the EU, so that the British people know there are new rules, but not what they are. The British taxpayer would be right to question just what their pounds have been doing.
If I may use an analogy: thereâs an exam and the set date was given but no one has done any swotting. Messrs Davis and Frost havenât even done the coursework and sat in the lectures and tutorials blankly.
The person who has done the least is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the British prime minister, who stumbled in to the exam room at the last minute without knowing the subject.
But never mind, sneaked into the room with his clobber is an earlier graduateâs paper! Surely he can plagiarize some of the answers out of that should the same questions arise!
I donât know much about SHA-1 hash algorithms but the original Tweeter informs us that this had been âdeprecated in 2011â as insecure. However, I can cast my mind back to when âNetscape Communicator 4.xâ was my browser of choice, and that was 1998â2001. (I stuck with Netscape 4·7 for a long time, as 6 was too buggy, and in 2001 a friend gave me a copy of Internet Explorer 5, which I then used in Windows. This pre-dates this blog, hence Netscape is not even a tag here.)
This is a comedyâtragedy from the land of Shakespeare, and I wonder if it means that the British government is expecting things to get so bad that they will have to wind up using computer software from 20 years ago.
Or they just couldnât be arsed over the last four years (yes, count âem!) to do any real work, and hoped that no one would read the 1,259 pp. to find the mistakes.
To conclude, another bad analogy: itâs not really oven-ready despite all this time baking. However, it appears the ingredients aren’t as fresh as we were led to believe. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
Very humorously, Nigella Lawson mispronounced microwave, only to have Those Who Have No Humour get up in arms and Ms Lawson having to clarify that she indeed knew how to pronounce the word the Tory way. Maybe itâs the Brexit age, where we canât even reference the Continent, because of the Empah or some such, but sadly it might be down to the demise of humour in parts of our society. Britain may be leaving the EU but parts of society are about as cheerful as a bureaucrat from Brussels as they realize itâs a fait accompli. Oops.
Back in April, I Tweeted this:
Maybe I have a dirty mind, but if the Leader of the Opposition believes he needs to drive a 1,000 km round trip to attend an online meeting, then my question is: who is she, and does Mrs Bridges know?
Got plenty of positive replies and likes except one chap was concerned:
Maybe ok for a bit of laughter in the enclosed bubble but not so sure about on a public forum. Does my humor cause distress for innocents is a good benchmark
So even in New Zealand, free from the stresses of COVID-19 infections, humour is dying in parts of our nation. (In this country, it’s spelled humour.)
The reason the joke isnât offensive or even distressing is that itâs highly unlikely. Thatâs often the essence of a good joke. (âLetâs send an astronaut to the sun.â âTheyâd get burnt up.â âNot at night.â) If you took exception to it, then the explanation that follows is that you think the scenario is likely, and, therefore, youâre in a defensive mode.
And come on, most of us wouldnât drive hundreds of kilometres to take a meeting during a pandemic, so if you choose to make an odd decision, then expect some mirth at your expense.
This entire episode brings up so many other thoughts: what did he tell his wife? (âJust popping out to have a chat to some people at work.â) What did she respond? (âCome back by 11 p.m.â) What crossed his mind then? (âCool, she didnât say which day.â) Thereâs an entire sitcom episode about the drive down.
I believe Mrs Bridges is English by birth and it’s completely in line with her country’s sense of humour. (‘Another woman? Pull the other one, I couldn’t even get Simon to drive back to Oxford.’) Iâd even say she loves a good joke because of some of the things her husband says. Simon Bridges showed his more jovial and relaxed side once freed from the pressures of leading the Opposition, so clearly he has a sense of humour, too. You’d need it to have taken on that job.
I used to wonder why this country no longer does political satire as often as it once did, but the humourless are being given positions of responsibility. Ever been to a party where certain staff from a certain ministry are present? (I wonât name which one, in case they change their mind about my being the New Zealand ambassador to Someplace.)
This has been happening since Labour got elected in 1984. McPhail & Gadsby, endless critics of Sir Robert Muldoon, and The Billy T. James Show vanished. The powers-that-be didnât want to risk their own lot being lampooned. Being a National MP, Simon clearly wished to reverse that by entertaining all of us in the absence of such shows. How we all laughed at David âIâm not that guy off Red Dwarfâ Seymour twerking, and look at the votes he got! And how he converted the votes from Dancing with the Stars to political ones in 2020! Thereâs something to be said for the Wally act. If we no longer fund such programmes then it is over to the politicians.
How I wish that were not the case and Melanie Bracewell could appear more often as Jacinda Ardern. Is Liz Mullane still keen to don the Helen Clark costume? Whoâd play Dr Ashley Bloomfield? Calls to Jacinda. (Episode 1: Helen Clark calls Jacinda Ardern. âIf you want my advice âŠâ âI donât.â Episode 2: Jack Dorsey calls Jacinda Ardern. âWhy donât you Tweet much?â ‘With Jack and Maurie on there? Are you mad?’ Episode 3: James Shaw calls Jacinda Ardern. ‘Come round, I’ll brew some tea the Green Party way.’ We would entitle this âThe Billy Tea, James Shawâ.) Iâd watch that.
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilâs Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, âWheel Manâ, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
Yet thereâs precious little about Smith online. His Wikipedia entry is essentially a version of his IMDB credits with some embellishments, for instance. It doesnât even record his real name.
Donât worry, itâs not another dig at Wikipedia, but once again itâs a reflection of how things arenât permanent on the web, a subject Iâve touched on before after reading a blog entry from my friend Richard MacManus. And that we humans do have to rely on our own memories over whatâs on the ânet still: the World Wide Web is not the solution to storing all human knowledge, or, at least, not the solution to accessing it.
Itâs easy to refer to the disappearance of Geocities and the like, and the Internet Archive can only save so much. And in this case, I remember clearly searching for Murray Smith on Altavista in the 1990s, because I was interested in what he was up to. (He died in 2003.) I came across a legal prospectus of something he was proposing to do, and because it was a legal document, it gave his actual name.
Murray Smith was his screen name, and I gather from an article in The Independent quoting Smith and his friend Frederick Forsyth, he went by Murray, but the family name was definitely Murray-Smith. Back in those days, there was a good chance that if it was online, it was real: it took too much effort to make a website for anyone to bother doing fake news. My gut says it was George David Murray-Smith or something along those lines, but thereâs no record of that prospectus online any more, or of the company that he and Forsyth set up together to make Frederick Forsyth Presents, which I assume from some online entries was IFS Productions Ltd. Some websites’ claim that his name was Charles Maurice Smith is incorrect.
Looking today, there are a couple of UK gazette entries for George David Murray Smith (no hyphen) in the armed forces, including the SAS in the 1970s, which suggest I am right.
Even in the age of the web, the advantage still lies with those of us who have good memories who can recall facts that are lost. Iâve often suggested on this blog that we cannot fully trust technology, and that thereâs no guarantee that even the official bodies, like the UK Companiesâ Office, will have complete, accessible records. The computer is a leveller, but not a complete one.
Itâs hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19.
With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where the numbers arenât as staggering, so they donât always make the six oâclock programme. Aljazeera English mentioned South Koreaâs third wave, looking worse than the second, and I knew Hong Kongâs numbers were on the up.
However, right though the month of November, I didnât calculate positivity rates at all, even though I had been doing them most months, sometimes multiple times a month. These were going on to my NewTumbl blog, which Iâve decided not to update for the time being, for reasons already outlined.
Doing them again since late October gave me quite a surprise. I knew Europe was having a rough time with it, but there was quite a change in the numbers. In fact, it wasnât long ago that these rates were trending downwards for the majority of countries that I had been tracking; that is no longer the case. Itâs rising almost everywhere apart from India, the KSA (which has sensibly and surely got its first wave downâIâve seen days of under 200 infections), Singapore, Australia, and, of course, here in New Zealand.
For the first time since Iâve been doing these calculations, we are at the bottom of the table, a fact that Iâm relieved about, but it does make me worried about the rest of the world. I have a lot of family in the US and Hong Kong.
The data come from Worldometers and they tend to source from official parties. I believe I loaded the page around 2200 GMT.
Brazil 25·77% â
France 10·86% â
Sweden 8·07% â
Italy 7·50% â
USA 7·33% â
Spain 7·12% â
India 6·57% â
Germany 4·11% â
UK 3·79% â
KSA 3·62% â
Russia 3·12% â
Singapore 1·25% â
South Korea 1·19% â
Taiwan 0·64% â
Australia 0·27% â
Hong Kong 0·159% â
New Zealand 0·158% â
Brazil 24·63% â
France 7·651% â
India 7·645% â
Spain 7·16% â
USA 6·67% â
Sweden 5·33% â
KSA 4·50% â
Italy 3·59% â
UK 2·80% â
Russia 2·64% â
Germany 2·15% â
Singapore 1·66% â
South Korea 1·02% â
Taiwan 0·55% â
Australia 0·32% â
New Zealand 0·18% â
Hong Kong 0·15% â
which were measured against a bunch from September 2.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
Time for another podcast, this time with a Scottish theme. I touch upon how fortunate we are here in Aotearoa to be able to go to the ballet or expos, and, of course, on the US elections (thanks to those who checked out my last podcast entry, which had a record 31 playsâsure beats the single digits!). That leads on to a discussion about A. G. Barr, Richard Madden, and Sir Sean Connery, who never said, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’
Iâm surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its two syllables.
The words on the headline included the work wank, which was even starred there (w*nk) for the really sensitive. I realize this is an American website but I didnât even think that was a word they used. For most of us in the Anglosphere, itâs nowhere near offensive. Itâs not uncommon to call someone a wanker and the word is never bleeped on televisionâitâs that throwaway. I learned of the word wank when I was 11, and wanker I heard before that. Kids would probably know of it even younger now. A younger reader would not link it to anything sexual and if they did, theyâre a dirty little kid. (Same with bugger, which infamously even appeared on television commercials for Toyota here, and I know in Australia, too.)
The second word that appeared was cock, a colloquialism for penis, but also it has other meanings. Letâs not get into those: itâs clear the context suggested penisâin the same way an American might call someone a dick, I suppose. Again, hardly offensive, never bleeped, and, I donât know about the US, but here itâs the word that children might learn to refer to male genitalia.
But, hereâs the real kicker: the image was from the front page of a national newspaper. Not the top shelf wrapped in a brown paper bag or plastic at a convenience store.
Looking at the classifications, M is for adults-only stuff, with âstrong suggestive or violent language.â O was already suggested by NewTumbl staff as suitable for politics, including COVID-19 posts (this qualified), and the language by any standard was mild (feel free to come and give your reasoning if you were the mod and you want to defend your decision).
So Iâve had a post removed for a word that an 11-year-old uses (remember, O is for âolder teensâ) and another word that children use, and both appeared on the front page of a national newspaper.
I have used these words on a website run from a country that thinks itâs OK to show people getting blown away in violent movies and cop shows (oh, sorry, âpolice proceduralsâ), where guns are commonplace, but words are really, really dangerous. Thought you guys had a First Amendment to your Constitution.
The conclusion I am forced to draw is that the post was removed because, like Facebook, there is a right-wing bias shown by a moderator who does not like a conservative government criticized here. Good luck, because Iâll continue to criticize a bunch of dickheads that even my right-leaning, pro-market, lifelong-Tory friends in Britain dislike. If this post is classified M then I will have to conclude that the reason is also political, because thereâs not a single word here that any right-thinking user of English would deem âstrong suggestive or violentâ.
I came here because I objected to the censorship at Tumblr, where, for instance, they hide posts referring to NewTumbl in searches. Thatâs pretty tame but enough for me to insist on free speech over silly, petty corporate decisions, the sort of games that other silly, petty corporations like Google play. I can live with NewTumblâs male nipple rule and other attempts to be non-sexist, but I also believe that if youâre moderating, you should be apolitical.
Iâm sure there are many, many more examples of this tune being used to promote TV networks, but it seems to be a standard in at least three countries I know, and probably far more besides.
It is, of course, âStill the Oneâ, which ABC used in the US to celebrate being the top-rated network there in 1977 for the second consecutive year. It was rare for ABC to be on top, but I think the general consensus was that jiggle TV got them there.
Australia, which has always had a lot of US influences, then used it for Channel 9 in 1978 and included the original American footage. It would have been properly licensed but in the days before YouTube, and less international travel, few would have known of the origins.
It was then adapted for the Murdoch Pressâs Sky One satellite network in the UK the next decade (did they first see it in Australia?), before being revived by 9 in Australia in 1988. It was adapted once again for TVNZâs Channel 2 here in New Zealand to kick off the 1990s.
The slogan was used regularly by 9 as the 1990s dawned though new songs replaced the original, and by the end of the 1990s, both Channel 9 and its NBN sister were using the familiar tune again.
Was that the end? In 2003, WIN, another Australian network, brought it back for their promos. As far as I can tell, WIN, a regional broadcaster, doesn’t have a connection to 9, but instead has an agreement with the Ten Network there. Just to make things confusing, 9 was using it at the same time, and it continued to do so into the mid-2000s.
A quick internet search on Duck Duck Go reveals it was originally a song performed by the band Orleans in 1976, from their album Waking and Dreaming. The song was written by the then-married Johanna and John Hall. It charted at number five in the US. Given that it was used by ABC in 1977, it would have been a familiar tune to Americans at the time. I wonder if the Halls expected it would become a TV network standard in so many countries, and what did they think?
Let me know if there are other countries and networks that used thisâI’ve a feeling it went even further!
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilâs Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, âWheel Manâ, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
