David Rowan
Report: TEDGlobal 2011, day 2: viruses and Bad Science
14 July 11
David Rowan
Editor of Wired magazineLeave a commentThe strongest session so far at TED Global in Edinburgh was on Wednesday afternoon, titled "The Dark Side". Speakers recounted their experiences challenging corrupt systems -- sharing extraordinary, moving and sometimes hilarious personal encounters. Here are some highlights:
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure Corporation in Finland, has tracked computer viruses since they began -- identifying the Sasser outbreak, and briefing governments about the Stuxnet worm. "I love the internet," he said, as he showed a 5 ¼-inch floppy disk containing BRAIN.A, the first PC virus his team found, back in 1986. "We know where it came from," he said. "It says so inside the code." Which, indeed, it did -- revealing the name, address and phone number of the Pakistan-based writers:
Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Basit * Amjad (pvt) Ltd. BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for vaccination...
Six months ago, Hypponen decided to go and visit that address in Lahore -- where, indeed, he knocked on the door and found the two brothers who wrote the virus, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi. "And both had had their computers infected dozens of times by other viruses," Hypponen explained. "So there's some sort of justice in the world."
It was a way of explaining how viruses are now a global problem: his firm finds hundreds of thousands of pieces of malware every day, much of it now written by organised crime gangs. He showed the Russian website Gangsta Bucks, where infected computers are traded. He showed a live list of available credit card numbers, with matching customer addresses (which I can only hope will be obscured when the video of the talk goes on TED.com). He also explained how he traced a line in another virus's code to St Petersburg: the virus writer had included his car registration in the code as a means of declaring authorship. "But mostly we don't even know which continent they're in," Hypponen said. And mostly the resources to fight such criminals are simply not made available.
"If we don't fight online crime, we're running a risk of losing," he concluded. "We have to do it globally, and right now. We have to find the people with the skills [to write these viruses] but before they have the opportunity."
Former BBC journalist Misha Glenny, author of the great book McMafia, about his journey in the criminal underworld, offered a similar plea for governments to engage with criminal hackers, rather than jail them. He cited a story covered in WIRED a few months ago about Max Butler, who as "Iceman" crowned himself king of a global online fraud network. "I don't think people like [Butler] should be in jail," Glenny said. "Hackers should be recruited and mobilised on behalf of the state. We need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these people. Or we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame."
The evidence is everywhere that "we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the internet", Glenny said. He cited Anonymous's targeting of Fox News -- raising a laugh for pointing out "the irony of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp being a victim of hacking for a change". A security friend told Glenny that there are two types of company: those that know they have been hacked, and those that don't.
He cited six examples of hackers who learned their skills in their early to mid tenns; who each had an advanced ability in maths and science; who failed to demonstrated any real social skills; and who consistently manifested a degree of Asperger's syndrome (which, Glenny said Simon Baron-Cohen told him, is also evident in Gary McKinnon -- currently facing prosecution in the US).
Karen Tse, a powerfully focused human-rights lawyer, gave a moving talk about the organisation that she founded. International Bridges to Justice. IBJ is dedicated to protecting the basic legal rights of ordinary citizens in developing countries -- offering a guarantee of the right to competent legal representation, to a fair trial, and to be protected from torture.
Back in 1994, Tse said, she walked into a prison in Cambodia and met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured. He was in jail for stealing a bicycle. As she has written, "Like most prisoners in Cambodia, he had no lawyer or human rights worker to defend him or safeguard his rights, and he had no pending trial date to determine his guilt or innocence. I flashed back to ten years before, to my college days of organising letter-writing campaigns for political prisoners. We had demanded that they be free from torture and be granted their right to fair and speedy trials. But as I came face to face with this young boy, I realised that neither I nor my fellow students would have written a letter for him. He was not a political prisoner; he was just an unimportant 12 year old boy whose mischievous behaviour, trying to steal a bicycle, had landed him in this quandary."
In her talk, Tse explained how widespread the problem is. There was the eight-year-old in Burundi, for instance, jailed for stealing a mobile phone. And Vishna, the four-year-old born in a Cambodian prison. "Of the 113 developing countries that torture, 93 have passed laws that say you have the right to a lawyer and not to be tortured," Tse said. "Ninety-five per cent of torture doesn't involve political prisoners. It's people in broken down legal systems. It's cheap."
She saw that huge changes could be made if lawyers took action collectively to ensure that the local laws were being honoured. This would need training of defenders internationally; ensuring that defendants had systematic early access to counsel; and the long-term commitment of lawyers to their cases. So her organisation began placing trained lawyers at police stations, and "step by step defenders are changing history". A moving and inspiring talk by a woman whose determination and focus is making a real difference.
WIRED friend and troublemaker Ben Goldacre gave a riproaring talk in the same session on the need for scepticism towards spurious science, whether expressed in newspaper misreporting or TV nutritionists who pretend they are academically qualified when they are not. He presented examples of The Daily Mail Project, collecting together the newspaper's headlines that had suggested cancer was caused by divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee; and that it could be prevented by crusts, red pepper, liquorice and, er, coffee (some control error there, perhaps?).
Goldacre, who wrote the Bad Science book, enjoys unpicking dodgy claims -- one of his slides claimed to show "536,731 ways that evidence can be distorted", but I'm sure I counted only 535,730. But he has a serious purpose. He wants to alert us to "the weakest form of evidence known to man -- authority", which is easy for those selling things to contrive. Gillian McKeith PhD, for instance -- "or, to give her her full medical title, Gillian McKeith", as she bought her doctorate through a non-accredited correspondence course. By coincidence, Goldacre bought his dead cat the same august qualification.
There is actually some life-and-death stuff behind Goldacre's concerns -- especially when doctors and patients are prevented from knowing the truth about drugs' efficacy. He warned against observational studies that lack control groups; and pharmaceutical trials against placebos rather than best current treatments; and industry-funded trials in general, "which are four times more likely to give positive results than independent trials". He worries that negative trial data too often goes missing in action when it is inconvenient for those funding the trials. The Cochrane Group, for instance, has still not been given full data on Tamiflu.
"This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical question facing medicine today," Goldacre said. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." For better public health, we need to be able to "lift up the lid and peer in".
Incidentally, you can learn a lot about someone from their email signoff. And Goldacre's is a classic of the genre:
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. If you are anything other than a friend or an institutional professional colleague and you are writing to me about Bad Science stuff then it is reasonable to assume that I might quote our discussion in my writing, usually anonymously.
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Report: TEDGlobal 2011, day 2: viruses and Bad Science (Wired UK)
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