taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

BBC: Cocaine on ‘100% of Irish euros’:

One hundred percent of banknotes in the Republic of Ireland carry traces of cocaine, a new study has found.

Researchers used the latest forensic techniques that would detect even the tiniest fragments to study a batch of 45 used banknotes.

The scientists at Dublin’s City University said they were “surprised by their findings”.

Also at RTE, Irish Examiner, PhysOrg.com, Bloomberg.com, even at Kazakhstan’s KazInform.

This story is (of course) being played widely in the media as “OMG Ireland must use more coke than anywhere else” — in particular, in comparison with a previous study in the US:

The most recent survey carried out in the US showed 65% of dollar notes were contaminated with cocaine.

The DCU press-release has a few more details:

Using a technique involving chromatography/mass spectrometry, a sample of 45 bank notes were analysed to show the level of contamination by cocaine. …

62% of notes were contaminated with levels of cocaine at concentrations greater than 2 nanograms/note, with 5% of the notes showing levels greater than 100 times higher, indicating suspected direct use of the note in either drug dealing or drug inhalation. … The remainder of the notes which showed only ultra-trace quantities of cocaine was most probably the result of contact with other contaminated notes, which could have occurred within bank counting machines or from other contaminated surfaces.

However, looking at an abstract of what I think is the paper in question, Evaluation of monolithic and sub 2 µm particle packed columns for the rapid screening for illicit drugs — application to the determination of drug contamination on Irish euro banknotes, Jonathan Bones, Mirek Macka and Brett Paull, Analyst, 2007, DOI: 10.1039/b615669j, that says:

A study comparing recently available 100 × 3 mm id, 200 × 3 mm id monolithic reversed-phase columns with a 50 × 2.1 mm id, 1.8 µm particle packed reversed-phase columns was carried out to determine the most efficient approach … for the rapid screening of samples for 16 illicit drugs and associated metabolites. … Method performance data showed that the new LC-MS/MS method was significantly more sensitive than previous GC-MS/MS based methods for this application.

My emphasis. I’d guess that that means that comparing this result to banknote-analysis experiments carried out elsewhere using different methods is probably invalid — perhaps this method is more efficient at picking up ‘contact with other contaminated notes, which could have occurred within bank counting machines or from other contaminated surfaces’, as noted in the DCU release?

Tags: bad-journalism, banknotes, chemistry, cocaine, dcu, drugs, ireland, press, research, science

DRI’s formal launch is next Tuesday:

December 6th sees the formal launch of Digital Rights Ireland, with a press conference in the Conference Room, Pearse St. Library, Dublin 2 at 11.30am. We would like to invite to you to come along - we’d welcome your support, and the chance to chat with you about your concerns after the main conference. Please feel free to invite anyone else who you think would be interested in digital rights. To give us an idea of numbers, we’d appreciate an email to <contact AT digitalrights.ie> to let us know if you’re planning on coming along.

Tags: conference, december, digital, dri, launch, pearse, press, rights, room, tuesday

Patents: yes, I keep rattling on about this — the vote is coming up on July 6th. I promise I’ll shut up after that ;)

UEAPME has issued a statement regarding the directive which is strongly critical of its current wording (UEAPME is the European small and medium-sized business trade association, comprising 11 million SMEs). Quote:

‘The failure to clearly remove software from the scope of the directive is a setback for small businesses throughout Europe. UEAPME is now calling on the European Parliament to reverse yesterday’s decision at plenary session next month and send a strong message that an EU software patent is not an option,’ Hans-Werner Müller, UEAPME Secretary General, stated.

‘There is growing agreement among all actors that software should not be patented, so providing an unequivocal definition in the directive that guarantees this is clearly in the general interest. We are calling on the Parliament to support the amendments that would ensure this,’ said Mr Müller.

‘The cacophony of misinformation and misleading spin from the large industry lobby in the run up to this vote has obscured the general consensus on preventing the patenting of pure software.’

That’s all well and good. So presumably the Irish members of UEAPME, ISME and the SFA, are agreeing, right? Sadly, neither of these have issued any press releases on the subject, as far as I can see, and approaches by members of IFSO have been totally fruitless.

Since both have made recent press noting that Irish small businesses face difficulties with the rising costs of doing business, this would seem to be a no-brainer — legalising software patents would immediately open Irish SMEs up to the costs associated with them: licensing fees, fighting spurious infringement litigation from ‘patent troll’ companies, the ‘chilling effects’ on investors noted by Laura Creighton, and of course the high price of retaining patent lawyers to file patents on your own innovations. One wonders why they aren’t concerned about these costs…

Tags: business, directive, july, parliament, patent, patents, press, smes, software, ueapme, vote

Security: the use of backscatter x-ray scanners has hit the US press now that the TSA are taking an interest.

These are interesting devices; unlike normal X-rays, they effectively render clothes invisible. That’s obviously got big privacy implications.

Quite a few of the press stories include images that have been blurred or obscured, presumably to render them printable. However, this image seems closer to the real results (not work-safe).

They were trialled in Heathrow’s Terminal 4 last year. One slashdotter’s experience:

Every Nth person in the line had to go through. They take you to a seperate are which is blocked off, make you lift up your arms and then move, facing three different directions. There was one operator and the screen was blocked off. The operator is always the gender of the person being scanned. Still I felt very offended for two reasons. First, even though it was enclosed it still made me feel exposed and my personal space violated, second, any questions I asked the operator with regards to their data storage, or if I could see the images that had been made were met with ignorance and my questions were ignored. However, turning down a scan you would probably get a strip search which would be even worse. I disliked airplane security checks before, but now it is incredibly annoying.

The Times has some passenger’s reactions to images from their scans:

‘I was quite shocked by what I saw,’ said Gary Cook, 40, a graphic designer from Shaftesbury, Dorset. ‘I felt a bit embarrassed looking at the image.’

A female passenger, who did not want to be named, said: ‘It was really horrible. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination because you’re virtually naked, but I guess it’s less intrusive than being hand searched.’

If these are installed more widely, I wonder how long it’ll take before we start seeing backscatter images of supermodels being saved to floppy by unscrupulous staff, and leaked?

Also, SpyBlog notes that images of children scanned with this device would constitute ‘making, distributing or possessing child pornography’ in the UK, presuming the machine stores them internally in electronic form. oops!

Tags: backscatter, image, interest, operator, passenger, person, press, privacy, security, tsa, use

Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).

To quote John Graham-Cumming’s newsletter on the subject:

1 in 5 British Consumers Buy Software from Spam: that’s according to a survey by the Business Software Alliance. I find that a pretty surprisingly high number and considering it comes from an advocacy group that tries to get people to buy legitimate copies of software I expect it’s not totally accurate. The one thing I find really surprising from the survey are these two statistics: 23% of spam is read by the person receiving it and 22% of people have bought software. Apparently, 11% of people surveyed like the idea of buying through spam because the software is cheaper.

It’s still an interesting figure, but the BSA has come up with some pretty suspect statistics in the past, so pinch of salt applies. As jgc points out, the BSA have a vested interest in making the problem sound worse than it may be in reality.

Still, the survey PDF can be read here, and is worth a look.

Tags: alliance, body, bsa, business, lot, press, release, software, spam, survey

Law: t r u t h o u t quotes this press release from Rackspace:

In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner’s subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.

(my emphasis.) I wonder which of those 3 Indymedia is supposed to have been infringing? It’s pretty clear how Rackspace feel about this situation, I think.

It seems MLATs have been used before to shut down Indymedia sites in the US; this cryptome mirror of Montreal IMC pages documents one such case. Here’s a summary from a quoted email there:

Heres a quite interesting story on the power of mlats and what we will have to look forward to with the COE treaty :

A cop car was broken into in Quebec and a security doc relating to measures for the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit protests was stolen and posted in the net in Seattle. At the behest of the RCMP, a magistrate judge issued an order to grab the records from a Seattle web site called the ‘independent media center’ using the US/CAN mlat. They were then visited by the FBI/Secret Service. They then had a gag order on this for several days before it was released today.

Great precedent. I wonder if when my car gets broken into again, I can use the cybercrime treaty to find my stereo again…

And snippets from the IMC press release of the time:

On the evening of Saturday, April 21, a day which saw tens of thousands demonstrate against the FTAA in the streets of Quebec City, the Independent Media Center in Seattle was served with a sealed court order by two FBI agents and an agent of the US Secret Service. The terms of the sealed order prevented IMC volunteers from publicizing its contents; volunteers immediately began discussions with legal counsel to amend the order. This morning, April 27, Magistrate Judge Monica Benton issued an amended order, freeing us to discuss the situation without the threat of being held in contempt.

The original order, also issued by Judge Benton, directed the IMC to supply the FBI with ‘all user connection logs’ for April 20 and 21st from a web server occupying an IP address which the Secret Service believed belonged to the IMC. The order stated that this was part of an ‘ongoing criminal investigation’ into acts that could constitute violations of Canadian law, specifically theft and mischief. IMC legal counsel David Sobel, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, comments: ‘As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment protects the right to communicate anonymously with the press and for political purposes. An order compelling the disclosure of information identifying an indiscriminately large number of users of a website devoted to political discourse raises very serious constitutional issues. To provide the same protection to the press and anonymous sources in the Internet world as with more traditional media, the Government must be severely limited in its ability to demand their Internet identity–their ‘Internet Protocol addresses.’ A federal statute already requires that such efforts against the press be approved by the Attorney General, and only where essential and after alternatives have been exhausted. There is no suggestion that these standards were met here.

The sealed court order also directed the IMC not to disclose ‘the existence of this Application or Order, or the existence of this investigation, unless or until ordered by this court.’ Such a prior restraint on a media organization goes to the heart of the First Amendment. Ironically, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer learned about the existence of the order from ‘federal sources,’ suggesting that the purpose of the gag order was simply to allow the government to spin the issue its way.

The order did not specify what acts were being investigated, and the Secret Service agent acknowledged that the IMC itself was not suspected of criminal activity. No violation of US law was alleged.

Of course, cryptome is still chugging away as it always has been; simple HTML and no server-side dynamic scripting, means easy offshore mirroring ;)

Tags: court, imc, indymedia, law, matter, mlat, order, press, rackspace, release, treaty

Funny: Who knew there was a Commodore 64 gang sign? PRESS PLAY ON TAPE, that’s who!

Spam: Ever wanted to ask a question of one of the biggest ‘e-mail deployers’ on the planet? Aunty Spam’s providing the venue, and accepting questions for Scott Richter, erstwhile star of the Daily Show. There’s a few already up there.

Tags: aunty, commodore, funny, gang, planet, play, press, question, sign, spam, tape

FFII have issued a press release: ‘2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents, call for rejection of McCarthy software patent directive proposal’:

A ‘Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents’ has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a ‘patent landgrab’.

Reminder: there’s only 7 days left before the plenary on June 30th, so if you’re European, write to your MEP backing FFII’s position. Full text here.

Tags: call, directive, ffii, mccarthy, patent, press, proposal, rejection, release, software