The British government has officially apologized for the treatment of Alan Turing in the post war era

Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.
Writer Ian McEwan has also backed the campaign, which already has the support of scientist Richard Dawkins. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

It finally happened, the British government has officially apologized for the treatment of Alan Turing in the post war era

Below is the statement


2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

Placebo button, now you know why that button doesn't do anything

If this is true then this is hilarious!
From wikipedia's placebo button entry

A placebo button is a push-button that appears to do something, but actually has no effect, like a placebo. They exist to give the user an illusion of control.
Many walk buttons at pedestrian crossings in New York City were once functional, but now serve as placebo buttons. Many door close buttons in elevators are placebo buttons. Office thermostats may also function similarly.

Hey at least you don't have to ever fix these buttons since they don't 'work anyway :-)

AMD aims to stay in the race with Magny-Cours 12-core CPU

Saw this story in my Google Reader. Very interesting, I have a quad core CPU at home right now and never get above 30% CPU usage,I wonder what would happen with one of these 12 core CPUs on it. Here is a blurb from the article

At Hot Chips this past week, AMD unveiled more details of the upcoming 12-core "Magny-Cours" processor that it hopes will help it stay competitive in the server game. Due in 2010 on AMD's 45nm SOI process, Magny-Cours uses the same basic core microarchitecture as the current Shanghai quad-core server processor, so if there's any improvement in per-thread performance it will have to come from better system design.

The basic idea behind Magny-Cours is simple: take two six-core Istanbul processors, downclock them a bit to reduce power, and squeeze them into a multichip module (MCM) so that they can fit into a single socket. By using an MCM, AMD will be able to fit 12 cores into the same thermal and power envelope as Istanbul.

Read the rest here: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/amd-makes-tradeoffs-in-upcoming-12-core-server-cpu.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

I wonder how many years it will take before we see 64 cores on the desktop and maybe 32 cores on a laptop? This reminds me of razorblades....first we had one blade, then two...now we have five....how long before we have ten blades in those?

Walt Mosspuppet review videos

Walt Mosspuppet, a fake video blog starring a puppet version of the technology reporter, this is just awesome :-)



You can see more videos here: http://rantpuppets.com/ like this gem: Walt Mossberg: "I am Responsible for Apple’s Success"

Is Gmail down for you too?

I am getting a 502 server error when trying to get to Gmail. IS it also down for you? The cloud is not cooperating right now :-(


The Apps Status Dashboard has a status of Service Outage

We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Oh well, I am adding that Beta label back to gmail the moment it comes back up :-)

I will use smoke signals instead...now those are real clouds ;-)

Google released an apology detailing what happened

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

Crazy idea? Could we replace the nation’s pavement with solar panels?

Saw this story on Google Reader today

Could we replace the nation’s pavement with solar panels?

If all paved surfaces in the U.S. were replaced with 15% efficiency solar panels, the resulting distributed power network could provide three times the electricity the nation consumes, with zero carbon emissions and no additional power grid infrastructure. (Yes, I’m aware manufacturing, installing, and maintaining it would generate emissions, as with any infrastructure project.)

So crazy it just might work? Apparently the Dept. of Transportation thinks so: Solar Roadways has received a $100,000 contract from DOT to build a prototype:

The Solar Roadways will collect solar energy to power businesses and homes via structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon, to be placed in parking lots and roadways in lieu of petroleum-based asphalt surfaces.

Wow, that sounds a little overambitious if you ask me but who knows,maybe it is possible. Next thing would be to have a moon/sun roof on every car that will also convert the energy from the sun into fuel.

IBM X-Force Report Reveals Unprecedented State of Web Insecurity

Wow, I am reading this report and it is a sad world. Some highlights

• Vulnerabilities have reached a plateau. There were 3,240 new vulnerabilities discovered in the first half of 2009, an eight percent decrease over the first half of 2008. The rate of vulnerability disclosures in the past few years appears to have reached a high plateau. In 2007, the vulnerability count dropped for the first time, but then in 2008 there was a new record high. The annual disclosure rate appears to be fluctuating between six and seven thousand new disclosures each year.


• PDF vulnerabilities have increased. Portable Document Format (PDF) vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of 2009 already surpassed disclosures from all of 2008.


• Trojans account for more than half of all new malware. Continuing the recent trend, in the first half of 2009, Trojans comprised 55 percent of all new malware, a nine percent increase over the first half of 2008. Information-stealing Trojans are the most prevalent malware category.


• Phishing has decreased dramatically. Analysts believe that banking Trojans are taking the place of phishing attacks geared toward financial targets. In the first half of 2009, 66 percent of phishing was targeted at the financial industry, down from 90 percent in 2008. Online payment targets make up 31 percent of the share.


• URL spam is still number one, but image-based spam is making a comeback. After nearing extinction in 2008, image-based spam made a comeback in the first half of 2009, yet it still makes up less than 10 percent of all spam.


• Nearly half of all vulnerabilities remain unpatched. Similar to the end of 2008, nearly half (49 percent) of all vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of 2009 had no vendor-supplied patch at the end of the period.

How is image-based spam making a comeback? I use Gmail and also Outlook both of those disable images by default. Adobe also seems to have a real problem with reader and flash, PDF vulnerabilities are rampant. If you listen to the Security Now podcast (like every IT person should) you will notice that there are almost always problems with Reader/Flash/Shockwave.



Read the full report here http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28257.wss