carrier buster and crypto payloads

I thought it would be interesting to see how easy it is to put a hidden message into a photograph on the internet. The simple reason is because it is something I might want to do in my novel.

It is remarkably easy and I have done so with the above picture, without using any specialist software.

I have kept the main message 'clear' so that it can be read by anyone who wants to hack the photograph. I could have encrypted it as well, which I suspect would make it quite difficult to spot.

Today is the day that George Osborne presented the Investigatory Powers Bill at GCHQ, and through it HM Government will make sure it has the powers to access vital intelligence about the intentions and activities of those who wish us harm.

The challenge is whether the toolkits used by such enemies of the state become more sophisticated (as in the dark web) and whether the sheer amount of material to be processed rises exponentially.

When the internet was first created, the TCP/IP protocol on which it was based was designed explicitly to be rugged and to withstand attack or disruption. Because it was originally used for sharing limited government computing resource, the original trust mechanisms were sometimes simply paper memoranda.

As the internet progressed it became a vehicle for both good things and bad.

Hence the new national cyber plan being incorporated into the Spending Review with the message that we need to invest to keep up, although I can't help thinking that there will still be ways around the edges of many public systems.

My picture is of a Chinese Dong-Feng 12D carrier-buster missile and includes my friendly message payload. That missile is one step down from the WU-14 that I'm incorporating into the novel.

corner. paint. no door.

After my few day gap, I've restarted the novel writing and somehow managed to catch up with where I am supposed to be by this point in the process.

It means I've had to leave a few sections rather rough-and-ready on the way through, but I know if I start to revise anything then I'll burn up the available time and miss the end target.

I've got the makings of a plot, a small number of characters and a deliberately constrained environment. Now I need to take some time to think through how I can get my characters out of the rather difficult corner they have painted. I knew I was supposed to plan these things.

NaNoWriMo Icelandic horse dream sequence

I've had to take a few days off from NaNoWriMo, but aim to restart today.

It means my word count will have stalled and that I'll need to accelerate to keep up. I did think of a few ideas including some whilst on a long drive.

I'm not sure that the 'Icelandic horse dream sequence' will add much to the story though.

My recreation of part of it in my above snapshot illustrates the kind of thing. I know, it doesn't obviously fit with the main Colder War theme and needs to go.

It looks as if not writing things down could have saved me after all.

quayside

Yes, I'm still hanging around in the north, and in this case hanging out of the window.

we pop into City Hall to see @will_young31

Last night we were along to the City Hall to see Will Young's 85% Love tour.

Insiders will recognise that there's a certain devoted following of Mr Young close to me, so it was no surprise to notice that we'd got prime seats in about the 2nd and 4th rows.

Will Young played a blinder of a set, around a third of the way through his 25 or more venue tour.

A mix of older tunes and new material, he has an excellent selection to make a fun and varied evening, augmented with various imaginative effects and engaging chatter with the full and participative audience. Whether they were telling him off for getting caught smoking in his hotel, feeding him lines about the ugly sisters (two suspicious looking nuns in the audience) or simply singing along to some of the favourites, this was a fun and joyful event.

I've seen him perform any number of times, often when I get roped in to taking a few pictures as well. I'd judge this to be one of his strongest gigs that I can remember. He's a performer who maintains a durable and innovative way with his style of music and this latest tour sees a further refresh of his approach.

We'll be sticking around in Newcastle for a couple more days, although Mr Young and his cavalcade of black buses have already moved along to the next spot, in Glasgow.

Well worth getting hold of some tickets for somewhere on his route around the country, if still possible.

back up north

Yes, almost Wordless Wednesday finds me back up north.

slowly understood by machines

My speech pattern is consciously different when I'm talking to my car. Whether I'm on a hands-free phone call or asking the car to do something via the little Linguatronic button, I tend to speak slightly louder and for the car's system I also have.a.more.clipped.style. [NAVIGATION ON. DESTINATION HOME.]

It's the same this year for NaNoWriMo. I've been experimenting with a small dictation machine that came as part of a recent software update - a thing called Voice Tracer which is simply a digital recorder which can plug into the computer to offload the dictations. It has a speech start/stop feature too, so if I stop talking then the recording will stop until I start again. I notice the memory of the unit says its good for 49 days, although I expect the battery would run out before I reached that landmark.

I know that the iPhone has a recorder too, and my one probably has at least 3 recording type apps, but there is a simplicity to the single-purpose device which is quite appealing.

The connection to the USB works well too, straight into Dragon Dictate, which has a transcribe facility that takes my spoken words and with surprisingly few mistakes converts them into text. There's probably less typos than I make as well. I didn't even really teach this latest version of Dragon any of my speech either, so it must have clever processing. I tend to make 20-30 minute recordings, which take a few minutes each time to convert into pretty decently interpreted text.

It's another situation where I speak...slowly...when...I'm dictating. There's two reasons for this: I have to think about what I'm trying to put into the story and also to decide whether to use the ability to add in punctuation automatically. FULL STOP. NEW LINE. NEW LINE.

I'm not so good at those punctuation controls, and although I could use the same dictation directly into the computer (without the recorder, but with on-screen prompts), there's something about being able to get away from the screen completely. Some people will be using typewriters, pencils and paper, or glass writing pens with multi-coloured inks for their NaNoWriMo attempts.

I can understand that it's also about reducing the distractions from the technology. I'm hoping my own 'speak the story out loud' technique will work just as well.

remember remember

Yes, Guy Fawkes Night - a couple of days ago but mostly celebrated at the weekend. Here's a few snaps I took of our local fireworks which started tonight at about 6.15 pm.

The story commemorates a failed conspiracy by a group of provincial English Catholics to assassinate the Protestant King James I of England. It still gets told to all schoolchildren, although the message is somewhat diluted. I don't think the symbolic burning of the Pope is still condoned, for example.

There's still the effigy of Guy Fawkes, which burns on most bonfires, but I suspect that the real ceremony goes back even further to Samhain and the start of the dark half of the year.


Here's the blood-curdling children's verse:
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.

Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England's overthrow.
But, by God's providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James's sake!
If you won't give me one,
I'll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

hypersonic glide vehicle

I might just try to crank out another 650 words today, which would get me to 1/3 of the way through this year's attempt to create a novel in a month.

Logically it's completely daft and I have several other unfinished drafts laying around from previous years, but it's still quite entertaining to make the attempt.

This year, other than the idea of writing something about the Colder War, I had absolutely no idea about characters or plan for plot before I started. It seems to have something to do with roubles at the moment, although I expect the Chinese will turn up sooner or later, and maybe a WU-14.

...and in other news

Sometimes you just can't make it up. Nor the one about the Febreze scented Audis

started with a mouse and ended with a telly

I re-accessorised my iMac recently, by moving to the new generation keyboards and mouse, plus updating the home's Apple TV to the new type. It all started because of a broken mouse on a PC, so I needed to 'trickle down' a component.

Keyboard first.
It's a keyboard after all, this time with a slightly lower profile than the old one. There's both a lower rake on its slope and also the keys themselves are slightly thinner. I didn't expect it, but it took me a day or more to get used to the lower pitch. They've changed a few of the graphics on the keys and removed the old 'option' symbol, replacing it with the word 'option'. The main advantage is that I won't need to keep a box of spare batteries in an adjacent cupboard for their all too frequent replacement. The new keyboard is rechargeable using a lightning connector which is included in the box. When connected it makes the keyboard seem kind-of old-school.

Magic Mouse II
This was my original reason for visiting the store. There's so little cosmetic difference that I thought I might have accidentally picked up the wrong unit. Even the box omits the II from the labelling. Inside it is the newer unit, with only the inner leaflet really giving away the difference. I'll be rotating the older mouse onto a work PC where the mouse had broken, but where I only use it occasionally when I'm doing presentations or similar. It's surprising how many PC people are still freaked by a mouse with 'no buttons' - "How do you use it?" etc.

Like the keyboard, this is a rechargeable unit, although in a moment of sheer obstinacy Apple have decided to make the charging point underneath the mouse guaranteeing that you can't use the mouse whilst charging. It would look so 'attached' wouldn't it? I decided not to get the trackpad unit. I'm very happy using a trackpad but a long time ago I realised that I still prefer a mouse if I'm doing something fiddly like drawing boxes or graphics.

Apple TV 4
I've come through the generations of Apple TV, although back in the early days I preferred to use a Mac mini as a TV device rather than the earliest and similar sized TV units. Nowadays the boxes are smaller and the main problem is more one of commercial rights. All the non-linear TV providers are in competition with one another and find ways to limit each others' programming.

Frankly, for general TV viewing the Sky TV box still seems to have the best EPG, at least in terms of broad usability. The Apple box is therefore an extra unit, although with Airplay it gets increasingly used to view things that have first been selected on a laptop and can be flipped onto the telly.

Our main television is also hooked up to an Onkyo media system, which has about 7 HDMI inputs and a couple of outputs, so the buttonage count from all of the remote controllers is probably at least 500.

That's why we use a single Logitech Harmony as the controller for everything - television, Sky, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Spotify, iPlayer etc. plus some domestic chores like the fire, the central heating and mood lighting. If it sounds complicated, its not, because all of the options are programmed into the single handset and can be selected with options like 'Watch TV', 'Watch DVD', 'Fireplace' and so on.

When I said one handset, we actually have two - that's the full version with a small touch screen and the even simpler version which is more button based. I'd almost forgotten that once it is set up it can also be operated from an iPhone - although we never seem to do this. The clever part is that the Harmony is wireless rather than infra red, so can be used without pointing at the relevant devices. It also blasts out infra red from its hub, which can easily cover the area of all the TV devices.

Back to the Apple TV, the new handset is a small unit, albeit slightly larger than the old one. That's because it too has a touch capability now, as well as Siri support. My main trepidation was whether the new Apple would still work with the Harmony, but fear not, I plugged in the new Apple TV and then tried the Harmony buttons and everything still works fine. It's just that I had to reprogram a lot of password settings for the varied services before the Apple TV would work properly again.

Have I used the Siri function? I tried it and discovered the problem of licensing. I was in Netflix and said "Skip backwards last three minutes" or something similar. It started asking me about which team between Atlanta and Chicago or something - "Epic Fail" I think they say. It wasn't even trying to work with Netflix. Next I said "Interstellar" as a quick test to see what it would do. It immediately stopped the Netflix TV episode I was watching and took me to the Apple iTunes Store to ask me if I'd like to buy a copy of the Interstellar movie that I already have in my iTunes DVD library. So no, the Siri function needs a lot of work to make it usable. I like the idea of voice activated multi devices, but we've still got a way to go before we can say "Open the pod bay doors, Siri."

I think I can safely put the new remote controller away with all of the other ones unless I want to use it for gaming and instead rely on the Harmony for routine control.

As for Amazon, it doesn't even come up as an option in the TV's App library, although I've installed the youtube, vimeo and flickr which were embedded on the old TV3 but are App options on the TV4, as are a selection of games.

Briefly mentioning the games support, we're not really a gaming household, so I'd describe the games we do use as 'light entertainment' rather than grimy shoot-em-ups and drug cartel based car chases. I tried a simple platform game that involved making a bright red crab bounce up through various lily pads using the Apple TV handset in portrait mode as the controller. It works well and is sufficient to keep the telly gaming-friendly without needing clutter up the living space with piles of Xboxes and Playstations. I'll be looking for the inevitable family-friendly quiz program and some sort of karaoke as we approach the festive season.

So overall views on the three devices:

• The mouse was needed as a replacement for something that had failed - aside from charging, it works the same and is still my 'mouse of choice' for any device.
• The keyboard was an impulse addition, and apart from the battery saving is sufficiently similar to the prior one to be unremarkable.
• The Apple TV 4 keeps the living room current and provides future potential through the extra programmability. I'm more interested in the 'home' services aspect than specifically consuming iTunes content. It also gives me the older unit to move to another area where I can use it as a service on another TV.

inside the northern powerhouse suite

There's a lot of talk of the Northern Powerhouse at the moment, including last Friday's speech by Osborne, at the National Infrastructure Commission meeting in York National Railway Museum. Given the location, the locomotive in the background for most of the coverage didn't look very British.

It initially reminded me of a massive German locomotive, both in shape and because of the foreign-looking paint job. A kind of strange symbolism, maybe? My inner trainspotter had to take a closer look.

It turns out it was British designed and built in 1935 by Vulcan Foundry from Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire for the Chinese Government Railways. A KF7 class 4-8-4 No 607 to run on the Canton-Hankow railway. After decommissioning in 1981 it made its way back to the UK.

So it was made by British northern workers using British steel for export to China, where it worked for 46 years.

I've been in the north for the last few days. Stuck in huge traffic jams from road works, diversions and similar from the broken infrastructure. It makes me very wary of Osborne's words. All that time parked on the motorways has given me time to think. Since Osborne took office, there's been a 5.4% fall in infrastructure investment. Now he plans to announce a 'suite of asset sales' which the Treasury expects to raise billions of pounds to be ploughed back into projects. That sounds like code for more privatisation.

Potential examples of one-time sales are:

• Royal Bank of Scotland circa £23.2bn
• Lloyds Bank circa £13bn
• UK Asset Resolution (UKAR) circa £13n (that's the mortgage bits of Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley)
• Royal Mail circa £1.5bn
• Monetising the Student Loan Book £12bn (watch out if you have student loan)

Then there's a few more aspirational items like Channel 4, the debt-laden Network Rail and a few crony cash-in favourites like Ordnance Survey and Companies House. The trouble is, the total is still somewhere up to about the £70bn range, so maybe the rest will come from loans. I seem to remember the EU has agreed some support for the nuclear programme as an example.

It is all very mysterious, because on the one hand Osborne is having to rediscover ways to recoup the £5bn-£10bn gap caused by changes to the benefits plans, but at the same time he is promising £100bn of infrastructure spending by 2020. He says the bundle will have initial priorities of examining connections between the big northern cities, London’s transport system and energy infrastructure.

Ever the tactician, the bundling of statements makes better headlines.

As a quick example, my supposition is that the first £25bn goes on Hinckley Point C and perhaps another £30bn on another power station for Bradwell. That's more than the first half of the money gone without any of it directly reaching the north. Now let's add in the Crossrail 2 plans for London. That's another £32bn. Also southern.

Assuming the London plans don't also include airport spending, there's still £13bn left. I'll round it up to £15bn, because that's the amount that was stipulated last December for road improvements across the UK. I took a look at the statement and it breaks down as:

• north east and Yorkshire - 18 schemes worth around £2.3 billion and estimated to create 1,500 construction jobs
• north west – 9 schemes worth £800 million and estimated to create 600 jobs
• Midlands – 17 schemes worth £1.4 billion and estimated to create 900 jobs
• east of England – 15 schemes worth £1.5 billion and estimated to create 1,000 jobs
• London and south east – 18 schemes worth £1.4 billion and estimated to create 900 jobs
• south west – 7 schemes worth £2 billion and estimated to create 1,300 jobs

Of course, £15bn is still a considerable sum, but somewhat short of the £100bn headline. Slightly weasel-worded it talks about 'examining connections' rather than 'building connections' for the north. We should also notice that the money is to be spent between 2015 and 2020. Of the balance, that works out to around £2.6bn a year, even if it all were to go to the north. The above transport link plans suggest that about half is spread elsewhere. Not quite such a good headline, is it?