Database failure takes out cable in Orlando

WOFL in Orlando, Florida is reporting that Bright House Networks, the cable provider in the Orlando area, is (or at least was, as of a few hours ago) suffering an outage in television service due to a "corrupt database".  The outage only affects television service; reportedly telephone and internet services are unaffected.

So my question is, how does a "corrupt database" interrupt television service on a cable system?  I can see this impacting delivery of encrypted digital channels (the database with the encryption codes might not be accessible) but how would a database be involved in delivery of basic analog cable channel service?

Russ Martin latest casualty as mainstream media continues to crash

So Russ Martin is the latest casualty in the trimming down of mainstream media, as media organizations all across the country wither in the current sorry economic times.  Seems Russ' employer decided to switch to an all-sports format (sports programming is cheaper to produce because you don't have to pay sports figures to come on interviews, while most other celebrities typically expect some sort of honorarium). 

This on the same day that Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times announced that it was seeking to mortgage its office to raise cash.  And NBC recently announced that it was considering cutting hours, maybe even days, out of its programming schedule.

At least the movie theaters are doing well.  That happened in the 30s, too.

F/A-18 crashes into house

The news is now reporting that a Marine F/A-18 out of Miramar has crashed into a house in San Diego. Apparently, the pilot ejected prior to the crash. I have a message for the pilot.

Pardon my french, but what the fuck are you doing ejecting out of a plane when your plane is on a crash trajectory for a residential neighborhood? Your duty is to protect the citizens of the United States of America. It is your duty, in this situation, to do everything in your power to keep that plane from taking the life of an American citizen. If that means you have to stay at the controls of your malfunctioning plane as it augurs into the terrain, then that's what your duty to the United States called for you to do today. Ejecting from a plane that might crash into an occupied civilian structure, especially over a residential neighborhood, is only excusable if there was no chance of controlling the descent of the plane in any way. What if it had crashed into University High School? How many children would you have killed?

If this pilot ejected from a plane that he had any chance of controlling, and in so doing failed to do his utmost to protect the lives of the citizens of San Diego, I fully expect that he be charged with gross dereliction of duty, and, given that at least three people have died as a result, manslaughter.

P.S. Some people have expressed upset at my tone. Perhaps my ire should be directed more at the Marine Corps, for operating an aviation training facility in a densely populated area. If it comes out that the pilot in this case did absolutely everything humanly possible to control the course of the plane before ejecting, then he has done his duty (provided, of course, that the plane's malfunction is not itself his fault), and the deaths that may well have resulted from this are not truly his fault. But as I first read about this, I was reminded of that news chopper pilot whose tail rotor failed. This is a circumstance in which most people would consider the chopper "uncontrollable". He managed, nonetheless, to somehow wrestle the chopper to a crash landing on top of a commercial building so as to minimize harm. (There's film of the last several seconds of the flight somewhere on the web.) I admit that I hold our servicemen to high standards. Those standards will sometimes require Marines to die for their duty. That's part and parcel of the job, and if you aren't up for that, don't take it.

Update: The Marine Corps has disciplined 13 service members for errors in handling this incident, including relieving four officers from duty. Still no word on what discipline, if any, the pilot will face. It seems that a number of people screwed up rather badly here.

Wikimedia vs. Internet Watch Foundation

The tech media are all abuzz over how the Internet Watch Foundation has recently added a page on Wikipedia to its "list of pages that contain child porn". This has had the effect of causing all web traffic to any Wikimedia site from any customer of the several ISPs that subscribe to the IWF's filtering service to be forced through IWF's proxy filter so they can block access to the (so far) one page that they've found that contains child porn. A side effect of this is that Wikipedia (the English Wikipedia, at least) has had to block all editing from anonymous persons on the affected ISPs, because they cannot "differentiate different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other people as well."

Most British ISPs voluntary agree to filter web traffic through their networks for content which violates UK law. Most of them use the services of the Internet Watch Foundation, which is a non-governmental organization with close ties to the Home Office and other law enforcement entities, but not a law enforcement organization in and of itself. I haven't been able to dig out the details of the 1996 agreement that created the IWF, but I get the feeling that there was an undertone of "you do this voluntarily or we will force you to do it" and the ISPs agreed to it because they didn't want the negative PR of appearing to be on the side of child pornographers. Anyway, the IWF provides its clients with lists of URLs that contain "unlawful" content, which its clients are required (by contract) to block. They may not manually review the lists, but must use them exactly as provided by IWF; the IWF is the sole party responsible for the lists.

Wikipedia has an article about a 1970s album by the Scorpions (a German hard rock band) titled "Virgin Killer". The original cover for this album featured a naked prepubescent female with a "cracked-glass" effect covering her genitals; this cover was extremely controversial and was rather quickly withdrawn and replaced by a much tamer cover for most distributions, although it is still possible to buy copies with the controversial cover on it, even in the UK.

Someone (anonymously, presumably) reported the page to the IWF as a "webpage containing potentially illegal content". The IWF reviewed the article and concluded that the image "may be illegal in the United Kingdom" and added the article to its blacklist. Doing so forced the subscribers to IWF's blacklist to force all traffic to any site hosted on the same server as en.wikipedia.org (which is to say virtually all Wikimedia sites) to be passed through the filtering proxy in order to detect and block any attempts to access the article. As a side effect, this caused everyone who goes through the filters to appear to Wikipedia's security systems to appear to be coming from the same IP, which significantly undermines Wikipedia's internal security measures; in addition, at least some of the proxy filters are unable to cope with the load and are reportedly generating random page load failures and other problems in addition to blocking access to the page in question.

Somewhat strangely, IWF did not block the image itself; they only blocked the Virgin Killer article and the "image page" for the image. If the image were to appear on another article, that article would be left untouched, and the image would be displayed. The image in question appears on articles on at least four other Wikimedia projects, none of which were being filtered at last report.

Wikipedia has responded with a cavalcade of screeching about the evils of censorship; a handful of editors who have argued for removing the image have been shouted down and in some cases blocked from editing. Although I have seen no public statement from the Foundation, rumor has it that there have been conversations between the IWF and Sue Gardner (WMF's executive director), and the WMF has sent demands to the ISPs to discontinue the filtering. There appears to be no possibility that Wikipedia will consider removing the image, or even diminish its prominence. Some editors even argued for a hard block of all UK IPs "in order to send a message" that censorship is wrong. In addition, the raw inconvenience that has been imposed technically on UK editors has profoundly upset many UK editors.

There's so much to comment on here. On one hand, we have ISPs imposing filtering that their customers haven't specifically asked for, using filter lists from a self-governing third party that appears to be responsible to no one, so as to require the filtering of an image that is almost certainly not illegal under the relevant law. The filtering is done so badly that it fails to block most uses of the content that is alleged to be illegal, and also blocks content which is not alleged to be illegal (specifically, the text of the article about the album, which is not alleged to violate any law at all). Finally, the technical solution used is apparently not robust enough to handle the traffic caused by forcing most of the UK Wikimedia-related traffic through its servers.

On the other hand, we have the ideologically detached Wikipedia community that has steadfastly refused to contemplate that there are topics, and especially images, which, while they should be available, ought to be placed behind "shields" of some sort so that they are not unexpectedly displayed to readers who are likely to be offended by them. The Wikimedia Commons by now quite likely has the largest collection of free porn on the Internet, and there are just a plethora of articles on Wikipedia about thoroughly prurient topics that are certainly of interest to some, but at the same time are not the sort of things that most people will want children exposed to uncontrollably. Wikipedia's community, however, has steadfastly insisted that "Wikipedia is not censored" and thus steadfastly, even defiantly, almost always refuses to conceal, minimize, or shield prurient, offensive, or shocking images. (Thus, if you happen to be reading Wikipedia from work, absolutely do not hit "random article"; you might well end up with an image of gay sex on your screen.)

Now, I'm a pretty committed civil libertarian; I think censorship is wrong, and I object to the imposition of content filtering on anyone's internet connection for any purpose except at the express request of the customer. So it's very much my wish that this particular filtering scheme be attacked on general principles. However, it's clear to me that this filtering scheme is well-established in Britain (it's been in use on at least one of the ISPs there since 2004, based on one article I read) and there doesn't seem to be much public dissent to its use. Not being British I don't have a really big dog in this fight, and there are far worse offenders on this issue than the UK.

I also take issue with the IWF filtering the article instead of the image. Surely their technical people realize that images within a webpage load independently of the webpage itself, and that they can block just the image without blocking the rest of the article. I question why they did not do this in this case, as it would have been the least intrusive means to accomplish this.

On the technical issue regarding the IP appearance issue, the reports are that the IWF is willing to work with the WMF to sort out a solution that avoids this. If I understand the situation, this is just a matter of them ensuring that XFF works correctly in their proxy, and that their proxies are properly registered with the WMF.

The one thing that would have probably rendered this situation less problematic would have been if the IWF had contacted the WMF when it reached the determination that the content was illegal under UK law. Not only could the WMF have advised the IWF on the least intrusive manner to block the image, but they could also have ensured that the necessary forwarding configuration was in place to avoid the disruption that occurred over the past few days. That said, I suspect that had the IWF attempted to contact the WMF, they would have gotten nowhere; it's likely that the WMF would have either ignored the communication, or responded with hostility instead of attempting to cooperate, or to negotiate a compromise solution.

It's my position that this image should not be blocked. The fact that the exact same image is in use on Amazon UK's site without any action taken against Amazon suggests that there's hidden motivations on the IWF's part here. And it seems quite likely that the WMF's general incompetence combined with the complete lack of community leadership within the English Wikipedia will combined to prevent at sort of compromise solution; the WMF has nobody with the competency to negotiate one, and even if they did there is no effective way to impose it on the community because of the lack of leadership within the community. So I strongly suspect that the IWF intends to stand strong on this one, secure in the understanding that this is one they can win.

Go ahead, Jimmy, Sue, and Mike. Prove me wrong. I dare you.

P.S. Other coverage: Seth Finkelstein, Danny Wool

Savannah cats?

So why are savannah cats the top search right now? Did someone mention them on a TV show or something? They're pretty cats and all that, but why would they be the top search on a Saturday evening otherwise? It's not like they're new on the scene.

(Image by Jason Douglas, from Wikimedia Commons)