Was the truth out there?

A real life story that is beginning to resemble a conspiracy thriller: Gary McKinnon is to be extradited for trial in the U.S. after allegedly hacking into various government computers to find evidence of UFOs. Mr. McKinnon was first arrested in 2002 but there have been a series of cases and appeals since - and further appeals are still possible.

I don't want to call for a particular outcome from the trial - I feel I don't know the facts well enough, and also don't believe in trial by media. However I do want to express the wish that he has access to a fair trial wherever it takes place, and if it is the case that he has Asperger's syndrome, as has been reported, that this is taken into account and the trial is carried out in a way that does not place him at a disadvantage.

McKinnon has stated in a BBC interview that he was able to access military computers as many still had their default password settings. He has also appeared on a discussion panel at an Infosec conference - you might remember, that's the organization that carried out surveys giving out free pens to London commuters in return for their passwords - the most common was "password" in 2002 but this had changed to the much safer "admin" by 2003.

Mr. McKinnon seems to have stirred up a real hornet's nest within the Vast Machine: I can't help wondering, what did he find?

Asperger's syndrome is also a theme of this upcoming film which I might just go and see:

Crisis in Orbit

Real life sometimes holds its own against science fiction. The events of the Apollo 13 flight matched any sci-fi action film for excitement and Ron Howard's Apollo 13, does a good job of telling this story and portraying the tension and action; while sticking meticulously to the facts there is also good use of cinematic technique and symbolism (the moment when the flight plan is literally torn up to make part of an oxygen filter is a good example of this).


More recently (although not that recently - in the days before the International Space Station) were the weeks when the Mir space station was in crisis, after a collision with a Progress freighter left it damaged and spinning out of control; as with Apollo 13 there were no casualties and the day was saved by heroic efforts and out-of-the-box thinking by the station crew and ground control teams. "British-born astronaut" Michael Foale was one of the key figures in the solution. To find out more, read Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir, an account that includes all the tensions between American and Russian teams as the crisis unfolded.

For a more general insight into the Mir programme, as well as a touching and beautiful film and more great sci-fi that just happens to be true, watch Out of the Present, a documentary made by cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev during one of his record-breaking stays on Mir - he left in the Communist era and returned to Earth to find Russia an emerging democracy.

Real life sci-fi: advances in computing

On a snowy day a couple of years ago I was waiting at a station for a train no doubt delayed by adverse weather. The station's computerized announcement system relayed changes in the estimated time of arrival at regular intervals. Finally, in the same spliced-together female voice it made the following announcement: "On behalf of South East Trains I would like to apologise for the cancellation of the 10.20 train to Tonbridge" (The train details have been changed).

I can think of a number of explanations for this curiously personal announcement:

1. The computer is indeed responsible for scheduling trains and is taking responsibility for the decision, made by itself and possibly overruling human advisors, to cancel the train.

2. The computer is acting as a kind of confessor, having taken responsibility for the decision from its' human colleagues at South East after they have confessed their sins to it.

3. The computer, while not actually having taken the decision, has gained awareness of the inconvenience for its cold and frustrated passengers, and has become guilt-struck.

Any of the above imply a computer with an impressive level of emotional intelligence and self awareness way beyond anything I've heard of outside science fiction. Conversely, it hasn't escaped my attention that the computer might simply have been programmed to speak in this grammatically and contextually inappropriate way. In this case, if the apology is automatically generated or someone has pushed the "Apologise" button on their keyboard, but no apology has actually been spoken, does it count?

This event reminded me to stay on the lookout for signs of computers insidiously taking over the world. Today I came up against another computer - I was sent an inconvenient delivery time for a new desktop, and when I phoned a call centre in Limerick to rearrange it I was informed, by a woman with a beautiful but fear-tinged voice, that the decision to deliver at this time had been taken by a computer, and that there was no-one in the entire delivery company who had the authority to overrule it. With the UK news agenda dominated by Wossygate and Sargentgate I may have missed coverage of a robot revolution in the Republic of Eire.

Real life sci-fi

I read here that astronauts on the International Space Station are currently searching for a spider that escaped from an on-board experiment. Once again life imitates art, in this case one of my favourite fx films Spiders (2000) which begins with Mother-In-Law running amok on board the space shuttle.