The dark side of the internet

The dark side of the internet

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

Andy Beckett
Thursday November 26 2009
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about ? freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky ? they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" ? "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn ? [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness ? its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" ? the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet ? The value of deep web content is immeasurable ? internet searches are searching only 0.03% ? of the [total web] pages available."

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything ? that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."

But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial ? "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet ? all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture ? the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog ? and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand [http://www.sealandgov.org/" title="Sealand official website]. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay ? the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise ? announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet ? we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable ? suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web ? the content, links, and transactions between people ? A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

Scary happening - being in limbo

A reminder of the timelessness of the Akhirah.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/23/man-trapped-coma-23-years

Trapped in his own body for 23 years - the coma victim who screamed unheard

• Misdiagnosed man's tale of rebirth thanks to doctor

• Total paralysis masked fully functioning brain

Rom Houben, 46, was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state after an accident in his 20s but can now communicate by computer keyboard. Photograph: VTM Belgium

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.

Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally.

"I had dreamed myself away," said Houben, now 46, whose real "state" was discovered three years ago, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week.

Laureys, a neurologist at the ­University of Liege in Belgium, published a study in BMC Neurology earlier this year saying Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed comas around the world. He discovered that although Houben was completely paralysed, he was also completely conscious — it was just that he was unable to communicate the fact.

Houben now communicates with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair – he has developed some movement with the help of intense physiotherapy over the last three years.

He realised when he came round after his accident, which had caused his heart to stop and his brain to be starved of oxygen for several minutes, that his body was paralysed. Although he could hear every word his doctors spoke, he could not communicate with them.

"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he said, via his keyboard.

The Belgian former engineering student, who speaks four languages, said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. He told doctors he had "travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether". Sometimes, he said, "I was only my consciousness and nothing else".

The moment it was discovered he was not in a vegetative state, said Houben, was like being born again. "I'll never forget the day that they discovered me," he said. "It was my second birth".

Experts say Laureys' findings are likely to reopen the debate over when the decision should be made to terminate the lives of those in comas who appear to be unconscious but may have almost fully-functioning brains.

Belgian doctors used an internationally-accepted scale to monitor Houben's state over the years. Known as the Glasgow Coma Scale, it requires assessment of the eyes, verbal and motor responses. But they failed to assess him correctly and missed signs that his brain was still functioning.

Last night his mother, Fina, said in an interview with Belgian RTBF that they had taken him to the US five times for reexamination. The breakthrough came when it became clear that Houben could indicate yes and no with his foot.

"Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it," he tapped out on to the screen during an interview with the Belgian network last night, AP reported.

Laureys, who is head of the Coma Science Group and department of neurology at Liege University hospital, has advised on several prominent coma cases, such as the American Terri Schiavo, whose life support was withdrawn in 2005 after 15 years in a coma.

Laureys concluded that coma patients are misdiagnosed "on a disturbingly regular basis". He examined 44 patients believed to be in a vegetative state, and found that 18 of them responded to communication.

"Once someone is labelled as being without consciousness, it is very hard to get rid of that," he told Der Spiegel.

He said patients suspected of being in a non-reversible coma should be "tested 10 times" and that comas, like sleep, have different stages and need to be monitored.

Houben hopes to write a book detailing his trauma and his "rebirth".

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Global financial system reform

1.       The ribawi-based financial system, the lubricant of economic growth in the developed world and therefore a major mechanism and tool to prolong their economic and political hegemony is under surveillance.

2.       Britain, the Great prefixing its moniker long gone, is now slowly trying to fulfill a global leadership vacuum it lost painfully when Blair was playing lapdog to Bush Jr, and clearly by playing the moral high ground in climate change and the global financial revamp issues. In climate change, it is trying to be the middleman between Obama’s US insisting on self-regulation and the rest of the world who insists the world’s largest polluter should have to answer to some form of polluting taxation.

3.       Now, Adair Turner is cranking up the pressure on the global financial system, insisting it has grown too big for its good and too complex to be controlled.

4.       He has his own ideas, but perhaps the is not yet a ready admission that the alternative should really an equity-based financial instrument which curbs excessive growth of financial instruments based on underlying asset values, aka Islamic finance. Asset bubbles and systemic shocks are painful manifestations of the interest-based system, and it’s interesting that Turner even raised the issue that taxation is leaning towards interest by taxing profits after interest.

5.       Jewish interest groups make it impossible to change their forte in interest management, obtaining unpronounceable amounts of profits since before the days of Rothschild’s and such. Ford’s Zionist Protocols could have something on this – but as ever, I am cynical of what could come out of this. Until and unless the D-8 of the OIC, the OIC itself, the rest of the developing world acknowledge that they too can partake in global leadership and compete on equal footing with the great powers, I doubt they could transform themselves into paragons of virtue and goodness. Bubbles have come, and they have gone, and it still remains as it were. Interest groups reign supreme, and the shadow players behind the scenes are the supremos.

6.       There is so much to do to bring back justice to the world.

===================================================================

The agenda for a global finance revamp 06 Nov 2009

By David Wessel - The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Date Published : 06 Nov 2009

The repair of the global financial-regulatory system is too important to future prosperity to be left to technocrats and bankers. But the substance is so arcane and complicated that few politicians or informed citizens can grasp the issues, let alone choose solutions.

That puts a premium on public-spirited insiders who think and speak clearly enough for the rest of us to understand, even if only to disagree with their diagnoses and remedies. It is that talent that makes Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's uber-regulator, the Financial Services Authority, worth listening to.

The U.K. didn't, as Lord Turner puts it, have "a good war." A couple of its big banks and several smaller ones imploded. It had a housing boom and bust. Its people put savings in Icelandic banks that collapsed. Its economic engine, finance, is sputtering. Its recession was deep.

And what had been seen by many in the U.S. as a model -- a central bank that stuck to setting interest rates and a single regulator that oversaw banking, securities markets and insurance -- is discredited. The rising Conservative Party wants to undo the structure built a decade ago by now-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and would fold financial supervision into the Bank of England.

Lord Turner, 54 years old, a Cambridge-educated former Merrill Lynch executive and McKinsey consultant, didn't arrive at the FSA until September 2008, well after FSA mistakes that contributed to the crisis. That liberates him to preach without first confessing sin, and preach he does. In a conversation in the London offices of the Climate Change Commission, which he also chairs, he was animated, even passionate, even though he had flown overnight from Washington. The word, according to Lord Turner:

-- One, finance got too big. "We must be more willing to ask . . . whether the financial system is delivering its vital economic functions as efficiently as possible, or whether parts of it can, and before the crisis did, swell beyond their economically efficient size," he said in a recent speech. He clearly favors the latter view: There was more "clever finance" and more trading than desirable to keep the world economy humming. Hence his willingness to consider a global tax on financial transactions, to the horror of many of his peers and the banking establishment.

-- Two, there was too much debt in the system. "There is a huge bias in the tax system towards debt," he said, largely because companies can deduct interest payments before computing taxable profits. "If we can't change that, then the regulatory approach needs to lean against that." Hence all the talk of reducing the leverage of financial firms. While U.S. and U.K. households and businesses did borrow more during the boom, the big run-up was in borrowing among financial firms matched by a huge increase in trading relative to the value of underlying economic activity, he observes. When bankers bellyache, he refers them to point one above.

-- Three, regulators failed to curb excesses, but politicians hardly encouraged aggressive regulation. The cry for "better regulation" meant less regulation, both in the U.K. and U.S. The diagnosis of Britain's economic woes was that regulation was stifling entrepreneurship, he said. No politician asked the FSA: "Why aren't you doing more to restrain this boom?" Few, if any, politicians can point to a speech made three years ago that asked why regulators weren't restraining lending or regulating with less of a "light touch."

-- Four, erecting a wall between ordinary deposit-taking and lending, on one hand, and trading on the other is impractical and unwise. Economies benefit when banks turn loans into securities or hedge their positions -- to a point. But by forcing banks to hold capital in the trading operations to provide thicker cushions to absorb losses -- he calls it "a bias towards conservatism" in trading beyond what is necessary for ordinary banking -- speculative trading will migrate away from banks toward hedge funds and the like, a change Lord Turner welcomes. That makes banks less risky (with smaller profits in boom times and smaller losses in busts), but he said it requires more oversight of big trading firms which, history proves, can endanger the whole system.

-- Five, for all the angst about the slow pace of postcrisis repair of the financial system, global regulators are making surprising progress toward consensus on a new regulatory regime. "We are attempting in 18 months to do changes far more radical than we did in Basel II that took between 12 and 15 years and dealt with some of the areas which proved to be less important," Lord Turner said, referring to the pact regulators reached in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that didn't avoid the crisis. Pushed by the newly empowered Financial Stability Board, the process, he said, "has worked better than I would have expected," he said.

Britain, of course, hasn't the clout to rewrite the rules of banking unilaterally. Lord Turner may not have precisely the same job in a year's time, if the Conservative Party takes power and sticks to its promise to abolish the FSA. But with a trenchant voice, he is helping to set the agenda for the most significant revamp of financial regulation in more than half a century.

Deep thinkers

Subhanallah - the beauty of Allah's creation!

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Deep thinkers

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be. By Anuschka de Rohan

Anuschka de Rohan
Thursday July 3 2003
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jul/03/research.science

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

"Intelligence" is a term with many definitions and interpretations. It's difficult enough to measure in humans let alone other animals. Large brains are traditionally associated with greater intelligence, and the brain of the adult bottlenose dolphin is about 25% heavier than the average adult human brain. Generally though, larger mammals tend to have larger brains, and so a more accurate estimate of brain power comes from the ratio of brain size to body size - the "encephalisation quotient" (EQ). While river dolphins have an EQ of 1.5, some dolphins have EQs that are more than double those of our closest relatives: gorillas have 1.76, chimpanzees 2.48, bottlenose dolphins 5.6. The bottlenose's EQ is surpassed only by a human's, which measures 7.4 (Australopithecines - hominids that lived around 4m years ago - fall within the dolphin range: 3.25-4.72). But we don't know enough about the workings of the brain to be sure of what these anatomical measurements truly represent. Today, most scientists share the view that it is behaviour, not structure, that must be the measure of intelligence within a species.

Dolphins have invented a range of feeding strategies that more than match the diversity of habitats in which they live. In an estuary off the coast of Brazil, tucuxi dolphins are regularly seen capturing fish by "tail whacking". They flick a fish up to 9 metres with their tail flukes and then pick the stunned prey from the water surface. Peale's dolphins in the Straits of Magellan off Patagonia forage in kelp beds, use the seaweed to disguise their approach and cut off the fishes' escape route. In Galveston Bay, Texas, certain female bottlenose dolphins and their young follow shrimp boats. The dolphins swim into the shrimp nets to take live fish and then wriggle out again - a skill requiring expertise to avoid entanglement in the fishing nets.

Dolphins can also use tools to solve problems. Scientists have observed a dolphin coaxing a reluctant moray eel out of its crevice by killing a scorpion fish and using its spiny body to poke at the eel. Off the western coast of Australia, bottlenose dolphins place sponges over their snouts, which protects them from the spines of stonefish and stingrays as they forage over shallow seabeds.

A dolphin's ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they "caught on". Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours.

Dolphins are quick learners. Calves stay with their mothers for several years, allowing the time and opportunity for extensive learning to take place, particularly through imitation. At a dolphinarium, a person standing by the pool's window noticed that a dolphin calf was watching him. When he released a puff of smoke from his cigarette, the dolphin immediately swam off to her mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk, causing a similar effect to the cigarette smoke. Another dolphin mimicked the scraping of the pool's observation window by a diver, even copying the sound of the air-demand valve of the scuba gear while releasing a stream of bubbles from his blowhole.

Many species live in complex societies. To fit in, young dolphins must learn about the conventions and rules of dolphin society, teamwork and who's who in the group. For these dolphins, play provides an ideal opportunity to learn about relationships in a relatively non-threatening way. At Sarasota Bay in Florida, Randall Wells and his team have observed groups of juvenile male bottlenose dolphins behaving like boisterous teenage boys. Using its head to do the lifting, one dolphin may even get another dolphin air borne, actually tossing it out of the water. It's unclear exactly what is going on. It could be play, but more likely these are serious interactions that are defining social relationships.

Dolphins gradually build up a network of relationships, ranging from the strong bond between a mother and calf, to casual "friendships" with other community members. Wells and his team were the first to notice that adult male bottlenose dolphins tend to hang out in pairs. The dolphins' motivation for ganging together is under study but may involve ecological and/or reproductive benefits. Dolphins may also form "supergangs". Richard Connor and his team in Shark Bay, Western Australia, discovered a group of 14 males. The supergang was a force to be reckoned with. In the three years it was studied, it never lost a fight.

To keep track of the many different relationships within a large social group, it helps to have an efficient communication system. Dolphins use a variety of clicks and whistles to keep in touch. Some species have a signature whistle, which, like a name, is a unique sound that allows other dolphins to identify it. Dolphins also communicate using touch and body postures. By human definition, there is currently no evidence that dolphins have a language. But we've barely begun to record all their sounds and body signals let alone try to decipher them. At Kewalo Basin Marine Laboratory in Hawaii, Lou Herman and his team set about testing a dolphin's ability to comprehend our language. They developed a sign language to communicate with the dolphins, and the results were remarkable. Not only do the dolphins understand the meaning of individual words, they also understand the significance of word order in a sentence. (One of their star dolphins, Akeakamai, has learned a vocabulary of more than 60 words and can understand more than 2,000 sentences.) Particularly impressive is the dolphins' relaxed attitude when new sentences are introduced. For example, the dolphins generally responded correctly to "touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it". This has the characteristics of true understanding, not rigid training.

Lou Herman and Adam Pack taught the dolphins two further signals. One they called "repeat" and the other "different", which called for a change from the current behaviour. The dolphins responded correctly. Another test of awareness comes from mirror experiments. Diana Reiss and her researchers installed mirrors inside New York Aquarium to test whether two bottlenose dolphins were self-aware enough to recognise their reflections. They placed markings in non-toxic black ink on various places of the dolphins' bodies. The dolphins swam to the mirror and exposed the black mark to check it out. They spent more time in front of the mirror after being marked than when they were not marked. The ability to recognise themselves in the mirror suggests self-awareness, a quality previously only seen in people and great apes.

Not only do dolphins recognise their mirror images, but they can also watch TV. Language-trained chimps only learned to respond appropriately to TV screens after a long period of training. In contrast, Lou Herman's dolphins responded appropriately the very first time they were exposed to television.

Of course, an understanding of TV is of little use in the wild, but the ability to respond to new situations has huge implications. In the shallows of Florida Bay, Laura Engleby and her team have recently discovered an ingenious fishing strategy. A number of the local dolphin groups seem to use a circle of mud to catch mullet. The action usually begins with one dolphin swimming off in a burst of speed. It then dives below the surface, circling a shoal of fish, stirring up mud along the way. On cue, the other dolphins in the group move into position, forming a barrier to block off any underwater escape routes. As the circle of mud rises to the surface, the mullet are trapped. Their only option is to leap clear out of the water and unwittingly straight into the open mouths of the waiting dolphins.

There is still much to learn about these flexible problem-solvers, but from the evidence so far, it seems that dolphins do indeed deserve their reputation for being highly intelligent.

Zoologist Anuschka de Rohan produced last month's Wildlife on One programme, Dolphins - Deep Thinkers? This piece is based on an article in the July issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine, available from newsagents or BBC Wildlife Magazine Subscriptions on 01795 414718.

Prosperity without Growth

1.       All this malarkey about New Growth Model / High-Income Model etc is making me puke. It’s a shameless and misguided call for increasing GDP growth figures so that wealth will create happiness to people.

2.       TDM’s years have actually proven that placing this criteria above all else is mistaken. Back at the peak of the Asian crisis, our GDP growth figures held up reasonably compared to our peers, but that’s because of pump-priming, aka let’s build beautiful buildings in Putrajaya so that we can tell the world how we’ve got it made, and **** the masses cos the spillovers will benefit them. Fast fwd to now, and we have a country building up its debt levels with all these continuous deficit budgets, increased crime, fractured society and blameworthy politicians from both divides. While I’m being disingenuous if I were to blame all these problems to the construction of Putrajaya, I’d like to venture that that was a manifestation of spend to create growth, for GDP growth is the penis envy affliction of some country’s economic administrators.

3.       And here we are repeating the same mistakes with the NGM / MIM thing, and this SWF is lending its full support to execute this.

4.       What we need is a leader who knows that life in Dunya is only as preparation for the Hereafter, but this life in Dunya needs to sustain a happy, sustainable lliving for all. And again, this philosophy is superbly, comfortably captured in the Quran.

5.       The following extracts bring recency to this argument, although intuitively I sense certain gaps are missing as it’s still looking into merely “worldly” things, but it’s a fantastic start, and ideologues for Islamic economics would do well to pick this up.

Source: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/public-data/files/happy-planet-index-2-0.pdf

Excerpts from the report:

“To maintain growth, Western capitalist economies have a structural need to sustain demand for consumption.72,73,74 But this feature of the system sets it at odds with a widely noted fact about human nature – that once our basic material needs are comfortably met, more consumption tends to make little difference to our well-being. This is not just folk wisdom, although it is certainly the case that throughout history, and across all cultures and religions, people have cautioned against an excessive focus on wealth and material possessions. Research suggests that in most reasonably developed countries, material circumstances such as wealth and possessions play only a small role in determining levels of happiness – some psychologists estimate that they explain only around 10 per cent of variation in happiness at the aggregate level.75 Beyond a certain level of income, increasing wealth makes little difference.76 Much more significant are factors relating to individual differences in outlook and to the kinds of activities that people engage in: socialising, participating in cultural life, having meaningful and challenging work and so on.

But the requirement to maintain consumption growth at all costs has led to a situation in which, for decades, we have been presented with a poisonous combination of messages. First, we are constantly bombarded with messages from advertisers and marketers, all pushing the idea that buying this or that new product will make us happier. Added to this, in many countries we have been offered staggeringly easy access to credit with which to keep up our level of consumption. Quite apart from the environmental impacts, this has served us very poorly in a number of ways.

For one thing, levels of debt have soared in recent years; in 2007 and 2008, for the first time on record, UK personal debt exceeded total GDP.77 As recent research from the Institute of Psychiatry in London shows, debt is a large contributing factor to a person’s chances of developing clinically significant anxiety and depression, largely irrespective of their income.78 It is not hard to imagine why this might be. The stress of working just to keep up repayments is exhausting, the fear of defaulting constant and gnawing, and that’s without having to deal with the feelings of despair and inadequacy for having failed.

But there is also a more subtle and no less damaging aspect to all this focus on personal consumption. People who are strongly motivated by the idea of getting rich and famous are what psychologists refer to as materialistic. Using an engaging metaphor, psychologist and author Oliver James describes them as having caught the ‘affluenza’ virus.79 The scientific evidence for the negative impacts of materialism is overwhelming; they range from poorer personal relationships through fewer good moods and lower self-esteem, to increased prevalence of psychological symptoms.80 In short, people whose main aspiration is to be wealthy are inclined to be less satisfied with their lives in general than those who focus their energies elsewhere.81 What is worrying, but perhaps unsurprising, is the extent to which materialism is on the rise. Figure 2 shows data from an annual survey of college students in the USA. The proportion of respondents feeling that being very wealthy is important has doubled since the early 1970s, with a concomitant decrease in the number considering a meaningful philosophy in life to be important.”

Pian Sukro, JDC, School, Pajam and Family

I’m trying my darndest to fill my head with execution-minded stuff now, not the variety with guns or rolling heads, but of the action-oriented, operational variety. At the same time I also try to justify these actions, so it’s a case of filling the gap between stimulus input and feedback, and where there is a more intimate, rolling-the-options-in-the-head justifications to the action. (although, from past records, a lot more, will end up as inaction)

1.       Pian Sukro

I read the report of his very much untimely and premature death this morning with sadness, but Allah knows best. I have the fullest respect for him as a CEO and a leader. Even then I know I may have maligned or disparaged him with my rather indisciplined tongue when discussing TNB or the energy industry with colleagues or fellow discussants, deep down it is nothing but respect.

He had the foresight to execute capex-heavy investments like SAP, the BCG-advised T7 program – the TNB transformation strategy and from which Che Khalib benefitted greatly from and many others. These were the sort of stuff that was needed to be done to drag TNB out of the morass, not merely some financial paper shifting thing. (although Izzaddin did superbly – the best CFO TNB has ever had by a long mile!)

By the by, this is Malaysia, the land of compromises, half-actions, negotiated truths, half-half measures, and there could be a lot more things he could have done were he not constrained by the political and business masters that we all somehow consented to have power over us. All things considered – he did great.

May Allah rest his soul and consider his actions as amal maaruf, and grant him the company of the solehun and mukminun. Al-fatihah to Allahyarham Pian Sukro.

Note – and hopefully the Energy Commission can find someone just as capable (or even better, though unlikely) to replace him,

2.       JDC

Attended my first JDC meeting on Friday night. My first thoughts – strong cliques among the committee arising from the closeness in age and “batch” – and hopefully not too strong a groupthink, there are shades of SPU about the discussion there. IMO we should be thinking strongly of strategic moves to enhance our presence in Cheras, the impressive developments in Balakong and the surrounding Cheras Selatan are good developments we should ride on. Societal changes etc are also opportunities to be considered, and we should refrain from taking the easy way out of doing things. Ie more of Penang and Azlishah’s PJ than the current mindset. Not taking anything away from them, it was my first 2 hours with this group, and I should keep an open mind and share, contribute as necessary. My groupmates were (by seating arrangement) Najib, Zul, Faisal, Ust Zul, Nazeli, Susilawati, Rosliya, Zaini, Amirul. Personal preparation and planning should help – ie towards contributing to the most optimal portfolio.

3.       School and Little Azhar

How strategic are education-related initiatives towards societal change? VERY! Preschool education should very much be allowed to proliferate towards their desired niches to target towards the relevant societal preferences, as long as it retains its fundamental Islamic outlook. (for those who take issue with Fundamentalist Islam, start researching this subject and don’t be swayed by the Internet and Wikipedia too much – start asking the right people) Daerah should have a say in the running of these preschools – preferably post of TPSM should be automatically a Board member of Education institutions to anchor the debates and discussions in realistic societal-centric strategies. And from there, demand for Islamic oriented schools can be cultivated and nurtured and thence a stronger Islamic educational institutional can be anchored to rival the Kuen Chengs of the world. Then, all this nonsense espoused by the goblog Oi Jeff can be effectively challenged.

4.       Pajam

How can it be to develop agriculture in Pajam be the best option 3 weeks ago and suddenly turn into lets sell this to this Datuk at any cost? Unsurprising that the outcome is like this when nobody is coming forward to support Mak and she’s the one wracking her brains to solve her problem of asset management, and she also sees this as doing a favour for her children who she sees as incapable of handling their problems. Admittedly, I am the one who should be doing this, but past experiences are just holding me back. I’m not keen to help my sisters by helping Mak, and she’s not likely to favour me by bypassing my sisters. So the cycle continues.

IMO it’s still a long call to sell – it takes someone either not business-savvy or a bit mad to purchase Pajam at the inflated prices being pushed by the owners (Mak and Zadi being the ones rational on the pricing, leaving the other as the irrational one) – and feasibly Datuk could be one of those. Couple that with his interest to develop this “friendship” and this could be a good call to solve Mak’s perennial problem. Otherwise, I should still keep the option for developing in the backburner.

5.       Family

And here lies the rub. To do all that I’ve said should be done above needs me to exercise my independent outlook on life and I feel my options before have restrained rather than unleashed my options. Although OTOH when I’m left to make my own calls, I’ve been railroaded into making all the wrong decisions anyway.

But, hard choices, decisions, and finally action! Need to put my easel frame into action now!