A Day at Marwell

Great day at Marwell Wildlife today. Last day of my weeks leave and the little one’s birthday spent in some glorious autumn sunshine. I could stare at those Tigers all day…

Google, open WiFi and your privacy

One of the things I love about Twitter is the ability to fire-off quick thoughts that, from time to time, sparks spontaneous conversation. Once such tweet is this:

I’m big on civil liberties & privacy but this is BS. Broadcast unencrypted data; you can have no expectation of privacy http://bit.ly/cnpSIL

I’d just been reading about Privacy International’s claims that Google capturing open, unencrypted WiFi packets displays “criminal intent”. It irked me, and the tweet sparked up an interesting discussion with my CTO at work.

It’s right that Google are being pulled up on this. It’s daft. It was a foolish and unnecessary thing to do. Google claim it was a mistake, I’m inclined to believe them. Google, unlike Facebook, realise that their business depends on users trusting them. Without us trusting Google with our data their advertising strength is massively weakened. Google’s culture is to protect that trust at all costs. I don’t believe they’d do this “maliciously” (assuming collecting WiFi packets can be deemed malicious at all).

Anyway, I digress. My main issue with the PI approach is that it pursues headlines over facts and education. Focusing on Google being wrong and using terms like “criminal” says to the uneducated that using open WiFi is fine. Broadcasting your data to the world is not a problem and anyone who picks up that data is in the wrong and should be punished. This message is not only of dubious legal correctness it’s potentially dangerous.

As an organisation that exists to protect privacy and civil liberties PI had an excellent opportunity to highlight the dangers of open WiFi and push an education message to people. Encrypt your WiFi! That’s what the message should’ve been. Instead we’re left with dramatic headlines that’ provide short term publicity but no longer benefit to WiFi users.

Protecting your WiFi is a simple thing to do, there are dozens of guides around the web. People need to understand the risks of open WiFi, and this is an education opportunity missed.

A response from Steve Strong:

Completely agree on the views regarding Google here - I’m definitely in the “foolish, not malicious” camp. The bit that is harder is the education thing - my Mum wouldn’t have the faintest idea what “protecting your wifi” meant, and if she went to one of the dozens of good guides on how to do it, I’d say that there’s around a 50% likelihood that I’d be getting a phone call later that day saying her “web wasn’t working”, or words to that effect.

We’re in interesting times where technology is moving ahead at a high rate, with many consumers are being left behind, not having a clue as to what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Education is one aspect that for sure would help, but most of the non-techies I know are not in the slightest bit interested in how things work and what “best practice” for the box that BT just installed is. They just want to use it. They never needed education to use their TV safely.

I think that along with some attempt at education, there also needs to be a concerted effort by the manufacturers of these so called consumer products to ensure that they are setup correctly by default, to use non-technical phrases when writing manuals, to have a native speaker do the translation into other languages (I’ve read some router manuals that I find hard to understand!).

Without that, it’s inevitable that folk are going to end up with things badly configured, and through no fault of their own. Whilst that’s the norm (which I think it is today), I think it’s proper that they should have a degree of legal protection from people sniffing their conversations. Even with encryption as the norm (which would be a good thing), I still think some legal protection is useful. Do we really think that Joe Public is going to be great at picking passwords?

The key, in my head, is whether the law is applied appropriately. In Google’s case, if it really was an honest mistake then they should show the data is deleted and that should be the end of it. If they were intentionally sniffing data with the aim of profiting from it in some way, then I think that would be very poor form and they should be prosecuted.

Most TVs, for example, are pretty good. You plug them in and they pretty much sort themselves out. Most IT hardware is way short of that in terms of user-experience, and it ends up with folk sending their secrets out in the clear

Our 20 Week 'Anomoly' Scan

At 10 this morning Katie and I visited the Fetal Medicine consultant for our 20 week “anomoly” scan. He spent a good deal of time looking around the heart and other important organs and we’re both delighted (and relieved) to say everything looks fine. :-)

Obviously, there are things that ultrasound can’t show you but this is excellent (if not terribly suprising) news. So time to relax and look forward!

Below are all the pics from this and from our 12 week scan.

Goodbye Sweetheart

It’s just about a fortnight now since we first heard that there might be a problem with our unborn baby girl. It’s almost certainly the hardest two weeks I’ve lived through, and hopefully the hardest I ever will. I’m quite sure there’s no emotion ever been felt that we haven’t felt in the last 14 days except, possibly, joy. There’s probably others to be honest but my mind’s a bit fuddled right now.

For those who don’t know we took the decision to let go of our baby girl, our Doughnut. She’s at peace now and she will not suffer. At all. Ever.

Before I go further it’s impossible to pretend that allowing a pregnancy to end early is anything other than a contentious issue. We’ve found no-one yet who’s criticised us, or argued against us. At least not openly. For sure those people exist, and it’s likely we will see them some time – we are prepared for this. However, I’m not going to spend time now defending our choice. This is not the time, and this is likely not the place.

All I will say is this – the last few days have taken everything I thought I knew, opinions I thought I had, beliefs I thought I held and challenged them all. I have learnt that no-matter how strongly one feels it’s impossible to say what one would do in a given situation until you are actually there.

The hospital, operated by the NHS, have been superb. It amazes me that we live in a time and a place where we can get such fantastic information, counselling and support for zero cost at the point of need. At every step along the way we have met compassionate, caring, talented people with only one thing on their mind – our care. A simple thank you is not enough.

So…

On Sunday morning Katie and I entered the hospital to take the first painful steps towards saying goodbye to our baby. At 14:59 that afternoon – Sunday 29th November 2009 – Katie gave birth to our second little girl, and she was beautiful. She will forever be known simply as “Doughnut”.

The overriding memory we have of the remainder of the day is peace. We were remarkably, surprisingly peaceful, and Doughnut was also at peace. Despite our sadness, we held our baby girl and felt a calm that I’m not sure I’ve experienced before.

Monday was another tough day as it was time to go home. Without our baby. Saying goodbye to loved one’s is always tough. Saying goodbye to your child is heart-breaking. I’m not ashamed to say it took all the strength that we could muster to leave hospital. A little piece of each of us was left behind and we’ll never get that back.

I’m sure the days ahead will be a mix of good days and bad. Someone will say something, or we’ll see something that causes us to stop and remember. These moments are hard, but together we’ll find a way through. Eventually the pain will ease but things will never be quite the same again.

Which Hell would Sir like today?

Last Thursday I fired off a Tweet that pretty much summed up what was, in the end, a bad day.

Every now and then life throws you a curve-ball. No matter how hard you look you never really see it coming.

As already announced, Katie is currently pregnant with our second baby, affectionately named “Doughnut”. Last Thursday was our 20 week ultrasound scan. If you know about these things you’ll know that the 20 week scan is more formally the “fetal anomaly” scan. A check-up to ensure that all of babies essentials parts (limbs, organs, bones etc.) are present and correct. It’s a beautiful thing. Seeing your unborn child moving, and seeing each part of her growing perfectly into the tiny person she is to become.However, there’s a reason they go looking for anomalies. Sometimes things aren’t as perfect as you might hope. As the sonographer spent more and more time looking at Doughnut’s heart it became painfully apparent that something wasn’t right.

If you know about hearts (and we’re learning rapidly) it’ll be obvious that a heart can be simplified into a number of parts. There’s two atria (collecting chambers) where blood comes into the heart and two ventricles (pumping chambers) from where blood is pumped out of the heart. Then there’s the main pulmonary artery that carries blood to the lungs and the aorta that carries blood to the vital organs. The left and right sides (an atrium and a ventricle on each side) should be separated by a wall.

The sonographer couldn’t locate baby’s pulmonary artery, and found evidence of a hole in the wall between the two ventricles. This is known as a ventrical septal defect (VSD), essentially a hole in the heart.

At that stage it was all maybe’s, possibly’s and probably’s. After the longest weekend I can remember we met with the Fetal Medicine department on Monday and now have a clearer idea of the problems.

Our Doughnut has a problem they call Pulmonary Atresia with MAPCA’s. A whole bunch of words that I’d never heard, and probably never wanted to hear. But, here we are.

Pulmonary means “of the lungs” and Atresia means “an absence of”. Together they are used to describe problems with the pulmonary artery that can be anything from a narrowing and blockage of the main pulmonary artery, through to pretty much no pulmonary artery at all. MAPCA’s stands for major aorto-pulmonary collateral arteries.

The normal pulmonary artery arises from the heart and the splits towards each lung in something like a “T” shape. It’s three parts are the main pulmonary artery, the left pulmonary artery and the right pulmonary artery. If the main pulmonary artery is absent the left and right can form in a range of ways. On one end of scale the left and right pulmonary arteries are intact and feed both lungs taking a supply from the aorta instead of the absent main pulmonary artery. On the other end the lungs are fed from a number of smaller arteries that are connected to the aorta. These are the MAPCA’s.

What we know is that Doughnut has no significant main pulmonary artery, she has a hole (VSD) in the wall between the two ventricles where the main pulmonary artery should rise, and she has MAPCA’s. What we don’t know is the quality of those MAPCA’s. Sometimes they’re bigger and stronger, sometimes they’re smaller and weaker. Obviously, the stronger the better. Due to the limits of ultrasound it’s not possible to say for sure how good the MAPCA’s are. For a true picture we’d need to see an angiogram which can’t be done until baby’s born.

In most cases this kind of defect is operable but it’s not guaranteed to be successful. A number of surgeries would be required, potentially over several years. To try and improve the situation a surgeon would attempt a process called “unifocalisation” where a number of MAPCA’s are brought together to form one artery. If this is successful the ultimate aim might be to insert an artificial artery where the main pulmonary artery should be and then seal up the hole. This process may or may not be successful and may take many, many years. Ultimately it would be palliative rather than corrective surgery.

It seems that bad news rarely comes unaccompanied. A heart defect such as this is often caused by a chromosome problem. In this case a problem called 22q11 micro-deletion, or “DiGeorges Syndrome“. This refers to parts of chromosome 22 being missing, specifically that part at a location designated q11. 22q11 Chromosome problems can be inherited but it’s unlikely as neither Kate or I display any symptoms. Often it is simply a random anomaly. The chromosome problem can lead to a range of problems including specific facial features, immune system weakness and learning difficulties in later life.

The chances that our baby has 22q11 micro-deletion are about 20-25%. An amniocentesis test can provide us with more certainty on this but it involves placing a needle into the amniotic fluid and can bring on a miscarriage in between 0.5 and 1% of cases.

We now have decisions to make that are, quite frankly, terrifying.