Crikey caption competition

Crikey says: Congratulations to “pseudomys”, who was our pick from The Sandpit yesterday, choosing a caption to fit the text message Rupert Murdoch’s looking at in this pic …

“Hi Rupert — soz but no knighthood w/out Aus citizenship. Best, Tony.”

Was Hughes’ trial unfair?

Cliff Ellen writes: Re. “How the media fingered a star paedophile — and prejudiced his case” (yesterday). Assuming Greg Walsh is correct as in Robert Hughes not getting a fair trial, and further, the appeal judge agrees with Walsh, the point is can he uphold the appeal? This would put him on a crash course with The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and A Current Affair. Who could blame him for choosing the easy way out?

The real unemployment figures

Marcus L’Estrange writes: Re “Strong economic data, but will the RBA take away the punch bowl?” (yesterday). Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer can analyse the monthly labour force figures until the end of time and it would still be a waste of time. It is riddled with so many catch-22 definitions of employment/unemployment that deliberately keep people artificially out of the so-called official labour force and therefore out of the monthly unemployment statistics.

Former Commonwealth statistician Dennis Trewin told Tim Colebatch of The Age that “the official [monthly] measure of unemployment does not reflect the true jobless rate”.

Former ALP Victorian Employment Minister Steve Crabb, himself an actuary, once said:

“There are lies, damn lies and statistics, the monthly unemployment numbers is not only misleading, it causes real harm and asked why the ABS produced these old cobblers.”

Keane and Dyer now need to explain why they continue to analyse these old cobblers.

Overstating Heartbleed?

Geoffrey Heard writes: Re. “Heartbleed reveals a big hole in Australia’s cybersecurity strategy” (Wednesday). Internet nerds are fond of telling us the most dire stuff about internet security breaches and whatnot. Now we have this regarding Heartbleed:

“Make no mistake about it. The OpenSSL Heartbleed security hole is as serious for internet security as a stage four cancer diagnosis would be for you,” wrote technology reporter Steven J Vaughan-Nichols.

Well, no, it is not. The security hole can be fixed in what amounts to a jiffy — it has already been fixed. Stage four cancer is most likely fatal.

I remember all too well the Millenium bug (came to nothing in the end; some people did a huge amount of work to combat it, lots of others did nothing, I was using a Mac anyway) and numerous other security breaches that have occurred and had people rending their garments (to make up for the potential losses, no doubt).

So someone has “stolen” my personal data. I am sure someone has done that long ago.