I am not planning any nuclear attacks

http://henrysmith.org/blog/2014/08/04/not-planning-any-nuclear-attacks/

by technicalfault • 12 years ago

250 146 12 years ago

kjjw8• 12 years ago

Par for the course with letting agents in the UK. I'm surprised they didn't begin evicting the renter. Using a property for work is often prohibited in the boilerplate rental agreements they charge £100 a time to change the name on.

orf2• 12 years ago

Hardly, that is a personal project so wouldn't count as work. Renting a property for non-commercial use then running an office out of it is quite rightfully prohibited.

kjjw8• 12 years ago

As if they could comprehend the difference.

And anyway - quite wrongly! What if one works from home?

And whatever happened to fostering entrepreneurship, innovation and asking people to take their own lives in their hands by doing things like setting up their own company, all these things that the current UK conservative government claims to want and support?

The law around lettings in the UK is detrimental not just to those who rent in the UK but the country as a whole.

teamonkey• 12 years ago

From what I understand, in the UK at least, they obviously can't stop you from working at home or running a business from home or setting up an office in your home.

What they don't like is using your rented home as a warehouse or place where customers regularly visit. That kind of thing usually needs some kind of licence from the council.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

Using a property for work is often prohibited in the boilerplate rental agreements

To be fair using the property for work changes the insurance and tax situation.

kjjw8• 12 years ago

Insurance maybe. But I doubt it changes buildings insurance (which is the only insurance a landlord will take out.) Tax not really - only if one wanted to claim back the income tax one pays on a percentage of their rent, a percentage in line with the percentage of the property used for solely work. That has nothing to do with the agent / landlord.

jon-wood• 12 years ago

You're doing well to be charged £100. We just renewed our tenancy, and got charged £120 by the letting agents to process us signing the same agreement we signed 12 months ago, and update their records to show we're not due to do so again for another year.

teh_klev• 12 years ago

Fortunately that kind of thing has been outlawed in Scotland. Letting agents can no longer charge supplementary fees to tenants.

"As a result of this consultation, we will make it crystal clear to tenants, landlords and their agents that all premium fees, over and above rent and a deposit, are unlawful." - Housing Minister, Keith Brown

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-1937...

kjjw8• 12 years ago

To update the date on the contract (renew)! You've been had! I only paid £80 for that!

Never actually saw a version of the contract with an updated date, mind you. I am trusting them that it exists.

danparsonson2• 12 years ago

For anyone else in this situation who is not aware, by default an Assured Shorthold Tenancy (which you probably have if you're renting all of a self-contained dwelling) becomes a statutory periodic tenancy (i.e., usually, rolling monthly on the same terms) at the end of the initial contract period - this requires no action on the part of anyone involved so you can politely tell the agents where to stick their £100+ bill, assuming you don't mind being on a rolling monthly contract. You can of course do this next time you're due to renew even if you've paid for it before.

I've done this in four out of the five places I've rented over the years (the fifth being a special case as the landlord wanted to sell) and had no problems - although I had to argue the point with one agent who initially insisted I had no choice but to cough up. Pays to know your rights :-)

Sources: This guide is great and used to be on the UK government website:

http://www.leeds.gov.uk/docs/Tenants%27%20Tenancy%20guide.pd...

Since superseded by:

https://www.gov.uk/private-renting

which sadly doesn't seem to cover as much detail.

JonnieCache2• 12 years ago

Tip: just before you pull out your card to pay the fees, look into the kid's eyes and say something like "ummmm, this seems a lot, I don't really feel comfortable paying this much, can we reduce this at all?" The guy starts sweating as he sees his commission disappearing into the sunset, replaced by the prospect of a grovelling call to the property owner. They will often knock off about 50%. Sometimes you can just refuse to pay. Depends on the market.

NB for best results, start your contract at the worst time of the year for landlords, usually just after all the students have finished moving. Also, be at least a foot taller than your letting agent.

kjjw8• 12 years ago

Sorry but I live in a place where supply of property, rental or otherwise, is so constrained when compared to demand that any local letting agent knows they can rent out any place within a week. You go along with whatever they say or you don't get the place. End of story.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

Sadly, if you look carefully at the pictures, it's pretty clear it's for a game...and I didn't even need to read that he mentioned that they were game ideas.

Goes to show how dumb people can be.

mattmaroon4• 12 years ago

No it's not. At all. I mean, a rational person might make the assumption that this guy is not actually whiteboarding an ICBM launch from a rented apartment. But there's nothing about it indicating to a non-technical person that it's a game.

crazypyro3• 12 years ago

Uhhh? The "mouse click" was a dead give away. Also, Occam's Razor. Is this guy programming a game in his apartment or is he programming a ICBM with 0 related hardware plus probably no other corroborating evidence. No reason to act like it takes more than a couple minutes of investigation to figure this shit out.

Edit: for the guy below me, since I can't reply directly, find me a nuclear missile guidance system that is destination controlled by a freaking mouse clicking on a map in the Pentagon and I'll concede the point.

tgb• 12 years ago

Honestly I hope that even non-technical people know that the blast radius of a nuclear bomb is somewhere around the size of a city, not several US states. But there goes my optimism again...

sampo• 12 years ago

Common sense tells that anyone who has access to Intercontinental Missiles probably does not sketch a trajectory by hand on a whiteboard in a rental apartment. Even if there were no it-technical context, it could be a plan for a novel or a movie script. Than much even non-technical people with common sense should be able to guess.

voidlogic• 12 years ago

Rational person might make the assumption that this guy is not actually whiteboarding an ICBM launch from a rented apartment

In my mind the real problem is that there is nothing wrong with "whiteboarding an ICBM launch". Me or me and my friends have every right get wargame 1980 or 2014 global thermonuclear war. Its seems like it would be a fascinating intellectual exercise. For that matter why can't people wargame terrorist plots, apply game theory, etc.

Between first amendment rights and the need for academic freedom, people should and do have every right to do this. In someone saw this can became concerned, they have have every-right to investigate, but in my mind, so long as it doesn't involve anything official or contacting the people involved without tangible evidence.

After all, if I talk about what might happen in a car crash, it doesn't remotely imply I intend to go out and get into one.

tomp3• 12 years ago

Actually, it's not clear at all. The only clue I found that it's only a virtual plan is one mention of "WebRTC" in the third image. Far from obvious for most non-programers.

madaxe_again6• 12 years ago

"Mouse click"

That's the mouse that you put in the nose of a MIRV, and when it starts clicking its teeth because it's damnably chilly in space, it's time to re-enter. Right?

realusername• 12 years ago

I'm going to get downvoted for this but I cannot believe what I'm reading... we're talking about a nuclear attack involving inter-continental missiles. I'm far from an expert on this subject but I'm pretty sure you cannot build one in your garage on your own. (and especially not with a simple schema on a white board).

mikeash9• 12 years ago

Yes, it is clear. The only groups which possess ICBMs are the governments of the USA, Russia, China, India, and possibly North Korea. None of these groups would be doing any planning on a whiteboard located in some random English apartment. Thus, the only clue you need to know that this is not a real plan is the fact that it involves ICBMs and it's on a whiteboard in a random English apartment.

apple314159• 12 years ago

Wow, sounds like 1990 over again i.e. Steve Jackson Games.

ryan-c2• 12 years ago

For those not familiar, Steve Jackson Games makes RPGs and were nearly driven out of business due to a secret service raid[1] done in response to the "GURPS Cyberpunk" book (described by the secret service as "a manual for computer crime") they were working on.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil

hyyypr• 12 years ago

"This raid is often wrongly attributed to Operation Sundevil, a nation-wide crackdown on ‘illegal computer hacking activities’ that was occurring about this time."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk#.E2.80.9CThe_b...

downandout• 12 years ago

What are the odds that someone leasing a house has control of an ICBM and is making plans to use it on his home whiteboard? People, especially stupid people, that can't mind their own business, are both dangerous and endlessly frustrating. Personally, I hope this guy tries to get the letting agent fired.

madaxe_again6• 12 years ago

Ah, letting agents.

I got evicted from a property years ago because they did a surprise inspection while I was out (which is, of course, totally illegal), and decided they'd found "mountains of cocaine" on the kitchen counters.

It was fucking Ajax kitchen cleaning powder. Still, they didn't care. The police (who they contacted) thought it was laughable, but couldn't do anything about the fact they were evicting me.

cpfohl• 12 years ago

What state did you live in? You've got tenant rights, and one of them is almost certainly "You can't be evicted for cleaning your apartment." Just a wild guess.

madaxe_again6• 12 years ago

The fine state of County Durham.

As a tenant - a student tenant, no less - your rights are virtually squat.

ctz• 12 years ago

What did the court say when they applied for a possession order?

madaxe_again6• 12 years ago

To be fair, they just gave me my marching orders and said they'd proceed to eviction if I didn't scram - and scram I did, as the place was falling down anyway.

citricsquid• 12 years ago

For the sake of clarity it's worth noting that in England tenant rights are quite good. For an eviction to take place it must be ordered by the courts and a landlord can only apply to the courts for possession after providing a tenant with 2 months notice. A quick eviction in England takes 3 months, an average eviction is closer to 5 and in some cases it can take much much longer. The only situation in which someone can be evicted with no notice is if they are a lodger (renting a room with a resident landlord), which wouldn't involve letting agents or inspections. The confusion over evictions in England comes from tenants not understanding their rights, a notice to quit (Section 21) is NOT an eviction.

A tenant can only be evicted for rent arrears if they have over 2 months rent due (and bringing the arrears under 2 months at any time invalidates any court action), landlords cannot evict if they have not legally protected the tenants deposit and landlords have no rights to enter a tenanted property unless it is an emergency.

kjjw8• 12 years ago

And then you'll never be able to rent again. At least through a letting agent, which is how most rentals occur.

murbard2• 12 years ago

Shall we play a game? How about Global Thermonuclear War.

ProAm• 12 years ago

The only thing missing from those photos was a telephone and and old school desktop modem.[1]

[1] http://pc-museum.com/046-imsai8080/wargames-02.jpg

hmsimha• 12 years ago

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

CalRobert2• 12 years ago

Something weird-looking about France and Germany there...

rtkwe• 12 years ago

They were the first to fall under OP's brutal attack. RIP.

CalRobert2• 12 years ago

Ah, you guys are no fun. Sheesh. HN is no place for lighthearted banter apparently. I wear my downvotes with pride.

smcl• 12 years ago

Henry I'm not sure if you are checking this thread, and I can't find a way to contact you on your site but...

I wanted to see more of your posts, so trimmed the URL down to "http://henrysmith.org/blog/" and got an error message "Included file 'navbar.html' not found in _includes directory" at the top of your page. Clicking your name in the left directs me to henrysmith.org which doesn't have this problem.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

Common sense isn't quite as "common" anymore. If you actually read those diagrams it is pretty obvious (to me) that that is a game, and not some missile design or "plan" (although who plans a state missile attack from their apartment?).

pyre5• 12 years ago

If we assume that all terrorists that are planning to launch ICBMs are smart, then all of the ICBMs launched by dumb terrorists will fly under the radar. Then we'll have nuclear attacks that could have easily been prevented! /s

burkaman2• 12 years ago

From his previous blog post, they could tell it was a game:

“Except… the person who did the inspection did have some concerns about one thing. There were some… whiteboards? And some… drawings on them?”

“Ah shit! Yeah I totally forgot about those! You mean the nuclear attack thing, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Yeeeeeah…. Sorry! You see…. It’s for this game I was making! It’s like, a web thing and it uses Google Maps to simulate a nuclear war.”

“Ahhh, okay! We kind of thought it had something to do with gaming!”

Apparently somebody was still worried about the idea of a realistic nuclear attack simulation game. Reminds me of the time some kid was arrested for making a Counterstrike map based on his high school.

pyre5• 12 years ago

Apparently somebody was still worried about the idea of a realistic nuclear attack simulation game. Reminds me of the time some kid was arrested for making a Counterstrike map based on his high school.

This is even more ridiculous. The kid could reasonably obtain weapons and bring them to school. The likelihood of obtaining an ICBM is nil.

mirkules• 12 years ago

Reminds me of the time some kid was arrested for making a Counterstrike map based on his high school.

Nobody seemed to mention this, and I feel quite old saying its, but "Global Thermonuclear War" was the name of the simulation Matthew Broderick's character played in "War Games", which should have been another clue to the authorities or whoever that it's just a game.

samspot3• 12 years ago

Devil's Advocate:

You are a nontechnical person and stumble upon what appear to be plans for a terrorist attack. You talk to the person about it and they say "Don't worry. is computer game".

A great exploration of this is the 30 Rock episode where Tina Fey reports her neighbor for what ends up being a plan to get on the show 'The Amazing Race'.

The problem is, not knowing any better, you feel obligated to report the activity just in case. Let someone much smarter than yourself decide what is really going on. If you say nothing and someone gets hurt, can you forgive yourself?

As a hacker, I would understand this is definitely a game. But can I really expect the same from non-technical people?

DanBC3• 12 years ago

But the people higher up the chain don't get to see the whiteboards and so can't easily dismiss this as planning a computer game. Unless the agents took photos?

NhanH• 12 years ago

The priori of a dude planning an ICBM attack on whiteboard in an apt is so low that unless you have very very strong evidences that it exists (and words by random people without photos certainly don't count as one), for all practical purposes, it isn't true.

And I sincerely do hope that if such a plan truly exists somewhere, the power that be have better evidences/ discovery than being informed by letting agents.

mikeash9• 12 years ago

It takes only the barest application of common sense to realize that an ICBM attack is not going to be planned on a whiteboard in plain view in some random apartment. It does not actually appear to be plans for a terrorist attack, because terrorists don't have ICBMs.

Beltiras2• 12 years ago

Also: Terrorist are not too concerned about mouseclicks ....

samspot3• 12 years ago

1. How do I know they don't have ICBMs? Bill O'Reilly hasn't told me that yet.

2. Or, we don't have ICBM's yet. Hoping that part of the plan will work itself out. Step 1: Collect underpants ... Step 3: Profit!

2. Maybe this terrorist is just working from home and trying to understand the larger plan. Or he could be brainstorming for a future powerpoint presentation on the subject.

Just having some fun with the idea.

pyre5• 12 years ago

The problem is that everyone in the chain ends up buying into this. The police make a record of it 'just in case.' You end up on a no-fly list 'just in case.' Everyone in the chain is covering their ass 'just in case' this person really is a terrorist.

No one ends up willing to stick their neck out and say, "this person probably isn't a terrorist"... just in case.

Beltiras2• 12 years ago

And it all becomes Kafkaesque and you can't get the bureaucracy to respond because '... it might reveal our methods and tactics in combating global terrorism.'

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

The extreme example of "everyone in the chain" buying into an extreme form of this thinking came in the form of the "1% doctrine" articulated by then-Vice President Dick Cheney: "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."

rlpb• 12 years ago

This is exactly what happened in the Twitter Joke Trial:

"The airport management considered the message to be "not credible" as a threat, but contacted the police anyway."

They ended up finding something unrelated to actually protecting the public from a terrorist threat that they thought would stick after it got escalated to the point where they couldn't back down. This led to a conviction (eventually overturned on appeal).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial#Background

mikeash9• 12 years ago

One big problem is that people take the idea of "better safe than sorry" as a way to avoid thought. Don't analyze the situation, just pick the option that appears safest after a glance!

What it should mean is that you should take both probabilities and costs into account when deciding what to do, as it's often worth doing something easy to reduce the risk of something unlikely but catastrophic.

But that doesn't mean you can just avoid thinking about it! "Often" doesn't mean "always". For example, it's worth checking the tire pressure in your car on a regular basis, because incorrect pressure could lead to a blowout at high speeds which can be most unpleasant, and checking it takes little time. But it's not worth checking the car for bombs every time you drive it, at least not for most of us, because the odds of being the victim of a car bomb for most of us are indistinguishable from zero.

A little thought reveals that this case is clearly in the second category, and thus calling the police is just a waste of public resources. But if you're incorrectly using "better safe than sorry" to mean "pick the option that appears to be safe without any analysis", you're not going to apply a little thought.

samspot3• 12 years ago

Fantastic point that cannot be understated. When thinking about this I assumed the authorities would run some quick sanity check and dismiss it. While that probably does happen, we often see cases where it has not worked that way.

stevebot2• 12 years ago

Ha nice, I immediately thought of that episode to after reading this. I really miss that show :(.

It is a good point, but I wonder when it breaks down and turns into something like McCarthyism.

lwhalen• 12 years ago

Ohh I'd say about 13 years ago.

stronglikedan• 12 years ago

This example illustrates the very slippery slope we find ourselves on today. The problem is that it's really no ones business unless and until I break a law. I shouldn't have to justify may legal actions to anyone, regardless of what they do and don't understand.

aetherson• 12 years ago

No particular technical sophistication should be required to understand that terrorists do not launch intercontinental missiles.

Torgo• 12 years ago

Sometimes it is because, even if the chance it's real is slim, the stakes would be incredibly high. One time I thought I witnessed a kidnapping, a woman shackled and gagged in the back of a car. I contacted the police and they very thoroughly and professionally pursued it. Afterwards they told me the two people involved were engaged in sexual roleplay. She wasn't being kidnapped, it seemed kind of unusual (you had to be there) but I would have been irresponsible in not reporting it.

On the other hand, they could have been SWATed, and it probably cost my city government five digits. I don't have an answer.

chrismcb• 12 years ago

Why do you feel obligated to report the activity?

stevebot2• 12 years ago

This reminds me so much of an awesome 30 Rock episode where Fred Armisen plays the middle eastern neighbor of Tina Fey's character. She ultimately gets him turned in for planning an attack, when he was just preparing for The Amazing Race with his friend.

Its sad how sensationalist and afraid we have become.

aroman• 12 years ago

I think "cautious" is a better word. What aspect of this story was sensationalist?

nitrogen• 12 years ago

Avoiding the rough part of town at night is cautious. Turning in a neighbor for basically nothing is sensationalist.

kabdib• 12 years ago

I prefer "gibbering bongo full-goose paranoia".

angersock• 12 years ago

The part where a game design document on a whiteboard resulted in referral to the police?

I think "cautious" is white-washing of the highest caliber.

smacktoward• 12 years ago

Wondering if Introversion Software had to deal with this when they made Defcon (http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/)...

bencollier49• 12 years ago

I'd be livid if something like this happened. I think it's worth this chap getting the details of the police report, and speaking to someone on the force directly. He needs to be assured that he won't end up on any "lists".

I'm not sure whether he has any legal recourse over this. I doubt it, but he has potentially been materially disadvantaged (if indeed, it goes "up the chain" and he finds visas being denied).

At the very least, he needs to enumerate to his landlord the various ways in which this could seriously affect him, and ask for a rent reduction.

artumi-richard• 12 years ago

I'm doing work with a drug testing company, that generates a lot of stuff you wouldn't want taken out of context. This kind of stuff: "How's the meth goin?" - "Oh great. We're getting loads this week" "And the Steroids" - " Ah, not so well. Bob's lab is running behind, they're really busy"

e40• 12 years ago

This seems relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Title is "Dont Talk to Police" from 2008. Henry Smith should probably watch it.

ckrailo• 12 years ago

I love this video so much, a while back I made a Bitly link to make it easy to remember and share to my friends when out-and-about.

bit.ly/dont_talk_to_police

BrandonMarc2• 12 years ago

Bruce Schneier calls this the "war on the unexpected". If you take average people, who aren't experts at security / investigating / etc, and you tell these people "if you see something, say something", then you're going to get a ridiculous amount of false positives.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_th...

Everything "unusual" becomes suspicious. See a guy taking photos at an airport? Must be a terrorist! Can't be a photographer and aviation enthusiast, no!

As Bruce says, the CYA angle is also horrific. Landlord sees something, thinks it might be nothing, but just in case, tells the local cops. Cops figure it might be nothing, but just in case, calls the FBI. Branch office figure it might be nothing, but just in case, gets regional / national HQ involved. Somewhere in the chain someone inadvertently gets word to the other 3-letter agencies, and the effect is magnified.

... and every time it's escalated, people figure "well, the people below me wouldn't have escalated unless they had reason to" ... while at the same time thinking, "well, I'm not sure, but I'm also not going to be the scapegoat if I fail to neutralize a potential attack and something does happen."

Everyone in the chain has plenty to lose and little to gain for not escalating to the next level -- nobody wants to be the guy who missed an opportunity to stop / neutralize a threat, especially in the unlikely-but-possible scenario that an attack does occur.

Regarding "if you see something, say something", Rick Moranis had an intelligent take on that at the beginning of his guest column in the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16moranis.html?_r=...

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

This is exactly the problem, as I have myself experienced firsthand.

The 'problem' is that all of us - everyone - has a number of ways in which their life is 'unusual'. Aberrant (deviating from the norm) is not inherently suspicious, because everyone is aberrant in some aspects of their life. Nobody is truly 'normal'. In fact, if you thoroughly investigated someone and found nothing that was 'abnormal'[0] in some way, that would be suspicious!

Most people's individual personalities and quirks aren't suspicious if you look at the whole picture, but when someone's entire job is to find evidence of 'abnormal' or 'suspicious' things about someone it means that they can construct a suspicious narrative about anyone, as long as they have the motivation or interest to[1].

In other words, it simply becomes a game of finding evidence that confirms one's own (or an organization's own) cognitive or systemic biases.

[0] More than 1 or 2 standard deviations away from the mean, etc.

[1] CYA is a common 'motivation' in this sense.

BrandonMarc2• 12 years ago

In fact, if you thoroughly investigated someone and found nothing that was 'abnormal' in some way, that would be suspicious!

I've heard spies are sometimes caught this way. Their life-profile is so deliberately normal that, having no quirks, they actually do stand out as such.

arh68• 12 years ago

Yeah, it's really odd to spend effort maintaining haystacks, trying to keep their needle:straw ratio high, trying to grow and filter the haystack, et cetera, then pump giant aqueducts and funnels (pass it up!) of absolute crap intelligence into it. There needs to be a word for losing knowledge: instead of extracting knowledge from streams of input, you're smearing it all around, obfuscating the useful bits.

shostack• 12 years ago

No kidding...

Was sitting on the runway and the cockpit door was open. Saw a really cool view out the window with the pilots and such, so I grabbed my DSLR and snapped a shot (I'm a photo geek).

Stewardess gave me issues about it and started telling me she didn't think it was allowed (it is to my knowledge), but I held my ground and it was fine.

I'm probably on some list now just for wanting a cool shot.

danneu• 12 years ago

Planning a missile strike by drawing a crude world map with an explosion (labeled "explosion") is like planning a killing spree by drawing a stick figure with an uzi in each hand mowing down other stick figures.

readerrrr2• 12 years ago

Funny/Scary. Imagine that instead of the nuclear war map, the landlords encountered the image you described. OP would be in detention/questioning right now.

path4112• 12 years ago

Zero tolerance public schools have taught us that anyone who can draw a gun is a terrorist.

mcguire• 12 years ago

That's a hell of a blast radius.

gone35• 12 years ago

Yup it seems off by at least an order of magnitude --ie even for a theoretical maximum of 100 megatons.

reinier_s4g• 12 years ago

hahahaha, awesome!

notastartup• 12 years ago

Law enforcement is full of retarded psycopaths? What's new?

lamontcg• 12 years ago

"I am not planning any nuclear attacks as my centrifuges are on the fritz and I have been unable to procure switches accurate enough to get a good implosion out of my C4 detonators. Also, it turns out that my ICBM designs are prohibitively expensive, and the Russians will not let me have access to their launch sites for some reason."

I am not planning any nuclear attacks

Related Stories