The man who wrote the original anti-virus program tells Paul Rodgers he wants to make data safer

Sunday, 18 October 2009

Where Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg have made geekdom funky, Peter Tippett is a bit of a throwback. He has on a grey suit with a conservative blue tie when we meet; his hair would please a marine drill sergeant and he wears wire-frame glasses that are almost as unstylish as (though undoubtedly more expensive than) mine.But in his own fashion, Tippett has been just as revolutionary as the founders of Google and Facebook. Long before the internet took off, in the days when software spread from one machine to another on 5 1/4-inch floppy disks, Tippett wrote the world’s first anti-virus program, called Vaccine – at the same time inventing, almost as an afterthought, the undo command (control Z in many applications) and the restore disk. He also built not one but two big security companies, the first evolving into the business now known as Norton.

Along the way, he developed a security philosophy that is so full of common sense, yet so defies commercial imperatives, that one can only conclude that the buying public is mad. “This is how we’ve done security in the real world for ever,” says Tippett, leaning forward to make his point with an enthusiasm that belies his dour dress sense. “Why people don’t want it on their computers is beyond me.”

Most people consider themselves lucky to have a single career. Tippett has qualified for six. For starters he’s a pilot, licensed to fly jumbo jets loaded with passengers across oceans. “I’ve been flying since I was 15,” he says. “It’s my hobby.” He also has a PhD in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a commercial radio engineer certificate. Plus he’s a medical doctor, which led, circuitously, to his jobs as entrepreneur and security guru.

“For 32 years I’d had no income,” he says. “When I got my first job as a doctor I didn’t know what to do with the money, so I hired four guys and put them to work writing programs in my living room.”

That was shortly before the first computer virus was developed by Frederick Cohen at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 1983. Tippett and his chief programmer met a Lehigh student at a trade show in California and got a copy of the virus from him. “Writing Vaccine took us five weeks, including the manual and the sales brochure,” says Tippett.

Yet when McAfee came along three years later with its own anti-virus suite, it quickly ate into Vaccine’s still-small sales. The two programmes worked with philosophies that were diametrically opposed. Vaccine checked that the software on your machine was approved and hadn’t been tampered with. Anything else it considered to be a threat, an approach known in the jargon as “default denial”. McAfee’s program allowed any bit of code as long as it wasn’t on its list of known viruses, an approach called “default permit”. When a new bit of malicious programming emerged, McAfee had to get a copy, write a bespoke response, and distribute it to customers. “It’s like putting a big sign outside your house inviting everyone in to root through your stuff as long as they’re not convicted criminals,” says Tippett in his slightly nasal Michigan accent. “It’s not what we do in the real world.”

The story reminds me of the superiority of Betamax over VHS in the late 1970s, and of Apple over Microsoft a decade later. So why didn’t buyers go for the better product in this case? “What people wanted from an anti-virus program,” says Tippett, “was the ‘scan’ function.” They wanted to be reassured that every line of code had been checked.

For now, at least, the battle has been lost. Like McAfee, Norton works on a “default permit” philosophy these days. And Tippett has moved on. By the start of the 1990s he was an acknowledged expert on information security, and advised the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on cyber warfare during Desert Storm in Iraq. He sold his company to Symantec in 1992, though he stayed on to help them for more than two years. “I left after they decided they didn’t want me to be chief executive,” he says candidly, adding: “I don’t hate them; they bought me a jet plane.” A little one, he adds.

Tippett made his second fortune building Cybertrust, a company that would eventually become the Virginia-based security arm of Verizon, the world’s largest internet service provider, where it does, among other things, the lion’s share of the forensic work after hackers break into corporate and government databases. And its a Verizon report on this work, in its own way as iconoclastic as Vaccine, that he’s here to talk about.

“Computers are at the same point in the growth cycle as airlines were at the time of the DC3,” he says. “Back then we could fly to France, but we’re 5,000 times less likely to die doing it today. How did we make airlines so safe?” The answer, he says, is rigorous scientific investigation of every case where the system fails.

Admitting that corporate firewalls have been breached and sensitive customer data, often financial data, have been stolen is bad for business, he says, so only a third of cases are reported publicly, usually because its a legal requirement. Verizon, however, investigates 90 per cent of such cases around the world, putting it in a unique position to analyse who the hackers are and how they work. The results contradict many popular myths in the information security world.

It is widely thought, for example, that most hacks start with an insider. But Verizon’s stats show that only 11 per cent of cases are down to employees acting alone, while in another 9 per cent outsiders are helped inadvertently by an employee’s actions. Seventy-four per cent of hacks involve outsiders, says Tippett. And those outsiders were far more effective thieves, stealing 99.9 per cent of the records. The remaining cases are initiated by people from partner organisations, such as suppliers, with access to the target’s computer network.

The hackers are also unlikely to work for state organisations – the popular KGB scenario. While there’s no evidence of governments backing hackers, plenty of it points to known organised crime gangs.

Tippett also pours cold water on some of his industry’s favourite remedies, such as encrypting every piece of data, applying security patches immediately, or using long passwords. Most uses of encryption won’t stop hacking, he says – though it might be helpful on easily stolen laptops – few cases of data theft involved recently discovered vulnerabilities in the system and when thousands of user names are being attacked, an eight-digit code is only slightly more secure than one five digits long. The bigger risk is that passwords will be left on the default settings, such as “admin” or “password”, especially on servers.

What’s needed, he says, are layered defences, each catching most, though not all, attempts at invasion. “The number one thing to do,” he says. “is a lot of little things.”

An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness is being developed by scientists.

The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain’s top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.

He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.

No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.

Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.

Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.

Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.

Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.

Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation’s health.

The NHS report Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2009 found more than 800,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in 2007-08 – and more than 6,500 deaths – at a cost to the service of £2.7bn a year.

Some charities estimate that the toll could be up to five times higher. Drink is, for example, a factor in 40 per cent of fatal fires, 15 per cent of drownings, 65 per cent of suicides and 40 per cent of domestic abuse. It also has other costs, including 17 million lost working days a year, worth about £20bn to the economy.

“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.

“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.

“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”

Getting the drug approved could be hard for the team as clinical trials are expensive, and it is not clear who would pay for them, according to Professor Nutt.

He said that the traditional drinks industry has not shown any interest, however some countries might be persuaded to sponsor the team.

Some countries have more liberal regimes than others, though, and Professor Nutt thinks Greece or Spain, within the EU, could lead the way.

The latest Home Office performance figures showed that more than one in four people believe that alcohol is blighting their community.

A survey of every police force area in England and Wales found that 26 per cent of those polled “perceived people being drunk or rowdy in public placed to be a problem in their area” – a slight increase from last year.

The fears over the affects of alcohol range from urban to rural communities, with the worst hit being Manchester, South Wales, London, Northumbria and Gwent.

One of the super-cooled tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider

Sunday, 18 July 2010

After decades of bending atoms around giant rings and smashing them apart in search of the secrets of the universe, scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, are reviving a 1960s technology and going straight.

Their latest ring, the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only got up to speed in March, yet physicists meet in Paris this week to discuss plans for a new $6.7bn (£4.4bn) experiment – the International Linear Collider (ILC), which they hope to start building in 2012.

The new machine will be a straight-line tunnel, 31km long, and will use super-conducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalents, towards each other at close to the speed of light.

“To explore what the LHC discovers in more detail, you need an electron collider,” says Professor Brian Foster, the European director of the ILC project. Part of the report to the Paris conference will be “a blueprint for how you would set up an ILC lab”. More than 700 people at 300 laboratories and universities around the world are already working on the accelerator. The only other high-energy linear electron smasher is the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, a 3.2km track built in 1962.

Both the existing LHC and the planned ILC are trying to solve fundamental physics questions, including – what happened in the Big Bang? Where did all the antimatter go? How many dimensions does space have? Why are there so many different sub-atomic particles? And, most famously, what does a Higgs particle look like?

While the 12 subatomic components of matter have all been found, including quarks and neutrinos, the Higgs has proved more elusive. The leading theory of how the universe works says that the Higgs gives matter mass, and therefore gravity. Its discovery could point the way to unifying the two great 20th-century theories of physics – quantum and general relativity.

It may also help solve the mystery of the missing 96 per cent of the universe. When astronomers estimate the mass of galaxies, including stars, planets, nebulas and black holes, they find that they are so light they should fly apart as they spin. The extra mass needed to keep them together is thought to be hidden in as yet undiscovered “dark matter”.

Although a location for the new device has not been decided, Cern is a likely contender, if only because most of the physicists who might want to use it are already there, along with the infrastructure they need.

Cern’s LHC uses protons made from atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, by stripping off their electrons in a strong magnetic field, and accelerating them to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.

By the time they enter the LHC, Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is in play. Since the protons can’t be made to go any faster, pumping additional energy in makes them more massive. In the LHC, they can be pushed to 7 trillion electron volts. When two beams, rotating in opposite directions, cross, the energy released from a single pair could be as high as 14 TeV.

But proton crashes are “dirty”. “It’s like colliding two oranges together at 45mph,” says Professor Foster. “Sometimes the pips hit each other, but usually it’s just a spray of juice.” The pips, in his analogy, are the trio of quarks that make up a proton and which cause the most interesting smashes. Typically, only one quark from each proton in a collision will hit head on, while the other four will miss each other.

Worse, although scientists know how much energy they’ve put into each proton, they don’t know how it is distributed between the pips. One quark could have most of it, or all three could have roughly equal amounts. At best, researchers can tell the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve. Still, the LHC produces billions of bangs a second so they know roughly what energy levels give them interesting results.

But for a more precise exploration of the high-energy frontier, they will need the ILC. Electrons are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and do not have an internal structure. When two of them run into each other, the energy released is known exactly.

But electrons are not perfect. When particles are bent by magnetic fields, they emit X-rays. For relatively massive protons, this is not a problem, but for the lighter electrons it’s a huge obstacle. Most of the energy pumped into an electron in the LHC would merely replace that lost to radiation.

And so, scientists are returning to the linear design of half a century ago. The exact specifications will have to wait until the LHC has identified which energy ranges are of interest, but the ILC as envisioned will have energy levels of around 0.5TeV.

Construction of the new accelerator is expected to take seven years. No one would be surprised if, during that time, plans emerge for an even more powerful, next-generation accelerator.

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The Place of the Ravens, 30km west of Baghdad, has long been of interest to civil liberties groups. The largest prison in Iraq, built in the 1960s by British contractors, has for decades generated stories of abuse, not least under Saddam Hussein, who kept as many as 15,000 people imprisoned there. But it was in 2004, when pictures of offences ranging from the grossly humiliating to murderous leaked out, that the jail’s name became a byword for torture – Abu Ghraib.

The abiding image of that period is of a hooded detainee, standing on a box and draped in sack cloth, with electrodes attached to his fingers and testicles as if he is about to be shocked. Other pictures show grinning guards with naked prisoners in degrading poses. Reports of beatings, rapes and deaths were described by the US army’s own investigation as “credible”. The commanding officer of Abu Ghraib, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was demoted to colonel for failing to stop the abuses, later said that 90 per cent of the Iraqi prisoners were innocent.

It was exactly the sort of case that Amnesty International was established to fight against. “We should have had huge protests,” admits Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary general, with an engaging candour. “We failed. As an organisation, we failed to move people to outrage.”

You can tell that it bothers her. For the first time during our interview at Amnesty’s fortress-like headquarters in Clerkenwell, London, she’s uncomfortable and fidgety. “We published reports,” she says. “We had meetings with governments. We were on the website, and we were in newspaper interviews. But the other side was the security agenda, and we were unable to understand how to overcome the fears of the people. In Amnesty we are still too legalistic and remote from the concerns of people.”

While many in the US, and elsewhere in the West, felt revulsion over Abu Ghraib, few experienced anger. Many people saw the detainees as the enemy, the sort who crash airplanes into skyscrapers. Besides, the US army acquitted itself relatively well, investigating even before the first public leaks and court-martialing those soldiers it could, including officers.

Higher up the chain of command, though, the Bush administration and its supporters circled the wagons around the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who since 2001 had encouraged the use of “aggressive interrogation techniques” – the euphemism for torture.

Amnesty’s failure to rouse even its 2.8 million members, let alone the public, may simply have reflected the general ambivalence created by divided authority figures at a time when the West, and the US in particular, felt under threat. But perhaps it was because, under Khan’s eight-year leadership, Amnesty has taken its eye off the ball. Faced with the biggest single threat to the liberal values that underlie Amnesty’s existence, Khan has been haring off in new directions.

Irene Zubaida Khan, who is relinquishing her post at Amnesty at the end of this year, is in many ways the epitome of a career international bureaucrat. She was born in 1956 in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, the privileged daughter of a doctor and granddaughter of a lawyer. “We were a professional, middle-class family,” she says, “which taught me that you have a responsibility for others. I saw my father take considerable risks to go out and provide medical care to civilians who had been wounded by the army during the war of independence.” That was in 1971, when she was 15. “War seemed almost romantic,” she says. But there were painful experiences, too. “The father of one of my very close school friends was shot dead, in front of his daughter’s eyes, because he was a Hindu. There were stories of women being raped and once bullets came flying through our house.”

After the war came retaliation against those who had collaborated, and then famine. In 1973, her parents sent Khan to the safety of a boarding school run by Catholic nuns in Northern Ireland. “In the middle of the Troubles,” she says, her eyes agleam with amusement beneath her nest of curly black and grey hair. “A lot of bombs were going off, so to me it seemed a normal way of life.”

School was followed by law degrees at the University of Manchester and Harvard. By the time she got her masters in 1978, she had already helped set up the development organisation Concern Universal. A year later she was working as a human rights activist with the International Commission of Jurists. By 1980 she had settled into her 20-year career with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

She served as chief of mission in India and as head of the UNHCR team in Macedonia during the Kosovo war. “In the evenings I would go to the border crossings and you could see thousands of people walking across.” One night, the Macedonians decided they’d taken in enough, and guards began pushing people back across the border to where the Serbs were waiting. Some of those refugees were never seen again. “As UN officials, we protested, but it was a terrible experience to watch people being pushed back and not be able to do anything.”

While Khan was wending her way from Dhaka to Skopje, Amnesty was on a journey of its own. The organisation was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, an employment lawyer, after he read about two Portuguese students jailed by the Salazar dictatorship for drinking a toast to liberty. Its aim was to protect prisoners of conscience under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among those it would not support at first was Nelson Mandela, because he had advocated violence. Over the next three decades it expanded its remit, adding torture and disappearances, and winning, along the way, the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. Later came concern for refugees forced to flee from human rights abuses, extra-judicial killings, arms sales to oppressive regimes, and the death penalty.

“Amnesty had its biggest exodus of members when it decided to pick up the issue of the death penalty; the US section was totally opposed,” says Khan. “A lot of people also joined after that, because they thought it was right to campaign against executions.”

But while all those extensions could be seen as connecting to the original concept of “prisoners of conscience”, the change wrought at the turn of the century was viewed by a “strong minority” of Amnesty members as a stretch too far. The organisation began campaigning not under the Universal Declaration, which limits what states can do to their citizens, but under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which obliges nations to ensure their citizens have things like an adequate standard of living and the highest attainable standard of health. While the Universal Declaration grew out of the Enlightenment and the Second World War, the covenant has its roots in the Fabian Society and the socialist politics of the 1960s. It is deeply partisan, cutting sharply along the left-right divide in many countries.

In her new book, The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights, published in Britain this week, Khan reasons that without economic rights, there can be no human rights. A poor rural woman who can’t afford the bus fare to visit the police or courts in the nearest town has no access to justice, for instance. “There is a link between discrimination and poverty. It’s often discrimination that drives people into poverty, and the poor tend to be discriminated against.”

It’s a compelling argument, and one that many IoS readers will agree with. But it comes with a price attached. The more resources Amnesty pumps into campaigning against poverty and women’s issues, the fewer it has available to defend prisoners of conscience. The world has plenty of organisations devoted to alleviating poverty, though often without the human rights angle, but few that are dedicated to prisoners of conscience, and none as effective as Amnesty.

The organisation spent a decade debating the issue before making its decision and hiring Khan to implement it. She took up her new post in London on the morning of 12 September 2001, less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The “war on terror” that followed ushered in the sharpest curtailment of freedoms in the West since the Second World War. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Khan doesn’t see things that way. “Loads of classical human rights problems, such as torture and cruelty in detention, were thrown up by 9/11, but we realised there were deeper problems. One was that the international community had ignored what was happening in Afghanistan. So it showed the indivisibility of human rights.”

When we meet, Khan is preparing for a trip to Sierra Leone to launch an Amnesty campaign to raise awareness of maternal mortality, but she is vague about what she will do after she leaves the organisation. For those interested in human rights, the bigger question is who will replace her; Amnesty is still looking. If the next secretary general continues on the course that Khan has charted, perhaps the time will come to start a new group, one dedicated solely to prisoners of conscience.

CV

Born 1956, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)

Educated LLB at University of Manchester, masters at Harvard

1977 Helped found Concern Universal

1979 Activist, International Commission of Jurists

1980-2001 United Nations High Commission for Refugees, including chief of mission in India and Macedonia

2001-2009 Secretary general, Amnesty International

Married to an economist, one grown daughter

‘The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights’, by Irene Khan, is published on Thursday by WW Norton

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The only road to St Theresa Point in north-eastern Manitoba is made of ice and lasts just two months. The remote community’s 3,200 people, most of them Cree Indians, are squeezed into 530 homes, more than half of them without running water. Until June, a doctor flew in once a week for three days. But since an outbreak of swine flu left more than 200 people ill and sent 12 by air ambulance to Winnipeg, 600km (375 miles) away, Health Canada has been ferrying in more doctors. This autumn, in preparation for the flu season, it is also delivering something else: a supply of body bags.

In Australia, a similar scenario played out in July. An estimated 400 people out of a population of 3,400, more than 90 per cent of them Aboriginal, caught H1N1 influenza on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. In Brazil, a conference on indigenous education was cancelled in September after seven members of the Matsigenka, a tribe living along the Urubamba river in the Peruvian Amazon, tested positive for swine flu.

As health authorities gear up for the northern hemisphere’s flu season, the new strain of influenza is expected to hit indigenous peoples far harder than it will healthy, wealthy, urban Westerners. If the outbreaks in Canada and Australia are any guide, native communities could find a tenth of their populations sick, and untold numbers dead.

The World Health Organisation warned in its August briefing note on the pandemic that minorities and indigenous peoples face a far higher risk of hospitalisation and death. “In some studies, the risk in these groups is four to five times higher than in the general population,” it said.

Survival International, a London-based charity that tries to protect indigenous peoples, has called on the government of the Andaman Islands to close the Andaman Trunk Road because it runs through land populated by a nomadic tribe. The Jarawa came into contact with outsiders only in 1998; within a year, half of them had suffered respiratory problems after an outbreak of measles.

Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who works closely with Peru’s Matsigenka, said they are not the only tribe he is concerned about. “The arrival of swine flu among the Matsigenka is especially worrying as they are known to have intermittent contact with quite isolated Indian groups living near by,” he said.

Scientists and medical researchers have two hypotheses to explain the vulnerability of tribal peoples. The first is that those, like the Jarawa, who have had little contact with the global community simply have immune systems that have never been primed. Kevin Paterson, a Canadian doctor, notes that during the 1918 Spanish flu, 8.5 per cent of American Indians died, but among the more isolated Inuit in Nome, Alaska, the toll was 55 per cent. In Hebron, Labrador, 5,000km to the east, 150 out of 220 Innu were killed. Yet the global fatality rate for Spanish flu was just 2.5 per cent.

The other hypothesis applies to those indigenous populations that live on the fringes of Western society, such as the Cree of St Theresa Point and the Aborigines on Palm Island. For them, the problem is poverty, poor general health and crowded living conditions. “We have in excess of 15 people living in a three-bedroom home, which you wouldn’t find in mainstream communities,” said Alf Lacey, the mayor of Palm Island. Although Tamiflu was available, many islanders were unaware of it because they are unable to read.

“Influenza has a cure,” said Dr Paterson. “It’s called affluence.”

By Paul Rodgers and Smitha Mundasad

Sunday, 16 May 2010

The spectre of plague stalked the world last year with its constant companion, fear. Schools and stadiums were closed in Mexico, tourists from Egypt to Singapore were quarantined, and the surgical mask became a universal fashion accessory across Asia. Yet predictions that the global death toll from swine flu could reach 7.5 million were well off the mark. At most, the virus killed 14,000 people, and some of those had pre-existing conditions or had been infected by other dangerous bugs as well. Against a background death toll from seasonal flu of up to 500,000, the new H1N1 strain was invisible.

Professor Ulrich Keil, a World Health Organisation (WHO) adviser on heart disease, said the decision to declare a pandemic had led to a “gigantic misallocation” of health budgets. “We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,” he told the Council of Europe. Yet governments “instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak”.

The suspicion that the response to the outbreak was an unnecessary panic has been spreading since the virus slipped from the front pages. Even the WHO, the UN body that first punched the big red button, may be having doubts. An external committee has been set up to review its reaction and will deliver an interim report this week, though at the moment no bombshells are expected.

The WHO faces two main charges. The first is that between the first cases of H1N1 being reported in March and the declaration of a full, phase 6 pandemic by its director-general, Dr Margaret Chan, in June, the organisation changed its definition of a pandemic. Critics say the old definition required that a virus result in “enormous numbers of deaths and illness”. The new definition applies only if the virus is new, if it spreads easily between people, and if the population has little or no immunity to it. A bug that causes a mild case of the sniffles could qualify.

A spokesman for the organisation insists there has been no change at all – that the old definition was an error on a single web page about bird flu, the last great influenza scare. But Peter Doshi, a doctoral candidate at MIT whose thesis is on science, politics and influenza policy, argued in a paper in the British Medical Journal in September that the old definition had been widely applied by the WHO since at least 2003.

The second charge, prominently made by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the former head of health at the Council of Europe, is that the WHO is unduly influenced by the drugs industry, which stood to make a fortune from selling anti-virals and vaccines. The Swiss giant Novartis, for example, saw its profits jump by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year to $2.95bn, much of it from delivering swine flu vaccines ordered last year. Debate rages over allegations that some experts who recommended the pandemic be declared, have links to drugs companies, although this has been denied. But critics note that it’s hard to become an expert in the field without having some funding from big pharmaceutical companies.

Others say that the problem is due to the spread of false assumptions. Most people think, for example, that when they have flu symptoms they must have influenza. But Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the evidence for various medical treatments, notes that more than 200 agents can cause flu-like illnesses. Only 7.5 to 15 per cent of cases are actually influenza. Anti-viral drugs and vaccines are aimed just at this group. “To stop one new case of H1N1, you’d have to inoculate 100 people,” says Dr Jefferson “or you could get four people to wash their hands.” Masks work too, he says, and so does sending people home from work if they have symptoms.

The usual justification for the massive response to H1N1 is that no one wants a repeat of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people. But scientists are not even sure if that plague was caused by influenza at all. The virus was not discovered until 1933. And outbreaks since then have been much milder.

The last time H1N1 showed up was in 1976, at a US army base. Washington ordered the immunisation of 40 million Americans before it discovered that it had only one death from the flu but hundreds of cases of severe side-effects to the vaccine. A review headed by Dr Harvey Fineberg put much of the blame on the “influenza fraternity”, arguing that expert panels tend towards “group think” and should be backed up by independent scientific advice. Dr Fineberg is now chairman of the WHO’s external committee evaluating its response to the 2009 outbreak whose final report next May could well lead to a radical rethink of the world’s reaction to new viruses.

Sunday, 22 August 2010

BHP Billiton, the $200bn mining company, will tomorrow find itself in the middle of a massive geopolitical independence row due to its hostile takeover of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan.

Marius Kloppers, the chief executive of FTSE 100 stalwart BHP, is taking a $39bn offer for Canadian fertilizer giant PotashCorp directly to shareholders after its board dismissed the amount as “grossly inadequate”.

However, the deal is set to get even uglier due to PotashCorp’s relationship with Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco’s state phosphates company. OCP is estimated to supply around 500,000 tonnes of phosphates to PotashCorp.

The Sahrawi people have long fought for the independence of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and have accused PotashCorp of propping up an “illegal regime” by importing so much phosphate. Three vessels filled with phosphates are understood to have sailed to PotashCorp facilities so far this year.

In a letter to William Doyle, the PotashCorp president and chief executive, dated 1 October 2008, Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW), an activist group, said: “We urge you to demonstrate your attachment to international legality, human rights and basic standards of corporate social responsibility by reconsidering your involvement in shipping phosphate of Western Sahara origin.”

WSRW’s international co-ordinator, Sara Eyckmans, said that the group will write to BHP’s management and shareholders tomorrow. “Given the urgency of the situation, we need to get our case in on Monday,” Ms Eyckmans said. “If BHP does take over the company, we do not see how it could help its corporate responsibility profile [unless it stopped trading in Western Sahara]. We will tell management about our concerns. To the shareholders, we will highlight that we are in close dialogue with ethical investors around the world.”

Ms Eyckmans added that the group had raised its concerns to PotashCorp several times in recent years but had not received a response. A spokesman for the company said that it had replied on each occasion.

WSRW’s claim of influence with ethical investors has some weight; €32.5bn Norwegian life insurer and investor Kommunal Landspensjonskasse blacklisted PotashCorp for purchasing phosphate from Western Sahara.

BHP’s offer for the potash and phosphate group is one of three big deals last week that electrified the City, which has been starved of major acquisitions since the credit crunch began to bite. FTSE 100 group Cairn Energy agreed to sell a 51 per cent stake in its Indian operations to miner Vedanta and Korea National Oil went hostile with a £1.9bn bid for Dana Petroleum.

Remarkably, despite the enormity of BHP’s offer, the group’s huge market value means that it does not cross the percentage threshold that would force the mining colossus to get the deal approved by shareholders.

However, Mr Kloppers is expected to outline the rationale of the takeover to analysts following BHP’s full-year results on Wednesday. Cairn and Dana release first-half figures on Tuesday and Friday respectively.

Sunday, 26 September 2010

Australia’s Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent’s fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.

The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.

It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year’s infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: “South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered.”

A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.

Though locusts move slowly when the sun’s up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. “A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them,” said Professor Sword.

All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.

Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.

Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. “Swarms are like lifeboats,” he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. “If you’re the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you’ve got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch.”

Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.

And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.

The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. “They were here long before humans arrived,” he said.

Sunday, 12 September 2010

The acrobat was performing the Spanish web, winding down from the ceiling on a red ribbon in a move many Britons will remember from an advert promoting BBC1. But the people clustered around the stage weren’t watching Berlin’s Cosmic Artists directly. Instead, they peered through special spectacles at TV screens showing the action live in 3D.

The giants of the television hardware business, Samsung, Sony, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic, were all pushing stereoscopic screens (and accompanying goggles) at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin last week. Panasonic, for example, featured not only the live acrobats, but 3D clips from the Blue Man Group, Universal’s Despicable Me, a promo for the London Olympics, and, on a more high-brow note, a trailer for the forthcoming Wim Wenders film about the late dancer Pina Bausch.

Crucially, after Avatar’s success, film-makers and broadcasters are piling into the technology. A flurry of films including Alice in Wonderland, Shrek Forever After and Toy Story 3 followed the sci-fi blockbuster. And as Sky says of its new channel, due in homes before Christmas: “3D is the next revolution in television.”

The new technology is not just for content professionals, either. Panasonic’s headline-grabbing gadget this year is a 3D home camcorder – a world first – for under €1,500 (£1,250). Wedding videos will never be the same.

But a bigger contributor to the Osaka company’s bottom line will be the one million 3D sets it expects to sell. “It’s like the switch to colour,” says Panasonic’s president, Fumio Ohtsubo. “Once they’ve tried colour, no one wants to go back to monochrome. When you compare it with the pleasure of 3D, the inconvenience of wearing glasses is next to nothing.”

In a Spartan conference room above one of the vast exhibition halls at Berlin’s Messe complex, Mr Ohtsubo is holding forth in Japanese, his voice soft and his demeanour calm. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt with a white collar and two small badges on his jacket lapel: one says simply “Panasonic”, the other is a green leaf with the slogan “Eco ideas”. And there-in lies a contradiction. For while Panasonic’s marketeers are focused on television’s latest magic, Mr Ohtsubo wants to talk about a less sexy product – batteries.

Like companies from Marks and Spencer to Shell, Panasonic has an environmental plan, in this case called GT12 (Green Transformation 2012). “We want to bring everything under the eco umbrella,” he says.

Central to that plan is Panasonic’s 100 per cent takeover of its home-town rival, Sanyo, launched this summer after it bought a 50.2 per cent stake for £2.8bn last December. The attraction, says Mr Ohtsubo, is not Sanyo’s wide range of consumer products, from mobile phones and (2D) television sets to refrigerators and washing machines. Instead, the allure is its expertise in alternative energy generation – particularly solar power – and storage, a low-profile field that he believes has huge potential. “Even without subsidies, we think the solar business will grow,” he says.

The company that is now Panasonic was founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita, his 22-year-old wife, Mumeno, and her brother, Toshio Iue, 15. Its first product was an improved light-bulb socket. Nearly 30 years later, while Japan was occupied by US forces, Mr Iue borrowed a disused Matsushita factory and began to manufacture bicycle lamps. His business later became Sanyo.

So was Panasonic’s acquisition a fraternal rescue or a predatory pounce on a weakened rival? Sanyo has been plagued with bad luck for the past decade. First it got caught selling under-powered solar cells in the subsidised Japanese market. Then, in 2004, a devastating earthquake crippled its semiconductor plant in Niigata plunging it into a financial crisis. A ¥300bn (£2.3bn at today’s exchange rates) restructuring in 2006 left its banks holding five out of nine board seats.

Even the company’s battery division was not immune. In 2006, shortly after the collapse of a proposed joint venture with Nokia to make handsets, it recalled 1.3 million mobile phone batteries when they demonstrated a tendency to overheat. Efforts to sell the semiconductor division were abandoned in 2007 after the credit crunch hit. Mr Iue’s son, Satoshi, stepped down as chairman for personal reasons in March that year and the grandson of the founder, Toshimasa, resigned as president in April.

By then, Sanyo was embroiled in a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation (since settled) for allegedly failing to report a $1bn loss. By November 2008, Sanyo’s new president, Seiichiro Sano, was in talks with Mr Ohtsubo.

There are several possible explanations for Mr Ohtsubo’s dedication to greenery and interest in Sanyo. Cynics might argue that it’s just greenwash. But the price he’s paying for his rival, though well below peak, is far too much if all he wants is a lick of green paint to satisfy investors on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Another explanation is that Mr Ohtsubo has spotted, or thinks he’s spotted, a genuine growth market and is seizing the opportunity. If so, he’s got nerves of steel, because this is a huge gamble. Solar power installations are not profitable without subsidy, and in tough economic times, government handouts are vulnerable. Spain, Europe’s solar power leader, cut its photovoltaic subsidy – worth €3bn (£2.5bn) last year – by up to 45 per cent this summer amid howls from the industry.

Rechargeable batteries, where Panasonic-Sanyo now leads the world, with 43 per cent of the market, is also a long-range bet. The company likes to show off the battery packs it makes for hybrid cars. But while it’s true that hybrid market share is growing fast, it’s doing so from a low base, 3 per cent in Europe last year. This is a market driven by the desire of some people to “do something” about the environment rather than by calculated self interest. The sales growth could have a low ceiling.

To succeed in either of these fields, Panasonic will have to improve its technical performance. This, it seems, is Mr Ohtsubo’s strategy. “There’s a lot more we can do to improve our technology in order to increase capacity and speed up charging time,” he says. “Everyone knows petrol will be replaced by electricity.”

What nobody knows, though, is how quickly this will happen. The tipping point will come when electric cars undercut the price of those with internal combustion engines. And that will depend not only on Panasonic’s technology but on innovation by car makers and how long supplies of cheap oil last.

Initially, investors took a dim view of Mr Ohtsubo’s decision to buy Sanyo and another part-owned energy subsidiary outright in an ¥800bn deal. The move sent Panasonic shares tumbling 11 per cent. And the firm had only just pulled out of a two-year slump.

But the buy-out did make sense to some analysts. “Panasonic faces fierce competition from Samsung and Sony in consumer electronics,” Yuji Fujimori of Barclays Capital in Tokyo told Bloomberg at the time. “Its rivals are not as competitive in the energy-related products and household-electrics systems that Panasonic aims to strengthen.”

Oddly, Mr Ohtsubo does not justify the acquisition by pointing to juicy profits so much as matters of principle. “A company is only viable when it is useful to society,” he says. “Each company has a role to play, and the role Panasonic should play is to cope with the most important issues of the time. At the global level, that’s how human beings can co-exist with the environment.”

At Panasonic, the idea that the company has a higher social purpose was being taught to employees long before Western management gurus invented CSR. “At the base of our vision is the principle and philosophy of our founder,” says Mr Ohtsubo.

That principle was set out in 1932 in an address by Mr Matsushita to his assembled employees: “Our mission as a manufacturer is to create material abundance by providing goods as plentifully and inexpensively as tap water,” he said. “This is how we can banish poverty, bring happiness to people’s lives, and make this world a better place.”

And nearly 80 years later, Mr Ohtsubo is eager to take up the challenge. “We have so many things to do,” he says. “This is giving us much pleasure.”