September 8, 2012

Cops with debts may be fired

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:45 pm

Being in debt is a valid reason to be fired as a police officer, a court has ruled.

The Centrale Raad van Beroep, an appeals court for civil servants, came to this conclusion in the case of a police man with ‘many debts’, as NOS Nieuws puts it. He had been reprimanded in 2005, and when that did not work he was fired in 2009.

The court argued that officers with access to all kinds of databases open themselves up to blackmail, which makes them a greater security risk. Police officers are therefore expected to live up to higher standards.

In the Netherlands jobs are protected. You can only fire an employee through the courts, unless there is a strong reason for immediate dismissal.

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September 3, 2012

Red heads break world record in Breda

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:03 pm

The biggest gathering of red heads in the world took place in Breda yesterday, netting the city on Noord-Brabant a fresh mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

Some 5,000 gingers from over 60 countries descended upon the city for its annual Red Head Day. To break the old record of most natural red heads gathered in a single enclosed space, Breda had to collect more than 892 of them. In the end 1,255 red haired people did the job. The old record was established in 2010.

Brabant’s cities seem to like these record attempts. In 2007 Tilburg set the world fire breathing record, and later that same Breda set the record for cola fountains.

RTL Nieuws has a couple of photos of the event.

(Link: De Stentor. Photo of last years visitors by Eddy Van 3000, some rights reserved)

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September 2, 2012

Dutch Rail abused privacy ‘anonymous’ transport card users, and more

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:27 pm

Dutch Rail is on a roll. Last Tuesday Webwereld reported that the state-owned monopolist has been sending spam to the users of the ‘anonymous’ version of the OV-chipkaart, the troubled Dutch transport card.

According to the tech news site, users of the anonymous card, with which you can pay for travel across modes and providers, had to give Dutch Rail their e-mail address in order to be able to travel with the company—presumably so that Dutch rail could differentiate between first and second class. Dutch Rail would then, however, abuse those addresses by inundating them with spam.

Earlier Dutch Rail was fined 125,000 euro by the Dutch privacy authority CBP for storing sensitive data about student travellers for too long.

It has not been a good week for Dutch Rail. Yesterday De Volkskrant reported that the company has been evading taxes by buying trains using a subsidiary in Ireland. The subsidiary would then leases those trains to the Dutch parent company. Train companies pay 9% in taxes in Ireland, but 25% in the Netherlands.

Par for the course for big business, you say? That may be true, but Dutch Rail is owned by the government. Basically, this is the example the Dutch state is setting to all tax payers. To make matters worse, Dutch Rail has a monopoly on all the juicy routes in the country. Other transport companies are allowed to run trains in the country, but only in areas that are not as profitable.

Suffice it to say that politicians were not happy, with for example PvdA (Labour) leader Diederik Samson calling Dutch Rails’ tactics ‘wrong’ and an example of ‘a lack of morals’. It is unclear to me whether politicians are upset because of Dutch Rails’ behaviour, or because their baby got caught red-handed.

(Photo by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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September 1, 2012

Money bra wins HEMA design award

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 11:17 am

A student at the Delft University of Technology has won the audience award of a design competition held every year by Dutch department chain store HEMA.

Hiske Elferink designed a brassiere that contains a small wallet which can hold some change, a bank card and perhaps a key. She told Radio Netherlands (see the interview below) that she got the idea because when she goes clubbing, she puts her bank notes in her bra. The problem arises when you get change, because coins will slide down and jangle.

A quick Google taught me that this is not the first money bra.

The professional jury did not award a first prize this year. The winners and runners-up will be on display at the public library of Amsterdam (OBA) until October 31.

HEMA organises a yearly design competition for students. In the past, several of the winners and runners-up have made it into the store’s inventory, such as the 103% Vase, a vase that had a little side vase for the inevitable broken flower.

See also:

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August 30, 2012

Mural in Amsterdam honours Dutch paralympians

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 7:32 pm

This mural by the brothers Stein and Wessel Koning honours the Dutch athletes currently participating in the Paralympic Games in London.

It depicts archer Johan Wildeboer, runner and long jumper Suzan Verduijn, runner Marlou van Rhijn, football player Dennis Straatman and tennis player Jiske Griffioen. The mural is an initiative of Marc de Hond, himself a disabled basketball player who failed to qualify for the games.

Originally this wall, just off the Amsterdamse Bos, contained a mural by the De Koning brothers depicting athletes from the regular Olympics, but it was defaced by vandals.

(Link: dichtbij.nl)

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August 27, 2012

Rijksmuseum purposely misspells name in new logo

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 11:32 am

The new logo and the old logo.

Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the home of many a Dutch master, has presented its new logo.

Oddly enough, the name is spelled “Rijks museum”, which is not correct according to the official Dutch spelling. As one commenter at Bright asked, who is Rijk and why does he have his own museum?

The designer, Irma Boom, explains that the space is on purpose: “Everybody is already using Rijks as a pet name for the museum”—her spelling merely codifies and pays homage to that practice.

Bright also links to a profile about Boom which is a must-watch for its opening sentence alone, “I hate hand-made books”, which runs completely counter to today’s idolization of all things artisanal.

Meldpunt Spatiegebruik, which collects examples of the misuse of spaces in compound words, writes: “Never have I received so many reports about a single space within half a day. But the Rijksmuseum belongs to all of us, so you can’t touch it.”

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August 26, 2012

Japanese fan mail for Florentijn Hofman

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 9:50 am

Rotterdam-based artist Florentijn Hofman, him of the huge rubber duckies and city square hugging plush toys, received a letter the other day:

Hello! I’m Zozi, your fan in Japan. When the Rubber Ducks appeared at Onomichi, I was so amazed at them. I like the Rubber Duck that you’ve designed, so I made this movie.

It is a nice video. Please watch it past the first minute and a half, to see the videographer bend reality.

(Illustration: screenshot of the video. Video: Youtube / zozi009.)

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August 25, 2012

The least safe PIN is 2580

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 1:04 pm

Two students of the Eindhoven University of Technology have discovered that the least safe code for your bank card (PIN) is 2580.

They did this by estimating which hand movements are easiest to observe, then calculating the amount of fits for each series of movements. The PIN 2580 on a grid that consists of the rows 123, 456, 789 and x0x requires a continuous downward motion of the hand, and is the only code possible for that series of movements. A bad actor should be able to guess that PIN 100% of the time.

Eindhoven Dichtbij reports that 292 codes can be guessed in three goes after observing hand movements. This also produces a 100% success rate, assuming the bad actors get three attempts before access is blocked. Codes that are relatively safe require lots of back and forth movements. The code 1959 belongs to the same set of hand movements as 105 other PINs.

I wonder if making fake movements would help against PIN thieves?

The students, Anne Eggels and Aukje Boef, also considered other ways of hacking PINs:

  • Dabbing the keys in salts, and measuring which salts were gone after use of the keypad—especially useful for PINs in which the same key is used more than once.*
  • Camera surveillance.
  • Observing wear and tear of keys—useful in locations where the same PIN is shared my most users, such as nursing home wards.

Aukje Boef has a telling name by the way, as her last name means ‘crook’ in Dutch.

Update: found an article from last year that claims 2580 is the third most used PIN.

*) This is an old trick that I was aware of. To this day paranoid me wipes all keys with his fingers after entering a code.

(Photo by Flickr user Redspotted, some rights reserved. Link: Bright.)

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August 20, 2012

Goat Riders of 18th century Limburg

Filed under: History,Weird by Branko Collin @ 5:11 pm

The legend of the Bokkenrijders (‘Goat riders’) from Limburg knows many forms. Crossroads Magazine poured one of them in an essay in 2008, contrasting the popular form quoted below with the opinion that the Goat Riders were a precursor to the enlightenment.

In the 18th century, while most of Europe was shaking off centuries of superstition and beginning to prepare for the age of reason, the lands which now form the Dutch and Belgian regions of Limburg were terrorised by hordes of flying devil worshippers.

These mysterious robber bands met in caves or at isolated roadside chapels. Riding through the nightly sky on the backs of big black goats, they plundered farms and churches. The Goat Rider owned the night throughout most of the 18th century, until they were finally brought to justice by brave and god-fearing officers of the law. This is a story that practically everyone in Limburg knows to this very day.

And:

If one thing is clear about the Goat Rider, it is the fact that a great number of people must have met violent, degrading deaths while being completely innocent of any crime. Indeed it is quite likely that the Goat Rider’s bands as such never even existed outside of the human imagination.

Via Metafilter. I cannot believe I’ve never blogged about the goat riders before.

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Jackdaw rules Dutch cities

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 11:22 am

The jackdaw (kauw in Dutch) is the most common city bird in the Netherlands, AD reports.

A census held by Sovon shows that of the 375,000 birds counted, 49,000 are jackdaws. Other popular city birds are the blackbird, the wood pigeon, the sparrow and the swift.

The jackdaw population has increased by 15% since 2006, but is only slowly on the rise. In the same timeframe, the Canada Goose has seen an increase of 372%, the stork of 201% and the gadwall of 146%. These are, however, relatively rare birds.

Birds that are rapidly disappearing from cities include the starling (obviously nobody counted birds in front of my favourite seafood store in Amsterdam neighbourhood De Pijp for this one), the robin and the great cormorant, my favourite. Because cormorants need to dive deep for fish, they allow their feathers to get wet. When they sit on lamp posts and in trees, spreading their wings to dry, they look like angels watching over the living.

In Europe, jackdaws are the smallest of the ‘true crows’. You can tell them apart from crows because jackdaws have a shiny, silverish head. They can be domesticated, and indeed we kept one when I was a kid, although keeping them is no longer legal these days. Ours was called Jacky, obviously!

(Photo by Kalle Gustafsson, some rights reserved)

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