Phone Hacking

Amidst the welter of mainstream news regarding phone hacking and dodgy behaviour by the British press I chip with a certain reluctance. Phone hacking suggests some technology wizardry and invokes some imagery of a bored but brilliant teanager exercising huge technical skill. In fact 'caller ID spoofing,' the technique probably used here, is relatively simple and involves calling the voice mail message centre from a phone with a caller ID that appears to be the same as the number of the victims phone.

Caller ID is the feature that allows you to see who an incoming call is coming from.  A number of companies exist which offer a caller ID spoofing service. To use a Caller ID spoofing service, customers pay in advance for a PIN, allowing them to make a call for a certain amount of time. Customers dial the number given to them by the company and enter their PIN. Then they enter the number they wish to call.
https://www.telespoof.com/
To access someone else's voicemail, which happened in the Dowler case, the number to call is the number of the voicemail service of the victims cellphone service provider. They must enter the number they wish to appear as the Caller ID as the number of the victims phone. When the call connects to the voicemail service the system uses the caller ID number to connect the call to the correct mailbox. Sometimes a PIN code will be also needed but these are often not used or will be 0000 or 1234 or some other easily guessed number. 
Then, when the hacker is into the voicemail system 'as the victim', can he replay or even delete the victims messages. 
Caller_ID_spoofing - Wiki
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2006/08/paris_hilton_ma/
The fact that this was happening became obvious to Britain's Prince William when he got onto his own voicemail and discovered messages tagged as SAVED MESSAGES that he'd not heard before. Someone else had been into his voice mail and replayed them first, while they were still NEW MESSAGES. This ought to be something of a give away for even the slowest Inspector Plod but even where Royal security was concerned the police have been reluctant to persue the matter.
In the case of the murdered school girl, Milly Dowler, her voice mail message was hacked into repeatedly and the messages of family and friends, desperate to get in contact with her, became news. The individuals involved in hacking were perhaps being paid on a message by message basis and finally when the voice mail was full and no new messages could be stored the hackers took it upon themselves to delete old messages to make room for new ones. By this stage not even Plod of the Yard could ignore the fact that unathorised people were accessing private messages and interfering with a murder investigation. 
Now, it seems, this 'revelation' has brought down one of Britains oldest popular tabloids. Big deal, there's plenty more bildzeitung keen to take over from the NOTW. Rebecca Brooks, CEO of the NOTW, is still claiming to have known nothing about it. Journalist on the NOTW claim that even the office cat knew about the phone hacking. What a disaster, and what a piss poor show by the police.

Sir Harold Ridley

It seems that I have a cataract. A few weeks ago I realised that the vision in my right eye was rather blurred, a visit to the optical shop showed no improvement with various lenses. A visit to the local eye doctor brought forth a, "I have good news and bad news." (I'm not sure if all German optical specialist favour Pythonesque humour but mine did.) A cataract is the condition where the normally clear natural lens of the eye becomes opaque. The modern treatment calls for the removal of the old lens and replacement with an implant.

Cataract treatment is one of the oldest surgical treatments devised and dates back to, amazingly, the 6th century BC. (Descriptions of this early treatment are not for the sqeamish.) At the time, with no possibility of vision enhancement using glasses, the utility of the treatment was dubious. Later, when eyeglasses became available, around the 1700s, the improvements in vision made the surgery more useful although the correcting spectacle lenses needed had many shortcomings.

It was work of an Englishman,Sir Harold Ridley who pioneered the use of lens implants. It was known from wartime experience that shards of Perspex, the transparent plastic used in aircraft canopies, could be buried in the body for years without being rejected. Ridley devised a Perspex lens replacement. (He worked with an optician, John Pike, of Rayners the lens makers, and a chemist, Dr John Holt, of ICI)  Other colleagues devised ways of sterilising the plastic lens.

The first lens was implanted in 1949. At the time  prosthetic surgery was almost unknown. Now we have a whole global industry built around eye surgery alone. It's remarkable to note that all the initial development and risk was taken on privately by Ridley and his colleagues and played down because of the revolutionary nature of the work.

This pioneering work met with considerable resistance within the establishment of British optical surgeons. Sir Stewart Duke Elder, who had appointed Harold to Moorfield's eye hospital before the war, had already fallen out with him. Harold was a highly skilled surgeon and after doing good surgical work on combat casualties during the Battle of Britain was banished, by Duke Elder, to Ghana. Harold was initially disapointed by this as Ghana was well outside the expected combat area where he thought he could be most usefully employed. But banishment to this backwater didn't stop Harold Ridley working. In Ghana he researched various causes of blindness and with colleagues made great progress on river blindness which was a huge problem in there.

After the war, and Harold's groundbreaking work on lens implant surgery, Duke Elder was still set against him. As a result ocular implant surgery gained quicker acceptance in US, and elsewhere, than in the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, Harold continued with other developments and pioneered the use of electronic television systems to image the eye, initially in black and white and in 1950 using one of the first colour TV systems in Britain.

In spite of his pioneering work Harold was not knighted until he was over 90, long after the demise of Duke Elder. And then only thanks to former colleagues and students and the intervention of Hilary Clinton and Cherie Blair. Finally, Sir Harold was properly honoured within his own lifetime. It seems that the influence of the enemy he had made at the start of his career, Sir Stewart Duke Elder, who had also been the Queen's eye surgeon, had lasted a long time.

I'm to have my cataract operation on the 18th of July. More on this later.