Declare a No Ball when a batsman attempts an early run

Girish Menon from CamKerala CC

David Hopps in his piece, 'Is the game going to the dogs' suggests that Stuart Broad in the forthcoming World T20 should without warning 'mankad' Kohli and Raina off successive balls. This is his way of reminding us of the role of convention and civilised behaviour in cricket and he implies that in its absence anarchy would prevail.

So, I decided to look up the meaning of convention on the omniscient Google and found that one of the meanings of convention is 'a way in which something is done'. I think it is this definition of convention that Hopps uses to criticise Keemo Paul for mankading Richard Ngarava in the U19 World Cup.

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I then asked myself what would be at the other end of the spectrum of convention and I felt the term 'creativity' would fit the bill. Google defines creativity as ' the use of imagination or original ideas to create something'.  When Keemo's act is examined from this perspective it is a creative act, not illegal, and an imaginative way to reach the objectives of his task.

In the history of the world, not just cricket, whenever any creative solution is implemented, affected governments would debate and proscribe such activity if it was not in the 'public' interest. In the case of 'mankading' such an inquiry has been conducted by the ICC and the act has still been deemed legal, hence the furore baffles me.

Hopps felt that it was newcomers who failed fail to honour cricket's conventions. So I asked myself, two questions:

'Is it newcomers to cricket who disrespect its conventions'?

and

 'Are conventions in the best interests of all participants?'

In the case of Keemo Paul, yes he is definitely a newcomer to cricket, so probably was the original sinner Vinoo Mankad and the other mankaders in between. I suppose these guys may have read about the laws of cricket and how the umpire's decision should not be questioned. As they plotted to get the opposing batsmen out, a difficult task at the best of times, they may have noticed this anomaly between the law and its actual practice. Being young and innocent they may have focussed on their objectives and failed to realise the opprobrium that will befall them if they challenged cricket's archaic anomalies.

So who makes conventions? A historical examination of societies will reveal that conventions and practices evolve out of the systems devised by the powerful. A history of cricket also reveals that it's rules and conventions were determined by upper class batsmen epitomised by the roguish W G Grace. The bowlers were the proverbial servants meant to exist for the pleasure of batsmen. It is these servants, like the erstwhile British colonies, who now challenge the prevalent conventions albeit legally in the case of the mankaders.

Hopps then gives an example of queue jumping to illustrate the catastrophe that will befall mankind if any convention is broken. Yes, the effects of queue jumping has created havoc in India and probably other erstwhile British colonies. Yet, as any economics student will tell you the problem with a queue is that it does not ration a scarce resource based on greatest need. If the A&E departments of NHS hospitals worked on the convention of queues then a Friday night over-reveller would have priority over a critical patient and an ambulance would be perennially stuck in traffic.



© PA Photos

Returning to mankading, I believe that cricket's current convention enable non striking batsmen to cheat wilfully throughout an innings and it is time for conventions keep in tandem with the laws of the game? I actually even have a solution for the mankading problem. Declare a no ball* and penalise the batting side every time a non striker steps out of the crease illegally. This could be done by the third umpire while the on field umpire focuses on the bowler's actions.



* This no ball means a one run penalty and a ball reduced from the batting side's quota.

How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

What began as a means of retaining individual freedom can now be used by smaller states to fend off the ambitions of larger ones

• 
• • Julian Assange
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 July 2013 12.45 BST

'Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by China. Will the internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century?' Photograph: Mao Siqian/Corbis

The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians. I was from a different tradition but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography was our secret weapon. It has been forgotten how subversive this was. Cryptography was then the exclusive property of states, for use in their various wars. By writing our own software and disseminating it far and wide we liberated cryptography, democratised it and spread it through the frontiers of the new internet.

The resulting crackdown, under various "arms trafficking" laws, failed. Cryptography became standardised in web browsers and other software that people now use on a daily basis. Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression. That is the message in my book, Cypherpunks. But the movement for the universal availability of strong cryptography must be made to do more than this. Our future does not lie in the liberty of individuals alone.

Our work in WikiLeaks imparts a keen understanding of the dynamics of the international order and the logic of empire. During WikiLeaks' rise we have seen evidence of small countries bullied and dominated by larger ones or infiltrated by foreign enterprise and made to act against themselves. We have seen the popular will denied expression, elections bought and sold, and the riches of countries such as Kenya stolen and auctioned off to plutocrats in London and New York.

The struggle for Latin American self-determination is important for many more people than live in Latin America, because it shows the rest of the world that it can be done. But Latin American independence is still in its infancy. Attempts at subversion of Latin American democracy are still happening, including most recently in Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador and Venezuela.

This is why the message of the cypherpunks is of special importance to Latin American audiences. Mass surveillance is not just an issue for democracy and governance – it's a geopolitical issue. The surveillance of a whole population by a foreign power naturally threatens sovereignty. Intervention after intervention in the affairs of Latin American democracy have taught us to be realistic. We know that the old powers will still exploit any advantage to delay or suppress the outbreak of Latin American independence.

Consider simple geography. Everyone knows oil resources drive global geopolitics. The flow of oil determines who is dominant, who is invaded, and who is ostracised from the global community. Physical control over even a segment of an oil pipeline yields great geopolitical power. Governments in this position can extract huge concessions. In a stroke, the Kremlin can sentence eastern Europe and Germany to a winter without heat. And even the prospect of Tehran running a pipeline eastwards to India and China is a pretext for bellicose logic from Washington.

But the new great game is not the war for oil pipelines. It is the war for information pipelines: the control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland. The new global treasure is control over the giant data flows that connect whole continents and civlisations, linking the communications of billions of people and organisations.

It is no secret that, on the internet and on the phone, all roads to and from Latin America lead through the United States. Internet infrastructure directs 99% of the traffic to and from South America over fibre-optic lines that physically traverse US borders. The US government has shown no scruples about breaking its own law to tap into these lines and spy on its own citizens. There are no such laws against spying on foreign citizens. Every day, hundreds of millions of messages from the entire Latin American continent are devoured by US spy agencies, and stored forever in warehouses the size of small cities. The geographical facts about the infrastructure of the internet therefore have consequences for the independence and sovereignty of Latin America.

The problem also transcends geography. Many Latin American governments and militaries secure their secrets with cryptographic hardware. These are boxes and software that scramble messages and then unscramble them on the other end. Governments purchase them to keep their secrets secret – often at great expense to the people – because they are correctly afraid of interception of their communications.

But the companies who sell these expensive devices enjoy close ties with the US intelligence community. Their CEOs and senior employees are often mathematicians and engineers from the NSA capitalising on the inventions they created for the surveillance state. Their devices are often deliberately broken: broken with a purpose. It doesn't matter who is using them or how they are used – US agencies can still unscramble the signal and read the messages.

These devices are sold to Latin American and other countries as a way to protect their secrets but they are really a way of stealing secrets.

Meanwhile, the United States is accelerating the next great arms race. The discoveries of the Stuxnet virus – and then the Duqu and Flame viruses – herald a new era of highly complex weaponised software made by powerful states to attack weaker states. Their aggressive first-strike use on Iran is determined to undermine Iranian efforts at national sovereignty, a prospect that is anathema to US and Israeli interests in the region.

Once upon a time the use of computer viruses as offensive weapons was a plot device in science fiction novels. Now it is a global reality spurred on by the reckless behaviour of the Barack Obama administration in violation of international law. Other states will now follow suit, enhancing their offensive capacity to catch up.

The United States is not the only culprit. In recent years, the internet infrastructure of countries such as Uganda has been enriched by direct Chinese investment. Hefty loans are doled out in return for African contracts to Chinese companies to build internet backbone infrastructure linking schools, government ministries and communities into the global fibre-optic system.

Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by an aspirant foreign superpower. Will the African internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century? Is Africa once again becoming a theatre for confrontation between the global powers?

These are just some of the important ways in which the message of the cypherpunks goes beyond the struggle for individual liberty. Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.

Old Conservative Values

Norman Tebbit in The Telegraph

It is all too easy for a blogger to respond a bit too much to the headlines of the day, so every now and again I think it useful to stand back and look at some long-term trends.


David Cameron used to speak about Britain's broken society, and even Ed Miliband makes socialist noises about society from time to time. The Lib Dems concede, too, that there are some deep-rooted problems facing any government which could not be solved by handing everything over to Brussels.
I know well enough that as a man of eighty years, if I say that many things were better in our society when I was young, those who never knew those years will condemn me as an addled old fool living in the past. Should I suggest that if a new way of organising things is clearly not working, and we might revert to the old way which did, some of the “all change is for the better” brigade will denounce me as a mindless reactionary incapable of progressive thought.

Yet the essence of Darwinism is not just that the new shall replace the old. The species that makes the wrong change in response to a changed environment suffers the same fate as that which does not change at all. For all that, there are a good many successful species which have scarcely changed at all for many millions of years.

In our human case the right approach must be the classical conservative approach. That is, when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. In recent years we have had too much gratuitous change, which has relentlessly divorced the consequences of actions from those actions themselves.

This has happened at all levels of human conduct.

Being fat used generally to be caused by eating too much. Nowadays obesity is generally a medical condition or an “epidemic”. Stealing from shops used to be theft. These days it is at worst shoplifting or a civil offence, or “a cry for help”. Sometimes no doubt it is a cry for help… but not all the time.

As we saw last summer, a crowd smashing into a shop, taking the stock and setting fire to the building may these days no longer be breaking and entering, conspiring to commit theft, violent disorder and arson so much as making “a political statement”.

Despite a rising level of expenditure on education we face a rising tide of illiteracy, innumeracy, and ignorance of science and history amongst school-leavers. Could it be that the cult of child-centred education is a failure? When bright pupils are held back less, the slow ones will follow – because they won't want to be left far behind. More to the point, if we're not stretching bright pupils in the classroom, they'll find some extracurricular activity (perhaps gang leadership) at which to excel anyway.

Why, we might well ask (as Duncan Smith has done), do we have these days hereditary unemployment in families where for two or three generations no one has ever been gainfully and legally employed?

Is it possible that we have constructed a world full of perverse incentives in which it is often the case that immediate gratification, even if not long-term benefit, is most easily achieved by anti-social behaviour? If so, might it not be a good idea to think about reverting to past ways of dealing with such things. After all, was a classroom in which corporal punishment was available, but in my experience seldom used, better or worse than one in which teachers may be physically attacked and teaching takes second place to just keeping a semblance of order?

Nor are such thoughts confined to the behaviour of the financially or socially disadvantaged. The excesses of bankers might have been more quickly changed for the better had rather more of them faced the criminal justice system. Nor can politicians escape their responsibility for creating a belief that the answer to the question, “should I do this?” is no more than “yes, if I can I get away with it”.

Perhaps my views are shaped not just by growing up in rather hard times, but by my profession as a pilot. We aviators learned the inexorable laws of aerodynamics and of the frequently fatal consequences of the pretence that they could be scoffed at, ignored, or changed. And we learned to pay heed to those who had survived longer than us in that unforgiving environment.

Interesting Stories of the Day

After the UK MPs were caught with their hands in the till, watch out for Euro MPs expenses scandal:

The UK Government has made it appear that all those who receive public sector pensions are the richest folks in the land:

After bombing Libya for so many days now the Arab League chief admits that the plan has not worked and may even be dysfunctional

George Osborne refuses to tell UK citizens how much the Libyan bombings will cost in an age of austerity.

The coalition hopes that the public sector strikes can be used to blame them for preventing the non existent economic recovery

Large yoga class takes place in Times Square, New York, USA.

Half of Britons have German blood.