Tourists' most embarrassing questions revealed by English Heritage

Aug 11, 2008
English Heritage has released a list of the most embarrassing questions asked by visitors to the country's historic sites and the worst is an unwitting insult to one of Britain's most sombre monarchs.

A young visitor to Queen Victoria's summer palace Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, was told that she had nine children and asked: "Did they all have the same dad?"

Another visitor appeared disappointed when he learned that the lavishly decorated building was once home to a Queen, and not the current residence of rock star Ozzy Osbourne and his television presenter wife Sharon.

The series of questions were released to mark the start of an English Heritage campaign to encourage shy tourists to ask guides if they have a query about the building they have come to see.

The organisation's hope is that more questions will mean that the buildings make more of an impression, which will encourage the visitors to tell others of what they have experienced and could boost visitor numbers.

Other faux pas include the tourist who asked why the English seemed so keen on erecting ruined castles around the country.

One visitor to Whitby Abbey, in North Yorkshire, asked a guide whether they were looking around Dracula's castle.

Castles appear to have confused tourists from countries without a tradition of giant stone fortresses. One young girl gazed at Clifford's Tower, in York - built after the Norman Conquest - and asked her guide: "Is this a bouncy castle?"

Children at other sites have made amusing errors, such as at Cleeve Abbey in Somerset, where one group were told to look out for monks when what they had hoped to see were monkeys.

But it is not only children who are prone to the occasional lapse of logic while strolling through England's historic buildings.

One anonymous visitor was interested in becoming a supporter of English Heritage and asked: "How long does life membership last?"

Another asked: "Are the tunnels underground?"

A tourist at Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, who was looking at a 300 million-year-old rock formation, asked: "Is that a manmade jetty?"

Tina Corrim, head of education at English Heritage, said: "We've all had the experience of wanting to ask a question and regretting not doing so when the moment has passed.

"When it comes to topics such as history, people can often be embarrassed to voice their queries, but the only way to learn is to ask.

"Learning about history should be fun as well as educational. It is important that children and parents ask us their questions about the properties. You might find out something amazing."

LIST OF QUESTIONS

"Is this where Sharon and Ozzie actually live?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of Wight

"What time do you switch the mist off?" – a visitor to Dover Castle and the Secret Wartime Tunnels, in Kent

"Where are the monkeys?" – a group of children at Cleeve Abbey in Somerset

"Why did they build so many ruined castles and abbeys in England?" - a tourist at Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

"Is it a bouncy castle?" - a little girl at Clifford's Tower, York

"Can you tell me where I can see the Hobbits?" - a visitor to Kenwood House, Hampstead

"Did they all have the same dad?" – a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White, who learned of Queen Victoria's nine children

"How many bricks are there?" - a visitor to Witley Court and Gardens, Worcestershire

"Does my ferret need to be on a lead in this area?" - a visitor to Kenwood House, Hampstead

"How long does life membership last?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White

"Did Lady Rachel ever de-bone her fish before eating it?" - a visitor to Witley Court and Gardens, Worcestershire

"Are the tunnels underground?" - a visitor to Dover Castle and Secret Wartime Tunnels, Kent

"Is that a manmade jetty?" - a visitor to Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, pointing at a 300 million-year-old rock formation

"Is this Dracula's Castle?" - a visitor to Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire.

Ryanair: If you can't beat them, buy them

Ryanair is interested in launching a £2 billion ($3.9 billion) bid for London Stansted if the UK Competition Commission recommends a breakup of airports operator BAA, CEO Michael O'Leary told The Daily Telegraph.

The Commission last year launched an investigation into BAA and the UK airport services market and in April said in an interim report that the operator's common ownership London's Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted along with Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow International and Aberdeen "may not be serving the interests of either airlines or passengers" (ATWOnline, April 23). Later, the UK CAA stated that the common ownership of the three London airports "is likely to prevent, restrict and/or distort competition."

The Commission has not yet published its final conclusions, and observers speculate BAA might sell LGW if required to divest one of its three London airports. However, O'Leary believes the Commission could mandate that each of London's three main airports be in the hands of separate owners. Just selling one, he claimed, would not address competition concerns.

Ryanair's alleged interest in Stansted is not coincidental. The LCC has been at odds with BAA for years and recently announced a capacity cutback it said was related to high fees. Last week, BAA confirmed that it has sued Ryanair because the LCC refuses to pay the increase in charges applied in April (ATWOnline, Aug. 5).

O'Leary claimed the airline will increase STN's throughput from 24 million passengers today to more than 40 million "by halving landing fees" and building a second runway for £150 million and a second terminal for £250 million.

He revealed that acquiring STN is one of his two remaining ambitions before leaving office in "two to three years." The other is the purchase of Aer Lingus, in which Ryanair holds a 29.8% stake. "I was ready to step down a year ago because it was getting boring, but now everyone says we're in the s--- so I'm definitely staying," he said.


by Cathy Buyck

Net address bug worse than feared

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

A recently found flaw in the internet's addressing system is worse than first feared, says the man who found it.

Dan Kaminsky made his comments when speaking publicly for the first time about his discovery at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

He said fixes for the flaw in the net's Domain Name System (DNS) had focused on web browsers but it could be abused by hackers in many other ways.

"Every network is at risk," he said. "That's what this flaw has shown."

The DNS acts as the internet's address books and helps computers translate the website names people prefer into the numbers computers use.

Mr Kaminsky discovered a way for malicious hackers to hijack DNS and re-direct people to fake pages even if they typed in the correct address for a website.

In his talk Mr Kaminsky detailed 15 other ways for the flaw to be exploited.

Via the flaw hi-tech criminals or pranksters could target FTP services, mail servers, spam filters, Telnet and the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) that helps to make web-based transactions more secure.

"There are a ton of different paths that lead to doom," he said.

'Hype'

But the DNS threat was played down by net giant VeriSign which issues many of the security certificates used in SSL. It told BBC News its system was "not vulnerable".

The Silicon Valley company looks after two of the net's 13 DNS root servers. It also controls the computers that contain the master list of domain name suffixes such as .com and .net

Ken Silva, chief technology officer at Verisign, said: "We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them."

He believed there had been "some hype" around how the DNS flaw will affect consumers. He added that while it was an interesting way to exploit DNS on weak servers, there were other ways to misdirect people that remained.

Mr Silva said he was concerned that people would read too much into the doom and gloom headlines that have surrounded the discovery of the DNS flaw.

"It's been overplayed in a sense. I think it has served to confuse the consumer into believing there is somehow now a way to misdirect them to a wrong site.

"The fact of the matter is that there have been many ways like phishing attacks to misdirect them for a long time and this is just yet another of those ways that will be surgically exploited."

Security gap

Mr Kaminsky kept news of the flaw out of the public domain for months after its discovery to give companies time to patch servers.

Mr Kaminsky said that 75% of Fortune 500 companies have fixed the problem while around 15% have done nothing.

Major vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and others have issued patches to close the security hole.

"The industry has rallied like we've never seen the industry rally before," said Mr Kaminsky.

DNS attacks are not new but Mr Kaminsky is credited with discovering a way to link some widely known weaknesses in the system so that the attack now takes seconds instead of days or hours.

"Quite frankly, all the pieces of this have been staring us in the face for decades," said Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, a non-profit that makes the software run by many of the world's DNS servers.

Mr Silva at VeriSign said even though patches have been put in place, this doesn't mean users can sit back and relax.

"The biggest gap in security rests between the keyboard and the back of the chair," he said.

"The look and feel of a website is not what a consumer should trust. They should trust the security behind that website and do simple things like use more secure passwords and change their password regularly."

Mr Silva said education is fundamental in making the net a safer place.

"We have been trained since we were young to lock the door to our house, our car. We take these sensible security measures in the environment we are functioning in.

"Yet when it comes to computer safety we forget to look both ways before crossing the internet highway."