Very disappointed in the Sheffield Star

Of course they couldn't have said anything as it would have diluted the anger and upset of a local woman that sells papers but, I am still disappointed.

They know that the response to:

The whole thing is a mess, why hasn't this been publicised? The last time there was a number change it was drummed into us for a year.

is "yes dear, you were told for a year that the code was changing to 0114 and that numbers under that would eventually start with all possible numbers not just 2, that is the whole point, we get more numbers in Sheffield" and the reason the Star know this? They will have been paid an extraordinary amount of money running full page adverts for months about the switch over. Perhaps Ofcom should take a little of the blame, they could possibly have avoided this by not using the two hundred thousand block first as I believe this re-enforced the confusion amongst the masses of people who find telephone numbers to be overly complicated.

The other thing they decided not to report is that these numbers started getting allocated in 2004, so are hardly "new".

Dogs in pubs.

Let me put forward a small confession, I don't really like dogs, they are to me smelly and vicious not so little buggers that shouldn't be kept in towns and cities. Feel free to carry on having them on your farm or for your shoot or hunt, but in the middle of urban sprawl don't expose them to me.
See the problem is unlike other things I don't like, it can be difficult to avoid dogs, people take them places with them to socialise.
I'm not asking for a ban on dogs in pubs, just dog and no dog areas so I can sit and have a beer without fear of being savaged to death by a wolf descendent.
Not to keen on them tied up outside shops either.

Can lightning strike twice?

This time last year, after trying via a web feedback form to ask the BBC a loaded question about their RSS feeds I posted it on this blog and got a prompt and positive answer from Jem Stone.
Today I am going to try the same with the Guardian and blog something that I have sent to their user help email address but so far have had no response to. As you will see if you read the slightly dull and geeky details later on I don't actually think the issue is their fault; but as things stand I feel it is more likely (despite this blogging platform being owned by google and them being quite good at searching for content on the internet) that this will reach people with the power to make changes at the Guardian than in Mountain View.

My problem is due to how much information I try and absorb on the move, sometimes on a netbook (as I am now, it is far easier to type on than my E71) but mostly on my phone. My browser of choice is Opera Mini, my aggregator is Google Reader and a number of the feeds I read, especially to do with politics and liberty are from the Guardian.

I am gettting an XML parsing fail looking at Guardian feeds, looking at the source the error shows that in the conversion of the encoded html in the <description> element. One out of Google Reader or Opera Mini is seeing '&lt;p style="clear:both" /&gt;' not recognising that it is self closed, deciding that it needs to add an extra closing p tag, and therefore breaking the parse.
As I have little in the way of web development tools on my phone I can only speculate that it is Google that is doing the insertion (as it would be strange bug for Opera to do so then choke on it).

As I said above I fully understand that this isn't technically the Guardian's problem since their feed validates as is but I am also hoping that it is a simple change for them to the template used for RSS presentation that can fix this issue for me and anyone else in my predicament.

If you are from the Guardian and reading this, thank you in advance for any help!

Please stop inviting me to sign your petition.

People keep asking me to sign a petition or join a facebook group protesting about the age and alcohol based segregation during gigs at Corporation.

Feel free to join/sign yourself if you want to but I won't be.

Having a suspicion that there was probably a reason why this licence condition had been put in place I made a Freedom of Information request to the council to see all 'reports, notes, minutes, agenda papers or other documentation' that had been put before the licensing committee to do with Corp. As I suspected it was all about the "Protection of Children from Harm" objective of the Licensing act 2003. The documentation from the council included reports from South Yorkshire Police and Sheffield Safeguarding Children Board about issues in the past with breaches of their license with respect to under 18s. So there are restrictions in place for Corp because they have been caught out so the anguished cries about this are getting no sympathy from me.

You don't *have* to believe me but...

The Taming of the Shrew is going to be fabulous.

Last night we had the final rehearsal before getting into the theatre and the show has really come together, the meaning is coming out well and even if I do say it myself the comic relief is very funny ;-)

To book please visit the box office at http://www.thecompanysheffield.co.uk/boxoffice/index.php

A seemingly ill informed MP

Twittering has to be a symptom of a dysfunctional society. You know the one I’m talking about; when people don’t talk to, care about, help, consider or even interact with each other anymore.

Nadine Dorries's Blog.

Now far be it for me to ever suggest that the MP for Mid Bedfordshire has a habit of believing things that don't stand up to research but this is a doozy. Where as she has a history of professional involvement with abortion, she doesn't seem to have any time working in the field of social networking on her cv. I don't have any expertise in doing scientific research on this kind of subject, but the whole 'facebook causes cancer' fuss caused Ben Goldacre to review what research was out there on internet use and well being and shock horror the picture wasn't all that bad.

To specifics, firstly the quote above, it is a well reported phenomenon that the Twitter community are always willing to help and will do things like passing on questions and crowd sourcing answers, to the point where people are now turning to twitter as the first port of call for information. Secondly (and you'll need to read the original blog post, I'm not quoting it all) the idea that the number of people who turn up to your birthday party is a measure of how well rounded you are and how functional your society is is crazy. Thanks to the social networking there are people that I would to invite to any such celebration but as they thousands of miles away it would be a little pointless. It would be very interesting to find out of the people psycho analysing how many of them were experts in either social networking or Psychoanalysis (note no space).

Test post for Rory Cellan-Jones

Dancing with the stars

As you can imagine I am not a huge fan of the dancing or singing "competition" programs that are the staple of Saturday prime time on Aunty Beeb's number one channel and care even less for the more populist version on the other side. I have no real interest in watching people, whether celebs or otherwise being humiliated supposedly for entertainment (unless they are in on the joke, I have watched a bit of the comic relief variant) and I certainly have never been interested in watching the overseas variants that BBC Worldwide have successfully sold.

I am however interested to follow the fortunes of the unlikely, the underdogs, I never watched him dance but it was always fun to hear the lightly humoured outrage that John Sergeant was still on Strictly. So it looks like the 'unusual choice' contestant is now part of the format as licensed as Woz is on 'Dancing with the Stars'

Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency

Got your attention? Yet again this is something we in the UK can only dream about but there are people in America trying to make it happen. Tim O’Reilly has the story.

OpenSourceGov

There is a new instance of mediawiki in town:

This site has been created to support the UK government's open source strategy and action plan. Hopefully soon, anyone who wants to know a bit about what open source is, and what it can do, will be able to find plenty to read here. – OpenSourceGov.

Didn't take long to find out who was behind it (whois helps with this sorts of thing) Dave Briggs, who says on his site:

Last week, the Cabinet Office published a new action plan for government and open source, to level the playing field when it comes to procuring software. [Snipped]
Excellent stuff. There is a Netvibes dashboard set up to help monitor what is being said online, some of which is a little cynical and critical. I tend to prefer to be relentlessly positive.

Anyway, the situation with open source is a little similar to that of social web stuff, in that knowledge about it, and its possibilities, are somewhat limited. We need open source digital mentors! Alternatively, we just need a wiki. – davepress.net

It will be very interesting to see how this develops, as with all of these kind of things^TM it will need to strike a cord and build a community to give it momentum and keep up to date.

Once again something cool and underground goes mainstream.

This is a guest post from esteemed presentations and speaking expert Olivia Mitchell.

People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

How to Present While People are Twittering | Pistachio.

The backchannel is dead, long live whatever we will call it now. I questioned a friend the other day when he used the term "Official backchannel" and mentioned that the organisers of the conference had a projected display of the activity that was going on using a specific hashtag. I suppose the name could stick as I was never sure whether the use of the term in a social media sense was borrowing more from the diplomatic term (unofficial/underground communications) or the Psycholinguistics one (the use of a nod, 'yes' and 'uh-huh' to indicate that you are paying attention and the other person should continue to speak) but it seems now that the former use has been seized upon as useful and it has been brought into the mainstream (conferences are opening embassies in twitter, to continue with the analogy) which means that it can actively work as the latter.

As many of you will know I spent my Saturday in a concrete bunker in Bloomsbury at the Convention on modern liberty and blogged and twittered all day. While at some points we would all loved to have what we were saying to be communicated to the panels whether directly or mediated, at other times I am probably glad they couldn't see what I was saying in real time, mainly when I was insulting them. On balance the usefulness of this communication methodology being absorbed probably outweighs the disadvantage of having to refrain from suggesting someone is talking utter rubbish. I mean how cool would it have been for Henry Porter to be able to whisper in David Davis ear on Saturday that he had just misattributed Clarke's Third Law to Robert A. Heinlein.

Evening Plenary

Billy Bragg was surprised to find himself agreeing with David Davis, but want to talk about the role of the artist “in this struggle. The issue we have and why we don’t have a document that starts we the people is because our revolution was 100 years to early. As we have no framework it is difficult, David Davis had problems protecting our rights because of it. It doesn’t really matter if it is called a British bill of rights as long as it is fair to all.

Lisa Appignanesi says she noticed a lot of talking about silence in the context of people not wanting to talk about things. She is revisiting Dominic Grieve’s point about repealing of laws. She would like the parties to say what they would repeal. 1st on her list are the anti terror laws, she talks about kids being arrested protesting, people being arrested reading at the cenotaph and then she moves on to a topic mentioned in my stream in which she finds laws to be abhorrent, “seditious” libel and criminal defamation. Penultimatly she wants to deal with what she refers to as concentration camps for asylum seekers. Lastly she supports the human rights act and isn’t sure why the media is so down on it.

Feargal Sharkey is here to talk about the oppression of music in the UK under the licensing act and other regulations especially in the Metropolitan area rather than here to do his normal trick of asking for extension of copyright. Tells a very funny story about belly dancing to lead in to a discussion of form 696. Apparently only 21 London councils have included the wording that enables this to be a licensing issue. He is reading from the form the implied threats if you don’t fill it in correctly.

Paul Gilroy wants to ensure that all of this is done in an intelligent and sensible manner, and brought what had been absent (from what I had seen) apart from Chuka Umunna all day which was the perspective that us white guys havn’t had it as bad as other people and provided a good bit of context about the UK and the rest of the world.

Cory Doctorow has been called a geek for twittering from the platform then he suggest that the US didn’t spot 9/11 because it collected too much info. Taking photos of public buildings can’t be considered a security issue as we all know what they look like. All of this would be less painful if the government delivered what it promised. I think that is a big disconnect  from a lot of people here who don’t want to give this information up even if it did the things the government suggests it should (Cory FFS slow down!).

Sorry this is patchy had wifi and power and helping out people with wikipedia lookups during the talks, huge apologies to the panel especially Paul :-(

How do we secure modern liberty

Afua Hirsch, starts by saying that she thinks it is far harder to do this than the day job(s), as a lawyer she challenges misuses of rights as journalist she highlights these abuses to the world, but  this saying what is the way forward. She also (relevantly) talks about the hairdressers and how the people there feel a disconnect with politics. Why aren’t rights part of education why don’t children get taught how they should be treated by society (and also how they should treat other people to not infringe their rights).

Chuka Umunna agrees that part of what needs to happen is making rights mainstream, it should be part of the bread and butter of the countries daily life. He is relating a very personal tale about liberties being infringed and wondering how to widen this to relate it to people who haven’t yet experienced these problems themselves. Discussing the real on the ground experience of CCTV and DNA databases in the the constituency that he is the PPC for. He is suggesting that we need to ensure that the whole picture of government and corporate incursion is considered, so that spam, direct mail and other big brother business concepts are considered alongside database government not 100% convinced about the snail spam threat. This is a PPC who says he wants it to be an election issue.

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested by the police” is Chris Huhne’s opening quote as he goes on to talk about the constituent members of what he calls the parliamentary liberal party with a deliberate small L linking LibDems 50 or so Labour MPs who voted against 90 days and by his estimation of half the conservative party who are also liberal in view. Strangely he is also pimping his new Freedom Bill ;-) Next why are Human rights more important than a bill of British rights? Because what if a future authoritarian government starts declaring people non persons then they are no longer protected, second instance of the conference ending abruptly due to Godwin's Law, Shami fell fowl earlier as well. The next way forward is to re-strengthen parliament keeping the government to account the separation of executive and legislative is so important.

Will Hutton has asked the question on what basis we put this to put across and has landed on the totally British point of making it ‘Fair Play’ and has folled this back to Chuka’s point about business, they are never going to behave better than the government and as the current government is not setting a moral bar they have nothing to live up to. The Audience is divided on comments about different cultures and how they see “public space” mainly because one of the contrast cultures was Islam.

Brian Eno puts down his Mac and hush descends, what is different about humans, imagination, this is because we practice it, we do this through arts and science. He now posits that our vision of people has changed we don’t see “the enemy” as we did in the world wars, we have empathy to their suffering no matter who or what they are and what the political machines are doing. The problem is that the though of imagination and empathy seems to be finite and as we have more feeling we have less vision of the future and aren’t seeing the coming problem as they dismantle the ramshackle edifice that is our civil liberties. Next is parallels with how much effort we need to put in to get climate change sorted how everyone should learn from the youth using facebook etc to organise etc to thwart control. In response to the earlier comments, he also supports the idea that education should immerse young people in liberty.

You should definitely watch the video, Eno is more expressive than I am.

Questions: Who would we trust in writing a constitution and what role could the convention play?

Chuka suggest web2.0 techniques to help write a new constitution, I think Chuka Umunna has just suggested crowdsourcing writing a British constitution. Looks like Will Hutton is backing him up. This would become a true Constitutional Convention.

Question about civil disobedience and asking if the “establishment” are as committed. Oh it wasn’t really a question.

Question about children being taking children from parents, Chris H responding, has moved back to the previous non question and suggesting that parliament is too stable.

Very important point from Evan Harris that all these rights belong to all, no matter what we think about them or what they have to say. Very big round of applause. All these freedoms need to fully free for all.

Eno has suggested a honoured group that should draft the constitution, Chris H cites two provinces in Canada that have done it with random people.

Who Rules: is there a Media-political class?

Liz Forgan starts of with the Lloyd-George Scott relationship and how it affected both information flow and impartiality. Should politicians fear the press, yes they should see them as an external consciences, the blogosphere is always kicking at any existing M-P class as it gets analysed and spat at from the internet, and that is keeping the media on the strait and narrow. Again discussing the fact that there needs to be a paid for media to pay for the day to day research and legal backup, references the Guardian tax avoidance pieces. Discussions about the Scott trust and how it supposedly works to safeguard liberal media to report on the erosions of liberty.

Peter Oborne is going to argue the thesis that not only does the M-P class exists and is a threat via international football. Sorry no Peter was apparently the wrong Crouch. The suggestion is that the current set of politicians are a clique amongst themselves and the supposedly opposition positions are all about maintaining the status quo of keeping the leadership in power. There is a term for this, it is a cartel. This manifests itself as a hatred of the institutions that could challenge them. He has just been wound up, in several ways.

Simon Jenkins starts with Norway and an exercise to see what the country would be like after a hundred years that was carried out at the millennium. The academics decided that the future was bleak and that the old truism (that was mentioned in the first session by the Polish editor) about it not mattering who you vote for, the government always gets in. The next point was a reflection of Eisenhower’s speech on the military industrial complex with the current security industry. What has happened to all of the campaigning politicians of yesteryear what is it that turns them into just another evil minister when they are in power.

Claire Fox is relating a Big Brother eviction into a liberty issue, which I am not sure I want to sign up to. Although her point about Endimol’s corruption of the big brother brand to stop it being as frightening as the Orwellian vision. She is continuing to talk utter shite about how reality tv is the problem. I really don’t think super nanny programs are really training people to be obedient.

Although it probably is quite good for organising questions, listing questioners 1 – 6 just really brings back memories of a certain programme that is about liberty being squashed.

Bloggers's Session

Sunny has introduced the panel, other famous bloggers have turned up an Bill Thompson has brought sarnies. We are starting of with mySociety and how the tools you use aren't the important thing but need to be used properly to get people working together. Heather Brooke is now talking about open data (w00t) and how the the data being open is a tool of free speech as with the original data people can see past the spin to what is really going on. Using her two famous examples of local crime data and MPs expenses. “Journalism” whether MSM, blogging, or a campaign group needs to cleverly use freedom of information requests etc in order to get this data out and show people the benefit. Of course when you convince the people they want the data free they can convince the government that.

Ben Goldacre although not a liberties campaigner is here to tell us to all put our efforts online. He contends that political blogging is opinion/invective while science blogging is an extension of undergrads etc publishing their university work. Then criticism moves to the paid academic sites which get subverted by bloggers. Using the Dore cure as an example. The great thing about blogging and the internet is the fact that everything is automatically searchable and it becomes part of the global repository of knowledge. I am going to assume that I don’t need to relate the Durham and LBC stories to you lot, you all read Bad Science don’t you?

Last but not least Phil Booth from NO2ID wants us to think about thinking about the effect you need to make. Focus your attempts to change on your issue and target, get everyone to look at it a thousand eyes are significantly better than one. As well as freedom of information, use Data Subject Access requests to indentify to people how are collecting your data. Go out looking for other people who have the same itch you have join groups like ORG

A question from the floor links back to the press freedom session, how does libel threats affect bloggers, The NZ blackout has been brought up and there is talk that the internet being gold rush country.

BG’s reaction to the libel question is that in many cases not having any assets can be a help as they might dissuade people from suing, but in the end it is only a hastle not having your leg cut off. If you have to do a Mclibel with a friend and a camera. HB is also responding about libel, if she didn’t love the work she wouldn’t do it, investigative work not as well paid for by newspapers as other forms and also a big risk from libel.

Take down notices are an indicator that somebody doesn’t want people to see something there should be a tool that archives content spots it disappearing and the posts it to a suitable set of world wide cache sites.

Protect yourselves by insuring your webhost will let you fight your own battle, use wikileaks to get “hot documents” off your hands.

Someone from the FT asked about the relationship between MSM and blogging which lead into a question that was asked about why Data formats from the UN etc are in formats that are easily parse able but uk data is haphazard and of course the data and definition has changed so if you get 50 years. Bill Thompson has been named checked on API works.

Political engagement was brought up by a green politician who feels bombarded with different contact methodologies, he wasn’t really delt with so much in the session but I manage to catch him afterwards to chat, he recognised my name from ORG-Discuss.

Press Freedoms

After suitably fulsome introductions we are underway, Alan Rusbridger has meandered off onto the issues of press economics. I felt for a moment that it was going to be an attack on blogging etc, but now he is off on restrictions to the freedom of the press with libel tourism. After a round up of how costly libel is for the press in this country and how the Tesco case has effected reporting on tax avoidance with numbers about how much subsequent reporting costs to get cleared by the legal team. This is going to become a true restriction on what gets reported.

We have moved on to Fatima Bhutto who is talking about *real* restrictions on press freedom, because while libel laws do stop you from continuing to publish it doesn’t give you too much fear of the knock on the door in the night. Her current points are based on new laws about ‘cyber crime’ being used out of proportion to prevent many kinds of dissent and “ant-democratic” practice, for example having a fake email account has a jail punishment attached and anti-spamming laws can be used to arrest people for sending out information to mailing lists. Censorship laws in Pakistan are being used to stop people hearing about the rule of law in parts of the country being handed over to those that wish to have a more religious bent.

Andrew Gilligan has started with the idea that the database that the government wants to put details of all our phone calls and emails in is an attack on press freedoms as no-one will come forward as an anonymous source as they will think that all contact into newspapers will be tracked. Next crack downs on whistleblowers, the only two people who have been arrested over the JCM shooting were the people who received the leak about him not wearing a heavy coat and running etc. Many other examples, that I don’t have the typing speed to note down. He has also brought up the closure of papers and economics as a press freedom issue, redundancies mean that not enough time for full investigative pieces. There is also a fine point being made that the media in the past have been as guilty of impinging on people’s liberties as defending. He is trying to claim that was just the bad old days of the red tops, I am not convinced that the tabloids are as much reformed as he does. The press has to make it’s case to the public, again with the press being better that the 80s still with not being convinced.

Nick Cohen has warned the chair she may need to lawyer him, he also thinks that their needs to be a change in how we think about rights and liberties. Apparently the judiciary cannot be relied on, that they are “establishment” now dovetailing into AR’s stuff on libel and explaining how it is about reputation. Apparently people whose reputation are already in tatters shouldn’t have access to libel because it is about reputation. Using Roman Polanski Vs Vanity fair as an example. Next example is also about libel tourism and how they are a threat to freedom of speech not just here but around the world if it can be said to have to been published here. Fabulously dodgy generalisation on which constituent groups go to which law firm. Good investigative journalism need the newspapers to back them up, the stamp of authority, bloggers will not be able to take up the mantle.

The chair has popped and is talking about extending protections such as the the Renold’s defence, including possibly setting up a statuary defence along those lines for journalism, there should be specific defences about publishing stuff about public figures in the public interest. Joanne is also suggesting that many of the current erosions of freedoms are going after journalists and sources.

Going to publish before the Q&A will do another post if that throws up good stuff.

My picked ‘stream’

Well in the end I decided to pick a stream about stuff I know little about but is still interesting, as I am well in touch with quite a lot of the database/politics stuff I have gone for media based stuff. So session six ‘Press Freedoms’ for the morning and session nine, “who rules, is there a media-political class” for the afternoon. Of course the fact that this gets me a seat and a power socket for the lunchtime bloggers conference is nothing to do with it ;-)

Of course this isn’t an official stream like you get at more geeky conferences, but interestingly this does seem to a) a very popular session b) of course has a number of people with cameras and notebooks out and c) where quite a lot of the twiterati of the conference are.

Actually having looked up and seen how packed to the gunnels it is I am very glad I got here early and grabbed a spot!

The crisis of liberty.

The first plenary session is underway, which at the moment isn’t very coherent^[1] but is full of good atmosphere'. interestingly despite even the conference organisers playing to the stereotype that the audience was a bunch of tree-hugging vegetarian Guardian readers the Conservative MP got a good response. You can probably guess what Helena Kennedy said, all good.

The gentleman now speaking is trying to persuade us that all of this database state stuff is about making life easier for us, he has already said he doesn’t believe one big database would actually bring the ‘managerial efficiencies’ that others are claiming, but he then goes on to hide behind the idea that everyone else is asking for our data so why shouldn’t the government. Luckily before he was lynched Georgina Henry pointed out you can’t be fined or put in jail for refusing to fill in the survey attached to subscribing to a magazine.

Now we are coming back to the questions raised  by Dominic Grieve and Helena Kennedy about what is in the water at the home office. Ken Macdonald is starting with some justification about how those in security and crime based ministries get the chapter and verse on the worst case every morning and then set out to try and protect everyone and this is what leads to the disproportionate measures that have been brought in by the last several governments.

^[1]OK apart from Mr Database state, it has now pulled together.

Convention on Modern Liberty

Well after an interesting night (the cheep and cheerful hotel was delightfully both, thin walls and windows did mean lots of noise though) I am here at the convention. Sat in the main hall where they are showing the best of the videos that have been being posted to the web in the run up to the convention.

There are two things I really want to say, the first is how impressed I am by just what a cross section of society there are here, but only in a socioeconomic context, in an ethnic sense the panels and speakers represent a far broader cross section that the audience does. I am not going to attempt to suggest reasons why, I am no expert on these matters, but I very much doubt it is from a lack of trying. I definitely think that it will be one of the things I will be asking the organisers about after, especially in terms of how to fix it next time.

The other is to say thanks to Glyn who is indeed a terribly useful chap.

I am resisting the temptation to liveblog the opening sessions on twitter, mainly because while I have gained access to the intertubes I don’t currently have a socket and I’m not sure how long this battery will last.

I knew it was too good to be true.

David Blunkett's repositioning continues apace in the Grauniad's liberty central. Of course as soon as you read it, it falls apart and you can see the spin and bullshit shining through.

We will ignore simple jurisdictional naiveté such as suggestions the information commissioner's position should be strengthened to deal with issues such as the Facebook T&Cs or utter laugh out loud lines like 'We are not a "surveillance state"' given the ridiculous number of cameras in use in this country and move strait onto the meat.

There is a misconception that the database for biometric passports and ID cards might be misused. That's why I'm coming to the conclusion that we may have to consider simply making passports universal.

Well I suppose to be generous, if you suggest that having a huge great database of everyone to be data-mined by government and lost in the post by contractors is the intended purpose of the database then is won't me misused. If by making passports universal, you mean we all have to have one, then that really isn't any different from an ID card now is it? I have written about the cards and the database so often that it even bores me, but the utter rubbish that they troop out in their defence makes me want tap-dance with anger.

I am coming to the conclusion that the national identity database is the single, solitary, biggest threat to national security we face. We are giving terrorists a central one-stop-shop location to have to break into to find out where all our constables and members of Her Majesty’s forces and the intelligence services live. Perhaps the first time this system gets broken or breeched the Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service will get charged with "Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc".

The other thing I want to take issue with in the article is the suggestion that we as a nation are "crying wolf" I would disagree, the boy in that story caused himself the issues by raising the alarm incorrectly and having the village react each time. I don't think that the current groundswell of protest at the moment is based on any false premises and Parliament (our village) isn't reacting. To back his Aesopian premise he also suggests that Stella Rimington was merely rambling on and apparently she doesn't understand the 'the genuine threat that new forms of terrorism pose' which kind of left me wondering whether the chutzpah of this man has an end.

Of all of it I think that commitment to freeing people from the fear and instability is the bit that is the worst attempt to misrepresent the 'Blunkett Position' he, along with Jaquie Smith and pretty much every other minister or prominent politician to speak on the subject in recent times, have cause far, far more widespread and persistent terror that anyone trying to blow things up in this country has.

The Independent: Blunkett warns over 'Big Brother' Britain

Ha ha hahahahah ha ha ha hahaha hahahahahahah *gasps for air* hahaha.

David Blunkett, who introduced the idea of identity cards when Home Secretary, will issue a stark warning to the Government tomorrow that it is in danger of abusing its power by taking Britain towards a “Big Brother” state...

Read more on this story at the Independent

The micro-dicked weasel

The micro-dicked weasel (Mustela diem) is a small mammal of the family Mustelidae. In Europe it is known as the cockless weasel or short-dick weasel.

Physical Description
The micro-dicked weasel is a member of the family Mustelidae, which includes martens, mink, otters, ferrets, and wolverines. The micro-dicked weasel's low legs, wide hind-quarters, and poor diet give it a pronounced waddle. The micro-dicked weasel's skin secretes a thick, syrupy oil which gives it's coat a greasy sheen.

Wondering what this is about?

Consistency in Parliament?

There is an Early Day Motion about Google and gambling adverts. Of the people who have signed it, only the following voted against the third reading of the Gambling Act 2005:

• Andrew MacKinlay
• Bob Spink
• David Hamilton
• David Taylor
• Elfyn Llwyd
• Ian Davidson
• Kelvin Hopkins

All the others should examine their position on this matter, unless they were actually in opposition to the bill but didn't vote due to a "Pairing" arrangement (pretty much impossible to tell).

What sessions should I go to at the convention on Modern Liberty?

I am having a bit of a dilemma; I don't know which sessions I most want to go to at the convention? If you are going which sessions are you going to and if you can't go which would you want to go to? I know Sunny is organising a bloggers’ summit over lunch, should we also try and parcel out the sessions and promise to blog about the ones we are going to, or are the bloggers’ carnival already organising that? Would people be open to the idea of trying to find a group of ten other people they are already connected to in some way and meet up at the end of the day for a winding down natter about the sessions they all went to and the highlights?

What do you think?

For your information the sessions are:

Morning Sessions 11.45 - 13.00

1. Judges and Politicians - who should decide?
2. Human rights and global responses
3. Business gets personal - can privacy have a future?
4. Faiths and freedoms
5. The Conservatives and civil liberties
6. Press freedom
7. The Police
8. The English tradition of liberty and the national question
9. Xenophobia
10. Democracy and liberty
11. Liberty at work

Afternoon Sessions 14.00 - 15.15

1. How dangerous is the database state and ‘transformational government’ to our civil liberties?
2. Why can’t Parliament protect our liberties against the executive?
3. 3. How do we stop rights and freedoms being a political football?
4. The Left and liberty
5. Liberty, sovereignty and republicanism: can the Leveller tradition be revived in the 21st Century?
6. Torture and the decline in fundamental human rights standards
7. Are human rights universal or a privilege of citizenship?
8. Love and liberty
9. Who rules: is there a media-political class?
10. Child’s play? Equality and young people
11. Can liberty survive the slump?

More on the Latitude storm in a teacup.

As a follow up to my polemic about Privacy International's noise making on the Google Latitude issue, when are they going to make a fuss about Tom Tom and Fireeagle. Where are the scaremongering suggestions that people will install software on your sat-nav if you leave it on the table in the pub? Or that you'll be given a poised chalice GPS unit by friends, family or work in order to spy on your every move?

The prospect is just as scary as it is for phones and latitude i.e. not at all.

Privacy International are too stupid to own a mobile phone.

Privacy International are at the centre of a storm of ill-informed self righteous indignation over Google latitude. Firstly they claim that people will have it installed and run on their phones because they have left it on the table in the pub. What? Yes, when I wander off in a public place I leave a piece of equipment worth £300 unattended! Even if someone did manage to sneak off with it they would have to get past the fact that it is a) code locked and b) encrypted. To be honest I would be worrying far more about them reading other things on my phone if someone did break into it.

The other scenarios they mention are to do with someone giving you a phone as a gift or for work with latitude running on it and you don’t notice. Are these people producing new stealth versions of phone operating systems?^[1] The Google maps application that empowers latitude updates from your phone is perfectly spottable when it enters its "just keep the updates going mode". Even if they did manage that trick I suspect they would have try and persuade you to never use the Google map application yourself as it asks you every time you select exit if you want it to keep your location updated, if nothing else that might rouse suspicions.

This has also brought on the usual patronising depressing rubbish stated about the internet and privacy to the fore once more, that people are sleep walking their way to giving away all their data. Complete toss!

Firstly I only publish on the internet what I want to publish, compare and contrast how easy it is to find my email address with how difficult it is to find my phone number. I am not a simpleton. If you can see exactly where I am it is because I want you to know, if you are anyone else you only get a more approximate idea of where I am and strangely if this ever became an issue I would stop.

Secondly you wonder how many of the people going on about this have credit cards, oyster cards, gmail/yahoo/msn email accounts, loyalty cards etc. all of which give personal data to other parties.

Thirdly wouldn’t it be better to put all the effort making noise about this non-story into real liberty issues like ID Cards, the attacks on data protection in the Coroners and Justice Bill and the rise in the use of anti-terrorist powers for other purposes. These are the sort of things I expect to talk about at the Convention on Modern Liberty whereas I really don't feel there is any real need to debate latitude.

^[1]I except that this is possible, but doubt anyone outside the defence industry would be likely to do this and you will almost certainly signed your life away in your contract in that situation anyway.

My current favourite steak sauce

• 250g chestnut or other mushrooms
• 150ml double cream
• 1/2 a good sized red onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 25g Parmigiano reggiano
• heaped teaspoon of wholegrain mustard
• good splash of brandy
• butter
• olive oil
• copious seasoning

Gently heat enough butter and oil to cover the bottom of a good solid pan. Very finely dice the onion and garlic and slowly start them sweating. Finely slice the mushrooms and add them to the pan and put on a lid. Keep an eye on the pan while you do everything else for the meal, agitating occasionally and for a minimum of 15 minutes if you are doing something real quick. While resting the meat, take off the heat and stir in first the brandy then the cream and finally the cheese and mustard. Season to taste (I tend to a little salt and quite a bit of pepper, most from my black pepper mill set to cause, some from the bill with a mix of Bristol 5 pepper blend and dried chilli flakes). Return to a gentle heat to warm the sauce back through and melt the cheese.

A new web project

I started a new web project this weekend, I’m not going to say too much about what it is until I have done a bit more of it. What I will say is something about the challenge I have set myself this time around. I am going to build the site just using free online hosted tools. The site itself is not on a topic that makes this a particularly obvious choice, in fact it is on a non-web subject, it was just an idea that appealed to me, is relevant (in an oblique way) to my current role at work and above all is a new nut to crack. The site requires a certain amount of content management, also holds some date/time based data and a small smattering of geographical information.

First off was picking a platform, I looked at a couple of choices, wordpress for example got junked from the list mainly because people are looking into how to use it in interesting ways at work and I didn’t want to be tempted to just go ask them what they are doing. The next big pointer was the need to run a calendar, Google have a pretty good one which if allied with their mail app gives people an incredibly easy way to give you their data, just send you an invite. This and the fact that I already use blogger^[1] and have a grasp of its templating system, pretty much made it a shoe in to use Google stuff as the basis for the site. Another advantage is most of the tools involved have published APIs so if I do fail in my challenge and have to write some of the glue code I won’t have to throw everything away and start again.

The next task was looking at what was out there in terms of good quality mashup glue. The answer looking through the extensive library of gadgets available (the same one as for iGoogle) was that I could have 4 million different games of hangman but not a suitable way of presenting data from the Google calendar, for example. So I decided to look into the standard data display widgets and put in some appropriate layers of intelligence using yahoo pipes. which is roughly where I am now, creating data feed manipulations by playing Pipe Mania. It looks like these will be used for other things as well, such as generating some more interesting navigation than the standard blogger stuff.

Next will be adding a smattering of extra shiny, this will require looking into what is good in the way of available online hosted user interface libraries YUI will probably be the first one I look at but do you have any suggestions?

^[1]As readers of this blog may will have spotted.

Bang bang, I hit the ground

Dizzy Thinks that with our own equivalent of the second amendment we would all be safer from muggings and aggravated burglary.

It is an interesting postulation and I imagine one that excites demographers and crime statisticians, especially if you widen the question and compare rates of such offenses across a whole board of different legal frameworks for gun ownership.

However I would like to suggest there may be a fly in the ointment, especially looking at Dizzy's original comparison between us and the United States of America, while gun ownership in this country may well make me feel safer from muggings, it sure as hell will make me worry much more about getting my fucking head blown off!

Unfortunately it seams that the last time the UN statistics had explicit information about gun homicide for comparison was 1999, but I have included the last comparative figures on gross homicide rate as well, these show that while we have seen a slight increase America has had a reduction in the overall rate.

The Seventh United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1998 - 2000) - Via Wikipedia

	Non-firearm homicide rate per 100,000 pop.	Firearm homicide rate per 100,000 pop.	% homicides with firearms	Overall homicide rate per 100,000 pop.
England & Wales	1.33	0.12	8	1.57
United States of America	4.55	2.97	39	7.52

Tenth United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems,covering the period 2005 - 2006 - UNODC

Country	Counts		Rates per 100,000
	2005	2006	2005	2006
England & Wales	766	755	1.43	1.41
United States of America	16,740	17,034	5.58	5.62

Unashamed plug