Alex “WorldChanging” Steffen is a fan of Samuel Smith’s organic beers, brewed in Yorkshire’s oldest brewery in Tadcaster. Who knew? I’d comment, but I’m barred from his comments thread for opining that Bruce Sterling is not always right. Slightly more seriously, the row related to RFID technology – both teh Bruce and the Worldchanging crowd…
Read More Save the world, one pint at a timeBlogs covered the news that the Forest Gate raid was down to the unsuppported word of a man with an IQ of 69 quite copiously. But there is more to the problem than just bad sources, Sir Ian Blair and the ACPO grandstanding for their new political role, or whatever. Simply, they have lost the…
Read More The wrong end of the telescopeShorter Times: Everything you know about the Operation Ore child-porn investigation is wrong. In information given to Interpol and in sworn statements submitted to British courts in 2002, Dallas detective Steven Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead claimed that everyone who went to Landslide always saw only a front page screen button offering “Click…
Read More Against mass surveillance, againBack in the 1990s, before foreign fighters and eye-catching initiatives, one of the catchcries of the Labour Party as it arrived in government was “evidence-based policy”. This meant, as far as anyone knew, that the government’s activity would be subject to review on the basis of results, and that choices would be made according to…
Read More Evidence-based stupiditySir Ian Blair is far more like Tony Blair than Tony would want to admit, but not in the way Sir Ian would want to admit. In the beginning, and still up to a point, Sir Ian Blair was subject to a steady flow of vitriol from what might be described as the Richard Littlejohn…
Read More Birds of a featherJohn Reid thinks the Home Office may have to be abolished. Just like me. See, Justin? He does actually acknowledge the existence of reality, unlike other potential Home Secretaries such as Hazel Blears.
Read More Reid: Home Office is brokenQwest wouldn’t give the NSA all their call data records, and neither would T-Mobile USA. The why, from ThinkProgress: the fine in the event of successful legal action would be $1000 per violation, and with a multi-terabyte database of records, each one a few bytes, that’s a lot of money even to a monster telco.…
Read More Obligatory Total Surveillance LinksOf course they will! Major Chip’n’Pin securifart. It’s essentially the exploit described by Prof. Ross Anderson of the Cambridge Computer Lab, as described on his cracking blog (in both senses of cracking) – thieves have converted some point-of-sale terminals to collect the data from the cards’ magnetic strips, then made new cards. They can only…
Read More ID Cards Will Make Us SaferWell, wasn’t Charles Clarke’s appearance on television fun? The boiling hatred and revenge just spumed off his hoggish cardiac-case chops. There’s enough lard in there to fuel a whole West Greenlandic tribe for a decade, even though elephant would be a novelty to them. Apparently the only reason anyone disagrees with house arrest without trial,…
Read More Like a Fiery (Safety) ElephantWell, those of you who are taking part in today’s protest against the Serious and Organised Crime & Police Act, aka the Brian Haw Act, may get to meet…me, as I’m quite likely to come over to the camp at Runnymede from the TYR operations centre in fabulous Egham. Beware.
Read More Demon Strate!