So, do we get to opt out of this one too?

I have already had to fill in 2 or 3 separate forms to opt out of having my medical data on "The Spine"; apparently one was not enough, they needed to hear it from me a bunch of times before they believed me. Are we now saying I have another bunch of opt-outs to sign to get out of this one as well ... despite making my wishes on the subject of my primary care data known to my GP .. up close, in person and in very understandable words.

At what point to they start to *Get It" ?

So we are agreed....

....The relocation to Riga was more inn the spirit of a consolation prize for the loss of an empire, than a punishment. If those ladies on the parade are anything to go by, the EU can console me any time they like :-)

My one and only question

Will the people who want to access this data be required to request a proper warrant, be required to present compelling reasons for the need, face the risk of being turned down and be limited to the scope of the warrant?

As I understand it, they currently do need to present at least something official to the ISPs to get access to the stuff they currently hold. If the newly proposed system no longer requires this protection, then it is a major step backwards and opens the way for a system indistinguishable from the original "Mega database of everything" proposal. The difference between a live connection to the ISPs, open to return search requests on tap and storing the same info in a single mega-database is nothing more than semantics. In fact the former would probably lead to a quicker response times.

This is the same semantic nonsense that leads the Waquis of this world to claim with hand on heart that to say the National Identity Register will contain health, vehicular or financial information is dangerous rubbish. On the surface they are correct and that's all that matters of course. However, the actual, practical spin-off of having a single index number for everyone, is that they can then reliably fire off a query to the (now information shared) NHS, DVLA, HMRC (et al) databases and get the stuff that they're not storing locally, just as if they did.

They've wanted to arm twist the ISPs into snooping on their own customers for years. So they propose something utterly preposterous (mega-database) and allow the usual suspects (hi there ;) to whip up public concern about it. Then they take a half step back and expect everyone to breath a sigh of relief that they have only taken half a step forward this time, rather than gone the whole way in one step.

Is it just me getting cynical, or are they getting way too predictable these days?

Erm

Actually no

I have no words :-)

With baited breath

I saw roughly the same article on another web site and googled the author of the "Learned" paper. I put forward the point about causation vs correlation and also the question: How have you separated the people who didn't go out for whatever reason, and filled their time using Facebook while they were in; from the people who prefer to go on Facebook than leave the building.

No reply as yet ;-)

Splintered and arrogant

A friend of mine built himself a new house next door and has just moved into it.

He spoke to BT eons in advance of the move and explained what he wanted. It was fairly simple; he wanted to be able to move himself, his family, his stuff, his phone line and his ADSL (not BT) from one house to the other on the same day. The Indian on the end of the line said that would be no problem and took his details. Then all of a sudden, nothing whatsoever happened. Then it happened again. Despite much phoning and poking and pointed question asking, nothing continued to happen again and again .. but it happened so close together that you couldn't really tell when one stopped and the next nothing started.

Suffice to say he and therefore his business, has been off the net for coming up 3 weeks now while BT keep handing on the buck like a game of pass the parcel bomb.

Why are BT losing money? Because they are completely useless that's why.

Passport triggered car bomb

Step one

Borrow a taxi used in the airport run, replace the rear seat stuffing with semtex and fit a passport tuned RFID scanner set to trigger the detonator when a UK or US passport is on the seat. You don't even need to know who, just that the codes are of US or UK origin.

There is no step two, particularly for the hapless tourist.

Onion Routing & Opportunistic Encryption

Check out Tor http://www.torproject.org/

The idea is to make your web request emerge from any one of a shedload of IP addresses to completely scramble the continuity. It's more than that but you get the idea.

As for email, if you set up your own self hosted mail server, arm it with a certificate and make sure you only communicate with others of similar setup, then the database can't see what you are doing. The mail doesn't pass through an ISP's mail servers and the data that does go through the ISP is encrypted. They can see it is on the right port for SMTPS but as for what's in it? Nada. I know that you cannot guarantee what everyone else is doing about their mail, but at least you won't be the one telling Jaqubooti all about yourself. They will at least have to piece your stuff together from the fragments that turn up in your less careful friends' ISP logs. It's not rocket science and it's not expensive. A great number of businesses already do this and have been doing so for years.

Texts? You're stuffed there I'm afraid. Sorry.

Now where do I go ??

For many years, up until a few years ago, Oz was my bolt hole of choice to emigrate away from the static prison ship the UK is being converted into. Canada is too cold. I can only speak English. South Africa is too dangerous. Please don't tell me my best option is to stay here, get the bar code tattooed on my forehead and have done with it ??!!

Or you could ...

: By Anonymous Coward Posted Friday 28th November 2008 00:21 GMT

: Alert

: ...the truly stupid of society.

: Wake up people, you need to protect your identity, not give it away

: to just anyone!!

Or you could take the approach that there is shedloads of data about you online already, NOT put there by you and more to the point not controlled by you. In my experience, a great deal of this 3rd party data is out of date and inaccurate.

I control the data I put up about me. If I make sure sure that it is accurate and up to date, then if someone does want to find out stuff about me, the bit I put up will at least be correct. If I am quite happy to tell something to a complete stranger I end up chatting to on a train, then I will put it on a social networking page. If not, I don't.

Managing your online footprint is not stupid. In fact, it could be argued that letting other people shape your online footprint for you is truly stupid. For myself, I choose to manage it myself but have no beef either way. It's all too soon to tell.

Paris 'cos she successfully managed her online appearance

Pot Kettle, Kettle Pot

So the EU, that centre of good practice, honesty, democracy, openness and stellar book keeping are going to investigate an organisation who's reputation worldwide, while having taken a few knocks recently, is still up there as being a straight and fair reporter of world events. I am told that there are still places that a gun or any other form of ID will get you shot or worse, but a BBC sign will get you the truth and a continued pulse. This is valuable to all of us and to be frank, 150 quid is not a great deal to pay. Try getting any other TV system for that.

Read my lips .. LEAVE THE BEEB ALONE !!

PS I was being sarcastic about the EU in case you hadn't worked it out.

Round of applause to Orange

No .. That's it thanks. Good on 'em.

For the Facebookers amongst us

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/132426

This is a Facebook "Cause" to promote the number10.gov petition to stop the "Communications Data Bill"

Join it and push it out to all your Facebook friends.

Anybody ??

The assembled company seems to feel a little sceptical about the lovely Ms. Smith's latest wet dream. I have to confess I'm a little anti myself.

So .. Is there ANYONE out there who thinks this might be a good idea?

Oh and the rest of you, BE NICE ;-)

Replace GATSOs with real Coppers !!

"Replace GATSOs with average speed checks

By Jel Mist

Posted Friday 18th July 2008 13:08 GMT

[...] but it makes me wonder what possible motive there is for objecting to speed cameras unless they cramp your style."

What winds many of us up is not the presence of the GATSOs, but the all but complete absence of any other form of automotive policing. It now seems that the only sin on the road is going faster than the (quite often) politically inspired arbitrary speed limits. It's almost the only road safety message that is being put out there. It's on the radio, the telly and even on the cinema!

You will now find people who genuinely feel they are doing society and their fellow motorists a big favour by plodding along at an average 35-40 MPH on perfectly clear and serviceable roads with posted 60 limits; but who are incandescent that they can no longer use their handheld mobiles while driving and who quite regularly drive home at 10:30 with several more than a couple of pints in them.

If the existence and placement of speed cameras was self evidently inspired by accident rates and road safety and not by catching people speeding on genuinely faster pieces of road ...

I understand that there is a speed limit. However, which is the more dangerous.

1 - Someone doing 80 on a 70 limit dual carriageway with nothing in front up to a clearly visible distance of a mile ahead in broad daylight on a clear dry day.

2 - Someone doing 45 MPH in the middle lane of a busy but not congested motorway, forcing 3 lanes of traffic into the outside lane and creating a several mile long tailback.

One is legal and one is dangerous and sadly they aren't the same one.

The laws are supposed to prevent dangerous behaviour, not become an end in themselves. Breaking road traffic law isn't in and of itself dangerous, they can only ever be an approximation and the politicos and safety nazis need to keep that one VERY clearly in mind.

IT: Because we need to get back out of the habit of jonesing for technological solutions to purely human problems.

Wrong way round

Hi There,

I remember reading figures derived from unique page views and such that show there are 1.5 times as many *active desktop Linux users as *active desktop Mac users. This is of course always going to be hard to trace as number of Mac licenses issued doesn't necessarily correspond to actual active users and the cut of Win/Lin/Mac percentages will vary with different web sites. I suspect that Apple's Mac's patch download site would show an almost universal desktop Mac world domination. These figures attempted to flatten it all out and once done, Linux came in a clear 2nd.

As for the when/where/who for these numbers, sorry, I read them with interest in passing and failed to note down where.

Just starting to get it then !

Hmmm .. I can see from a few of the comments here that the "Globalism is Good" "Bigger is Better" mantras are starting to lose their glitter. It seems that even though our great and glorious leaders have been repeating them over and over, that people are starting to have their doubts. Thank **** for that !

Now maybe we can try a new approach that I have heard called "Localism". A kind of freestyle mix of globalism, in terms of economies of scale, but where it is only the information that flows on a global basis; the movement of physical objects is kept to an economical minimum. When a function or company or government service is localised, such as a hospital, the costs of the hospital itself are combined with the estimated total travel costs for the catchment for that hospital and the feasibility/economic efficiency is calculated on the total, not just the blinkered cost of the hospital itself. This way a balance is reached between the reduction in the hospital's cost per head the bigger and more centralised it gets and the rise in user costs the further away it gets. We'll probably end up reopening all the cottage hospitals we had when I was a kid in rural Herefordshire :-)

ET Because this kind of decentralised thinking is completely alien to our lords and masters in Whitehall, for whom the actual people using it are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

Re: Not wishing to rain on anyone's parade

Fair comment if you only have one of everything, or don't want a means of rebuilding a machine that dies. I use cobbler to produce the second, thrid etc instance of a platform I have hand developed. I theoretically can use it to rebuild the basic platform before rolling the data back on ... but so far (touch wood) I haven't needed to do that in anger :-)

Trespass now a crime

I forget which item from the deluge of new law it was that made it so, but trespass is now a crime. IIRC it comes in various degrees for which the prison sentence goes up sharply with the use of violence and the possession of degrees of weaponry .. culminating in the authorities being able to bomb you from orbit if you pull a gun or some such.

ET because these days if he landed on farmer Joe's back 50 he'd be arrested for trespass.

Re: Blair/Brown make me sick

> By Anonymous Coward

> Posted Tuesday 17th June 2008 14:49 GMT

>

> I really would like to know how our Squaddies feel everytime they return

> from overseas to see the freedoms and liberties that they are supposedly

> fighting/dying for (as Brown stated earlier this week infront of his master

> GWB) being systematically eroded in the name of

> Terrorism/Peodophiles/Drugs/"Over-Hyped-Fear-Of-The-Week".

Well I can tell you what one ex-serviceman thought. A very good friend of mine was so disgusted with what they were doing that he emigrated to Canada. I am only staying because 1) Canada is too cold for me and 2) I want to "Do my Bit" by trying to wake people up to this stuff before the doors finally close and it's all too late.

Which side will you fight for in the Union War ?

More and more people of my acquaintance are seriously considering the possibility that there will be a civil war within the EU superstate, with the Unionist EU forces pitted against Nationalist forces from the individual states that used to exist before the commission slight-of-handed the components of the EU Consti^H^H^HLisbon Treaty into place and took over.

It could be flashed off by any one of a huge number of triggers. Maybe the phasing out of the former national flags in favour of the ring of stars. Maybe the partition of the nations into transnational "Administrative Zones"; I'll be living in the Manche zone apparently, a mix of southern England, northern France and bits of other countries. It could be the switchover of military and Police command from the British Crown to the Commission. Although history would suggest that is actually more likely to be something really quite trivial, but that happens at exactly the wrong time. [If you think I'm spinning one, check the Constitution, it's all there]

The previous commentators seem to miss the point about the Commission vs. Parliament. President Broon is so far up the EU that there is actually no real difference at the moment between the two. Of the other two major parties, one is even more EU-phile than NeoLabour and the other slightly less. However, just because the current incumbents are drooling for the EU politician gravy train, doesn't mean that the institution itself is a dead loss. We can get back to being the place we once were by a very few simple acts:

1 - Switch to a proportional representation style vote for MPs

The system we have at present presupposes that there are but two strands of opinion. Nowadays there are an almost infinite number of opinions, which would be far better represented by having to actually negotiate to get new law through; something our current elected dictatorship doesn't encourage.

2 - Repeal the European Communities Act

.. and therefore revoke all of the subsequent treaties, including the re-badged EU Constitution, when they sign us up to it despite massive popular opposition. We can then sort through the UK law that came off the back of the formerly mandatory EU Directives and pick out the stuff that is good for our country and dump the stuff that isn't. There is no way on this planet that the rest of the EU are suddenly going to stop trading with us and vice versa, so we can pioneer inter-state trade treaties that mirror and simplify the good parts of the former EU trading laws and leave the rubbish bits behind. We can also then choose which of our European friends deserve a financial helping hand, rather than being required to pay out obscene sums of money through a very corrupt and leaky middleman that would be better served going to rebuild out own national infrastructure.

As a closing note, if you think I'm being paranoid, just sit back and read about the history of Europe for a bit. Vicious and devastating wars have been kicked off for way less than we are already putting up with and chronologically we are WAY overdue. Y'all better start kicking up a fuss before it's too late.

Gods of Powercash

Who knows, maybe they just made a very, very impressive brown envelope.

Add my business to the tally

I will be closing my doors after 8 years in business for myself. As of last September my monthly takings were an amount I should be taking every two or three days.

Why? When I asked my customers, the response was that they were cutting back in case there was a recession. Were they at that point feeling the pinch? No, but we might in the future. I heard this message again and again. So of course the companies that were suppliers to them, themselves had to cut back and so on and so on until it reaches back to the start and fulfills the prediction. So, we once again enter a media inspired recession. The message of scares and paranoia from the press and telly makes it happen in reality.

It wouldn't be so bad if we had the usual cycle of good times, bad times, good times etc. Instead we have had average times, bad times, average times, bad times; so there's no profit from the good times to last us through.

Well done people and here we go again.

@Kjetil

Nice quote. I have always found it to be a whole lot easier and quicker to make the global assumption:

"Douglas Adams was right all along"

and carry on from there.

cf The cat owning existentialist that rules the universe. Perfect.

The man was a proper English genius, may he rest in peace.

Not to mention being one of only two authors (the other is Spike Milligan) who can make me lose it completely and roll on the floor incapable of speech with just the written word. I use the present tense as their books still make me completely hoot, despite having read them all a dozen times each.

Documentary

There a documentary a month or so ago (sorry can't remember title) that concerned the subject of airplane air quality ... not smoking, to which this thread seems to have been diverted.

Apparently, the chemical tricresyl phosphate, mentioned above, is used as an additive for lubrication purposes in the engines of big jets. The cabin air is sourced from the engine and can be contaminated with this chemical. There have been incidents where the contamination is so heavy it has rendered members of the flight crew incapable of doing their jobs. In one case, the pilot. In lower concentrations however, it cannot be detected by smell, but can cause nausia and other symptoms. Longer term exposure can have more drastic effects.

If this documentary is to be believed, then a study of this nature is LONG overdue.

[[ warning triangle as if you don't batton down the hatches you wouldn't need to worry about the air quality ... you wouldn't need any :-) ]]

Illegal != Immoral & Controlled == Uncontrolled

@ QuiteEvilGraham

[[ Secondly, obeying the law. This is an IT forum (sometimes) so I would like to remind our more moral contributors about what the law, and the zealous guardians thereof, did to Alan Turing for his disgusting, perverse behaviour in being homosexual. So what if he did directly contribute to shortening WW2 by about two years, thus saving untold millions of lives ... ]]

Obso-&&&&ing-lutely !!

This goes to the heart of something that is making me very very worried indeed about the state of our legal system and the future of this formerly-sceptered Ilse. The office of the UK President and his ill advised advisers seem to operating on a fundamentally flawed piece of logic. They need to think hard about this and understand that:-

*** Making something illegal does not make it stop ***

Think about the example of a decent bit of 60 limit road. Some eejit goes howling down it at 100 + X MPH and stuffs it through a tree. The CSIs say that the vehicle was traveling WAY over the limit and that the road is sound for the posted speed. The locals howl that "Something must be done", so the PtB make it into a 40 limit. They seem to think that if the road had been a 40 limit that the kids would not have broken THAT speed limit, despite the fact that they broke the other one. It now means that people who travel down that stretch at a safe 50-60 MPH will now face being nicked for breaking the law. This can only serve to weaken, if not finally crack, those people's regard for the law and make them less disinclined to break other laws.

So if we accept the quoted statement as fact, which we must inevitably do, then what does this say about the creation of laws like the subject of this thread that are inevitably going to criminalise a large number of people and a naturally occurring herb? What is the intended effect?

If we accept that toking is something that the establishment are worried about and that they want to make sure that people are educated about and not harmed by this herb, making the substance illegal is just not the way to go anyway.

What happens when you make something illegal that was formerly legal (not in my time, but once). In the old days, you could by smoking hemp in the shops. The shop keeper paid tax so there's money provided to the state by the sale of the substance to try and mitigate any harm caused. Make it illegal and as previously stated the use will continue, but now the shop keeper can no longer sell it. It will be sold by people outside the law who do not pay tax. The law enforcement authorities will then have to expend public money enforcing this law; lots and lots of it. The health authorities will still have to spend money trying to mitigate any harm caused. The government will have only a very cloudy idea of usage patterns and trends so cannot prioritise any messages they want to try and send out.

Leaving all morals aside it is a question of simple logic.

If you want to control it's use, then don't abdicate control of it; which is what you are doing by making it illegal.

I do find it very amusing (in a black comedy sort of way) that when a substance is made illegal it becomes a "Controlled Substance" when that's exactly what you've stopped doing! Prescription drugs are very highly regulated, measured, tested and all to ensure that the user gets exactly what it says on the tin. Street drugs are entirely unregulated, unmeasured, untested and a complete mystery to the user until after it's too late.

Society needs to sit back, think hard and decide exactly what they want for these drugs; and to start with there is one very basic decision to make.

"Do we allow that people can do what they want to themselves

as long as no others are harmed in so doing .. with the

exception of deliberate, immediate suicide?"

If yes, then why are the people who don't use these drugs getting so bent out of shape.

If no, then we need to think hard about rock climbing, parachuting, baccy smoking, drinking, skiing, weed smoking, injecting heroin .. you get the idea.

While you read the above, did you find yourself saying yes to some and no to others? Examine why that is the case. Is it because of the effect they have on others? Examine then if that is the act itself, or the fact that it is already illegal. Is it for the effect the act has on the doer? Examine whether it's any of your business to interfere in their lives.

This whole area is currently a completely illogical mess.

I suspect they make this stuff illegal just so that they don't actually have to exercise themselves and try and make any actual good whole brained decisions. Examine whether this is because they won't or just that they are simply not equipped.

[[ Mines the one with the very very long sleeves. it must be if I think for one minute that any politician is going to actually think about a subject like this and come to a genuinely intelligent pragmatic conclusion.]]

Same old same old

It's just one more way for the psychotic control freaks we seem to have inadvertently let into the driving seat, to type, collate, order, enumerate and index us and generally abuse their positions and exceed their remits .. AGAIN!

Does nobody see the obvious pattern here, or is it just me?

Look, I know I'm paranoid, goes with the job, but they may really be out to get us !!

Ditching 32 bit

I don't need to use 64 bit for the majority of my installs, so I would rather not buy 64 bit. I always used to spec AMD and had few if any problems with their stuff. Now I have no choice but to use Intel. If AMD still did 32 bit, I would still be a customer of theirs.

(I already got my coat and left .. months ago)

Its a ploy by ...

... the paramilitary wing of the UK Tourist Board !!

Self hosting - The facts that they don't want you to know.

[[ By Julian Bond

Posted Tuesday 25th March 2008 22:16 GMT

... IMHO, people should not be running SMTP servers at home on the back of a DSL/cable line. ... ]]

IMHO people called Julian should not be allowed to wear any item of clothing that is blue in colour ... well it's about as well argued.

Self hosting is a perfectly legitimate way of structuring your networking. It allows a much greater range of freedom to implement services for your company or household. It prevents your ISP from locking you in via a proprietary email/web domain.

If you want to know more, there's an article here that explains more about it:-

http://www.anvil.org/articles/self_hosting/

Paris: Because she knows how to do it for herself !!

EU .. not such a good idea

@ ge [[Let's join the EU properly and get Euros so all that Brent Crude can no longer be priced in dollars. ]]

Actually .. lets not .. All of the totalitarian new laws, all of the cultural sabotage (like destroying the rural post offices for eg) and a massive EU tax burden .. all courtesy of the EU.

Look up the definition of Fascist, then compare and contrast with the recent actions of the EU over the consti^H^H^HLisbon Treaty.

Europe in general and GB in particular became a major international force, out of all proportion to country size when we were a loose collection of mostly friendly countries. The closer we come to the United States of Europe, the lower down the league table we slip. If we try and imitate the federal systems in the massively failing USA or the completely defunct USSR, guess what will happen to us.

Who to go to & wget

Several people have asked "If not BT et al then who?". In the comments on another article on this subject I mentioned that I asked PlusNET if they were going to do this and they gave an unequivocal "No we are not". Despite the fact they are owned by BT.

As for whether wget will get caught, I'm not sure we know enough about the system to say 100%, but from the network diagrams, the wget traffic does at least pass through their equipment, so the Phorm system would seem to "see" your wget traffic, even if it doesn't note it down.

(Black Helis because the subject matter deserves it)

@Jason Edmunds

[[[ Can I just clarify something here? Without a recording industry absolutely nobody would have the faintest idea who Nine Inch Nails are.

Now that they're popular(ish), they can bite the hand that fed them their success, but who's gonna find the Next Big Thing and work to bring their work to our attention? ]]]

Wow! Are we really that brainless? I know that we have become addicted to the jollop dealt out by the big boys, but are we really that convinced that we can't do without their benign dictatorship? Time was when we had DJs, friends, local venues etc etc to find stuff we liked. We still do, but their job seems to have become a shedload easier. Now, it seems, they just do what they are told by the big media companies. And the result of this brave new world? Complete PAP that's driving the younger generation to buy up back catalogues of 70s and 80s rock bands; Led Zep, Floyd etc.

Anything new and innovative is a risk. Corporations don't like risks. They're far happier stacking the odds by putting together the "Perfect Band"; right look, right songwriters, right sound. The humanoids in the band itself might just as well be CGI, like in the film.

We know the power of "The Viral". We have the means of reproduction. All that is needed is an easy to use sales model that a new band can use to host the monetising section of their overall operation. Hopefully NiN can help work out what this looks like. I'm off to buy a copy. I haven't heard it yet, but I like a lot of their stuff, so $5 doesn't seem like to much for a punt. Wow again. Just like the old days. The price of a single was just little enough to be "Worth a Punt". What goes around, comes around eh :)

PlusNET Kosher despite BT connection

I just had a dialog with PlusNET (one of my ISPs) about this subject and they know of it, they know BT are using it and they do not themselves think it is right for us the customers. They also undertook to seek opinions via their forums before any future decision to change their minds.

Sounds ok to me :)

Who turned them down and how do we escape

Two questions, thanks for asking :-)

1 - Who, so far, has turned them down flat?

2 - Is there a way, other than a remote encrypted proxy or some such, of making your web traffic completely byepass their system. I'm not talking about vaig hand waving about collecting it but not doing anything with the data (honest guv); I'm talking about complete opt out so this mob don't even know I'm there.

I think the answer to 1) would form a good start on an ISP whitelist and 2) could well be the start of a new open source project.

Nothing left to add .. Fantastic !

I remember, going back a few years, when all this NIR nonsense first kicked off and I started getting involved in no2id, I was lambasted and ridiculed for being so naive and idealistic as to feel we didn't need this thing for "obvious" security / immigration / terrorism / paedophile / [insert horseman of choice] reasons. I have had the stunningly ignorant "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" mantra chucked at me more times than I care to mention. I was accused of being both anti-British and a Little Englander "Not allowing us to take our place on the world stage" in the same sentence even ... and I still have no idea about the logic for that one!

So, I read the article and, per habit, made notes on the ill informed, self serving waffle disgorged by the latest to hold this particular poison chalice, with a view to making a suitable comment.

Then I read the existing comments.

Fan-bl**dy-tastic folks ! You got the lot :)

I then read through the comments again. Not one was even slightly in favour of the scheme !

As an aside though .. does anyone know where she got the "60% in favour" stats. The last survey I saw suggested that it's more like 47% (and rapidly falling) for, 50% (and rising) against with up to 25% of the population in jail if they ever try and make them compulsory.

eg http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39292691,00.htm

Smiley .. Cos it make me happeee :-)

Social Terrorism

It occurs to me to parallel email based social viruses and these apparent threats from liquids, shoes and even pregnant ladies' bumps (for heavens sake).

The intent of the social virus is to make the recipient send it on to a dozen or more new recipients. Get a calculator and see how many times you can multiply 12 by itself before the calculator borks. They are very easy to create. They cause no direct harm in and of themselves, but rather rely on the "Better safe than sorry" instinct for a nice knee jerk reaction.

It is very hard to actually smuggle a bomb onto a plane. Gilligan notwithstanding it would take a lot of specialist knowledge and planning to get the job done. So why bother. What is it done for? Obviously, to create a reaction in the public in general and the authorities in particular; in aid of promoting your particular cause. There's no need to actually smuggle bombs to do this, just to make the authorities believe that you can and are about to do it. They will then react .. and if history is to be believed *over* react. The response will inconvenience and spread fear amongst thousands and thousands of people. Job done.

The only question is, are the authorities over reacting because they genuinely believe that there is about to be a flood of bogus pregnant ladies blowing themselves up on planes; or are they deliberately pumping up the fear level, using these reports, maybe even generating these reports, in order to justify their own "security" agenda.

[wokka wokka] Wokka Wokka WOKKA WOKKA !!

@Anonymous Coward

The original target of your question "What is wrong with ID cards" was Guy Herbert, who is actually the General Secretary of NO2ID. He spends a great deal of his time on this very subject and there are in fact a large number of reasons why ID cards are a very bad idea. I don't wish to put words in his mouth, but I suspect he would expect you to take a peek at the no2id web site as suggested in a previous post. To save you hunting for it, you might like to take a glance at:

http://www.no2id.net/IDSchemes/whyNot.php

.... this lists some of the heavy hitters.

May I return a question to you?

What are they good for .. and is this enough to justify to the monstrous amount of money they are currently budgeting for .. and we all know about government IT budgets, and their ability to step up by orders of magnitude at the drop of a hat.

Please take a look at page indicated before answering, as many of the governments stated "Good Reasons" are completely bogus. For example they say it will destroy ID theft once and for all, whereas in fact it would make the problem far far worse by enabling ID fraudsters to present a supposed "gold standard" ID.

What are you doing over here, the point is over there

@Geordie Pete

"I read of a case of a surgeon performing elective surgery, who had to contend with four different sets of patient records for the same patient, each with a different patient number, and no single one of which contained all of the necessary information. One set even had the patient's name spelt differently. It's situations like this where mistakes arise."

.. and a massive centralised database is going to cure the problem of bad data entry or maybe b) make it even more dangerous because, as with the National Identity Register and the ID card the data will be "Right". It is automatically assumed to be the plain, god's honest, reference TRUTH.

So *when* someone suffers from a mistype the doctor will simply follow his nose and potentially kill someone.

@Tom

"The doctors don't design, test and implement the infrastructre. I do!"

From what I read, this is a major part of the problem; not that you *do* design, test etc (I'm sure you do a fine job, you are certainly proud of what you do, which is good), but that the actual end users *didn't*. Many articles around the subject have stressed the point that the design may be great, but it is not relevant to the needs of the clinicians that are supposed to be the end users.

Another major point is that once the database is complete and the NIR number is embedded (plans already made public), all it would take is another carefully stage managed "Emergency" to enact legislation allowing this database to get pulled into the mix along with the other "NIR enabled" gubmunt databases. Forget NHS login cards. Now they (read any civil servant or agency employee, cf the NIR act) have a high definition picture of your entire life. Imagine how valuable THAT will be when the lose the next 60,000,000,000,000 records on a BluRay disk.

PH Because as a rich celeb she probably won't be on any of these databases for "Security" reasons.

(Apparently important people's security worries are more valid than mine)

@ Ash

"Are you trying to tell me that you CAN:

[...]

3) Get married without providing proof if identity (baring in mind the name change of spouse is legally binding, is it not?)"

Yup .. Although I'm a Brit, I got married in Vegas. We both brought our passports with us to both the registrar and wedding chapel. We didn't need them. We filled in our names with a stubby pencil, passed over some Dollar bills and were handed a marriage license. End of.

@Anonymous Coward (Legal Tender)

"This *may* be illegal. It *is* illegal if they pay you without your consent only in a way that can be redeemed at company stores (as per the song) but that's not quite what you describe. Still sounds dodgy though.

Can anyone more knowledgeable comment?"

IANAL, but had to do some background research for a customer on the concept of Legal Tender. If a particular financial instrument is designated "Legal Tender" for a given range of debt values, the vendor cannot refuse them. In the UK, Bank of England notes and coins (below certain limits) are so designated.

For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender