Re: Not a moment too soon
I don't think that's what they're trying to get. This is more consistent with wanting to watch all data from all people, to find people who can be accused of something but who are not yet known to the authorities.
595 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jan 2008
Not that all of the cameras will necessarily be visible to the public, but people could start marking the positions of those they can spot, on openstreetmap, as described at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made=surveillance.
There are already a few marked in the area: https://kamba4.crux.uberspace.de/?lat=51.5320529&lon=-0.1206259&zoom=17
(It would be interested to seeing whether those watching the cameras will spot that people are looking for/at the cameras and making notes, or indeed whether police on the ground would spot it. I'm not sure whether this means it's better or worse to do it as an organized mapping party.)
"You want him to have an off-site backup as well? There are trust issues with off-site backups."
Yes, definitely. Especially if he's doing something that he's aware may "come to the attention of the authorities". And, assuming the backup is encrypted to the same level as the original, I'd trust an offsite USB stick or SD card that the authorities won't find more than a drive that they will find. It doesn't have to be left with a person who knows him; it could be under a stone somewhere in the countryside around his village, for example.
I think they may have sunk a bit further, with the smear contained in "Private data, including photographs of vulnerable children, from an autism charity and Treehouse School" --- if he's picked up data about autism-related education, it's likely to include information about schools at which the children may be classed as "vulnerable", and if he's done "wget" on a school website, it's likely to include photos with some of the pupils in them. But the way they've mentioned it looks to me like they're hoping the Daily Mail will pick up on that and infer that the photos were indecent.
In his situation, I wouldn't want the hardware back, except to do a bit of post-forensic forensic examination of my own. I would assume keyloggers or similar would have been planted at a low level in the systems. (It might be interesting to examine the machines to see what has been done to them on behalf of the state, but I wouldn't trust them for real use.)
It also seems odd (although not implausible) for someone of his learning not have kept important files backed up, so perhaps there is something more complicated to this.
So with the fingerprint reader in the on/off button, if you need to read a fingerprint again once the machine is running, can you do that without it taking it as "off" and switching itself off again? Maybe short touch for fingerprints, long for on/off? Or touch vs push?
I get annoyed with my work laptop (Dell) putting the power light inside the on/off button, so if you want to see whether you've held it down long enough yet, you have to put your finger only half-way on the button as otherwise it covers the light up.
And thinking of accessibility for the blind, separate buttons for "on" and "off" so you don't have to be able to see the display or take some other action to find out, to know whether you're switching it on or off, would surely be better anyway.
That's one of the aspects in which my first ever laptop, an Epson PX-8, was more advanced than most that have come after it: a proper slider switch with a positive action for on/off. You knew where you were with that! Not that in fact I have a problem with switching laptops on or off accidentally, but still putting more functions into that one control seems a bit like expecting your car's ignition key to control the windscreen wipers too. (The other way it beat modern laptops was that it had a carrying handle built in.)
Bunk'art, in Tirana, is a museum and art gallery built in the main Cold War bunker of the Albanian communists, and is fascinating to visit.
(And, although not a bunker, in the same city, the old secret surveillance centre The House of Leaves is also now open as a museum, with a lot of old wiretapping and other bugging equipment on display.)
As phone processing gets more powerful... yes, but you won't like it with the present level of battery power density, unless they drop this slenderness fad and give us a nice chunky phone again, perhaps with hot-swappable batteries.
And I suspect there'll be government pressure against it, from many governments, because of the enhanced privacy it'll provide. Maybe even some legislation on some weird pretext, such as classifying it as a munition?
Perhaps by "hash" they mean file size? Which, after all, is a hash, albeit not a very useful one for most purposes. For the government's purpose, in this case, they might find it rather useful: "The sizes of the encrypted files are the same as the sizes of some encrypted porn images. Therefore the files are encrypted porn images, because hash collisions are so rare."
I'm sure a little "lobbying" from the industries concerned will change the MEPs' minds, and they will declare anything repairable to be dangerous (in case children eat the batteries, or something like that; actually that one is a real risk but banning removable batteries isn't the right solution).
Why don't we have a "brown envelope" (or currency notes) icon?
The explanation of anti-submarining bars (on the rear of trucks) that I remember from when they were relatively new was that they wouldn't stop the accidents from being fatal, but at least the car occupants wouldn't be decapitated, thus improving the reputation of the road transport industry.
I think it's probably more to do with separating passengers from their laptops, for convenience in raiding the laptops (planting keyloggers, like the first stage of an "Evil maid" attack, perhaps?).
Or perhaps they really do think it's better for people to put electronic devices in the hold. Remember Lockerbie? Well, it didn't happen over US territory, so I perhaps they dismiss that as irrelevant.
There being more Pis than Pi owners is to balance the survey finding that there are many more householders who consider themselves cat owners than there are cats.
So how many Pis per cat?
Big brother icon, because the NSA is sure to be tracking your cats via your catflap computers, and sending the results to MI5.
I'm sure there'll be a way round this for the farmers, involving putting up a notice under the Occupiers' Liability Act section 4(2)(h) disclaiming any responsibility towards trespassers. Well it works for everything else, or at least you'd think so going by the number of such signs around the place.
Since their pay to stay, Premier Foods have been a company I'd be delighted to see go under, in the hope that whoever moves into their niche will be an improvement. I'm not going to notice their price hikes, because I've not bought from them since then.
Phone coverage isn't the only thing they do better than us; for example, their cafés are much better too. (In fact, Albanian friends assure me that if their café culture wasn't as good and people got out of the cafés a bit more, they could have a really thriving economy. But I think economics may be a bit more complicated than that.)
But seriously, it is embarrassing for the UK when you consider that a fairly poor and very mountainous country beats us at coverage.
If you get a large enough mesh, it will increase the communication that avoids going via ISPs, and hence reduce the amount of storing and filtering.
On the other hand, it's a radio protocol, and a published one at that, and so implicitly observable by anyone who joins the mesh.
I wonder which way that will play out? (My guess is neither; that areas of mesh won't grow large enough for this to be much of an effect.)
Indeed; and those politicians are, on the whole, keen on even larger organizations such as the EU, taking the power even further from the people. The EU, in particular, seems keen to promote the idea that smaller states (such as nations, or even smaller ones where democracy has already been shown to work well) must inherently be at war with each other; which is very convenient for them.
On the other hand, modern communications has started to shrink the world, in the sense of bringing more contacts and information into reach, so effective democracy could become workable on a larger scale than has been done so far; and developments such as Pirate Parties and DemoEx show that there is an alternative to "government as distinct from citizens".