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A new blog has made its way onto my short list of bookmarked blogs: Allah Is In The House. The funniest stuff going, bar none, and brutally incisive social commentary to boot! His periodic surveys of the news are just priceless. R. C. says check it out. January 22nd, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Are politicians actually capable of thought and articulation or they merely making noises in return for which they think they are going to get rewards? Barely two weeks after Michael Howard trumpeted his alleged belief that “the people should be big and the state should be small“, he weighs in on the side of big state and against the little citizen:
Well, there is a germ of truth here in that HMG is most certainly in a ‘muddle’ but at least it is a muddle which is shambling along, after a fashion, in a sort-of, vaguely right direction. The motives may not be entirely logical or even honourable but I think it’s results that count here. But am I to believe that Mr Howard has thought about this ‘very carefully’? Cannabis is only illegal because people like Mr Howard demand that it be so and the question of whether or not it is ‘safe’ (whatever that means) is entirely irrelevant. If he genuinely wants to the state to be small then he is hardly likely to achieve that aim by reinforcing the principle rubric behind big government, i.e. that it is necessary in order to manage the citizen’s health and welfare. So is Mr Howard (a) disingenuous or (b) really not thought this through at all? I think we have a right to know. January 22nd, 2004 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
An excellent summary of the issues that slipped under the radar over the Christmas period (the summary, not the issues…). Biometrics, surveillance, RFID, data retention and more…
Please read for an overview of the last year’s developments and links to relevant coverage. Silicon.com also has a useful section Protecting Your ID special reports that is worth checking out. January 22nd, 2004 | Comments are closed
Silicon.com reports that the controversial radio frequency ID (RFID) tracking tags will become ubiquitous in consumer goods but privacy issues, standards and cost need to be addressed first, according to a senior executive of UK supermarket chain Safeway. Safeway ran an RFID pilot with Unilever last year on 40,000 cases of Lynx deodorant tracking them from the factory through to the shelves of three stores and, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Safeway CIO Ric Francis said that while the company has no immediate plans to use RFID, the pilot did enough to convince him that the technology is absolutely key to the future of the retail sector.
The hope is that once the standards are in place and the cost of the RFID chips drops, then the technology will become an unseen and accepted part of shopping. January 22nd, 2004 | Comments are closed
It sounds as if brows all over Europe are being furrowed, heads are being shaken and hands being heavily wrung. What to do? What to do? Via Instapundit:
Mama Mia, Ai Caramba, Gott in Himmel and Merde! Does this mean that the European ‘social model’ is not working? The Professor himself points the way:
Well, yes. They do have something to do with it. In fact, they have everything to do with it. But just because this is slap-in-the-face obvious, it would be unwise to assume any public (or even private) recognition of this obviousness in the halls of European power. → Continue reading: We’re in a hole! Keep digging January 22nd, 2004 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The natives are finally growing restless. Well, some of them are, at any rate and, for just for a change, this is grass-roots agitation of the righteous sort. Yes, the people behind the Taxpayers Alliance are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. The strapline says it all:
Right on, brothers and sisters and Amen and, might I just add, about bloody time too. Ever since the mid-90’s, when the producing classes were finally bullied and browbeaten into dolefully accepting that higher taxes would result in better government services, they have stoically maintained their stiffer upper lips while the fiscal thumbscrews have been steadily tightened. But the government services they thought they cherished have remained as crap as they ever were and now, finally, a few of them have realised that they’ve been took, they’ve been had. But (and you all knew that there just had to be a ‘but’) as pleased as I am to finally see these few worms turning, they still have some way to go before they address the ‘root causes’ of their problems:
The objects of their attack are what they see as the ‘waste and inefficiency’ of the government as if those things can somehow be magically eradicated while leaving the public sector largely intact. However, ‘waste and inefficiency’ are not bugs requiring elimination in order for the welfare state to function properly, they are systemic features of the welfare state itself. For as long as these campaigners continue to accept the fabian argument that services like healthcare and education must be provided by the government, then their otherwise noble campaign will remain fatally flawed. It leaves them wide open to the counter-argument that state and schools and hospitals must have the necessary ‘resources’ and sooner, rather than later I think, they will find themselves running smack into that brick wall. But, that said, they are still doing the right thing. Or, at least, starting to do the right thing. I hope it is the thin end of a very thick wedge. [My thanks to reader Gawain Towler who provided the above link via Terence Coyle.] January 21st, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
A kind reader provided a link to an article by the BBC warning that snooping powers given to more than 600 public bodies look set to create a small industry of private firms that will help process requests for information about who people call, the websites they visit and who they swap e-mail with. One firm, called Singlepoint, has been specifically created to act as a middleman between the bodies that want access to data and the net service providers and phone operators that hold it.
Singlepoint spokesman explained that without Singlepoint it would be more difficult and costly for public authorities to request data as they would have to set up relationships with all of the UK’s communication service providers. Instead, Singlepoint was setting up a system that would automatically route requests for information to relevant net or phone firms. The Home Office estimates that up to 500,000 requests per year are made for information about who pays for a particular phone or web account. About 90% of these requests are for subscriber information. Singlepoint estimates that there could be millions of requests per year. Most of these requests are made by the police but approximately 4% are made by the many public authorities that have had new powers granted under RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act). Other firms are starting to set themselves up as trainers for people within public bodies involved with investigations. the Home Office was keen to get firms offering courses because the police did not have the resources to take on the training of these public body workers itself. Bodies granted snooping powers include the Serious Fraud Office, all local authorities and councils plus other organisations such as the Charity Commission and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science. When proposals to grant these snooping powers were first aired in mid-2002 they were greeted with alarm by privacy advocates and civil liberty groups. A campaign co-ordinated by the FaxYourMP website prompted the government to withdraw its proposals. However, following a consultation exercise the proposals were resurrected and the powers granted in a series of statutory instruments issued in November 2003. January 21st, 2004 | Comments are closed
Wired reports that customers will want to control exactly who knows where they are and when now that wireless companies can track a mobile phone’s location. Bell Labs says it has developed a network software engine that can let cell users be as picky as they choose about disclosing their whereabouts, a step that may help wireless companies introduce location-based services in a way customers will find handy rather than intrusive. Under a federal mandate requiring that cell carriers be able to pinpoint the whereabouts of any customer who calls 911 during an emergency, expensive network upgrades have made wireless companies more anxious to deploy services that can exploit these new capabilities for a profit. Examples of such services would typically include the ability for restaurants and other businesses to send a solicitation by text message to a cell phone when its owner wanders within range of those merchants. Other applications might include the ability to locate co-workers and customers. While many cell-phone users might like to be notified of a nearby eatery or find it helpful to let others keep track of their movements, most would rather not expose themselves to round-the-clock, everywhere-they-go surveillance. However, given the real-time requirements of transmitting information over a telephone network, it can be difficult to program a wide range of options for individuals to personalize preferences such as when, where and with whom to share location information. One solution is to hard-code a network database with an “on-off” switch that activates or deactivates a service, for instance, during a window of time with set hours such as peak and off-peak. Bell Labs said it used a “rules-driven” approach to programming that can take personalization to a less-rigid level without bogging down the computing power of a network. January 21st, 2004 | Comments are closed
A lovely interlude in the Telegraph yesterday:
First time in history? How about Charlemagne? Napoleon? Hitler? Britain and five other EU nations have challenged the Commission to reduce the maximum share of national budgets that Brussels can spend from 1.24 per cent of GDP to one per cent. How revolutionary…  January 21st, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Telegraph has an article about an official parliamentary report that notes that Holland’s 30-year experiment in trying to create a tolerant, multicultural society has failed and led to ethnic ghettos and sink schools.
The major parties in the centre-Right government dismissed such solutions as insufficient. Maxime Verhagen, the Christian Democrat leader in parliament, said one had to be “either naive or ignorant” not to understand that the policy had led the country into a cul-de-sac.
Holland used to be an example of multi-ethnic tolerance, spending large amounts of funding to welcome immigrants and running ‘ethnic diversity projects’ that included 700 Islamic clubs that are often run by hard-line clerics. Two years ago, Pim Fortuyn voiced the resentment that had been building up behind the ‘multi-culti’ facade. The European Union’s Racism and Xenophobia Monitoring Centre has catalogued a rash of anti-Muslim attacks, leaving girls too frightened to go out wearing head scarves. The violence has been on the increase since the September 11 attacks. The Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, has warned that the al-Qa’eda network is stealthily taking root in Dutch society by preying on disaffected Muslim youth with Jihad video cassettes circulating in mosques, cafes and prisons. This is what happens when the state interferes with natural social processes, such assimilation. The example of the US shows that the melting pot approach works just. It is only when the state decides to promote one group or another the social sets in. As always, the state is not your friend. January 21st, 2004 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a story in today’s Guardian about a new kind of musical gizmo, the sinfonia, which is striking terror into the hearts of West End theatre musicians:
First reports made it sound to me like a glorified backing tape. That really would be creepy, with the conductor having to keep time with a predetermined tempo, with a predetermined performance in fact. However the Sinfonia does seem to be a bona fide musical instrument:
Older versions, presumably, of that music geek in Fame who played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (I think it was) all on his own at his high-tech keyboard.
It occurred to me while reading the story that if costs can be reduced, maybe it will become possible to put on more musicals, thereby creating as many jobs for musicians as ever, and many more for singers and dancers. But the Musicians’ Union cares not for such speculations, and the union-friendly Guardian man ends his piece not with such economic optimism but with this decidedly menacing final sentence:
Expect it soon, a remake of that old Kazan classic, this time called In the Orchestra Pit, with the guy in the Brando part now saying: “I could have been a concert pianist.” January 21st, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you think the French ‘headscarf ban’ is going to cause friction, then I cannot wait to see where this is going to lead:
The decision as to whether or not to grow a beard should be left to the individual schoolgirl. After all, it is what is going on inside that counts! January 21st, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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