We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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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.
We saw an opportunity for a business or a facility that could provide secure processing for the data requests that will come out of this legislation.
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.
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.
A lovely interlude in the Telegraph yesterday:
Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, accused Britain and other member states yesterday of betraying the historic goal of EU expansion by depriving Brussels of the money needed to make enlargement work. Mr Prodi said he was mystified as to why some countries were proposing to reduce the ceiling on payments to the EU budget when the continent was about to unite “for the first time in history”.
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…
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.
Between 70 and 80 per cent of Dutch-born members of immigrant families import their spouse from their “home” country, mostly Turkey or Morocco, perpetuating a fast-growing Muslim subculture in large cities.
While the report praised most immigrants for assimilating and for doing well at school, it attacked successive governments for stoking ethnic separatism. The worst mistake was to encourage children to speak Turkish, Arabic or Berber in primary schools rather than Dutch. The report concluded that Holland’s 850,000 Muslims must become Dutch if the country was to hold together. It proposes cheap housing in the leafy suburbs to help ethnic groups assimilate with the rest of the 16 million population.
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.
Immigrants in the Netherlands top the ‘wrong’ lists – disability benefit, unemployment assistance, domestic violence, criminality statistics and school and learning difficulties.
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.
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:
Theatre musicians held opening talks last night with the millionaire impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh in what they suspect may be a battle for survival against his plan to introduce an electronic “magic box” in place of part of the orchestra for musicals.
Champions of the device, called the Sinfonia, maintain that it “gives more bangs for the buck” than musicians. Musicians say it “steals jobs and cheats audiences”.
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:
The Sinfonia resembles a synthesiser but consists of two powerful computers and keyboards. It was developed by two professors of music technology.
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.
Using a keyboard, the operator controls the instrumental output while watching the conductor’s baton on video.
Virtual orchestras were a factor in a recent Broadway strike. This led to compromise on a minimum of 19-26 musicians for each production.
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:
Last night the Musicians’ Union said it understood there were no trained Sinfonia operators in Britain.
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.”
If you think the French ‘headscarf ban’ is going to cause friction, then I cannot wait to see where this is going to lead:
A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister.
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!
Instapundit quotes from this, which is about how the North Korean regime may finally be coming to its last days.
The bit he quotes concerns aid. Apparently foreign donors are refusing to just throw good money after bad, because they are not being allowed to see if the aid they sent last time has reached its intended donees. Instead, the assumption is that the North Korean army is gobbling it all up, as I am sure it is.
This is all excellent and a credit to the aid givers. First your target the vile regime you intend to topple. You then give it a succession of vast aid bribes. The regime accordingly becomes addicted to your aid for its continuing survival, and stops bothering about finding resources anywhere else. Then you cut off the aid, and start dangling the thought of resuming aid if certain political concessions are made.
Instead of crushing the regime militarily, we simply buy it.
Bad luck for the millions of poor bastards on the receiving end of the vile regime in question, of course, but at least this way they have hope that their torment may end one day, provided they can live to see “one day”.
On the other hand, maybe the aid givers achieved this outcome by mistake. They were trying truly to help the vile regime. No matter. When it comes to toppling a vile regime, idiots trying to help can be just as effective as competent people trying to topple.
I recall how the Communist regime in Poland never ever really recovered from all the aid it was given by idiot merchant banks in the nineteen seventies. The rulers of the place became addicted to a lavish lifestyle that their bankers eventually got bored with paying for, and it all unravelled from there.
As Instapundit says of North Korea just now: stay tuned.
Hosting Matters was having some ‘server issues’ which caused Samizdata.net to be briefly unavailable. We are also having other technical problems but expect to be fully operational again shortly.
Beautiful thoughts from Lileks on Monday, at the end of a piece which starts with him complaining in a humdrum way about some humdrum journalists saying that space program money ought to be spent instead on curing cripples:
Just thought of something: What holds the paraplegic in their chairs? What keeps them from shooting around the room, stopping their progress with a finger, floating from desk to desk?
Gravity.
And gravity isn’t a big issue . . . where?
I love the internet. And especially the bit where I or other intelligent people have chosen to stick something up every day, but allow themselves to put up boring nonsense if that is all we can think of. That way, two bits of boring nonsense (space programme money should cure paraplegia instead, no it should not) combine and catch fire, while you are doing the piece. Thesis (yawn – but I have to put something so I will complain about this particular something), antithesis (yawn again – but I am right, aren’t I?), synthesis (just thought of something … wow!).
Ron Crickenberger, a well known libertarian activist of several decades standing, passed away overnight.
He is survived by his partner Noelle Stettner, two children, and one grandchild.
The movement will miss him.
If you knew Ron, please add your remembrance to our comments section.
I feel about skyscrapers the way lots of other libertarians feel about space travel. I may have all kinds of doubts about the purity of the capitalism that gives rise to them, but… wow! And I want now to mention here a particularly impressive one, soon to be built in London.
I’m talking about London Bridge Tower.
I have already commented on this tower as a mere plan on my Culture Blog, here, and before that here. But what I later missed was that last November, the building received planning permission and is now definitely going to be built.
My first reaction to the first faked photos I saw of this immense spike was that it looked like a paper dart that had already been thrown a few times and had had its spike somewhat damaged. Now, I find myself looking forward to its construction immensely. Expect photos here of it as it takes shape in the years to come. Building starts in 2005 and will be complete, or such is the plan, in 2009.
It is to be built in one of my favourite London places, namely on the south bank of the River Thames, which just gets better and better with every year that passes. Recently they have added the Wheel, and the undeniably impressive if decidedly fascist looking Bankside Power Station has metamorphosed into Tate Modern, the interior of which is very fine even if it does not seem to contain much else that is much good most of the time. Eventually they may even sort out that nothing space next to the Wheel. You can already walk all the way along the river on the southerly side through the centre of London, and this tower will only add to the fun.
The reason why London Bridge Tower will be such a draw is that we will not just be able to walk past it and gawp up at it; we will also be allowed to ascend within it and gaze out upon London, from a viewing gallery half way up, and from another public spot near the top. What this will cost I do not know, but I will be doing one of those trips at least once, I can tell you. Quite how all this public participation was contrived, I don not know, and no doubt some of the politics involved was of the sort we here might not approve of, but personally I am delighted about all this.
This tower is the work of Renzo Piano, who co-designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Of this massive object he has this to say:
I don’t believe it is possible to build a tall building in London by extruding the same shape from bottom to top. It would be too small at the bottom and too big at the top.
Likewise, symbols are dangerous. Often tall buildings are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, selfish and hermetic. The tower is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline. Architecture is about telling stories and expressing visions, and memory is part of it.
Our memory is permeated by history.
How nuanced. How European. He even manages to turn the tallest building in Europe into an anti-American statement. Well, if that is what it takes to get a thing like this built, then well said Renzo, I say.
And even if you disapprove, it can not possibly end up being as big an embarrassment as this. Although I find that I like the look of that also, more and more, however totally useless it may be. It is the Space Shuttle of skyscrapers, you might say. Concorde pointing upwards.
See what happens when I do not pay attention to what The Dissident Frogman is doing? He sneaks off goes and makes another side-splittingly funny flash animation. I visit his site often but for some reason I neglected to ‘press the red button’. Big mistake.
I suggest you go and do so… right now.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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