I just picked this up from the god-like archives of the god-like Register. In 2003, a school was planning retinal scans before parting with school dinners and library books.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/08/uk_school_plans_retinal_scans/

The article says that tens of thousands of kids had already been fingerprinted then. However, a resourceful chap has found there are serious flaws in biometric iD.

“c’t gave biometrics a resounding thumbs down, after fooling a large number of devices with simple tricks and finding some unusable.

In its attempts at outfoxing the protective programs and devices, c’t concentrated on deceiving the systems with the aid of simple procedures (such as the reactivation of latent images) and forgeries, such as silicon fingerprints. It also achieved some success in eavesdropping on the communication (via the USB port) between a computer and the sensor and using this information in replay attacks to fool recognition systems. It didn’t try to hack into biometric data directly, though this might be another fruitful avenue of attack.”

It seesm that we are going to have to rely on the skills of a few eccentric hackers to keep some of the personal freedoms that used to be considered the essential benefit of democracy.

Democracy, hmm? Do you remember seeing anything in the voting materials at the last general or council elections that said

“By the way, we know you think jury trials and a professionally trained  police force and free movement are so 20th century.  We intend to replace the police with low-paid vigilantes wearing armbands and applying civil A-Social Bastard Orders that don’t requiire proof of actually breaking laws.

Oh, and we know you feel that 25 hour surveillance of everyone’s public activities  is the way to go. We are sure you feel uncomfortable when your biological identifiers,  credit record, medical history and address and telephone number and many other details or rumours about you aren’t held all over the place. We know you want these things to be collated at will by anyone with access to them – that is, more or less any public body or private company. 

We know that you are worried about toddlers wearing hoodies and veils, so we’ll make them our big priority.  Just let them try keeping a library book over the allotted 14 days!  We bet that you are furious that people can just walk into pubs without showing a biomentric passport. Well, we promise to sort all that out for you. Vote for us.”

On a similar theme- i.e. this country is fast approaching the repression levels previously associated with Nazi germany - a teacher who I know was told that the teaching staff in the archetypal ####  Comprehensive where he works would be fined £2,500 if caught smoking on the premises.  Get caught smoking more than a cigarette a month and he would obviously be having to pay to teach.  Even more insidiously, heads of department who know that a member of their staff has smoked on the premises but haven’t grassed him or her to the authorities will be fined a few hundred.

I suspect I couldn’t make this stuff up.

I was going to do the usual thing and keep my mouth shut about the £200 fine for not recycling accurately, as there is a very good blog further down about that. However, hard as that is to believe, there’s much worse.

A Register article just blew away my residual sanity:- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_fingerprints/  The title is

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide

That is, pubs are to get money to fingerprint customers. Seriously.   Pubs in Yeovil are already doing it. There is a nicely understated piece in the Register article that points out quite how voluntary the pubs entrance into this scheme is- they won’t get a licence if tehy don’t and they can open late if they do.

This reminded me of another article in the Register a few days ago that had already pushed the proverbial envelope of calm too far for me to express an opinion on it in moderate language . That was http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/mps_on_kiddyprinting/  Schools are apparently fingerprinting kids – allegedly so they can issue library books….  A simple rubber stamp used to suffice.

These articles are apparently genuine. I’ve found lots of other references to the schools one. Does anyone feel more secure with this stuff. I can sleep easy in my bed knowing that the local publican and school librarian are carrying out ad hoc surveillance at a level that George Orwell would never have dared present in his fiction.

 

Titchfield Abbey 2,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

I found a collection of old photos on my PC hard disk. These were taken about three years ago and look much better at smaller resolution.

Still – while flickr will allow me to host them, I may as well share them 🙂

Right, generally speaking, I much prefer Word Press as a blogging tool over Blogger and Typepad – however it seems a typepad account is on the cards.

Why?

It is the only one which works with the Lifeblog software on my Nokia phone. Bah. The Lifeblog software was itself a comedy of errors as despite Nokia saying “it comes installed (N73 phone)” the one I was supplied with by 3 didn’t have it. Would Nokia provide it as a download? No. I had to (after much web searching) get the version supplied for the N80 and then install it. Typical wonder of todays modern world.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Lifeblog software will only “talk” to Typepad. There is an interesting thing on the Nokia site:

Interested in Partnering with Lifeblog?
Lifeblog has an open posting protocol so anyone can make their blog service compatible with our software. To find out more, download our blogging specification document:

However, call me old fashioned but isn’t it the job of the “new software” to be able to talk to the old ones not the other way round. I can post to Wordpad from Flickr, Deepest Sender, Performancing even MS packages. What is so special about Nokia? Bah.

Well at least it being an open protocol means I can either see what chances I have of writing a connector between wordpress and Lifeblog or finding out some one else has already done it.

If not – you will soon see a typepad blog supporting this 🙂

I have spent a few days talking (on and offline) to quite a few people who have “fallen out” with Google. Most of these people have been at one end of the Google Advertising empire and end up getting stung.

People build websites, serve google ads and then when it comes to a payout Google back off (claiming things like “invalid clicks” or similar). Not a major problem normally but with google there are no ground for redress or process in which legitimate complaints can be investigated. This is wrong and certainly falls foul of the “do no evil” mantra. A similar thing (in reverse) has happened to a few people I know who advertise with google, they have been getting lots of machine generated clicks and although google has since suspended the accounts which appear to have sent the clicks (very hard one to tell at this end), the people have not had any money recredited to their adsense account, despite the claims made by google in their account termination message.

Because of the way google works there is no way to verify their business practices. Neither party has grounds for redress or verification.

Shocking.

There is something which can be done about it though. A few years ago when Yahoo, MSN et al., were obsessed with becoming portals and making money, Google snuck in the back door and was fantastic. Times have changed. Although I am a die hard, anti-MS, Linux fan, the search engine at MSN is now pretty good. Often returning better quality hits than google. Same with Yahoo. Same with Ask. For the last two weeks almost all my searches have been done on MSN and Google. Google is not better. Often MSN is actually better and it is never worse.
The solution to Google is simple. Use a different search engine.

Go MSN.