07.23.09
Posted in Burning Hatred, Technology, The Future at 10:38 by Tom Reynolds
A school has installed CCTV cameras in classrooms in a bid to avoid disputes between teachers and pupils and to tackle theft, the deputy head has said.
Mr Rush said that the reaction from staff, children and parents had been entirely supportive.
“The children are very happy here because they know they are on a school site where they are safe.
And this is the problem, that children ‘feel safe’ because they are under the watchful eye of a CCTV camera. They are being trained to believe that.
Likewise they are being trained that it is only right that your fingerprints can be taken so that you can borrow books from a library, that carrying ID cards is the norm and that you should feel safe now that you are put on a database as soon as you are born.
State control of your data is increasing and they people concerned have realised that ‘getting them while they are young’ seems to be the easiest way to slip these databases and surveillance systems in to place.
Seriously, look at the responses to the library fingerprints link – shouldn’t we be concerned that we are creating children who will accept anything for the sake of ’safety’?
The question therefore is what can we do to educate children about the flaws in such systems?
My immediate thought is to make Orwell’s ‘1984′ and Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother‘ compulsory English texts. But what else? Perhaps ORG/FIPR/No2ID should start setting out their stalls at school fetes, and town shows, or start making child friendly websites?
But what else can we do?
I’m open for suggestions.
(And the first person to say that ‘if you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear’ will have their net curtains removed, their walls replaced with glass and be made to sign a declaration stating that they trust this, and all other future governments, as well as every soul that works for the civil service, the NHS, social services, transport your local council etc…)
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03.25.09
Posted in Computers, Social Networking, The Future at 9:22 by Tom Reynolds
“Social networking sites like Facebook could be monitored by the UK government under proposals to make them keep details of users’ contacts.
The Home Office said it was needed to tackle crime gangs and terrorists who might use the sites, but said it would not keep the content of conversations.
Civil liberties campaigners have called the proposal a “snoopers’ charter”.”
I’m normally the first person to moan about the government taking liberties with our privacy, but in this case I see no problem. After all social network sites only have the data that you wish to place on them. If you don’t want people looking in your living room you put up net curtains, if you don’t want people looking at your personal data you don’t join a social network site.
The government is attacking our civil liberties in much more insidious manners than just looking at data which we choose to provide to a website.
For example, there is a certain expectation of privacy when you send an email but the government want to snoop on them, just like we don’t expect our paper based mail to be opened and read.
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10.03.08
Posted in Medical, Technology at 13:47 by Tom Reynolds
I’ve spoken before on the ‘Connecting for Health’ IT project, its something that frankly gives me the willies; a huge database of all your medical details that has shockingly bad security measures.
(I’ve spoken to people working on the system, and trust me, it’s horrendously insecure).
They are having a consultation process on the use of your medical information, which you can take part in on-line.
NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH) is conducting a consultation with the public and healthcare professionals on the use of patient information for purposes such as health research and managing and planning care.
The health and well-being of the population can be improved by activities such as medical research, disease surveillance, screening, needs assessment and preventative activities.
NHS CFH is keen to obtain the views of the general public, patients and other interested parties on how patient information held by the NHS should be used for additional purposes such as research.
I suggest that everyone in the UK has a look at it.
From the Open Rights Group mailing list I’m part of, someone has made the following point.
Note that the survey more than once claims that patients have no legal right to control information they have given the NHS about themselves once it has been anonymised.
As a matter of law this is nonsense.
Information given in confidence may not be used or disclosed except for the purpose for which it was supplied unless the supplier consents, and this is not changed by removing the supplier’s name. So I hope responders will challenge this (and perhaps also the blithe claim that
anonymisation only fails in the case of people with very rare diseases, which greatly understates the risk that an aggregation of conditions,
dates and places will identify someone just as plainly as a name and address).
This is just exactly the sort of function creep that I mentioned in the previous post, please go and have your own say about your data being used in this fashion.
Oh, and you folks do me proud. If anyone else wants to join up (I do recommend it, I’m a proud supporter, and you can see the sorts of bright people we have involved) you can find out more here. These folks do good work that you can help support for less than the price of two pints of lager.
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09.28.08
Posted in Computers, Media, Technology, The Future at 16:59 by Tom Reynolds
I do so love my Sony e-reader, it’s small, it’s tough and the text display is very much like paper. With it I can sling it in my bag and have a large chunk of my library with me at any one time.
For a while it was only available in America which is where I bought mine. I then waited what seemed like an eternity for it to be released over here in the UK.
In America there is a lovely big library of books you can download electronically and until Waterstones fired up their version of the e-book library over here in the UK the only books I could (legally) read on my reader were those either in the Public Domain, or licensed under the Creative Commons license.
So I was hoping for big things from the Waterstones launch.
The Waterstones website is not as slick or intuitive as the Sony’s American ebook library. To search for specific e-books as opposed to paperback or hardback formats, you need to hit the ‘advanced search’ button. The ebook minisite’s search bar will, by default, search the whole of the site.
For an example, if you go to the Waterstones ebook site and search for ‘Devil May Care’, the first four results are in non-ebook formats.
But here is the main problem. I really like the works of Neal Stephenson and I’ve been looking forward to reading his new book ‘Anathem’. I’m making an effort to buy as many new books in e-book format because they take up less space in my flat, are more portable and with the Sony e-reader, there is little difference between that screen and the printed page.
Also, downloading an ebook really does tickle the part of the monkey brain that desires instant gratification. Now waiting for the postman to drop an Amazon package through my letterbox and no need to go hunting for a copy (that may not be in stock) in physical bookshops.
But of course, ‘Anathem‘ is not in the Waterstones e-book store.
If I were an American I could buy it from the Sony library with no problems, but because of what I assume is licensing concerns it’s not available in the UK. Actually there is very little in the Waterstones library that I am interested in reading, it has quite a limited selection and as mentioned earlier the search mechanism discourages browsing.
At least I assume that it’s the licensing that is the problem – It is possible that Waterstones could be purposefully limiting the number of ebooks that they ’stock’ in order to determine demand. Or perhaps, for some reason, they want the e-reader to fail.
So they have a lost sale. If I weren’t such a rabid fan of Stephenson’s books I wouldn’t now go and buy the physical object, I’d just not bother.
I quite fancied reading ‘Apache‘, but it’s not available as an e-book and I don’t desire to read it enough to buy it in hardback.
One lost sale right there.
Electronic bits after all do not respect boundaries – It’s how I’ve seen, loved and evangelised ‘Burn Notice‘ before it’s show on UK TV. It’s why I make my book (and forthcoming sequel) available for download. Everyone who enjoys a book gets to appreciate the author and so will be more likely to buy other books by them.
By limiting the amount of readable material you are cutting your market. Can someone tell me how that makes sense?
It’s no wonder the torrent sites are doing a fine business, to take traffic away from them the legitimate companies need to concentrate on making the user experience of getting the content as easy and painless as possible. It’s the reason why I download my music from iTunes rather than bittorrent it, pure convenience and the satisfaction that comes from doing the right thing
Anyway, I’ve sent Waterstones an email, so I’ll be interested in their reply.
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09.26.08
Posted in Computers at 17:07 by Tom Reynolds
I’m currently thinking about why Auction Houses in MMORPGs don’t act in the same way as they do in real life.
Is it because the way things are done at present make it easier for game companies to cope with the problem of in-game inflation?
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08.16.08
Posted in Computers, Social Networking at 12:06 by Tom Reynolds
Still no IRC client for the iPhone? Tut-tut. Someone should get to writing one, hasn’t the world enough Twitter clients?
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08.05.08
Posted in Funny web stuff, Media at 21:15 by Tom Reynolds
Orangina have a new advert on the telly, something full of ‘Furry’ types in some sort of third generation Second Life.
Lots of pole dancing and bouncing furry breasts.
(Please note, this is not a blatant attempt to garner weird links. Honest)
Technorati Tags: furries, orangina, secondlife, sexsells
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08.04.08
Posted in Computers, Fiction, The Future at 14:38 by Tom Reynolds
It’s dark and it’s raining, I’ve managed to evade my pursuers for long enough to duck into an alley just so I can catch my breath. The party I’d come from seemed a lifetime ago.
It’s my own fault that they are after me, one of the microphones caught me at it. I can remember the days when the CCTV cameras only had loudspeakers, the controllers could tell you to pick up the litter that you’d just thrown on the floor. It was hailed as a great breakthrough, a way to stop the rot of anti-social behaviour. We’d asked for it ourselves, more and more cameras to make us feel safer.
But how could you tell the threatening behaviour from visual cues alone? How could you tell if someone was making a racist remark, or planning to bomb a tube station? So they came up with the idea that if you put boom microphones on the cameras you could listen in on what people were talking about. Again, this was welcomed by the public, “It’ll stop terrorism”, they said, “It’ll make it harder to live as an illegal immigrant”.
So the people agreed.
Obviously we weren’t arresting terrorists, and what police force has the resources to check anyone not speaking English as a possible illegal immigrant, so the system was overly expensive and hardly used for the purposes that it had been built for. The government wanted their money back.
I suppose that it was only a matter of time before one of the largest lobbying groups went to the government with an idea to help fund the system. It was pretty simple really, unlike the attempts to get voice or facial recognition working this was a proven technology. It was a technology lots of us had been using back in the day.
Music recognition.
Music recognition is a way in which we found out what music was playing in the bar, on the radio or over the end credits of a movie. You’d hold your phone up to the loudspeaker and after some clever ‘musical DNA jiggery-pokery’ it’d return with the name of the song.
It’s a really clever idea especially if, like me, you’d always be tuning into the radio halfway through a song.
So the record companies lobbied to have the technology wired up to the cctv microphones – they would then be able to collect fees for the ‘unauthorised broadcast or performance of copyrighted music’.
So if you hummed a copyrighted tune in front of one of these cameras it would recognise this music and flag you up on a map for the Copyright Police to come and get you. The Copyright Police were employed by the big record companies to make sure that you weren’t some sort of commie-pinko copyright infringer. They were allowed to hire these ‘copycops’ after they were given the power to stop and search your iPod for any tracks you couldn’t account for. They loved ACTA, it opened the door for all sorts of nastyness and did away with the need for a judge, or a jury of your peers.
As I say, it was my own fault. I’d been to a party and had forgotten to have my memory of the songs wiped. This meant that I had an illegal copy of the song roaming around my head, and when I’d inadvertently (and perhaps drunkenly) sung a snatch of it on the walk home I’d just confirmed myself as a pirate. I was stealing money from the grandchildren of the original artists.
As I say, the facial recognition systems are still buggy as hell, so if I managed to make it home I might be safe, I’d heard some horror stories of the Copycops wiping songs from your mind and taking half your childhood memories with it by ‘accident’.
I knew I should never have joined in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to my girlfriend at the party.
OK, so the snatch of fiction above is a bit far-fetched, but not by that much. Check out the links in the story if you don’t believe me, if the political or economic will is there much of this story could become reality.
So who do we have fighting against our digital rights being curtailed? Who is it that wants you to not be seen as a thief and a criminal? Let’s face it, if you have ever put one of your CDs on your MP3 player, or ripped one of your own DVDs to your laptop, then you have broken the law. If you have downloaded an illegal MP3 then you’ve broken the law, and it is estimated that 80% of internet users have done this.
This isn’t getting into the sillier things that the record companies are trying to do.
Who is fighting for the ability to audit elections and put a stop on expensive and easily fiddled e-voting?
In 2005 I was in the room to give my pledge of £5 a month to form what would become ORG. It’s £5 that I gladly spend to know that my voice is being heard.
But it’s time for ORG to grow. Those of you who visit my site as opposed to those who read my RSS feed may have noticed the ORG ‘Thermometer of DOOM’ that has appeared on the side of this blog. We are looking to increase those £5 a month to 1,500 subscribers.
As someone who is involved in the group I’d like to ask people to put their hands into their pockets and pledge £5 a month in an effort to make sure that a future like the one described above doesn’t come into effect.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at their website, all their campaigns are there, what they are fighting for and the already impressive success stories that they have already caused to happen.
Here is a bribe, and one that has been taken up by other bloggers – if I can get 10 people to sign up to ORG, I will promise to write a blogpost everyday for the next 30 days.
Please. Go here and join up. for the cost of a pint and a half a month you can have dedicated and passionate people fighting on your behalf against the groups who would have you sued into bankruptcy for taping something off the telly.
ORG -
Disclaimer – If three people sign up because of me I’ll get a T-Shirt, if I get the most new signers by November 19th I win an eeePC. That isn’t why I’m doing this, it’s because I strongly believe in the cause. (Of course, if you want to mention that you came to the site via me I wouldn’t be upset…)
Technorati Tags: openrightsgroup
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07.27.08
Posted in Computers at 22:37 by Tom Reynolds
I was playing ‘Assassins Creed’ on my XBox 360 and came across what must be one of my favourite bits of game dialogue, it’s between two medieval characters.
Character One: “Anyway, as the bible says, ‘God helps those who help themselves’”
Character Two: “No it doesn’t, that’s ‘Aesop’s Fables’ the bible has a lot about sitting around doing nothing while God decides what to do”.
Dunno why, but it just made me laugh.
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07.09.08
Posted in Computers, Social Networking, The Future at 1:28 by Tom Reynolds
Like I suspect many others in the UK who were looking to upgrade their iPhone, I’ve been left disappointed by the O2 website.
But it matters not – for the thing that I am most looking forward to is the Apps Store, the thought that I’ll be able to download additional software for use on my iPhone is the real thing that fills me with excitement.
And I can do that on my ‘old’ iPhone.*
Now, were I a clever person I’d be coding my own applications for the iPhone, unfortunately I am a bit thick at the moment so I’ll have to resolve myself into being the ‘ideas’ man.
So here are my ideas for the ideal iPhone application that I’d be willing to lay down cold hard cash for. There are more obvious ones but I would imagine that everyone and their dog has a chat or IRC client in production. (I would rather obviously love to get involved with number 2 if anyone has a job for me).
1) A MMORPG, something fairly lightweight, perhaps with the majority of the heavy lifting done not by a server, but by the combined mesh computing power of all the iPhones running the software. Otherwise similar to Runescape. Imagine being able to grind levels while sitting on a bus.
2) An Augmented Reality Game, perhaps crossed with social software overtones – consider if you will a game that is location based to where you *really* are. Using the location services in the phone (either original iPhone, or the AGPS of the 3G iPhone), you would be able to interact with the players that are around in you in physical space. I see it being based on a similar story to the old ‘Highlander’ TV series, or based around a secret society of wizards hiding in the modern day – or spies, or superheroes, or aliens looking to infiltrate Earth. I believe it is obvious how the social networking system would fit in on this.
3) An application that links up with Trustedplaces.com So I could use that location detection to find decent food places near where I am, read the reviews and decide where to eat. Again you could integrate the social aspects of that site into the application easily and have people filing their reviews immediately after eating.
4) Meetup – Yet another location based application. Let’s say that you are going to meet a friend, by sending out a ‘ping’ you could see the location of every friend near to your current location. Integrate the camera into it so you could send them a photo of where you are from within the application itself. Have it integrated with websites like meetup.com or Upcoming. This may be what Fire Eagle does, I’m not too sure as I don’t have an invite.
5) Lightsaber sound effects based on accelerometer input. Because I am a geek.
6) Two player board/strategy games like chess or backgammon. I’d be extremely surprised if these aren’t offered at launch or pretty soon afterwards. You meet up with a friend and pull out the board of a thousand games…
7) Voicedialing – possibly tricky with the access people have with the APIs, but it’d be a great upgrade. Now the Americans are having handsfree legislation introduced I suspect that Apple might include it with a firmware upgrade.
8) The iPhone camera able to take a picture of an object’s bar code and look it up on Amazon or similar comparison sites. Delicious library does this for the tabletop, but it’d be great to have that functionality on the go. Oh, and QR codes as well please.
9) VNC into my home Mac, because I am that sort of geek.
10) A copy of the BNF for offline reading, and not for £100+ please.
And generally I would give up a significant organ of mine if I could get a foldaway keyboard working with it, or use it as a modem for my Macbook Pro.
*Actually it’s my mum that is most annoyed, as she is the one who is getting my ‘old’ iPhone – and she is very much looking forward to it…
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Applications, appstore, apple, mmorpg, location, fireeagle, trustedplaces.com, lightsaber, voicedialling, augmentedrealitygame, meetup, vnc, wishlist
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