the fourth place

That's EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Many readers will know that I have recently moved to London, well, that's if you count 2 years as recently. Anyway, I thought London would be great, you know, because if you want a book to read you could pop out and go to a 24 hour books store on the high street and your sorted. Shops would be open late, even on Sunday and if you wanted to post a letter, no problem, the post office would never close. It would be a 24 hour party lifestyle and er.. everything you need would be at hand all day and all night.

Follow the links above and you'll notice that the promise of bright lights in the wee hours aren't necessarily true. Sure, in the very centre of London you can buy a book after five thirty, but only actually until eight o'clock. On a Saturday the local post office closes before I usually get out of bed and closes weekday evenings a full hour before I frequently leave work. Finally, access to plentifull time off work is an essential aspect of maintaining your health, not because you might become exhausted but because in residential centres the GPs don't open at the weekend.

So, in this country with a tax rate of nearly 49%, what one service do you think that the Government would make sure certain opened on the weekend? Yep, you guessed it. The regional interrogation centres. Nice.

On a happier more positive different note from my last post, Don Radlauer is the first person I've found online with anymore detail on the Hypermedia Seduction counter-terrorism workshop I blogged about the other day.

He was understandably nervous.

On a certainly heavier note I have to report a somewhat tedious development at my old uni, with students being electronically logged in to lectures in what seems a most patronising scheme.

Meanwhile there's been zero output from Glamorgan University on its work preventing terrorism. Interesting. I have enquired at the press office.

The Army Corps of Engineers has also shown an interest.

Welcome back world, all over again.

It doesn't seem that long ago that my last web host accused me of being a thief upon hearing that my credit card was stolen (it was, it was stolen from me) and - having already had his attention drawn to my account by a hacker exploiting it for DOS attacks - shut the service down. That incident left this blog offline for a week and lost me content that I was very much attached to.

This time around I'm spared the slur on my character, but am cursed by my own efforts to deal with spam. Having compiled a list of 200 domains that needed blocking I used a macro to make a large HTML form with a button for each domain and set about pressing each of the buttons. Server load shot to 12% (of what I have not been told, despite asking) and the abuse team shot into action by locking the world from the blog's home folder. The effect was to instantly halt my onslaught on the spammers and take my site offline for almost 5 days.

The common factor between each of these incidents is that in neither case did prohosted.net or hostgator.com think it wise to ring me or even email me before taking action and in both cases the time taken for the support team to get back to me was the largest part of the outage. In this case 3 days. Sure, if my well intended button pounding is really about to take out the whole server then block me immediately, but did it really need most of Friday, all of Saturday, and Sunday, and much of Monday for anyone to do anything.

Hostgator come off far the better for at least emailing me on an account they had reason to suspect I'd look at, but I think frankly if they are taking down a site they should at least phone me immediately and after that should be proactive in arrranging for it to come back online.

Not impressed guys.

trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.

Bruce Schneier

I get mixed feelings at this story about parents revolting against state catering in schools. While the social enterprise aimed at curing the problem of unpalatable food is laudable as an example of the citizen resisting state paternalism it is, frankly, a bit silly.

The state makes education and the type of education children receive practically compulsory. We're taxed sufficiently to pay for an inefficient and inefective state education, therefore smothering the market for good cheap private education. That's bad enough, but then in practical terms on the ground it has been failing to follow through by feeding children properly. This is incredibly bad form and thankfully its being sorted out, with more money being invested in catering services. That's the good news.

The bad news is that a vociferous minority of parents are now going well out their way to ensure unheathly food continues to be available. That's right, parents going out of their way to enable kids to eat junk. That doesn't sound like good parenting to me and I'd hope that appropriate filthy looks and tuts are directed towards them at the school gate. I draw the line though, at any suggestion that the state should prevent parents from doing this. The monopoly in eduction and educational catering is the ultimate problem and enforcing that monolopy is as silly as the parents doing shuttle runs to the chip shop. The state should break monopolies, not protect them.

Meanwhile, there is a legitamate concern that these aprents might be harming a graveyard in someway by offering this service. I'd obviously support the right of the church adinistration to bar the parents from entering for that purpose, but that must be their decision backed by the state - not made by the state.

Owen Blacker via email (who got it from his mate James, who got it from...?):

Tired of having your PC reboot itself to install a pointless DRM patch? Tired of having to keep tell Windows that “Reboot later” means more than five minutes later? I imght just be your new friend..

Start | Run gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update

The two settings you want are:

No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations (set to Enabled); and
Re-prompt for restart with sceduled installations (set to Enabled with as high a number as you’d like)

This has been a public service announcement. :o)

--
Owen Blacker
Developer

An old University colleague of mine is on a panel at this fascinating workshop in Israel where NATO are wanting to understand how hypermedia such as the web is used to inspire recruits. Chanel was clever as clever could be and I know she will be able to help people in this area.

While they are at it though, why not turn the mirror onto the West and take a look at this data point from Samizdata. I quite like Samizdata and am certainly sympathetic with the linked presentations, but I'm not kidding myself that there aren't directly equivalent multimedia experiences to be had from the other side.

On a lighter note, I was trying to dig up Chanel's email address, but I gather she may be past the £350 daily contract role I was thinking of forwarding. Well done.

Mark Thomas, a comedian partly responsible for my interest in politics but one with whom I don't always agree, organised a mass of individual demonstrations in Parliament Square. I can only imagine the impact of a few hundred individual applications to protest on the officers involved. Hilarious.

Anyway, photos are available at the London Daily Photo blog and they include a seriously hot anti-ID campaigner amoungst other hotties. Who says politics is boring?

I've just finished reading a report put together by the EU Referendum blog regarding the staging and acting going on in Qana the morning after the airstrike.

I find it frankly appalling that this has not yet garnered mainstream news coverage, its certainly a significant failing by the press and surely at least one mainstream outlet is not so deeply involved that it can't run an expose? Or is it that rocking the boat isn't in thier own best interest?

The mainstream media, including right-wing Telegraph but also left-wing Independant carried the photos, but I'm particularly appalled by the Independant front page covering Qana which asked without a trace of irony How can we stand by and allow this to go on?. It's an important argument and one prone to repetition, so lets break it down a bit.

The Indy are claiming that due to the obvious harm done in Qana Israel should be, or should have been, stopped. It invites us to reflect on the emotional image and ask ourselves how we tolerate such tragedy. With me? OK.

Kids died in Qana and the photos all over the report show very real very dead bodies who can only have died in fear and in pain, but we cannot with any credibility look at these photos, and the Indy front page in particular, and forget that the people in them are acting. The people there are abusing the corpses of children and adults with equal disregard. No emmotional appeal based on these images can ever be taken seriously.

This leaves us with the harsh objective reality that Hizbollah caused an Israeli airstrike and that people died horribly as a result. I think people tend to accept, thankfully, that Israel had to stop missile launches and that collateral damage, while tragic, is not morally equivalent to the acts of murder Israel is otherwise accused of. Therefore, when it comes to collateral deaths, blame for endangering life in the first place most properly and most heaviliy falls on Hizbollah.

But I'm blasted in the comments with accusations that Hizbollah were not there, and until now I have had seen no evidence that they were there, other than the assuption that there would have been no airstrike if they were not. The guys at the EU Referendum blog seem to think that the connection between Qanagate and Hizbollah is obvious, because who else would be capable of arranging such a stage show? They don't say this anywhere, but that was my impression, and if Hizbollah arranged the show then they must have been in the area so this is if - I'm prepared to beleive it - evidence for my point of view on Qana.

The thing is that actually I'm more prepared to beleive that there are enough crazy attention seeking people and greedy journalists in this world for Qanagate to have been spontaneous, but EU Referendum do point out that the area around Qana was a hotbead for missile launches and is a known Hizbollah stronghold. I can't comment on that, but they provide one more thing, and that is pictures of Hizbollah paraphernalia in the home of one of the actors. This, combined with the open claims that Hizbollah died in Qana with the other victims is enough for me to feel that I know the truth of what happened there in that icon of the war that it became.

I beleive that Hizbollah invited hell upon the people they are alleged to be protecting as a resistance movement. That while the children in that cellar died a Hizbollah supporters comfortable home went undamged and then when the media arrived he cynically went out and abused the corpses of children to make the war against them stop. The worst part is that the majority of news organisations have ignored this version of the story to protect their own interests and have kept the public from knowing the full situation. With a weak reactionary Government in power here, that greed endangers lives.

I don't especially like Jews or Israelis, so please no accusations of being brainwashed by Israelis or being pro-Israel. I don't actually know any Jews and have never worked for Jews, not that it would make much difference. On the other hand my own circle takes in a large number of Muslims some of which I do work closely with and all of which I would consider friends, or closer than friends. Yet I cannot agree with the view that Hizbollah are the good guys, to me they are evil people who prevent peace adn put me and my friends in danger for the sake of their own grip on power.

Biased BBC has a shocking example of its usual subject matter in which the BBC fails to describe, or mention, the incredible funding Shiite Muslims are receiving for reconstruction via Iran and Hizbollah, this, in a peice on the funding of reconstruction work in Lebanon. Oh Lordy.

Via links from Biased BBC I also discovered this fantastic example of desktop power coupled with online data. Be warned, firing up a visual map on that site will eat 77% of a 1300 Mhz Pentium, but the data presented is uniquely interesting.

Here is a particularly banal example of nanny statism in action. It's also an example of how the EU is encroaching into a our daily lives, not just with taxes and agrigultural tarrifs and that sort of thing, but our normal daily household chores and habits.

The Times reports that bugged are being fitted to wheelie bins as part of a scheme to encourage recycling. This is deeeply flawed (my emphasis):

The tag is screwed into a recess under the bin's lip. It contains a silicon chip with a serial number identifying the home to which it belongs.

This is detected by a sensor on the truck as the bin is lifted for emptying. The weight of the rubbish it contains is calculated by equipment on the truck. This information is then transmitted to a central computer.

The thing is, when I walk out of my house I pass several wheelie bins and I have no idea which is "mine". Sometimes I have access to two bins immediately outside my building (which contains two flats) and sometimes the nearest bin is situated between my building and the next giving one bin between four homes for that week. Which bin I use depends on the weather, what I'm carrying, and the amount of rubbish already in each bin.

How does a microchip link a bin to my home if I can't link my home to a bin? It's ludicrous. Assuming bins can be properly labelled and assuming the bin men will put them back in a place where they can be found on a Monday night I still have to work hard to ensure I'm not ripped off. How do I keep neighbours and passers by from depositing rubbish in the bin, currently kept on the pavement?

Here's an idea of what I think it would take to secure my waste-finances in my shared front garden:

• Dig away about 3m² of dirt maybe 40cm deep and lay paving in order to have a spot where the bin(s) could stand.
• Dispose of the waste topsoil.
• Put the rest of the garden in order, taking into account the change of layout.
• Repair the front gate.
• Repair the security lighting and consider the addition of CCTV (having effects on the privacy of my neighbours and therefore carrying significant responsibilities).
• Budget for a new variable bill each month.
• Locate additional space inside the home for additional dustbins into which bottles, tins etc can be sorted, this will probably involve changes to furniture to make space.

I'm simply not convinced that any of this has been thought about. I'll have to spend time negotiating with neighbours and updating the landlord (via an agency) and getting appropriate permissions. The total set-up cost including time could easily run to thousands of pounds.

Why are we bothering?

Councils face penalties of up to £150 per tonne of rubbish if they fail to meet recycling targets set under the EU landfill directive. This could lead to a bill of £230 million.

So heavy handed economic sanctions established by enviromentalists in the EU could cause massive disruption to the daily habits and front gardens of British homes. Bizarrely, as I mentioned above, this is likely to result in urban green spaces being paved over to give dustbins secure homes, resulting in rises in urban nightime temperatures and rises in the loss of carbon converting plants.

I titled this piece "Binning our liberties", not because I want to make drama out of these impositions, but because there are genuine infringments of choice and privacy.

Having your bin tagged means there is less deniability about what goes in there. A leaflet about a taboo disease. Your used condoms. Empty drink bottles. The contraversial literature you threw away. Credit card and bank numbers printed on discarded paperwork. All of this would now linked to you by virtue of the security measures you took to prevent your bin being ripped off.

This loss of privacy will put you on an invisible leash making you think twice as you enjoy the normal vices our society has to offer. It would also limits our economic choices. A scheme set up by the council backed by punative laws and drops in council tax levels is not the same as simple privatisation - a dead stop in state provision. It does not give us any more choice as consumers over who takes our rubbish away. It certainly does not improve efficiency as the layers of bureaucracy pile up, instead we are expected to act on our wallets without having the normal concomitant ability to vote with it.