Strangely Perfect

Okay.  Big title, and, I must admit, written after I spotted a link FROM Google Maps to this website in the logs!  It’s pointing to a post from last year. The good bit is that someone has had the bright idea to make a map, mainly UK based, geographically highlighting incidents of draconian stupidity, crassness [...]

Introduction Many years ago when I was living in France and during a prolonged period of French atomic weapon testing on the Moruroa atoll, the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in a New Zealand harbour. Initially, it was thought to be an accident. Now, as soon as this happened, I thought “who has [...]

The acknowledged founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, created the idea and much of the system that allows information to be shared, from the web page, by hyper-links, across the globe.  His was a basically altruistic idea. Brilliantly, it has brought disparate peoples together in hitherto unforeseen ways.  Anyone (like me), can [...]

Despite the best made plans and intentions, no security system is perfect. A massive recent security lapse means that (again!), the government’s continuing plans to implement ID Cards should be seriously examined. Not only have their own credentials at data security been demonstrated by themselves to be wholly inadequate (I’m thinking of the DVLA, MOD, [...]

This may be old news for some people, but the DVLA, who recently lost a shed load of personal details of the public, actually sell the same data to anyone, with only the most cursory checks. This post, What the DVLA has made selling your private details, this one, X-Ray Investigates: “Trustguard Security Limited” and [...]

I had two interesting calls yesterday from foreign gentlemen. Their basic call went thus: “Hello, is that Mr Rees?”    Hmm I replied. “Hi, I’m Simon from LHR. Someone, either you or someone from your address has made an insurance claim from your address recently…”   “Who exactly are you?” I said. He then repeated the first [...]