Strangely Perfect

Google StreetView is in Antarctica Although you can see how they’ve done it using the cameras and flags in the snow, it’s still really cute that they’ve given the appearance that the (in)famous Google Streetview Car has been that way. The Google Streetview Car is the one with the funny thing on its roof, NOT [...]

Introduction Yesterday’s News The use of intercept evidence in courts in England and Wales is not “legally viable”, …the Home Office has said.  This is reported on the BBC here, Using intercept evidence in court ‘not yet viable’ Security From the earliest days of the British (English) Secret Service, back in Elizabeth I’s time, all [...]

Too Little, Too Late, Gordon Brown This morning, PM Gordon Brown told Andrew Marr that he wants to ‘clean up’ parliament. He wants a ‘code of conduct’ for MPs to follow. The thing is, there’s already a code of conduct – it’s called the law! All we,  ‘the people’ want, is to have reasonable laws [...]

A Secret Shared: – Is Not  a Secret One Third of Second-Hand Hard Drives Contain Secrets This is the astonishing findings from research conducted by three Universities, from Wales, the US & Australia (see here). In an absolutely random sample of second-hand discs bought at computer fairs and places like eBay, 34% had secret, classified [...]

Boom Boom South Hook Coast Path: Pembroke To Amroth Boom Boom John Lee Hook  …er Boom Boom Port Accident ….. what price safety?

WARNING:  This Posting Contains Illegal Pictures I Can Be Imprisoned for Publishing Them. A little realised consequence of Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the ramping up of common hysteria across the English speaking western world is, bizarrely, that it’s now illegal to take pictures of people commemorating, in a patriotic symbolic way, the lives and [...]

The problem, in fact, is older than Turkey, older than the 20th century creations of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc.  The problem is the continual denial of the Kurds, and ancient people with their own language.  They’ve survived in the same area despite the incursions and massacres of Alexander the Great, The Mongols, The Murghals, [...]

One of the features of a transition to a police state is that those who should defend our liberties transfer their allegiance to the executive of the state. – quoting Craig Murray here. Following the disgraceful result in the de Menezes “inquest”, if that’s what the most recent government whitewash can be called (see Hutton [...]

Following on from my trial with Opera after my trying times with Firefox and Pipex, I’ve given the new Google browser, Chrome a go. So far it’s worked well, even as a beta.  It loads this website faster for me, as well as nearly everything else wonderfully, except… This morning my regular CTC newsletter arrived [...]

Public Profiler, http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames1/,  the on-line surname popularity and derivation checker, is working now – either people have given up, or all the initial applicants have been satisfied.(see previous posting here.) So me, as a sheep, have finally been able to take a munch of the greenery within. The initial set-up seems to be working okay [...]

Prisons ‘hold 8,500 ex-soldiers’ I thought I’d check it out to see what it means – bear with me! The article says that there are 8500 military chaps currently bunged up at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. If one checks the latest prison figures, quoted at 93,574 in the article, this equates to: 8500/93574 = 9.08% of the [...]

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 [...]

Recently in the news is the tale of a man that died from an aspergillus infection. I’m pretty sure I had the same thing about 20 years ago, except when I told people about it, they mostly sort of laughed that I was imagining it. One of the things I used to do was maintain [...]

The latest “news” in healthcare is (see this BBC item): Firms ‘to run failing NHS trusts’ Now where have I heard this before? I know! Let’s check (see this BBC item) here in April 2002! What we have is Alan Milburn saying exactly the same thing… The whole point of it is that they reckon [...]