Yes, these fantastic guys in the UK keep on building huge centralised databases: The NHS has had data of around 10,000 patients compromised in around 135 seperate incidents – last year alone!

In the Netherlands, they’ll be starting a system like this in 2009. Fortunately you can opt out here

If you live in NL, then you might want to remove yourself from the Vecozo database, which lists centralizes all insurance data on people in NL. There is no direct way to remove yourself from this, but you can try the contact page

A Chinese lawyer is suing Microsoft for hacking his PC by installing Windows Genuine Advantage on it without his permission. Too bloody right! Well done and hopefully we can make this a class action suit in Europe!

But how they got their hands on the Dock patent is a true mystery, considering the amount of prior art there is, reaching back before 1981!

Everyone over the age of 13 must be tracked by the government… Fortunately, the populace seems to have wised up and is starting to wonder why exactly they must be followed by Big Brother. Now let’s see if they follow suit in the the rest of the so called ‘free’ world.

Spying on your neighbour and reporting them to the authorities. Not for profit, but for fun! If you’re lucky your local council will appoint you to be the volunteer, unpaid, neighbourhood spy! No, it’s not Nazi Germany, not Stalin’s USSR, not even Bush’s US of A. It’s the United Kingdom, birthplace of Churchill!

I can’t put it any better than el Reg can.
Apparently the arctic ice has actually grown by 30% since August 2007.

Yes, without a warrant, UK council workers now have 1043 powers of entry to your house at any time to check if you have any weapons of mass destruction lying about, or illigally hypnotising people, or any of a whole list of zany reasons.

Open a smoking club. The down sides: everybody must be a member of the Germany Smokers Club and only members can be allowed in during club meeting times.

Yet another (but now, Grammy award winning) musician is sticking it to her record company and telling her fans to download, as long as they come around to see her live.

After Warner Music asked Kid Rock to denounce file sharing, he turned around and pissed all over Warner instead, by announcing that they stole from the musicians, and he wanted as many people as possible to download his music so they could hear him and then come watch him perform live. Well done that man!

Yup, Sweden is the next country to trounce on everyone’s privacy: it’s going to tap all communications passing through it and analyse it. So if you’re sending an email from the UK to Norway, the data passes through Sweden and is thus subject to review. Nice thought, eh, that the EU has so much to do with its’ citizens?

In a rare display of common sense, the US Congress has put through laws making it illegal to discriminate on DNA – ie. insurance companies can’t raise their rates or refuse to cover someone who has had DNA testing and has had results indicating a risk for certain genetic diseases. Not only is it none of the insurance companies business, but this means these tests can’t be forced on you by employers and that hopefully more people will get these tests done, allowing more scientific data to come out of it.

Who knew, that damned no-fly list?!

Central databases are great for ALL kinds of things! Not scared yet?

An excellent 1960s essay on the dangers of centralised databases. He gets it almost exactly right.

When the nation’s intelligence agencies wanted a computer network to better share information about everything from al Qaeda to North Korea, they turned to a big name in the technology industry to supply some of the equipment: Google Inc.

The Mountain View company sold the agencies servers for searching documents, marking a small victory for the company and its little-known effort to do business with the government.

“We are a very small group, and even a lot of people in the federal government don’t know that we exist,” said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google’s federal government sales team and its 18 employees.

Official Url

The former SAS officer accused of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea says Sir Mark Thatcher was involved in the plan.

Simon Mann was arrested along with 67 others in Harare, Zimbabwe, in March 2004, charged with conspiring to depose the government of president Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Official URL

Wikileaks is currently in the news because and idiot US judge ordered the domainname wikileaks.org down, following the publication of leaked documents on there. Of course this hasn’t stopped wikileaks, as it’s also available on their IP adress, as well as under .be (which is what this is linked to).

Anyway, leaked documents can be published on this site with pretty much bulletproof anonymity. The documents are then analysed, so you can read both the analysis and the documents on it. There are some pretty interesting things on this site dishing out the dirt on many countries and their political and commercial dealings.

This organisation makes an interesting point: they don’t want to be afraid, and they petition you to send a letter to your government saying something like

Sounds like a good plan to me!

Without the people really knowing or approving of their data in the system, a health care database has been set up with some very personal details in it of all people in Holland. The Vecozo database is searchable by 80,000 people.
Not too surprisingly, people aren’t too happy about this.

The smoking nazi’s have now gone to the next step in the UK – due to the smokers now being outside, there is a contamination of the “natural smell of fresh air” so time to throw up abatement orders!
The smoker retreat is becoming a rout in the onslaught of the evil anti-everything people.

The Economist has a good article on all the ways that society is watching and following you around nowadays.
An interesting point they make is that privacy has only been considered important since WW II. They fail to mention 2 reasons that this might be so:
1) The size of databases was only then becoming so huge that there was no way of destroying them before they came into Nazi hands. This lead to millions of Jews being targetted and killed because their ethnicity was explicity listed together with their adresses on paper (in the Netherlands they were particulary good at people registration).
2) The technology to build large databases to the point where they do invade privacy and become dangerous to it has only been around since WW II.

APEC security is lousy and people are stupid peons who will do anything if you give them a reason. We have been indoctrinated by fear. The Chasers prove it on Youtube

So now the bastards have made sure that you’re actually outside killing yourself in the rain, wind, sleet, cold, whatever with your cigarette, they’ve decided that the litter you create when you throw away your cigarette butt is aweful enough that they’re going to automatically ticket you for littering after they’ve automatically identified you with the huge CCTV spy network of camera’s they’re placing in front of every pub in Wales.
Run little smoking piggies, run! The government is out to get you…

In an interesting art project, where the director wanted to make a movie out of only CCTV footage (which the UK, under the DPA has to provide quickly and for a fixed fee if you want to see your own face with other faces blacked out) about a woman living in a land of faceless people, it turned out that the holders of the CCTV footage seemed totally unaware of the DPA or tried to break it.