Get this,

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has a rather curious new addition built in to his latest oversized yacht. The 557-foot boat Eclipse, the price tag of which has almost doubled since original plans were drawn to almost $1.2 billion, set sail this week with a slew of show-off features, from two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, to a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows to combat piracy.

[….] Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi “shield”. Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/russian-billionaire-installs-anti-photo-shield-on-giant-yacht/

They’re curbing them! They don’t want people, corporations or the government itself to collect too much data on individuals and they certainly don’t want that linked up. An individual’s privacy is important, they think. Well done Scotland!

Scottish gov to curb personal data collection • The Register.

It’s Hidden is a Dutch VPN service that allows you to surf the web and bittorrent anonymously. They say they don’t store any data and they encrypt it for you. The results I’ve seen so far show that they’re a fast service.

Home.

The US DHS, not happy with branding incoming people criminals and fingerprinting them at entry points, now also wants to fingerprint you as you leave.

Quite surprisingly, the heriditiary rules of the UK, the House of Lords, is fighting vigorously for the UK populace’s right to privacy. Probaby because they know the first people the government will go after is them. The Government isn’t having any of it. They say that we can trust them to treat the data securely and safely. Like they’ve shown many times they can’t.

Children as young as seven are being recruited to tattle on their neighbours. They are being taught how to collect evidence unseen as well as being given a special action pack complete with all the information and items you need to spy on your community in order to prosecute legally. They are calling themseslves ‘Street Champions’. My suggestion for a better name? ‘Cowardly Narc Pawns’.

Well there it is: every baby will be stamped with a digital prison tatoo at birth. Only *cough* 300.000 childcare professionals – who are especially trustworthy technically adept people who will NEVER compromise the integrity of the database and leak data to anyone else, just like the UK government never does – will have full, unfettered access to every detail of your spawn’s life.

Well, in the Netherlands they’ve been stored for 5 years since around 2002, so there’s hardly any news there. What is news, however, is that the UK government seems to be giving this information to all and sundry to peruse at their leisure. Whether this is because they know they can’t secure it or because they think privacy is an outdated construct, I don’t know. Glad I’m not living in that oppressive country though.

Brein, which is like the Dutch version of RIAA, went and physically visited a server colo host and through intimidation and threats managed to get him to take the sites down. Under Dutch law, running a bittorrent site isn’t illegal. That’s currently being decided by the outcome of the Mininova lawsuit.
That these kind of strong arm tactics are permissible in Holland is disgraceful.
Basically Brein is behaving like a bunch of thugs.

The German government has stormed Wikileaks’ owners house for ‘distribution of pornographic material’ after Wikileaks published the censorship lists of Australia and several other countries.
Is this a sign of the rising of the Fourth Reich – nip the opposers voices in the buds for complete control of your remaining, potty trained and scared shitless population?

This is a great example of why centralised databases are lousy: they get used for things they weren’t supposed to – in this case, for the exact opposite of why it was set up!

The Buma/Stemra thinks that if you link to a video of an artist from a site which allready runs the video (for free, such as from youtube) you should pay them so they can hoard the money and then presumably not give it to the artist who put their work up in such a way that it could be embedded. For free.

The Dutch version of the RIAA is called Brein. Tim Kuik has gone and stated in a newspaper that any time anything is downloaded for free, it’s illegal.
Of course others are blasting the patent idiocy of that statement, so I don’t have to.

Yup, they will brand your passport with your fingerprint, thereby putting your prints into a huge central database together with the criminals. Does it make you safer? Nope. It’s easy to forge fingerprints.

The OV chipcard is something like London’s Oyster cards. They allow people to use busses, trams and trains all over the country. One of the problems though, is that the Dutch public transport system isn’t nationalised, it’s privatised, meaning there are loads of different companies all over the country.

That’s a bit sick in my mind.

The UK police feel justified to hack into your computer, read your emails and other documents on your hard drive, install keyloggers – all without a warrant! The only nod they need is from a ‘senior police officer’.

The UK is going nuts! Now no tin rattling – they’re afraid it might intimidate some precious morons or something…

Health and safety say they could be harmfull. Whether they’ve been more or less harmfull compared to the amount of people who have been saved by them is an open question. Idiots.

Basically anyone who’d ever used the Government Gateway for payment or any of the myriad other systems had their logins on this memory stick, as well as the source code to the system itself. This shows what a fantastic idea centralised databases are, especially single sign on systems, when held in the capable hands of a government who has an incredible record of giving away military service personnell data, civilian data, laptops with confidential data and imagery of women undressing caught on the fantastic camera spying system to all and sundry.

By declaring anything 100 miles from a border a ‘constitution-free zone’, where the Dept of Homeland Security (aka SS or Gestapo) can stop, seize and search you, demanding papers (Auschweiss) with no reason or cause.

Of course, the happy jackbooted goons are taking advantage of this, using their powers to detain at random will.

Several companies have commercial, off the shelf technologies for mining your GSM calls. The NSA and other government agencies can tap into this kind of information because companies which run the GSM towers, for example, are exempt from laws protecting the customers of the carriers.