the judge granted a Viacom motion that records of every video watched by YouTube users, including their login names and IP addresses, be turned over to the entertainment giant

Holy fuck!

YouTube privacy at risk in Google-Viacom ruling | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

It looks like the EU has not learned a thing from the outrage of giving away flight data and swift financial data to the US, and is now agreeing to give all data the US wants as long as it is ‘adequately protected’. What that level of protection is, isn’t defined, so if the US says it’s adequately protected (say, by having it lying about in a taxi on a USB drive), then the EU will automatically have to give the US the data.
Not only that, but it also looks like there is absolutely no safeguard as to what the US government will do to the data once it’s finished with it. Destroy it? Sell it? Apparently the EU is saying: “Whatever”.

Yes, from our nannying UK – in order to be in touch with any children you don’t own, you need a government CRB check, declaring you ‘safe’ to be in contact with children. Most of the comments in the article register outrage, a few tiny small minority come out with the inane ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong why not submit to the check’ arguments.

Now anyone with his dog can get one! Gief mine!

NB About time – using the dot god infrastructure was a no go, Open Root Server cost too much and Namespace was too obscure (see here)

Which is yet another of the many many reasons why we should be highly sceptical of government surveilance through CCTV coverage, unfettered wiretapping and other forms of personal monitoring.

.. no, actually. Sorry. These are Network Operation Centers. But don’t you just see Bond walking into one of these while battling SPECTRE minions?

NOC gallery

Not only can they search them, they can copy whatever they like – your phone record, your email, whatever! And they can keep them for as long as they feel like.

Not mentioned in this article is that if it was encrypted, they can force you to give up the encryption password too. And we all know the friendly waterboarding tactics used by the US to get you to do things you don’t want to. Or admit to charges they made up…

There are a couple of sites out there which give you a good look at the global spam trending. Most of the links in here I found in the following site:

Spam Links – spam stats

Messagelabs has a weekly overview of virusses, spam and phishing

Commtouch Spam lab has a nice graph with 30 / 100 days or 12 months view

The Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse has MRTG graphs of mail checked and spam ratio over 300 servers with loads of options to search through specific periods

Spamcop has good statistics showing which IP blocks the spam is coming from

Barracuda Central shows you what types of spam / phishing mails are being sent.

The UK Government is refusing to investigate well grounded claims that BT together with Phorm electronically eavesdropped on hunderds of thousands of ISP users without a legal reason to do so. It seems the UK Home Office stance is that since they’re companies they don’t need to be brought to account, which means basically they’re saying that big businesses have the right to trample on the privacy rights of consumers.

OpenID is the open source single sign on system for websites: ie. sites using OpenID will all allow you to log in using one username / password combination. It’s something the Porn industry has been chasing for years, but is very very difficult indeed to achieve due to payment / trust issues – who gets to keep the userdata?

Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM have just jumped onto this bandwagon making it a winning contender.

Not just fingerprint data from the guilty, not just DNA from anyone entering the USA (I guess they’re guilty of that), but now more biometrics for more people! Irises, face shapes, scars, whatever the FB can think up they’ll be storing. And everybody will be in it. And everyone (well, OK, not everyone, but huge amounts of people – which means for a determined looker everyone) will have access to it. The land of the free huh?

And The Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy, thinks this is a good thing. The number completey startles me. Do they have that many people working in the secret services that can process all this?!

Yup, when big, centralised databases get made, it just gives you so much more information to sell or misuse. Here we have a corrupt customs agent sellling data to drug dealers. We also have people tracking ex-girlfriends. Yup, great, having no privacy.

The UK has managed to lose two CDs with lots of very private information on around 15 million of its subjects. These CDs contained the personal information of all people collecting child benefits and were lost as a result of them being sent untracked by courier. They never arrived at their destination and were sent without a tracking number.
The potential for identity theft related crimes is huge.
And this is the government that wants you to entrust even more of your private data to them with national ID cards.

If you buy a PC nowadays, it’ll come loaded with loads of crap you may or may not want: trial versions of software with nag screens after a period of time, the system builder’s own software, stuff that shows you ads, google desktop and toolbar etc etc etc.

PC World has a good article on this here.

To get rid of it there are a few clever freeware options:

PC Decrappifier is a good one for this

Dustbuster gets rid of temporary files and directories

There are more tools out there, mainly paid ones. Have a look here.

Apparently it’s legal in the US to discriminate against smokers. So Florida’s largest employer has decided to not hire smokers and mentions them in the same sentence as drug users in their policy. Now Florida is fairly anti-smoking, but this is pushing the line way beyond what people are willing to accept.

Stichting Brein has the power to have websites taken down at will and without any need for reasoning. Leaseweb is contending this.

So… then what are they for?

Not only that, they should mark each others’ tests as well.

First the UK has managed to scare the people into doing whatever it wants in the name of security, then it created a nanny state, and now it’s dumbing the people down – apparently people are still complaining too much about having their DNA on file for no particular reason.

The US Fearmongering has gone onto a totally new track – men are becoming afraid of children there, as they are likely to be seen as paedophile if they interact with them in any way.

Not only do the authorities not clear the DNA database of people who are not charged or are considered innocent, it now turns out that 1/8th of the data in the database is wrong.

Fox is starting the drumbeat to war on Iran and it looks an incredible amount like the drumbeat for war on Iraq. This guy has made a little movie, comparing footage to both. Well worth looking at.

Universal Music Group is to sell thousands of tracks DRM free untill 1/8, none of which on the iTunes store in an attempt to measure if DRM sells better or worse. Or if the iTunes store sells poorly. Or whatever. Probably just to piss Apple off really. And to see if people will really want to buy DRM free music (no way!). Who knows, but after looking at EMI (who still seem to be selling their music, even if it is DRM free and EMI don’t seem to be making such huge DRM overheads…) this is good news for the Music Industry as well as the consumers.

How ugly can competition become? AMD has set up a special website slamming Intel, using the material it’s using in the EC antitrust case (which hasn’t been proved at all yet).

Now in the UK, Southampton, the Wellington Arms has allready become a consulate for the Island of Redonda. It’s now trying to become an embassy, in order to escape VAT and most importantly, the bans on smoking that will be in effect from 1/7 in England.
Smokers will continue the fight!