a convenient truth

Quoth MindHacks:

Wired has picked up on the annual ‘psychiatrists diagnose fictional character with mental illness’ story by noting that researchers have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, with borderline personality disorder. But is he genuinely disordered or just misunderstood?

I don’t know how Paul missed this one.  Get married with a Stormtrooper escort, walking down the aisle to the Imperial March.  Skill!

Just check out this menu. Humour and verve, in a single insane 5 hour dinner. Superb.

We are the most observed nation in the world. CCTV cameras line our streets, our emails are stored for years as is our IP traffic. Our location is tracked using our mobile phones, and this is stored for years too. Our credit cards record our behaviour and our cash point use correlates our position. If you travel in London, your car is tracked by it’s number plate for congestion charging enforcement and your Oyster card is tracked on every bus, tube and train you use. We have few secrets now.

My instinct is that this is harmful to us as a society, because freedom to choose can only be exercised when unobserved. Our elections are secret ballots for a reason. If you choose to fund animal rights groups, or to go on a demonstration, or to visit a sex shop then these are lawful activities and you should not be prevented from doing them for fear of surveillance. This is not fear of Government necessarily, but there are many people with access to these data, and any of them could be suborned, or could leak the information if they were interested enough. Even celebrities deserve privacy.

Following the horrific story of Madeleine McCann, I kept thinking though that the perpetrators would have been caught by now if this had happened in Britain. Their mobile phones, or their cars, or their faces would have given them away. The police would have issued CCTV pictures within hours. I have young children and the McCann’s are suffering our worst and greatest fear. I would not be human not to be glad that my children are in some ways at least safer precisely because of our level of surveillance.

How to reconcile these? I’d like to propose an idea swiped wholesale from Larry Niven - The Commission for Citizen Oversight. Instituted by Royal Charter and not answerable to Parliament directly, with a self-regulating board of trustees. It’s charter would be to protect citizen’s privacy by storing all of the data deemed personal and private, and they would have a say on what that data is. Mobile phone positioning records, Oyster card records, all output from police and council CCTV cameras. These things would be required by law to be encrypted immediately using the Citizen Oversight public key, and transmitted to their storage facility.

They would have complete discretion in when to release this information to investigating bodies, but would be required by charter to provide data for police investigations into very serious crimes and for reasons of national security. But that’s it. No trolling for celebrities, in fact no trolling at all, or joining up data to invent new suspects.

The British constitution is strangely good at these independent sorts of organisations, that answer only to themselves. In practice it would provide a far greater layer of protection than the disparate, unsecured storage used now that anyone with a mind to could get into (and I expect our own, and other nation’s, security services already have installed back doors in - I know I would if I were them).

This would protect our privacy, would improve national security, and yet would allow the use of the data in instances such as the taking of Madeleine McCann.

Update 20/05/2007.  I’m closing comments on this post now, it’s all got way off topic.

Yet another one for Paul: Han Solo Encased in Chocolate.

The BBC is, after all, going to DRM stuff it distributes over the internets.  Weird decision really, since they don’t DRM it went transmitted any other way.  Still, it’ll keep UKNova in business.  They seem to have everything the BBC ever made, unDRMed in nice friendly torrent format.

The choice of Windows Media format is just as irksome, as it works pretty poorly on free platforms, because Microsoft won’t license it for free linux players.  Thay means the players have to utilise clean-room reverse engineering and all sorts of horrible hacks (like copying DLLs from windows boxes onto your computer) to decrypt them.  It’s all amazingly lame when there are perfectly good open video formats available.

Boo BBC, you have failed.

Remember the AACS business last week, where they are threatening anyone who mentions a certain big number with prison. Well, you too can own an integer! That’s right, under the auspices of the well-thought-out DMCA, you too can sue anyone who mentions your number, and just imagine - if every number becomes owned by someone we could end in a world without numbers! Utopia! The DMCA will have finally achieved it’s aims.

Incidentally, E4 DE 37 A0 C7 1F 8B 5A DC F4 F2 C3 6D A4 D8 33 is mine, ALL MINE!  bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

I’ve recently started using an application called dabble db. Without gushing too much, I think it’s the best online application I’ve used, period. It’s right up there with google’s maps, reader and email. In fact, if google have any sense they’ll buy dabbledb right NOW since it’s so damned good. It’s making my life massively easier already just working with some pretty simple data.

The application itself is really a database, but the User Interface is superb. It presents a sort of spreadsheet interface but instead of being a spreadsheet under the hood it’s a full relational database. Upload a spreadsheet and get going, and before you know it you’re working with vastly more control and much more naturally than previously. If you work with a lot of spreadsheets you really have to check it out.

It’s the address that really cracks me up.