Admitting it for all to see on his BBC blog. Very brave of him:
Past horrors and mistakes do not seem to have weakened a servile belief in the ultimate benevolence of the state and a willingness to grant it unlimited powers.
In this country, if you start to blame the system itself - and the men right at the top - you tend to get into all kinds of trouble.
Unsurprisingly though, he’s talking about China and not the USA or the United Kingdom.
The Open Rights Group are a UK based organisation fighting for our civil liberties in the digital age. DRM, e-voting, copyright term extensions, FOI, net neutrality, privacy, RIPA, creative commons etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. They’re like an English EFF.
They have a tiny staff and many other volunteers who are extremely dedicated to the cause and are working very hard for our freedoms. They are funded entirely by donations which pays for the staff, an office and expenses of running campaigns and pestering politicians. They’re currently hoping to push their income up so things are more sustainable.
So, please sign up and give them some money every month. Anything from £5 upwards would be super. If you use computers for pretty much anything, it will make your life better - or at least prevent it getting any worse.
The public can see for themselves the ‘neutral’ media language used to describe Israeli actions: ‘incursion’, ‘retaliation’, ‘military operations’. By contrast, Israel endures ‘terrorist attacks’, ‘slaughter’, ‘a bloodbath’. Careful analysis by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, of the Glasgow University Media Group, found a persistent, ugly pattern:
“In our samples of news content, words such as ‘mass murder’, ‘savage cold-blooded killing’ and ‘lynching’ were used by journalists to describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs. The word ‘terrorist’ was used to describe Palestinians, but when an Israeli group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian school, they were referred to as ‘extremists’ or ‘vigilantes’.” (Philo and Berry, ‘Bad News From Israel’, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 259)
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080311_israeli_deaths_matter.php
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
WikiLeaks and its domain registrar for the wikileaks.org domain name, Dynadot, have been sued by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, because of leaks claiming illegal activities at the bank’s Cayman Island branch.
The Judge order the DNS registrar to freeze the domain. The main servers are in Sweden though, so the cover names still work (such as the UK one: http://wikileaks.org.uk). There are also mirror sites. This is a good example of why you shouldn’t rely on US domain names (and why we need more diversity of root server control no doubt). Not sure how much better the UK system is though.
The Tor network has hidden services for this kind of thing and though not perfect, helps protect against this kind of attack (the Tor website is censored by my Vodafone ISP btw). A good time as any to volunteer to host a Tor router server.
The dominant system of economics is unstable, inimical to social justice and lethally damaging to the environmental support systems on which we all depend. A major failure in professional journalism has been the refusal to analyse this; or even to report that real growth rates in the developed world have been declining since the 1970s. Instead, corporate-employed journalists and mainstream analysts frequently extol the alleged spectacular achievements of an ‘unparalleled’ rise in wealth.
Medialens - a UK based media analysis project.
That quote is from one of their latest alerts, “‘CREATIVE DESTRUCTION’ – THE MADNESS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY”. Find it here: part 1 and part 2. You can buy their book, Guardians of Power, from here.
The CIA Freedom of Information website had the dumbest security hole in it. With all the recent hoo har about the “Family Jewels” documents, you’d expect they’d do a quick once over on this stuff. All the textual content on the document view pages is generated directly from variables passed in the url - with no input validation.
This opens them up to cross site scripting attacks (XSS) and really is just stupid. Lucky they aren’t the GUARDIANS OF THE LARGEST CACHE OF SENSITIVE INFORMATION IN THE WORLD or anything - *phew*.
Anyway, using this bug, I made a website where you can write your own documents and publish them on the CIA FOIA website:
I guess that from tomorrow, any mail for me should be addressed to Guantanamo Bay.
Actually, technically you’re the ones doing the exploiting by using the links my site provides - so, you know, at your own risk and all that.
The High Definition DVD encryption got cracked a couple of months back, but recently the AACS licensing authority have been threatening people who discuss it. At the core of this is the processing key, which can be used to decrypt all HD DVDs. The key is just a big number. The AACS assert that the number is illegal to disclose.
If you were counting a large number of something, you’d have to skip this particular number (or whisper it) because the AACS believe they control it.
Anyway, we don’t quite have the DMCA here in the UK, so I can write that number here:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0Without this work, you could not play legally bought HD DVDs with free software applications. You could not play legally bought HD DVDs that were from another country. You could not transfer legally bought HD DVDs to your hard disk for easy access, or to your portable movie player.
One might argue that you shouldn’t be purchasing goods from a company that is at war with you. Whilst I agree, it’s not that easy to find companies that aren’t at war with you and I support work like this to take back our freedoms.
Heard on the radio:
“Pathologists will conduct an autopsy on Mr. Litvinenko’s body this week”
If they are to examine his body, where is Mr. Litvinenko now? Is he in a waiting room? Has he gone back to Russia, leaving his body here for analysis? Maybe he’s gone to heaven.
This statement raises many questions. When Mr. Litvinenko was alive, what was he if not his body? Where was he? How did he control his body? Where was he before his body was born?
Additionally, how come I’ve not heard or read the word “terrorism” anywhere in conjunction with this story? Is it because the Russian Government is involved? Governments can’t commit terrorism?
Why can’t we get on a plane with a tube of arse cream unless it’s in a clear plastic bag but these guys were able to carry radioactive material onboard with no problems?
The government are centralising our medical information onto something called the “NHS Spine”. So our entire NHS medical histories will be moved to this system opening it up to general access for millions more employees of:
Well, you apparently have the legal right to opt out of this “data rape”:
In June 2005, FIPR developed an opt-out letter to send to the Secretary of State. People who sent this off have been fobbed off. We now recommend that you opt out via your GP. Ask your GP to enter into your record the code 93C3 (”refused consent for upload to national shared electronic record”). You can also ask for your address and phone number to be kept off the NHS internal directory, and for your hospital records also to not be uploaded to central systems: see here for details. We encourage you to opt out even if you have nothing to hide; if only people who do have something embarrassing in their records opt out, then doing so will carry a stigma.
BBC News is running this press release from the University College London: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6044310.stm
“Electronically tagging passengers at airports could help the fight against terrorism, scientists have said.”
But the only explanation of how this will actually help the “fight against terrorism” is
“the tags could aid security by allowing airports to track the movement patterns of passengers deemed to be suspicious and prevent them from entering restricted areas.”
Which seems to roughly translate to
Step 1: Tag passengers electronically so you can track their movements
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Security!!
Oh, I missed step 0
Step 0: Get big fat grant from the government and impress your fellow professors
The BBC obviously don’t ask any pertinent questions.
So, a BNP election candidate has been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in Britain. The government held a press conference. I read it on the BBC.
The guy was charged under the Explosives Substances Act 1883 last Monday. Another guy has been charged with similar offences. Yeah, I read it in the Guardian.
It has been reported that police discovered a rocket launcher, a nuclear biological suit, chemicals and BNP literature. It was right there in the Independent.
I’m glad to see that our government and corporate media treat all acts of terrorism equally, be they committed by brown people or be they committed by white people.
Just back from the Labour Party conference protest in Manchester. I’ve uploaded a few of the best photos but not had time for any fancy post-production. Consider these released into the public domain.
John Leach is a human being living in Leeds, UK.
The text of this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-ND license