John Leach's Blog

£5/month for your digitial civil liberties
July 11th, 2008

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.

Tags: copyright, creative commons, drm, evoting, foi, freedom, privacy, rights
Posted in Politics, Tech | 1 Comment »
Encrypted partitions with Ubuntu/Debian
December 6th, 2006

I figured out how to set up an encrypted partition on Ubuntu the other day. There are a bunch of ways of doing it but I found this to be the simplest. It should work on Debian too, since all the relevant packages are Debian ones anyway. In my example I’m encrypting an LVM partition (logical volume), but it should work with any device, including removable USB keys (see end notes). UPDATE: This is broken in Edgy but I figured out a simple fix, see below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Debian, encryption, filesystem, privacy, Security, Ubuntu
Posted in GNU/Linux, Security, Tech, Ubuntu | 15 Comments »
Opt-out of centralised NHS records
November 4th, 2006
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:
- various government agencies including the police and social workers
- private investigators, media organisations and other commercial entities.
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.
Tags: health, medical, medical information, n3, nhs, privacy, spine
Posted in Politics, Security | No Comments »
Referrer Securer
August 16th, 2006

Did you know that Firefox (and Epiphany) don’t send referrers when following a link from an SSL encrypted site? The target site cannot tell whether you clicked a link or typed the url in directly.

I don’t know about other browsers, but this seems like a sane behaviour.

Tags: browser, click, epiphany, firefox, http, https, link, privacy, Security, ssl
Posted in Security, Tech | 1 Comment »
ID cards to become law
September 30th, 2005

Just a reminder that the UK National ID card threat has not gone away. The government is still planning to get this piece of police state legislation implemented. The whole scheme is going to cost an estimated £19 billion. That’s over £300 per card. And it won’t make us more secure. It won’t prevent the majority benefit fraud. The technology doesn’t even work. It seems to achieve nothing but invade our privacy and provide fat contracts to private technology firms.

The world is not a different place since 9/11. The “rules of the game” have not changed. Reject the ID card.

Read more at “Our World Our Say” and No2Id.

Please donate something to the “Our World Our Say” campaign against ID cards. They have various projects to raise awareness and are currently raising money for an advertising campaign.

Tags: donate, government, id card, idcard, owos, police state, privacy, tony blair, uk
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »