About
John Leach is a human living in Bradford, UK. He makes regular and diverse changes to the universe.
Category Archives: Politics
Inside Google Plus
Steven Levy interviewed Google’s Bradley Horowitz about Google+: Wired: Some users are chafing at Google’s insistence that they provide real names. Explain the policy against pseudonyms. Horowitz: Google believes in three modes of usage—anonymous, pseudonymous, and identified, and we have a … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Tech
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April Fool: A man in Jalawla walked into a bar…
Medialens spotted that the BBC attributed a bomb attack on Monday in Iraq to “al-Qaeda”, with apparently little evidence. They wrote to the BBC’s “man in Baghdad”, Hugh Sykes, and asked him “what is the evidence that al-Qaeda, rather than … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Tagged al-qaeda, bbc, bomb, iraq, journalism, media, medialens, news, propaganda
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James Reynolds of the BBC comes clean
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 … Continue reading
£5/month for your digitial civil liberties
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 … Continue reading
BBC Racism
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Tagged bbc, israel, medialens, palestine, propaganda, racism, terrorism
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Wikileaks Censored by US Judge
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US. BBC News WikiLeaks and its domain registrar for the wikileaks.org domain name, Dynadot, have been sued by the Swiss Bank … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Tech
Tagged anonymity, Bank Julius Baer, censor, censorship, cryptome, dns, tor, whistle-blowers, wikileak, wikileaks
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Our dominant system of economics is unstable
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Tagged capitalism, china, economics, india, journalism, media-anlysis, medialens, neo-liberal, news
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CIA Freedom of Information – Publish Your Own
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Tech
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HD DVD cracked
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 … Continue reading
Mr. Litvinenko’s body
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 … Continue reading
Opt-out of centralised NHS records
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Security
Tagged health, medical, medical information, n3, nhs, privacy, spine
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Air passengers ‘could be tagged’
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Tagged airport, bbc, bullshit, passengers, rfid, technology, terrorism, university
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