Category: Personal

Stuff happening in my life

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 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?

1/12/2006 1 Comment

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 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.

4/11/2006 Add Comment

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 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.

13/10/2006 Add Comment

White Terrorists White Washed

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.

9/10/2006 4 Comments

Labour Party Conference Protest, Manchester

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.

23/9/2006 Add Comment

News Sniffer: Revisionista

The latest News Sniffer project went live today: Revisionista. It tracks changes in corporate news articles and marks the differences. So you can choose a BBC news article and see how it’s changed since it was first created. Most changes are on breaking new articles which get updated as more information becomes available, but some changes are rather telling of policy.

Currently only the BBC is monitored, but it’s pretty easy for me to add support for any site with an RSS feed.

Some examples:
(more…)

10/9/2006 6 Comments

BBC Have Your Say

A while back I wrote a system to detect when the BBC censor comments on their Have Your Say website. It’s been running for a few months now and recently I wrote a fancy front end for it to allow easy browsing of the database.

It’s called ‘Watch Your Mouth’ and it’s part of my News Sniffer project, which will include other corporate media monitoring tools (coming soon).

It was broken for the duration of last week so no censored comments got detected, but it’s been working since and there is a large archive of censored comments too from the last few months.

I spotted some BBC ip addresses browsing the site already too.

17/8/2006 9 Comments

Bruce Schneier whistles white noise

The new ELER strip is about Bruce Schneier and links to a Chuck Norris style Bruce Schneier Facts Database system I wrote. It got linked from Boingboing, Metafilter, Reddit and even Bruce Schneier’s own blog!

As you might imagine, it’s getting trabigillions of hits right now. Lucky I wrote it in Ruby on Rails with its built in page caching which (after first render) serves as fast as the webserver can serve. And since I’m using Lighttpd too, that is very fast.

17/8/2006 Add Comment

Can I Compost This?

Louisa and I am announcing our latest project: Compost This. It’s a directory of items with information about it’s compostability.

For example Tea and Flour can be put on the compost heap, but Bindweed and Walnuts cannot. And it’s not always a good idea to put Orange peel on there either.

For geeks: I wrote Compost This using Ruby on Rails, which is one of the best web frameworks I’ve used, and I’m really starting to love the Ruby language too. I’ll release the code soon as an example.

14/8/2006 2 Comments

Continuum

My continuity meter is broken. I can’t fix it because I need a continuity meter to find what’s wrong.

It reminds me of the time I banged my head in that I didn’t realise I was suffering from concussion because the detection equipment was suffering from concussion.

31/7/2006 Add Comment

Rehumanize

At the end of these…

Israeli girls write on shells

…are scenes like this

Lebanese boy with mother dying from shrapnel wounds

Why won’t the British and American governments support the end of this violence? Why is America rushing to continue it’s arms supply to Israel? Why is the British government allowing the transport of these weapons through our country? In the face of mounting evidence, why don’t the corporate media challenge the claims that our governments support peace? Why do we let all of this happen? Do we not care? What is wrong with us?

27/7/2006 10 Comments

Self-defence. Israelly?

“Israel has been pursuing a campaign in Gaza for almost three weeks, since Cpl Gilad Shalit was captured by militants on 25 June.”

–BBC News

“Gaza, itself, the latest phase, began on June 24. It was when Israel abducted two Gaza civilians, a doctor and his brother. We don’t know their names. You don’t know the names of victims.”

–Noam Chomsky interviewed on Democracy Now

“Nor have the press suggested that the one-sided nature of the killing in the weeks leading up to the capture of the Israeli soldier might have “sparked” Palestinian actions.

On June 8, the Israeli army assassinated the recently appointed Palestinian head of the security forces of the Interior Ministry, Jamal Abu Samhadana, and three others. On June 9, Israeli shells killed seven members of the same family picnicking on Beit Lahiya beach. Some 32 others were wounded, including 13 children.

On June 13, an Israeli plane fired a missile into a busy Gaza City street, killing 11 people, including two children and two medics. On June 20, the Israeli army killed three Palestinian children and injured 15 others in Gaza with a missile attack. On June 21, the Israelis killed a 35-year old pregnant woman, her brother, and injured 11 others, including 6 children. Then came the Israeli capture of two Palestinians, followed by the Palestinian capture of the Israeli soldier and the killing of the two other soldiers.”

–David Edwards in a Medialens alert

Research project of the day: Try and find mention of any of this relevant information in the mainstream media. Unlikely that you will. Try and find mention of it in relation to the current attacks by Israel.

I’ll get us started: BBC news do mention the capture (it’s only kidnapping when official enemies do it) of the two Gaza civilians in this article, which I had to dig around to find. I’ve not seen it mentioned being possibly related to the capture of the Israeli solders the next day.

17/7/2006 Add Comment