This week’s column is about the Home Office’s alleged new plans to keep a centralised record of the nation’s communications traffic data:
Can you “persuade others of the benefits of proposals or the value of a particular interpretation”? Then perhaps the recently advertised position of senior information officer at the Home Office’s new Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is for you.
According to the description of the £45,000-a-year job (removed from the Home Office website, but, at the time of going to press, still available in Google’s cache), the IMP has been set up to “maintain the UK’s capability to obtain and exploit Lawful Intercept (LI) product and Communications Data (CD)”, using “a range of new technologies”. You and I will know IMP better as the nutty plans that have been making headlines all summer, plans to log details about every web page we visit, every SMS message we text and every email we send. And not only that, but to store all this “communications traffic” information in a central database.
Read the rest here.
Last night, I enjoyed watching Mischief: Your Identity for Sale on BBC3. This style of documentary (very Michael Moore) always leaves me wondering how much the film-makers massaged the facts to sensationalise the story. But being somewhat of an expert in these matters, thanks to my work with ORG, I know they’ve got it right on the money here. Michael Wills MP (who is in charge of Data Protection) and David Smith, Deputy Information Commissioner, come off particularly badly. Find out more about the programme here, and watch it for the next 7 days here.
(Snooper’s Paradise is an excellent permanent flea market in the North Laine in Brighton. I love it. The picture above is taken from their store front.)
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- September 12, 2008 – 9:54 am
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- By Becky Hogge
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This week’s Reboot column is on The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey:
“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast . . .”
There’s something about receiving a parcel from Amazon that takes me back to 19th-century New York. Breaking the seal on a bulk order of books (I’m a sucker for super-saver delivery) makes me feel like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, ready to retire from society to my oak-panelled study with only a smoking jacket and a box of cigars for company. So it was last week, when I unpacked The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey (John Wiley & Sons, £21.99).
You can read the rest here. James has kindly made an RSS feed for Reboot (the NS don’t provide one) for those who want to stay up to date.
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- September 5, 2008 – 10:36 am
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- By Becky Hogge
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- September 4, 2008 – 9:54 am
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- By James Casbon
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This week’s New Statesman column is on sousveillance:
Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly as the paparazzi do, is it any wonder you crack?
This column has written a lot about surveillance, but in a world of cheap, portable technology, there is also sousveillance.
Sousveillance, or “watching from underneath”, counters the unblinking eye in the sky with millions of tiny blinking ones belonging to each one of us. In the surveillance society, or so the theory goes, sousveillance is the tool of the surveilled, keeping a watchful eye on the watchers.
Read the rest here.
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- August 29, 2008 – 7:52 am
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- By Becky Hogge
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Digging this new theme (Thanks, James!). Because my New Statesman column doesn’t have a dedicated RSS feed, I’m going to do my best to post links to my columns here, so those who wish to can keep updated.
Here’s this week’s column, on touching up your holiday snaps (see one such touched up snap, right):
My youth is captured for posterity by a series of blurred close-ups depicting me and my best friend in various locations in northern France, squinting into the sun as we attempt to point a Boots disposable camera at ourselves in the style of Thelma and Louise.
Inevitably, half of one of our faces is always out of shot. But things have come a long way since then. With digital photography, long gone are the days of walking into people as you left the chemist’s, flicking through the 30 overexposed, or pitch-black, photos in order to locate the six half-decent album candidates.
Read the rest here.
I’m posting this from Brighton today, where I’m enjoying a four day break, most of which I’ll be spending here.
- Published:
- August 22, 2008 – 2:02 pm
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- By Becky Hogge
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White as milk, which looks great.
Also trying out ecto as a client.
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- August 17, 2008 – 12:07 pm
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- By James Casbon
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Insteresting stuff for January 12th through March 7th:
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- March 8, 2008 – 7:27 am
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- By James Casbon
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Insteresting stuff for January 4th through January 11th:
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- January 12, 2008 – 12:30 am
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- By James Casbon
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Insteresting stuff for December 31st through January 3rd:
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- January 4, 2008 – 12:34 am
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- By James Casbon
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These are my links for December 21st through December 30th:
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- December 31, 2007 – 2:11 pm
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- By James Casbon
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