Author: Mike

To use that old adage, when the horse has escaped, what’s the point of bolting the door. It appears that Whitehall has finally woken up to encryption!

Sir Gus O’Donnell the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service has ordered all government departments to begin a massive program of encrypting data following an edict banning the removal of all laptops from government offices.

It really does seem to be a bit like bolting the door after horse has gone.

I was looking for some help last week with some Google functions and tripped over this very good Google Cheat Sheet, you can download it as a two page PDF file. It’s even better than Google’s own Cheat Sheet.

The current debate on the siting of US interceptor missiles in former Soviet Bloc satellite countries seems to be heating up with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin becoming more vocal in his objection to the plan.

One wonders what the real reason is that the USA want to have yet more hardware on European soil! To defend against rogue states is the normal answer. So, say if a rogue state did launch a strike with their missiles and the did get shot down, where are these missiles going to fall?

Yes right on to our own heads!!!

Is this another example of the current US administration trying to dominate an area of Europe that it see’s falling back into European hands? I suppose you can buy always yourself into some area’s.

The last ‘cold war’ went on long enough and yes Communism did end – thought I am not sure that the Cold did that by itself, but I wonder if this could be the start of yet another arms race that will serve the same purpose as the last one… nothing.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Tony Blair seems to have a good chance of becoming the next President of the European Council aka the President of Europe. Although supposed to be symbolic, it is rumoured that Blair is looking for a more in-depth role from which he can push forward his various agendas.

It seems that many people are so against this idea they have started an international petition at Go Petition to voice their disapproval. If you also disagree with Tony Blair being given yet another jobs for the boys position add your name to the petition here.

Personally I disagree with any person being given the job, why can’t it be put a vote with the right person getting the job on merit.

As with the No. 10 e-Petition site, there are some very interesting petitions as well as some very odd ones, but some are worth a look and if you agree, add your name to them.

It seems that Nick Clegg is starting to ask some interesting questions about the ever increasing UK surveillance society.

Perhaps here is one politician  that is at last starting to question all of the monitoring that seems to entering our daily lives.

See the BBC take on what he said.

With the increase of Wifi use, more and more people are stealing their online connections from you!

A new survey has show that 11% of 2,000 people questioned confessing to hi-jacking their neighbour’s Wifi connection. When I saw the survey, I carried out my own local survey by taking my laptop out and seeing how many unsecured Wifi connections I could find.

Within a 2 mile distance of my house I had found 5 unsecured private (that is not your coffee shop type) connections!

It’s surprising to me that people can be so cavalier with something that a) they are paying for – why do they want give it away free and b) why they want to be open to having their own PC hijacked?

Following few simple set-ups, depending on the type of connection and equipment that you have would save any potential threat turning into an hijack of your PC.

Check out some links below that can help with securing your Wifi connection…

• Get Safe Online
• Digital Home
• Broadband Choices

Saw this story on Silicon.com last week.

I’m not sure where the writer got their info, but as you can see from the comments, I think they need to do a bit more research before leaning too much in favour of the vendors.

Much has been said about the Archbishop of Canterbury comments that he believed “the adoption of some Sharia law in the UK seemed unavoidable”.

I had a look at some of the 1,000’s of comments posted on news sites such as the BBC, Sky, CNN and from the ones that I read, the majority (I would say over 95%) were completely against kind of dual law system for England , Wales and Northern Island citizen(Scotland of coarse has its own set of laws, but I would expect a similar reaction from them).

I am amazed that someone who is supposed to truly understand his flock should get such a fundamental ideal so wrong in such a big way. Rowan Williams perhaps may have wanted to have started a debate about the UK being even more inclusive than it already is, but I think that he has totally misunderstood what sort of reaction he would get.

It was interesting from the posts/comments that many were from multi-ethnic groups, some of which were also strongly against any change.

If Rowan Williams thinks that some citizens “did not relate” to the British legal system and those citizens wanted to relate to a better law, then I think they have a choice, stay and live under the law of the country that they chose, or move to another country.

I would say though currently, the UK has a quite number of citizens that don’t relate to British legal system that have nothing to do with a question of Sharia law, they would break any law in any country, perhaps it was these people that he was talking about, perhaps not!

I can’t think of something as big as this since perhaps the Iraq war decision and the Poll Tax that has raised so much comments. I wonder what other nations around the world must think of this mad idea?

I think the UK has done a good (but not perfect) job over recent years in being a more tolerant and welcoming nation to the various groups that come here. However, when opening our doors, everyone that enters has to understand that it’s one law for all, with no exceptions.

It seems Tony Blair is collecting an increasing number of backers to become the first President of Europe, the latest being French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the second week of January, the House of Commons (Labour Majority of course) voted to increase Britain payments to the European Union! From now until 2014, the UK’s contribution will be £5.5 billion each year!. This is even after any rebates are taken into consideration. Our previous payments, £2.8 billion!

What is going on? Not only will we not even have a vote as to who is the President of Europe! We now have another example of how out of control our MP’s are with our money, after all the past announcements about we’re paying less into Europe, we now find we’re paying more to promote one person!

Is Blair to cost the UK £12.2 billion to be President of Europe? I seems so!

Whilst not the first Web Browser to appear, that honour goes to WorldWideWeb, Mosaic was the first web browser that I had experience with and could be loaded on to just about any of the UNIX workstations that were about in 1993.

I was lucky enough to work for a company that had had a wide-area (as we called it at the time) network connection between our UK and USA offices from the early 90’s and via that connection was able to follow what was going with the early versions of the World Wide Web and after finding a early copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet, we were able to delve much more deeply into this new ‘cyberspace‘.

How far we have come since then, with so many varied browsers now available and most of our lives dictated by the Web and all of its advantages!

Sadly, Mosaic will not longer be an active participant as its current owners AOL are ending the development and support of the current version 9 of the product.

It’s a sad end to what was for all early web users, the beginning of our web experience. You can still download that original version of Mosaic from here, if you want to see what all the early fuss was about.