Author: Mike

Further to yesterdays post about telephone tapping and previous posts on the growth of UK Big Brother, more figures have surfaced out of the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner.

The Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Kennedy informs us that there were more than 253,000 requests to eavesdrop on individuals’ communications (land lines, mobiles, post etc.) in the last nine months of 2006! This included 1,694 requests by local authorities – tracking that recycling?

Is Big Brother watching you? Be assured he is!!!

Here’s the full report.

So just how good can satellite image get?

Take a look at a new offering from 192.com and you’ll find out what this image is off.

There are plenty of others to look at, in fact you can zoom in on any area on the map.

Here’s looking at the top of your head!

This Daily Telegraph article reports on yet another drop in the delivery of local services with nearly 155 local authorities having axed weekly rubbish collection.

What sort of value are we getting for our local taxes?

Here within the Wokingham, UK district area, we still have weekly rubbish collections, so I’ve written to my local Councillors using that great site Write to Them to find out what the plans are here.

I’ll post back here with their responses.

As I said in a number of previous posts, the UK’s Big Brother marches on, with over a 1,000 telephone lines a day being tapped by various UK authorities including Local Authorities.

A report, by Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of Communications Commissioner, has fuelled fears that Britain is becoming a state where private communications are routinely monitored.

The report also found that more than 1,000 of the bugging operations were flawed. In some cases, the phones of innocent people were tapped simply because of administrative errors.

I suppose in light of the recent missing data scandals I should not be surprised.

For more information take a look at this report.

I hope that anyone who thinks we don’t was watching last nights BBC Horizon programme What on Earth is wrong with Gravity?

I hope they also paid attention to the segment of the program that visited the USAF GPS headquarters at the Schriever Air Force base.

Yes your friendly Tom Tom is really at the mercy of what the USAF decides what will be today’s accuracy and how often the signal will be updated.

Is it right that such a fundamental tool of ‘today’ should be controlled by one nations military? No, and this is the reason why we need a civilian GPS version and that it is based here in Europe.

Take a look at this short GPS background article, which will bring you up to speed with a number of GPS aspects and what Galileo is all about.

Here from my Silicon.Com newsletter is an update about current status of the UK National ID cards scheme.

It seems that all is not well, for example Accenture and BAE Systems abandon bidding for any ID cards contracts.  Read here for more info.

Well as fast as the company that owns most of the UK delivery infrastructure (BT) work against the (what seems inadequate) budget that they have allocated for this upgrade work.

However all of their work may soon not be enough to keep up with ever increasing demand for broadband bandwidth.

With the daily arrival of yet more WebTV stations, more video sharing sites and more picture storage sites are we fast approaching a major web traffic jam when we all end up with just a dribble of data, instead of the promised land of up to 8MB’s?

This interesting article looks at some of the issues, such as 3.5 million people downloading the new BBCi Player in the first two weeks after its launch. If the average program is 350Mb, that’s a lot of traffic!

What is OFCOM about this impending log jam, read the full article here. Things may only be getting slower!

I found this story in one of my SlashDot newsletters today.

I don’t send many texts, maybe it’s age!!! But it forms a huge percentage of many of the UK mobile phone companies revenues.

So what is the real cost of the sending a text compared to say, downloading via your ISP, sending an email or even using the normal post to send a letter?

If these figures are to be believed, then no wonder so much profit is being made by the likes of Vodafone, Orange, 3 etc.

The article is based on recent USA AT&T data, but the principal would be the same for the UK I would think. I’ll have to see if I can find out some of the background info from a UK point of view and post it back here, unless anyone else beats me to it.

Here’s the main article at A Gthing Science Project

I was recently asked by a local councillor what I thought about the level of police numbers and what benefit I thought would come from increasing them.

Having lived in my very quiet street for the past 23 years and only having ever seen four police constables there (two of which once came to arrest me!! – It was a case of someone having used my name/address from the electoral role – another post perhaps?) I can safely say that I would probably not notice any difference. That is not to say that I don’t think that there should be more police on the streets of the UK.

Clearly, more police are required to deal with the increasing number of violent attacks on innocent people, gun grime has got completely out of hand and drugs continue to be a seemingly unsolvable problem, just to name three problem areas.

However, more motorists are being prosecuted for various offences and more and more minor offences seem to be making the headlines.

Here, Simon Heffer of the Times reports on an incident in Kent, where it seems they do have more police officers and are very available to harass and arrest 81 year old pensioners for driving too slow at night!

Yes, I do want more police on the streets of the UK, but I think the people in charge (you know the ones that sit behind the desks) have to make sure that they new police recruits are properly trained and fit for the job, not just target achieving bully’s!

Perhaps it’s not all the Kent Polices fault; looking at this quote from from the presiding Magistrate Angela Howe..

“We believe Mr Gibson is a man of good character, but in finding himself in this unusual situation he let his temper get the better of him and acted out of character.”

I do hope that Magistrate Angela Howe never finds herself in a future unusual situation and manages to not get over heated!

It seems that many of our MP’s have hidden secrets.

Brought on, I am sure by some Labour led investigation set-up to offset the media’s interest in the recent Peter Hain deputy Leadership election finding scandal. It seems that Tory (ex) MP Derek Conway’s political career hangs in the balance.

Now, I am sure that many MP’s have to engage family members, particularly wives (partners etc.) to help them with their work and why should they not be paid something for their time and trouble for this service.

But when as it seems as in the case of Derek Conway’s family, everyone has been involved, some reports say to the tune of more than £250,000 of tax payers money, then I do think that there is a bit of case to answer for Mr. Conway.

I wonder when a) MP’s will clean up their act, do they really think that the public has them in high esteem at the moment? and b) when will we (the taxpaying public) see some of these MP’s actually suffer stiff penalties for there errors of judgement? Probably never, in both cases.

Interesting link for another political firm.