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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.

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.