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I recently met up again with someone who had been looking for their 22 year old son who was missing from his UK home for over two years!

There were no known reasons that this devastated parent knew of for him to suddenly disappear and he had not turned up in any hospital that they knew off. Suddenly one Friday night, the son walked back into their home as if nothing had happened.

All this happened quite a few years ago and one of the problems that they had at the time was that there were not that many agencies that could help them.

How different it is today with many more resources available particularly on the Web.

It must be totally devastating when this happens and I hate to think how I would feel if I had to go through the same thing.

Here’s some links I found that would help anyone facing a similar situation.

• Missing You
• Missing People
• Missing People(2)
• Action for missing people
• Missing persons – help and support

You seen them and maybe you’ve not seen them, but you’ve probably seen the sensors at the exits to Supermarkets, Music stores and Petrol Stations.

They come in all sizes and shapes, from quite big to very very small , they can be square they can be round, in fact they can be any size and any shape.

Yes it’s the ever present RFID!

There now appearing everywhere in business, many companies using RFID’s to track their manufacturing processes from Automotive and Aviation spares to the latest high-end fashions.

As they continue to become more available, they become yet another tool that the UK authorities can use to keep track of the population as we go about our private business. More action need to be taken to protect us from this ongoing intrusion.

Some reference articles that show how prevalent RFID’s have become.

• Time Europe Magazine
• World’s tiniest RFID tag unveiled
• Global Research Article
• The UK considers RFID tags for prisoners

If you want to protect any RFID’s that your carrying such as Credit Cards etc. from being read illegally, then try one of these wallets or passport holders.

We’ve come out tops (or bottom depending on the way you look at it) in this latest poll, but for al the wrong reasons!!!

Taken from the latest 2007 International Privacy Ranking report from Privacy International the UK is confirmed again as being one of, if not the most endemic surveillance society in the world.

The reports puts the UK on the same level as other surveillance driven countries, China, Russia and the USA. Great, as a country supposed to be a champion of freedom!

The report paints a dark image of the way the UK continues down the road of to a total surveillance environment with further invasions of our privacy planned by our politicians via Identity Cards, Passenger Exit Records, Installation of yet more CCTV cameras to name just a few.

Other highlights from the report about the UK include:

• World leading surveillance schemes
• Lack of accountability and data breach disclosure law
• Commissioner has few powers
• Interception of communications is authorised by politician, evidence not used in court, and oversight is by commissioner who reports only once a year upon reviewing a subset of applications
• Hundreds of thousands of requests from government agencies to telecommunications providers for traffic data
• Data retention scheme took a significant step forward with the quiet changes based on EU law
• Plans are emerging regarding surveillance of communications networks for the protection of copyrighted content
• Despite data breaches, ‘joined-up government’ initiatives continue
• Identity scheme still planned to be the most invasive in the world, highly centralised and biometrics-driven; plan to issue all foreigners with cards in 2008 are continuing
• E-borders plans include increased data collection on travellers

Our freedom is slowly disappearing under this cloak of control to a point where we will soon be more monitored than even USSR citizens were during the Soviet era.

I wonder when we will see the State start to plant spy’s amongst us to track and report an individuals actions? It’s already started with hotlines for Benefit Fraud – yes we have to track criminals, but at what cost to the rest of us. “If you’ve nothing to hide, then you’ve nothing to fear”, is the cry that we’re then confronted with!

The report makes for very interesting reading and again shows how we, the great British masses are walking obliviously into a controlled society with little choice and eventually appearing to be just a number in one of the many governments databases, that is of course if they have not accidentally lost the data in the first place!

So why then, are willing to give complete strangers on the phone sensitive and private information when they claim to be from our Mobile phone supplier, Credit Card company or Bank?

Although many of these organisations have a policy of not initiating phone contact and asking for identifying information, some still do.

 Privacy International an independent human rights watch dog says that this should stop and have setup a trial with T-Mobile so that they have to ask you a question that proves that they are, who they say there are before asking you for private information. See the full story here.

After six months without a sitting government, Belgium still seems no closer to solving its ever lengthening constitutional crisis.

Protracted legal arguments between the Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia regions still show no sign of being resolved (the caretaker/interim government has only been in office for some 3 weeks) to the point where if not settled before 23rd March it could plunge Belgium back into political crisis and renew talk about the country splitting into Dutch- and French-speaking halves.

What would a split Belgium mean for Europe? There would be quite serious consequences I think as it’s one of the main hubs of major EU activity.

What is strange to me is how little we see this major story covered in the UK mainstream media. I suppose it’s another example of over there and out of sight. Just adds to the feeling that the UK media has no idea and no interest in anything outside of the UK except for the USA!!!

Interesting comments in Mark Mardell’s Blog.

I receive a number of daily technical newsletters to do with my day job and it is always refreshing to come across links that take me to a more than interesting web site.

If you ever need to explain to anyone what an RSS feed is, or what a blog is all about, then take a look at some of the brilliant online videos at Commoncraft. They explain many of the today’s web technologies in a very straight forward way using a paper point approach.

More on the birth of computing here in the UK with news about another set of articles about early UK computing, Tom Flowers and his involvement in the building of the Colossus.

In a previous post I talked about my visit to Bletchley Park home of the WW II Enigma code cracking team and saw the rebuilt Colossus in all its glory.

It’s a real shame that Winston Churchill instructed that all of these great machine be destroyed, who knows what Britain’s future what would have been, had we have had the foresight to keep them and build on their success?

Here’s one view on that ‘Colossus’ mistake!

To add insult to injury the HMRC are to being told that they must pay the full costs of the investigation of what has been termed the biggest lost property investigation ever in the UK.

The HMRC having already lost the discs containing the UK’s Benefits System CD’s the Metropolitan Police will aim to recoup it entire operational costs (said to be higher than an average murder case) even though they were unable to find any hint of the discs.

It still unclear who at the HMRC will finally carry the can for such a monumental disaster. Even though the cost maybe very high it will still be ‘us’ that finally carries the real costs!

New Year, New post!

From this to to this   read on…

Broadband speed is something that is being talked about a lot these days. What does ‘up to 8 MB’s’ really mean? Well unless you live right next to the telephone exchange you’re never going to get anywhere near to 8 MB’s.

What do I get? On average around 4 MB, sometimes I might even get to 4.5 MB. I’m with BT Broadband on Option 3 and have my broadband connection with the Reading South Exchange.

Although speed is an issue with any connection, consistency of service for me is even more important, whether you have 1MB, 2MB, 4MB or even 8MB! If you don’t have a consistent connection (or any connection at all), then even 16MB (if that was possible) becomes useless as a service. As I work from home, it is even more important!

If your not satisfied, why not change ISP, I hear some say! I suppose with the high number of ISP providers in the UK today, it might pay to shop around and get another deal, but moving your ISP is not as easy (or from a work point of view, convenient) as some would have you believe, it’s a bit more than just getting a new MAC code!

Why am I still with BT? Well in the end they did fix the problem, which was in the Reading South exchange itself (despite me being told initially by BT support many times to change my own line filter! But that’s another story!), perhaps it was through my persistence of calls giving feedback and other diagnostics information that I set them over the course of three months!

Here’s some background info that I kept about the problems. I have two BT lines into my house and one is dedicated to Broadband through a NETGEAR DG834G v2 router (backed up by a spare) with only a single telephone connected through a filter (I have spares of these as well). I work in IT, so being prepared is one of my fixations – by the way, when did you last back up your own PC?

Anyway, last year (2007) up until around May I had been having consistent connection and good speeds , even got up close to 6MB at one stage as can be seen by this graph collected by me monitoring the NETGEAR Log and using a number of online broadband speed testers (Audit My PC, One Stop Click, and SpeedTest.Net to get a good average.

However all was not well at the Reading South exchange as over the next two months, connections kept dropping and average speeds became more erratic.

When making calls to BT customer support I was always met with the usual liturgy of ‘have you changed you filter?‘ and ‘have you rebooted your router?‘ and ‘do you have any other equipment on the line?’.

One thing I insisted on when speaking to the various support agents – just how many do BT have for this function? was that the agent write something in their customer support call log about my problems and eventually they started to do this. I think that this one action helped me prove in the end that the problem was with their equipment and not mine.

July moved into August and September with similar issues including a false fix in August.

By this time we had moved onto BT Line testing!! I am not sure if it’s me, but it seems that when I am talking to the BT customer support person on the phone using the same BT broadband line (via a working filter – don’t ask me to change it) surely that must mean that the line is working!

No! comes the reply. We have to carry our more detailed tests to check what speed your line can support! So while they check the line, I look at the NETGEAR settings again and yes I am still connected to BT as I have an ISP allocated IP address and an ISP allocated Gateway Address and ISP allocated DNS numbers and the Router says that I have a DownStream connection speed of 8152 kbps!

All this and my browser still has a blank screen (apart from the ‘this page can’t display‘ message that is)! The agent comes back and says that the line test passed okay and that my line can support up to 2MB speed and is working correctly!!! However, my browser screen is still blank from any number of web addresses! The agent then starts to as if I have changed the filter…! Oh! dear have I broken the phone?

We move on to October and November…

 

It seems that either my filter is really defective or Reading South exchange is close to meltdown! Finally after more support calls, stupid questions, more line tests and checking that they are now able to read back to me from the call log what I had previously reported, in the middle of November, I am told that finally the call is being escalated to a specialist team that manage the engineers who visit the various exchanges in the UK! BT technical staff actually in the UK!!

At last I feel that we are moving somewhere, surprisingly at first this group of engineers seem unaware of all of the issues that I’ve had, but then suddenly they are able to read the log files that I made the other support group collect. After a number of sensible technical discussions, I am told that an Engineer will now visit the Reading South exchange site, make some investigations and report back.

On the evening of 27th November, I receive a phone call (yes they rang me!) to say that a fault had been found and would I please check my connection speed. I checked and it’s was up at 3.7 MB. We agreed that I would monitor the speed and consistency of connection over the next few days during which they were now ringing me twice a day to check on the connection quality. As can be seen from the end of the November chart, things begin to get better.

But what about December and January to date?

As can be seen from the charts below, December was the first month since May that I had not experienced any drop in the connection or a drop in speed below 3.5 MB! This has now carried on into January 2008 with a slight speed increase up to an average of 4.0 MB! Stability at last and with a good speed!!

  

Interesting point; I am still using the same filter, the same router, the same cables, the same phone connected to my broadband line as I had been back at the beginning to May 07 (and previous months) and I have not had to let anyone remotely connect to my PC to fix anything!

It may seem to have been a long haul to get to this point, but in the end perseverance paid off. Yes, I could have swapped ISP’s, but would I have got any better service? Based on what we all read about ISP’s in the press, perhaps not.

Perhaps someone at BT might read this and care to comment.

Some suggestions/conclusions that I can pass one:-

• Make sure that you have eliminated any other suspect items on your broadband line that could be causing an error by taking your Fax, Answer Machine and/or Alarm system of the phone line before you call.
• Keep a spare filter and phone lines handy to swap out before you call if you can afford it buy a spare Router.
• When you make your first support call, try as hard as you can to make them take down all your details and that they enter this into their call log system – it tracks calls against your broadband phone number, you can check that they did this, next time you call, that is if you have to.
• Regional accents can be very hard to understand on the phone, if you cannot understand what the support agent is saying, ask them to speak more slowly and clearly – they will do this.
• The support agent may ask some simple (and seemingly stupid to you) questions; at the end of the day these ‘front-line’ telephone support agents are working from a script and probably know less about broadband than you do.
• If they cannot fix the issue immediately they will need to gather further information. You should know how to log on to your router to access log file information, at the end of the day it is your equipment. Read your router manual and understand how it (and broadband works, here is a good tutorial on Broadband in the UK. Give as much information as possible and don’t fobbed off by lame excuses, that it could be the filter, phone cable, fax machine, because you will have already discounted these items. Won’t you?
• I’m am always very reticent about letting remote people log on to my PC, try to avoid this.
• Above all, you have to have patience and perseverance.

The problem can be fixed, it’s a matter of determining (diagnosing) where the fault is. I agree that in some rare cases all that may be left to do is to move ISP’s

This is not the first Broadband fault that I have had, and I am sure that it won’t be the last, but it certainly was the one that took the longest to fix. I’ll also be posting my monthly chart from now on as an update to this post. Now, if only I could get a faster speed!!!! Happy Browsing.

Back in October 2007 I posted about this Labour Governments move to allow over 650 public bodies legal access all of our mobile and land line phone records.

I said at the end of that first post that I would write to the Home Office to see if I could get some clarification as to who, what when etc. In early November I received a reply to my questions; however, circumstances delayed me posting about this before now.

The letter from a Simon Watkin dispels the notion that was…

…widely misreported as having been “enacted by the personal decree of the Home Secretary” and giving new powers to public authorities to obtain data. That was incorrect on both counts. The code was debated and approved by both Houses of Parliament and gave no powers to any public authority which did not already have them.

The letter also offers some links referring to previous Acts of Parliament that had allowed Public bodies unregulated access to our telephone call records!

• The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Communications Data) Order 2003 (Statutory Instrument 2003 No. 3172)
• The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Communications Data) (Amendment) Order 2005 (Statutory Instrument 2005 No. 1083)
• The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Communications Data) (Additional Functions and Amendment) Order 2006 (Statutory Instrument 2006 No. 1878)

The letter also contains links to a March 2003, Access to Communications Data consultation paper that we were all able to comment on before the Act came in to being in October – you didn’t see this! So you won’t have seen any of the responses that were received!

Also here is the a link to the final document that forms the updated Act – Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

And finally, the actual reply from the Home Office. This also contains a 14 page table of all of the “Public Authorities that can lawfully obtain all communications data (subscriber data, service use data and traffic data).”

It was sent to me as a Word file, but a PDF version is here.

Is this the last we will hear of this? I don’t think so. As the UK continues its steady move towards a total surveillance society, more and more private elements of our lives will come under scrutiny by this Labour government.

It’s very worrying that we don’t hear any of the other political parties standing up and shouting very loudly about the ongoing erosion of our freedom, the same could also be said about the mainstream media – I suppose there’s not enough celebrity about it!

Perhaps it’s a true conspiracy by all politicians to control the whole of the UK! I don’t know, what do you think?