Owning a camera doesn’t make you a criminal

Me on security guards, snappers and deleting photos…

Part of the problem is overzealous people in uniform, whether they’re security guards or serving police officers. The Metropolitan Police’s crazed anti-terrorism adverts (PDF), which brand photographers as potential bombers, don’t exactly help. But there’s also a problem with the law.

The idea that Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act makes photographing the police illegal is pure fantasy. It doesn’t mention photos at all. Rather, it says that it’s illegal to gather or publish information about the police or armed forces that is “likely to be useful” to a mad bomber, foreign spy or Osama Bin Laden.

With pretty much everything in the world linked to terrorism these days – Icelandic banks’ assets were frozen under anti-terrorism legislation, while anti-terrorism surveillance powers have also been used to crack down on such threats to life and liberty as dog crap and fly-tippers – then it’s easy to see how that phrase can be misinterpreted, either by accident or by design.

And journalists wonder why everybody hates them

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but Graham Linehan has beaten me to it: on the 8th of March, the Scottish Sunday Express ran a contemptible piece of shit by Paula Murray about the survivors of the Dunblane massacre. There’s a PDF link here. For some mysterious reason, the paper has wiped the online version. As Linehan writes:

As others have pointed out, the gist of the story is that these kids are showing disrespect to their dead classmates by… being alive.

Here’s an example of Paula’s scoop: “For instance, (name deleted), who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died, makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.”

Rude gestures. Boasting. Drunkenness.

As Chicken Yoghurt puts it:

If only the doctors and counsellors who treated the wounds and mental scars of those children all those years ago had had the foresight to say: ‘Now, children, you most now go forth and live the lives of angels, not only in tribute to your dead schoolmates who no doubt would have wanted you to live puritanical lives, but also to avoid the predations of journalists barely worthy of the name who, as soon as you turn 18, will ransack your private lives in search of cheap, revolting scoops.’ All this could have been avoided.

Tim Ireland may have discovered a teeny-weeny little bit of hypocrisy. On her Facebook page, she boasts about getting wasted.

In her attack on Dunblane survivors, Paula Murray castigated and demonised survivors of that tragedy who “boasted about alcoholic binges”, which is EXACTLY what she’s doing here.

Obviously, this is just cherry-picked text, and making a judgement based on these statements alone would be a wrong.

So to back them up, here’s a series of photos of Paula getting pished with her mates

Still, the Press Complaints Commission is on the case.

The editor of the Daily Express, Peter Hill, left the board of the PCC last year following front page and high court apologies from Express Newspapers titles the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday over a string of false stories about the disappearance of four-year-old Madeline McCann, which resulted in payments of £550,000 in damages to the McCann family.

Back to Linehan:

The press likes us to believe they’re a properly regulated body, but they’re anything but. First of all, The PCC seems to be a completely toothless organisation by design. It is made up of representatives of the major publishers, who are obviously not inclined to be too hard on themselves. Also, unlike Ofcom and the Advertising Standards Authority, who have easy-to-use complaint forms on their websites, the PCC don’t even accept third party complaints – in other words, unless you are the person named in a printed article, they’re not interested in hearing your opinion. So when faced with an affront to our humanity (which is what I believe this Express story is), there is no official channel for us to register our anger. That’s right – if you are offended by something on TV, Radio or in an advert, you can complain; if you’re offended by something in the print press…well, you’re just going to have to walk it off, because literally no-one wants to know.

While we’re on the subject of contemptible pieces of shit, what’s wrong with this picture? Clue: she isn’t dead yet:

I wonder, what company owns OK?

Copyright ©2009 Northern and Shell Media Publications.

Do they publish anything else? Yep, the Express and Sunday Express. According to the corporate website:

Northern & Shell is determined to maintain all its products and activities as benchmarks of excellence to its readers, customers, advertisers and business partners.

Benchmarks of excellence? Jesus wept.

Why local newspapers matter

A great post by Charles Arthur: When the diggers come for your town square, will you know why?

People who run shops and market stalls are starting to get worried about whether they can cover their bills, because the council did a stupid, mindless, thoughtless thing and nobody stood up quickly and loudly enough to point out that it was a stupid, mindless, thoughtless idea that would hurt peoples’ livelihoods during a brutal recession. I’m not holding my breath for the leader of Saffron Walden’s town council to appear on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, either.

How about you? How are things in your town? Would you be surprised if you turned up in the market square and found it being ripped up by diggers? Sure, as “Bruce” observes in the comments to Watson’s post, you know about the iPhone getting cut and paste, and you’ve got an opinion about the new Facebook UI. Now tell us how much you know what’s being done with your money a mile down the road.

Ban this evil vaccine!

Guess which newspaper?

More than 1,300 schoolgirls have experienced adverse reactions to the controversial cervical cancer jab.

Doctors have reported that girls aged just 12 and 13 have suffered paralysis, convulsions and sight problems after being given the vaccine.

Everybody panic! Why, out of nearly 3/4 of a million vaccinations:

Their latest analysis found there had been 1,340 reports in total, with 2,891 different adverse effects noted. Most were minor complaints such as rashes, swelling on the injection site, pain or allergic reactions.

Swelling on the injection site? That’s not going to scare the readers. How about more serious things?

Four girls had convulsions, one had a seizure and one had an epileptic fit.

Any history of such things? Was the one who had the epileptic fit suffering from, say, epilepsy? Who cares! We have a scare story to write!

There were several cases of paralysis. One had Bell’s palsy, which paralyses the face; one had hemiparesis, which paralyses or severely weakens half the body; two experienced hypoaesthesia, in which the sufferer loses much of her sense of touch, and one had Guillain-Barré syndrome, which paralyses the legs.

Let’s Google, shall we? Guillain-Barré syndrome is a kind of autoimmune disease that usually turns up after a viral or gastric infection. Hemiparesis is usually caused by lesions in the corticospinal tract, which runs from the brain to the spinal cord. Hypoaesthesia is reduced sensitivity to touch, or a feeling of numbness, and causes can include trauma, nerve injury, tumours, MS and, er, leprosy.

Back to the article:

There were almost 20 cases of blurred vision and one girl was reported as developing anorexia.

The implication there is that it’s Anorexia Nervosa, the psychiatric illness, which would be bizarre enough. But plain old anorexia just means loss of appetite.

No wonder it isn’t bylined.

Cutting the UK speed limit: here comes the consultation

It’s hard to disagree with Devil’s Kitchen on the government’s upcoming consultation on lower speed limits (inevitably the full post is very sweary):

Yes, it will be like the recent smoking one, highlighted by my colleague, in which the opinions of those who oppose the proposals will disappear into thin air whilst the responses that will count will be those of fake charities—such as Brake (£70,991 from taxpayers) and Living Streets (67% state-funded)—who support the government proposals.

.net column: could the war on terror mean the end of online anonymity?

Another of my print columns has made its way online: The war on terror will wipe out Web privacy.

Getting rid of online anonymity wouldn’t actually be that hard to do. Simply pass a law that requires everybody who goes online to get a unique identifier, and to use that identifier whenever they interact with the internet – when they email, or comment, or shop…

You’d need to provide your ID when you used your broadband connection, or set up a webmail account, or commented on a blog, or joined a public Wi-Fi hotspot, or used a cybercafe: no ID, no access.

Amazon’s Kindle: publishers, what the hell are you doing?

There’s a superb article on Slate about the Kindle – and in particular, the dangers it poses to the book industry.

the Kindle locks you down with more rules than the Army Field Manual. The Kindle won’t let you resell or share your books. Anything you buy through the reader is fixed to your Amazon account, readable only on the Kindle or other devices that Amazon may one day deem appropriate. (The company has hinted that it’ll build an iPhone app that can read Kindle books.) Even worse, you can buy books for your Kindle only from Amazon’s store. Indeed, the device makes it difficult to read anything that’s not somehow routed through Amazon first—you can surf the Web on the Kindle, and you can convert some of your personal Microsoft Word or text files to the device’s format, but doing so is slow and not very reliable. In order to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, and books, you’ve really got to go through Amazon’s store first.

Publishing is already changing because of the rise of Amazon and supermarkets, both in books – the independent bookshop sector has been decimated – and in magazines, where increasingly you can’t sell enough copies to make your publication viable if the supermarkets don’t stock it (and you might have to change your covers, content or hand over some cash to persuade them to do that). But at least there’s still a little bit of competition in the real world. If Amazon dominates ebooks – and the linked article’s argument that that’s going to happen seems pretty persuasive to me – then online, you’ll either have to go through Amazon or fight for scraps.

This, inevitably, involves DRM. There are all kinds of open formats for documents, including ePub, but guess what? They don’t have DRM.

The best way to make e-books sharable and to untether them from proprietary devices like the Kindle would be to sell them without copy protection—but the book industry, like every other content business, is paranoid about piracy. Record labels fell into the same trap: They demanded that Apple impose copy restrictions that forced iPod owners to buy music through the iTunes store. But that ended up making Apple the nation’s largest music retailer, with the power to single-handedly determine the price of all recorded music.

There is a smart way and a stupid way for publishers to approach this. The stupid way seems to be happening already.

The smart way? Assuming that DRM is a deal breaker, which I assume it is, then print publishers of all kinds need to come together, agree on a standard, cross-platform, royalty-free format for ebook publishing, get all the hardware firms to support it, get shitloads of titles available as soon as you possibly can and – this bit is key – only deliver books in your format. Amazon wants its own format? Tough shit. Good luck selling nothing but vanity publishing!

I appreciate that getting a consensus will be as easy as catching air in a net, and of course any copy protection will be cracked. But book piracy already exists. Scanned books have been online since scanners were invented. The trick isn’t to get rid of piracy. It’s to create a market so easy and so compelling that people won’t think of pirating because they can get what they want on the hardware they want for a price they won’t mind paying.

You know, like the music industry should have done a decade ago – and like Amazon is trying to do right now.

This is nearly the ultimate Daily Mail story: Facebook causes cancer

All that’s missing is a reference to house prices or immigrants.

How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer:

Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims.

Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and MMR

I will shut up about MMR in a minute, but I wanted to link to this post by Scots Law Student:

Saying that children’s vaccines cause cancer is a sure fire way to terrify parents and this should have been as well received as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s Radio 2 phonecall.

It’s a fair point, although of course the Barnett discussion was about autism rather than cancer – after all, scaremongering about vaccines actually harms children, whereas unfunny pranks don’t do any real damage. In an ideal world our campaigning newspapers would ignore the latter and scream the place down about the former. Then again, in that world certain papers wouldn’t manufacture anti-BBC sentiment to suit their own commercial agenda, they wouldn’t spend their whole time telling readers that everything in the world causes cancer, and they wouldn’t be guilty of anti-MMR hysteria that makes Jeni Barnett’s broadcast seem like very small potatoes indeed.

On the subject of which, Holford Watch has put together an exhaustive summary of the story, the legal threats against Ben Goldacre, the blog reaction and the involvement of Stephen Fry. Fry’s not just there for the techy things in life, you know.

If you’re interested in this, you really ought to check out Goldacre’s Bad Science book. The section on MMR will make you jump up and down in fury. I read somewhere (can’t remember where, sorry) a suggestion that we’re heading for a similar health scare over the cervical cancer vaccine, with evangelical groups pushing stories of the “this girl had the vaccine and her brain exploded” variety in the hope that gullible newspapers will run them.

Okay, back to gadgets and internet things…

BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

When Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre had the temerity to criticise an LBC radio broadcast by Jeni Barnett, lawyers sent him a nastygram. Bad Science is currently offline.

As Goldacre writes:

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.” “Science always changes so you can believe what you like.” “It’s a debate and a controversy.” “Measles was never that bad anyway.” “Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated.” “Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated.” And so on.

Naturally, the audio is on Wikileaks now.