Archive for February, 2007
Send a rude email, have News of the World readers attack you in the street
If you’re in the habit of sending lewd or utterly offensive emails and you live in England, you might want to stop: sending emails of a sexual nature can get you on the Sex Offender’s Register, a kind of Yellow Pages for angry mobs.
An order has amended the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 to make it possible for offences which are not primarily sexual in nature to be punishable by a sexual offences prevention order (SOPO).
Improper use of a public communications network is forbidden already by the Communications Act 2003. It defines improper use as sending a message that is “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.
The amendment to the Sexual Offences Act adds that offence to the list of others that qualify for a SOPO. The order does not extend to Scotland.
The Home Office says the new provisions cover such activities as nuisance phone calls, obscene messages, and harrassment emails of a sexual nature.
It’s not clear what kind of content qualifies - your idea of inoffensive might not be the same as a judge’s - but it’s probably best not to email some of the net’s more famously offensive images to Tony Blair.
Blair responds personally to ID card critics
The road pricing petition isn’t the only protest getting an email response from Tony: anti-ID card signatories are getting an email too. Although it’s easy to summarise - “I’m in ur base, eroding ur civil libertiez” - here’s the whole text. As you’d expect it trots out the usual crap - ID cards preventing benefit fraud, fighting terrorism, stopping children from being abducted by evil wizards and forced to mine salt in the centre of the Earth, that sort of thing.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it’s important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.
Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.
These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access to services.
The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don’t recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.
As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Blair
The nice people at No2ID have a rather different perspective.
Selling my phone on eBay. Third time lucky? Don’t be silly
Another week, another attempt at selling my phone on eBay. This time the winning bidder is in the UK. Or is he? Let’s see what happens when we contact the winning bidder in Cold Norton, Essex!
“Hello Mate,
How are you doing today,It a New Year,Let Thank God one could
see a New Year,Well i have just bidded on your item on ebay and i happen
to
be the wonner of your item,please payment will be made via PayPal,i willlike you to get back to me with the shipping cost to Africa,cos i want
you
to help me send it to Africa,i want you to send it as a First Class
Delivery,Please get back to me with the shipping cost to Africa as
soon as possilbe
Thanks”
Return of the Snap previews
I know you were all devastated when the redesign meant the disappearance of Snap link previews, so I’m sure you’ll be overcome with joy to see that they’re back. I’ve gone for a less intrusive option than before, though: to see a preview you’ll need to mouseover the Snap icon next to a link. If you don’t do that, you won’t get the preview.
If you really don’t like them you can disable Snap altogether by clicking on the options link at the top right of a preview window. I’d imagine it uses cookies, or something.
Frocky horror
Writing in today’s Guardian, Hardeep Singh Kohli reckons it’s high time men abandoned their trews in favour of skirts.
Why is it so very wrong for a slightly overweight Glaswegian Sikh to wear a retro-kitsch Diane von Furstenberg wraparound dress? Or perhaps an Etro skirt in a marled russet wool-and-cashmere mix with brocade detailing, cut on the bias just above the knee?
I’m surprised that, as a Scot, Hardeep equates kilts with skirts in the same article - that’s asking for the Scots equivalent of the drive-by shooting, the drive-by mooning - but I suspect there’s a bigger flaw in his plan. It would need re-education of the entire male population - not in understanding fashion, but in learning how to sit.
The thing is, unless men are also going to adopt hosiery then things could get very scary very quickly - not for us, but for the people around us. It’s something I learnt at a friend’s wedding: I was the best man, and because the groom wore a kilt I had to do the same. What I didn’t realise until I got the psychiatric bills was that, because I was unfamiliar with the right way to sit while kilted, the registrar spent the whole wedding ceremony with an unimpeded view of my bollocks.
NetNewsWire 3 sneak peek
It’s not even a beta yet, but you can play with the next version of the excellent OS X RSS reader NetNewsWire right now. Despite the warnings it seems perfectly stable on my ageing Powerbook, and it comes with goodies including a shiny new interface, Growl notifications, preview thumbnails and Spotlight searching. NNW is already a great program, but version 3 looks like it’ll be a belter.
How not to win magazine competitions
Over at All Talk No Action, Paul’s published a chat transcript that shows how not to win magazine competitions. The reader’s rock-solid reasoning amused me immensely.
Why not be a writaaaaaargh?
The “Why not be a writer?” ads are everywhere, and while most of the success stories are crap - “I’ve had three letters published in Bathwater Collector Monthly!” - others are more impressive: sign up for this course and you could get a £25K advance for your novel!
Many such claims, though, seem to be - fittingly enough - made up, as this superb post from The Triforce shows:
Or there’s Jon Eagle, whose testimony mentions that he was paid an advance of £25,000 for this. Except that’s published by Minerva Press, which is a vanity press that was closed down in 2002 according to Wikipedia (which is a website resource for journalists, in case you haven’t heard of it).
Lad mags in decline
Remember when lad mags ruled the world? Those days are gone, it seems: the latest circulation figures show massive declines almost entirely across the board. According to UK Press Gazette, the big losers include:
- FHM (down 25.9% in the last half of 2006)
- Loaded (down 29.9%)
- Maxim (down 29.3%)
- Arena (down 29.9%)
- Zoo (down 21.5%)
Looks like their readers have worked out how to find porn on the internet.
UK “get a Mac” ads backfiring?
Since the ads began playing on TV [in the uk], consumer buzz about Apple has fallen from +8 to +4, according to a survey of 2,000 people.
It seems the ads featuring David Mitchell (PC) and Robert Webb (Mac) are attracting criticism as the latter’s portrayel is see as being “a little too smug.”