a-cubed.info

I’ve not been posting as much on here lately as I’d have liked, because I’ve been having trouble with the blog. I’m hoping it’s now sorted out. One of the admin pages still looks awful, but it’s not one I actually need to go to and if I need to I can work with it. I was having trouble posting some entries and editing a lot of them. After hunting and hunting and hunting for the solution, I finally found something on the WordPress troubleshooting site about turning off Apache’s “security filtering module” in the .htaccess by adding this:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterScanPOST off
</IfModule>
As ifby magic, suddenly I can post and edit again. The original thread discussed certain words triggering this module. Dangerous words like “biopsy” and “autopsy”. I’m not sure what words in my Museums review post it didn’t like, but this shows how bad security can be in getting in the way of the purpose of software. The biggest problem is that I wasn’t getting an error. No, I was just getting booted back out to my home page.

Suggestions that the UK government is to introduce a new police power, that of questioning without concrete suspicion has been called a move towards a police state by some, and likened to the US’ illegitimate permanent detention centre at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. While I think the latter is hyperbole, the former is a more reasonable statement. What, after all, is a Police State? It is a state in which the police have arbitrary power, which they may exercise without reason, without explanation and without significant oversight. The over-use of anti-terrorist stop-and-search powers by some forces shows that unrestrained powers supposedly aimed at anti-terrorist operations can easily be overused (abused?) by officers.

Police already have the power to stop and question individuals, where they can show a reason to do so. So this is not about giving the police a new power of questioning, it is about removing the requirement for reasonable explanation of their actions. It is the requirement that police be able to explain their activity that prevents this being an arbitrary power.

Even worse is the suggesstion that refusing to answer the questions posed by a policeman would be classed as interfering with police business and in itself constituting an offence. The current government has already reduced the right not to incriminate oneself. This would be a further blow to that. Either you answer the police’s questions, or you are guilty of an offence by that refusal. This is a further erosion of human rights. All the rhetoric by government officials here, suggesting that anyone opposing these powers is “more concerned with the rights of terrorists than those of their potential victims” ignores the fact that the subjects of these powers will, in the vast majority of cases, be ordinary citizens, not terrorists.

Finally, imagine the world if Labour is re-elected in 2009 or 2010. In 2013 ID cards are planned to become compulsory. It is no surprise that these proposed new powers include the idea of “questioning as to identity”. It will likely become, effectively, an arrestable offence not to be able to prove one’s identity, i.e. to have an ID card with one at all times. “Ihre Papiren, bitte!” indeed.

Yet again an ambulance just used their siren/voice alarm at 12:45am. I’ve mentioned this annoyance in Japan before. In the UK it’s illegal to use your car horn after 11pm and before 7am. I’m fairly sure it’s either illegal, or at least severely frowned upon, to use sirens after 11pm, and certainly after midnight they’re rare. In Japan, the ambulance drivers in particular seem to be all like Bill Cosby in Mother, Jugs and Speed. This one used their sirens and the recorded voice that (I assume – I can’t hear well enough even to try and translate) tells people to get out of the way, then it stopped. About thirty second later it started up again. Since I’m sitting at the computer I pulled up the blind and watched them drive off quite slowly and with absolutely no other vehicular traffic in sight. They then proceeded down the “road” along next to the canalised river bed. It’s fairly narrow but it’s got good visibility and very few vehicles, mostly pedestrians. I’m sure that the ordinary lights would be enough to get people out of the way, and if people were in the way THEN they could have switched the siren/voice on. But, no, if they’re moving and on a call they have the noise going.

At least now the elections are over the loudspeaker vans have gone. There’s still a delivery van that beeps everywhere it goes, though. Makes me long for the once a week (alternating garbage and recycling) collection vans at 7:30am at home.
Japan has a serious problem with noise spam (spaudium?) .

The UK ID Card and Database

There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:

(more…)

While I’m in Japan, I’ve been ordering books from Amazon.co.jp. They do have an English language site, although it doesn’t cover all of the elements, which can be a bit annoying. I had to get one of the caretakers here at the Guest House to help me decipher the page to report a problem with an external seller order (Amazon were hassling me for feedback and it hadn’t arrived – they hadn’t shipped it yet nor updated the shipping estimate on Amazon’s site – they got modest feedback for that when it did arrive).

It did strike me that this is now a global marketplace for small businesses when I got a book today. I ordered it on Amazon.co.jp from an outfit called “UK Books and Music” (with web address Paperbackshop.co.uk) and it arrived posted from an address in Illinois in the US.

I’m really glad there is the Akismet spam filter for Word Press. So far, it’s caught almost 1500 spam comment to this blog, and not one seems to have been a legitimate comment. It’s catching better than 99% of the spam as well. I only have to manually mark a couple a week as spam. Of course, I’m not getting many comments, so maybe there’d be more false positives if there were more to make the mistake on.

While writing the post on the Butler cafe, I wanted to say something like “oodles of useless google search results”. This obviously leads to the new term:

Goodles: a large number of hits on a Google search, where the term you are searching for, if present anywhere, has been overridden by one of the following:

1. a semantic difference: e.g. searching for Bob Baker and finding bread and confectionery makers called Bob;
2. mis-spellings of a different word overwhelming it: e.g. searching for “femininist” brings up goodles of hits for “feminist” spelled wrong;
3. googlewashing;
4. googlebombing.

I’ve just spoken to BBC Online researcher Joe Campbell about the effectiveness of CCTV systems in crime prevention and detection. This was as background for material regarding the Woolmer case, where the hotel had CCTV cameras trained on nearby corridors but, as is often the case, the analogue tapes used to record the images had been so heavily used that they were “fragile”.

Despite the rush to deploy CCTV cameras all over the UK in the late 80s and 90s, there was almost no significant research into their effectiveness. Indeed, Norris and Armstrong (The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV) suggest that politicians did not want to know whether it was effective or not.Since finding the money centrally to promote jointly funded local schemes to deploy CCTV was relatively simple and the public believed that they helped to reduce crime, politicians would rather spend the money and be seen to be doing something rather than find out if what they were doing was effective (and exactly what is effective out of the various options) and be held properly to account for their efforts in tackling crime. In particular, no cost/benefit evaluations were done which considered the use of the money spent in other ways to reduce crime, either by providing other law enforcement measures or simply providing better street-lighting, or more facilities for young people (since much of the crime that CCTV has targetted is public order and low-value thefts).

Only recently have some studies suggested that CCTV has been effective:

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal (2004) 6, 21–33: Evidence-based Crime Prevention: The Effectiveness of CCTV by Brandon C Welsh and David P Farrington.

When the phrase “The Semantic Web” was coined, it was hailed by some as a resplendent vision, by others as an unachievable goal and by others as a new bubble. The point is that the current Web is indexed almost entirely syntactically. So, there is no simple way to differentiate between people who make bread (Baker) and the titular descendants of someone who might have baked bread hundreds of years ago (Baker) in a purely syntactic fashion.

Even within database-oriented proprietary systems, the injudicious digitisation or storage of digital information can lead to significant difficulties. While doing the research for my LLM thesis on copyright, I found that it was quite difficult to search the standard legal databases for “copyright”, since almost all written material included a copyright notice which triggered the search mechanism. I’m now finding a similar problem when trying to find papers on Google Scholar, and proprietary academic databases, regarding privacy. Many of the database engines include privacy policy links on their pages and the Google Scholar indexing system cannot distinguish between headers and links to privacy policies and papers about privacy issues.

Pandora’s Box: Social and Professional Issues of the Information Age is now listed on Amazon.