Sim-O

I’m away for a very long weekend, so expect even less content than usual.

Now, remember. You can have a party, just don’t trash the place.

The Guardian…

The rules that determine how MI5 and MI6 are allowed to interrogate suspects, including strict guidance banning the use of torture, will be published for the first time, Gordon Brown said today.

Just because there are rules banning something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

I’m not so sure the Pope is all too worried about the fornicators, homosexuals and unfortunates that have caught AIDS or are at risk of catching AIDS and is more worried about incurring the wrath of his boss, because as we all know…

Hopefully the vid works and is what I think it is. I can’t actually see myself from my work pc. If it doesn’t, I’ll sort it later.

From The Yoghurty One comes the news that people can’t just come busting into your house and taking stuff…

…following a comprehensive reassessment of the provisions in the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 ordered by the Secretary of State for Justice, the Government will not be extending bailiffs’ powers of entry and the use of force by enforcement agents, and will not be commencing Charging Order reforms.

Now that the house doesn’t need turning into a fortress to protect your stuff in case of an ‘admin error’, with the money saved little Johnny can have a new school uniform after all.

If you’re going to shout outrage at someone for boasting about drinking and drink-fuelled antic, don’t boast about drinking and drink-fuelled antics.

If you’re going to shout outrage about people having sex, don’t work for pornographer.

Participation in politics is well, disappointing. People do not give a toss because they think there is no point. No ones going to listen to what they have to say or what they think.

There is a lot of truth in that. and here is just one example of that…

Emails sent by members of the public to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights were deleted by the committee without even being read. Two people who happened to have enabled tracking sent me the following two automated repllies they received:

Your message

To: Joint Committee On Human Rights
Subject: Craig Murray:
Sent: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 20:51:41 -0000

was deleted without being read on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:46:42 -0000

and

Your message

To: Joint Committee On Human Rights
Cc: craig murray
Subject: Torture evidence on 10 March
Sent: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 14:47:36 -0000

was deleted without being read on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:46:42 -0000

Note the identical time of deletion. Evidently people’s emails were not even deleted individually but selected as a group and deleted en masse.

This is a shame because there was no template and people made some very telling individual points. Plainly people put time and thought into attempting to participate actively in a key part of a supposedly democratic process. It is a disgrace that these emails were deleted unread. Is the UK really a democracy now?

Follow the link for some of the letters sent.

Hagley Road to Ladywood…

The Sun likes to sneer at “council estate parents” who stick up for their kids even after they’ve been convicted of heinous crimes. Nothing can get those mums and dads to disown or condemn their criminal children, not even in the face of evidence. Whether it’s manslaughter, drug dealing, murder or setting fire to a bin, “he’s my son and he could never have done such a thing”, and cue the reports of the offenders’ families laughing in court or pulling faces at the victims’ relatives.

But if you just look at it, the Sun and the Daily Mail perpetrate this sub-human pattern in a much grander scale. The way they lashed out at the anti-Iraq war protesters in Luton (who accused British soldiers of brutality as well as of illegally invading another country) was textbook.

Read the rest

Timothy Garton Ash (CiF) [my emphasis]…

So, here’s the charge sheet in shorthand summary: American-authorised torture; British complicity; an American-British attempt to withhold evidence; and now the predictable temptation to cover up.
…
Last October, all the papers from the court hearings, open and closed, were given by the home secretary to the attorney general. If she thinks there might be a case for criminal prosecution against Witness B, or anyone else, she must either start a criminal investigation herself or hand it over to the director of public prosecutions. More than four months later, nothing has happened. Why? Well, perhaps she has just been busy. But there remains, in the British system, this latent conflict of interest which the high court summarises thus: “the Attorney General is a Minister of the Crown and thus a member of the Executive branch of the state whose officials are alleged to have facilitated cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture“.

A comment of Justins’ applies equally well here, I think…

They’re going to get away with this, aren’t they?

BBC:

A man jailed 27 years ago for murdering a barmaid could be released from prison after DNA evidence was reviewed.

Sean Hodgson, 57, is serving a life sentence for killing Teresa De Simone, 22. She was found strangled in her car in Southampton in December 1979.

The case has now been sent to appeal over claims tests on semen found at the scene prove it was not Hodgson’s DNA.

The BBC understands the Crown Prosecution Service will not contest the appeal on 18 March.

This guy has spent 27 years in prison, and now some DNA testing can, it is thought, prove that it wasn’t him that killed this girl. The fact that the CPS isn’t going to try to keep him in prison is a strong indicator that this man will be free and pronounced innocent.

So. Still want to bring back hanging?

Chicken Yoghurt…

Yay, my Project Honey Pot honey pot caught an email harvester. Go me!

“WTF is Project Honey Pot?” I thought.

Project Honey Pot…

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
…
We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.

Everyone hates spam and spammers, unless of course you are a spammer, and as someone who’s had their email address spoofed and then been spammed by my own email address, I particularly like this idea.

So, to all those spammers, I have this message, in the immortal words of Farmer Palmer…

Get orff moy laand!