Sim-O

BBC…

Online advertising firm Phorm is pressing ahead with plans to launch more than a year after it first drew criticism from some privacy advocates.
…
“We have been supported or endorsed by all of the leading stakeholders,” Phorm chief executive Kent Ertugrul told BBC News.

“Ofcom, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Home Office, leading privacy advocates like Simon Davies, the advertising industry and publishers have all backed our service,” he said.

All the major stakeholders except the people who will be effected the most: the internet using public.

And who’s this Simon Davies bloke? Never heard of him. he might have got this award or done whatever, but he can’t be that much into privacy if he’s ok with Phorm.

Kent Etugrul of Phorm…

I am surprised by the fact, after it has been repeatedly explained how the technology works, they seem to be very keen on misunderstanding what it does

No, people know what it does, and even how it does it. And that is the problem. It is opt out. A fucking awkward shitty opt out that one will have to opt out of every time ones cookies are cleared.
Even when someone has opted out, their movements on the web still go through Phorms equipment, there is no way to bypass Phorm. The user is still dependent on Phorm and its’ technology doing the right thing and not recording their movements.

Phorm and privacy? My arse.

Word comes from Craig Murray that the British embassies in the EU are to start getting support for Tony Blair to be the made the first permanent president of the EU.

Maybe I should’ve used the proper word there: appointed. ‘Made’ could mean elected by the people he would be president of.

As Craig eloquently puts it…

For anyone to occupy the position of President without a popular election would be very, very wrong. But Tony Blair? It is simply an appalling thought.

Why would anyone want a war criminal as president?

Horrifyingly, it appears that Blair may well be able to get a majority of EU member governments prepared to support him. That is despite his record as Bush’s poodle in launching illegal war, as one of the chief architects of the banking bubble economic disaster, and as the Middle East Peace Envoy who held the ring for Israel’s murderous assaults on Lebanon and Gaza.

I’m in two minds about the EU. It could be good, but at the moment the unaccountability and the bureaucracy, well, it seems like it is being run for the commissioners and the MEPs benefit, not the citizens of the EU.

In typical EU fashion, even the term is a bit ambigous: Permanent President.
Do they mean ‘for life’? Would they do that? What other meaning could the EU mean? The presidency at the moment is on a 6 month rotating basis, with the national leaders taking up the role. The occupant of the new style post of president would be full-time, rather than part-time, but still not permanent. Surely?

Either way, for the EU to have Blair as an unelected permanent El Presidente would lose what little credibility it has. And that isn’t a lot.

The quote in the title is Jacqui Smith talking about the NHS Database.

Do not believe it. What the Tories started in 1992, Labour have embraced used it extensively. That ‘it’, is Private Finance Initiative.

The latest PFI is to widen the M25. And seeing where the money is coming from is like playing Find the Lady.

George Monbiot…

The government, as usual, is telling us as little as it can get away with. But the Department for Transport has admitted that, to make the project viable, it might have to bail out the M25 consortium(12). Some reports suggest that to make sure the consortium remains solvent during the construction phase of the contract – which is worth £1280m(13) – the government will have to lend it £400m(14,15). The European Investment Bank has already pledged £500m(16), which is also taxpayers’ money. This private finance initiative scheme doesn’t require much private finance, or initiative.

If the government underwrites the scheme, the greater part of the risk will fall on taxpayers, negating the entire rationale of PFI. But, citing higher lending risks during the recession, the banks backing PFI infrastructure projects have increased their margins, in some cases by 500%(17). The government will lend or promise to lend cheap money to the banks, which will then charge us, through the consortium, crushing rates of interest for the use of our own cash.

Weird enough for you yet? Well one of the banks reported to be backing the scheme is RBS. The taxpayer now owns 58% of it. This is likely to rise soon to 95%(18). If the government underwrites the M25 expansion, it will in effect be bailing out RBS twice then charging itself for the privilege – and for the bankers’ fees, including salaries and bonuses. RBS – in other words you and me – already has £10bn invested in PFI schemes in this country(19), for which we are paying extravagant rates. If you have come across a state spending scheme madder than this, please let me know.

It’s a fucking road. The government doesn’t have to make a profit out of making it or the upkeep of it, so why can’t it just build a fucking road?
If company A can build a road and make a profit, the government should be able to match the price and build a better road or build the same road cheaper.

The governments, and not just Labour as this was started in 1992 and won’t stop if the Conservatives get back in, fucking us over, trying to i) blag the books to make themselves look good and ii) ensure employment when they retire/ get voted out.

It makes me shit-fucking-kicking mad.

Cannabis NI…

Dont be using empty coke cans for ashtrays. Breaks your heart when ya drop your j in :(

Back Towards The Locus…

As you might have heard, a man died after collapsing during the G20 protests. This was immediately notched up to natural causes. Yup, natural causes. No doubt about it.

To understand why someone may have been so affected by le cause naturali, one should look at the treatment of the protestors. Yesterday, the police used a tactic called ‘kettling’, whereby cordons are imposed and enforced to stop protests spilling out into the city. This left demonstrators in appalling conditions. There are numerous accounts of “cordon-induced claustrophobia“, with Rowenna Davis and Sunny Hundal reporting that “one woman sat down because she was feeling faint“. Water was scarce and there were no toilet facilities, forcing people to piss in the streets…

I was told by a police officer informed of my bad back that I’d ‘better go and sit on the floor then’ (cos that’s great for your back – sitting in piss on a concrete floor).

Read the rest

Guardian G20 live blog…

1.43pm:
More windows reported smashed at RBS, branch and masked people trying to get in. Chants of “Whose bank?” answered by “Our bank” and “We paid for this, rob the bank”.

I understand feelings run high and the adrenaline gets going, but what does fucking places over achieve? Not a lot. Apart from it can feel quite good, smashing stuff up.

And that chant? You’re going to rob yourselves then? Or you’re going to rob every other taxpayer, unless you take something equal to your share of RBS. Like a pen, or a pad of Post-It notes.

And take those fucking masks off. If your there for a noble reason and not for looting, general vandalism or because you just love fighting then show your face, your fucking cowards. Criminals, thugs and crooks wear masks.

Rhetorically Speaking…

There’s something about the lede of this story that makes me deeply proud to be British:

Members will this week be shown copies of thousands of receipts and other documents due to be published under the Freedom of Information Act. They will be invited to redact the documents, blacking out information they do not want to disclose.

Other countries have corruption. Other countries have censorship. But we, the British, have a free media which reports that – in the coming weeks – our elected officials will finally be forced to release details of their expenses after a lengthy legal battle, but not before those politicians have been invited to censor their own records.

The Dunfermline Building Society has been bought by Nationwide, the UKs’ biggest building society.

Well, I say it’s bought Dunfermline…

But Nationwide will not be taking on the bits of Dunfermline that are seriously loss-making.

These are commercial property loans and portfolios of buy-to-let and self-cert mortgages – with a gross value of £1bn.

It’s actually bought only the good bits. And where are the bad bits going? Yup, to the treasury. Who’d have thought that would happen, eh?

Being a building society rather than a bank, there aren’t any short-termist-greedy shareholders to blame, probably just plain boring mismanagement.But once again, a private entity shifting it’s crap on to us, the taxpayer.

I realise there is not a lot that can be done about the shit currently hitting the fan, but for the future, companies/business, especially big business, need to be regulated to within an inch of their lives or kept small enough not to fuck everything else up if an entity goes belly up.

Capitalism and neoliberalism is trumpeted to be the the fairest business systems there is etc, but it doesn’t really seem fair to me that a company can take risks and reap the rewards, but then not have to take the consequences when the risks don’t go the way they expected/hoped.

Obviously, the old addage of the private sector doing a better, more effient job than the public sector is a load of old toss, and I reckon has come about because, right the way through from way before PFI to these latest bailouts, the public sector has taken the hit, and the private sector the profits.

Oh and don’t forget, If you fuck everything up big enough, you’ll be asked to advise the government on how to put it back together.

Even recently, when the government made a u-turn with the decision to put a service out to tender (I can’t remember which one) and then because of the uproar decided just to let the Post Office keep providing the service, the minister in charge on Radio 4s’ PM programme refused to answer the question of how much compensation the government had to pay the companies who have submitted tenders, citing commercial sensitivity.
What the fuck is that all about? Paying people because you don’t want them to do the job? You get a few builders round your house to quote for an extension. You suddenly decide that you’re going to move house rather than extend, you don’t pay the builders for loss of work or the time they took to quote, do you?
And commercial confidentiality? When the government aren’t actually getting anything in return? It could be argued for if the government was actually getting something for it’s (our!) money, but when it’s just a fucking payoff? Someone deserves a kick in the face for that.
Try it next time you go for a job and don’t get it. Send the company an invoice for time and travel and preparation of CV, maybe a new suit, see what the response is, because that is what these ‘Captains of Industry’ do when they applied for government contracts.

Nice work, if you can get it.

The Guardian…

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

*puts head in hands* FFS.

The proposals would require:

• Children to leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication. They must gain “fluency” in handwriting and keyboard skills, and learn how to use a spellchecker alongside how to spell.

Why do these formats of information need specific mentions?
What is there to learn to use these formats as sources of information? Blogging is no different to essaying or pamphleteering, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, podcasting is TV & radio and Twitter is no different to blogging.
If the intention is to teach ‘how to’ on any of these formats then it is going to be a waste of time. Podcasting for instance, there are so many different ways of recording a podcast that to teach a general ‘how to’, it would become useless. Get a kid to write a story about the school holidays in WordPress on teh internet instead of in a school book and hey presto, the kid is a blogger!

The curriculum, if it is to be teaching this type of stuff, should be teaching about the back end that runs all of it. the principles of databases or programming languages, the stuff that doesn’t, cannot change very easily or quickly. The front end of Wikipedia could be changed not quite overnight, but quick enough to make a lesson about it redundant, but how the internal gubbins, how it references itself and all the other stuff (can you tell I’m getting a little out of my depth here?) is not going to alter for long time. That is the type of thing that needs to be taught with regards to ‘new media’.

handwriting and how to use a pen and pencil should be a priority over keyboard skills. Handwriting needs to be more than fluent, as get the handwriting skills wrong to start with, and the kid is left with poor writing for life. Keyboard skills will improve everytime a keyboard is used.

As you can probably tell from this post, I could probably do with some lessons, but that would be lessons in English, not in blogging.

Jon Gaunt is set to return to broadcasting, according to the Press Gazette.

Jon got the sack from Talk Sport for calling a councillor that wanted to stop smokers from adopting children a Nazi, and since then has only had his Sun column to rage from.

Apparently mainstream radio is run by idiots that are only interested in their bottom line, which of course is nothing like the mainstream press, who do not make up/run made up stories to sell papers, or change the angle of stories to sell as many copies as possible. Mainstream papers are altruistic in the desire to bring the news to the people.

He said: “Mainstream radio is dying because it’s run by idiots who have no interest apart from the bottom line. Now the bottom line is disappearing they don’t know what to do.

“What I love about The Sun is that it is like when I was back having my first job in local radio. They said can you be mischievous, say what you want and have some fun.”

With that in mind, the Sun is giving Jon an internet ‘radio’ phone in show.

With this show Jon has a lot of freedom because…

His new show will not be subject to Ofcom rules on “due impartiality” and “harm and offence” but will instead, The Sun confirmed, be governed by the Press Complaints Commission – which has no rules on taste and decency, or political balance.

Hold onto your hats, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.