Facebook And Online Privacy

 Computing, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 232007
 

Today the UK’s Information Commissioner announced that today’s young (and in some cases not so young!) are putting their future careers at risk with some of their ‘riskier’ posts on social networking sites such as Facebook. In addition they pointed out that they were risking identity theft by putting so much personal information online.

It is worth mentioning that information can live online for a very long time … forever if the people behind Archive.Org have their way. This is not necessarily a bad thing although it can come as a nasty shock to realise just how shallow one was as a youth!

But do employers really care what people put on their Facebook profiles ? Well I dare say some do, but they probably should not. I’ve had more than my fair share of ‘youthful excesses’ in the distant past, but I’ve been a reasonably productive employee for all of that time. Now some more conservative companies may be worried about people making an association between their Facebook profile and the company they work for … fair enough. It seems perfectly reasonable to have a policy to say that one’s Facebook profile should not be linked to one’s place of work.

But not to employ someone because their Facebook profile looks a little wild ? That probably counts as cutting off one’s nose to spite your face! And quite possibly may count as age discrimination!

Now I come to identity theft. It is true that having too many personal details online may well make you more subject to identity theft which is a serious problem (although not a new one!). But is eliminating personal details online the right way of tackling the problem ? We have also seen this week that people can be subjected to the risk of identity theft through no fault of their own. Those who do not follow computer security news closely, may not realise that this is a story that is regularly repeated although not usually on such a scale.

Whilst being careful about putting personal details online is undoubtedly good practice (because no other solution is going to arrive quickly) we need to think about better ways of defending against identity theft other than hiding personal details. I have no ideal how this might be done in detail, although one obvious thing occurs … to have multiple ‘keys’ which serve different purposes … perhaps a government ‘key’, a financial ‘key’, a ‘social networking key’ (for things like Facebook and online forums), and a ‘key’ to be used for employer identity purposes. Seperating these ‘keys’ would limit the damage if a leak did occur … essentially you would need to steal multiple ‘keys’ to steal someone’s identity.

The problem of identity theft is only going to get worse unless we do something better in the future. Basing one’s identity on things like address, birth date, etc. is not going to be anywhere near like secure enough. It has always been possible to steal someone’s identity if you have these details, but the pervasiveness of IT systems makes it easier.

In the computer security world there is a truism that ‘security through obscurity is no security at all’, and what we are currently doing to protect our identity is attempting to practice security through obscurity.

Japan To Start Slaughtering Humpback Whales

 Politics  No Responses »
Nov 212007
 

It has recently been announced that the Japanese government has decided to start killing humpback whales for ‘scientific’ research.

Of course nobody with more than half a brain cell really believes that any kind of serious research takes place with the whales that Japan catches. Ignoring all the other whales than Japan catches, what kind of research needs fifty humpbacks?

The truth is that the Japanese government is lying through it’s teeth when it claims that their whaling boats are slaughtering whales for scientific research. It is really just commercial whaling by another name. Which of course is banned by international treaty.

Strangely the Japanese government has to publicise the ‘benefits’ of torturing whales to death for food because there is not as much demand for whale meat as their existing ‘scientific’ research supplies. So why do they need to add humpback whales to the larder ? Seems that Japanese politicians can give politicians everywhere a good challenge when it comes to knuckle-dragging stupidity.

The Japanese government has labelled those who protest against the hunting of whales ‘environmental terrorists’ which is a bit rich considering the protesters do not try to kill anyone! But if we’re going to start splattering the ‘terrorist’ label around wildly, the phrase ‘environmental terrorists’ works quite well for the Japanese government.

Wildcat Postal Strikes

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 102007
 

Like most people in the UK, I am suffering from a lack of postal deliveries because of an official strike that ended today (with rolling strikes due to start next week) … I have several parcels stuck waiting for delivery and it is more than a little frustrating! I was more than a little surprised (and initially annoyed) when the early morning news announced at least one wildcat (unofficial) strike taking place.

Fortunately the media let slip a little detail about why the wildcat strikes started. It seems that the post office managers had changed the working hours without talking it over with the union first. Now perhaps many people reading this will think the managers had every right to change the working hours without negotiating with the work force … personally I disagree, but I am not going over that issue.

The postal workers returned to work at 5:15am (or a similar time … it has been a few hours now) probably in a bit of a militant mood (I’ve been on strike myself and it has that effect), but mostly also keen to get on with dealing with the large piles of unprocessed post. Only to be told by the managers that the hours had changed and they would not get paid for the work done before 6:00am.

Now in normal circumstances the workers would have been prepared for this change … they may not have been happy about it, but they would know and would probably casually mention it to each other on the way home the previous night. Anyone who forgot would probably just slap themselves on their forehead and think “how dumb am I?” (I’ve done something very similar myself).

But these are obviously not normal circumstances. Communications between workers and managers tend to break down during a strike, and the workers may not have been aware of the change or they could have thought that it would be quietly dropped, or simply forgotten about it. And anyone with any sense would see that quietly dropping the change in working hours for now would be diplomatic.

Again there are those who say that the managers had the “right” to change the working hours, and again that’s not the point. The point is that making workers who are keen to get stuck into that big pile of letters and parcels (and most probably were keen) either wait for nearly an hour or to work for free is not likely to encourage good worker-management relations. And in these particular circumstances is likely to provoke exactly what we have seen … wildcat strikes.

Whilst the wildcatters probably deserve a bit of condemnation for what they are doing, it would seem that gross stupidity on the part of the management also deserves some of the blame.

Alcohol Fueled Violence

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Oct 062007
 

There is no such thing as alcohol-fueled violence; there is only idiot-fueled violence. Claims about how alcohol fuels violence are regularly heard on TV and radio, and in one small sense they are right. Violence can be found in areas where a large amount of alcohol is consumed. But take a closer look …

It is not everyone who goes out drinking on a Saturday night who ends up involved in violence, or even everyone who drinks far more too much who ends up in violence. If that were the case, the level of violence in certain streets would be probably two orders of magnitude worse than it is (i.e. 2 fights would be 200 fights; 10 fights would be 1000 fights). It is only a tiny minority of idiots who cause problems with violence.

These idiots may blame the alcohol, or they may even only become idiots when they have consumed large quantities of alcohol. Either way, the alcohol is not the problem, it is the idiots themselves.

Most of those who complain about the violence want to fight it by doing something about alcohol sales … make it more expensive, stop selling to people who’ve had a few, etc. But why should the majority who drink be punished because of the idiots ? That is not to say that the violence should not be tackled in some way … and the majority of drinkers would be happy to see something done about it. After all we have more interest in seeing something done than those who prefer to stay at home.

One simple idea is to ‘tag’ those who get involved in violence (both sides … one person may be obviously to blame but I’ve seen myself people who go around trying to provoke a violent response) with an electronic tag, and give them on the first occasion a month’s ban from all drinking centres. For a second offense, it becomes two months, then four, and so on, doubling each time. This would be in addition to any other punishment the law may enforce … a prosecution is (and should be) difficult to get a result from, but a simple curfew could be given without so much evidence.

To enforce the curfew, give each doorman a tag detector so they can easily scan people going into a pub or bar, and prevent them.

Don’t punish the drinkers; punish the idiots.

The BBC TV License

 Politics  No Responses »
Sep 292007
 

One of the things that periodically surfaces to my attention is the debate over the TV license that those in the UK pay. This funds the BBC including TV, radio and Internet activities (there are ‘fringe’ activities which are not funded by the license fee such as the BBC’s World Service. The notion of a tax on watching television is archaic and unfair to commercial broadcasters. However it should stay.

Why?

The first reason for keeping the license fee is that the BBC actually does quite a good job. Not all of it’s activities please everyone, but that is impossible goal to achieve and it is not something that the BBC should be trying to do anyway. Look at BBC News. This is the largest news organisation in the world with a well deserved reputation for probity and honest reporting … in any “big” news event, the UK population tends to switch to the BBC for news.

There are those who criticise the BBC News for impartiality … the one who makes the biggest noise is Israel who claim the BBC is anti-Israeli. Of course Israel views any kind of criticism of Israeli government actions as anti-semitic, so we can probably discount this criticism. In fact the BBC probably is not doing its job properly if it does not get criticised by Israel.

The BBC also produces a large range of original drama, documentary and entertainment programmes of high quality. In recent TV awards, the BBC was awarded 9 out of 20 awards. That sounds like the result a quality organisation would get.

There are those who say that having a well funded public broadcasting organisation is unfair to commercial broadcasters. They are right. So what? Life is unfair, get over it.

A far more subtle point is how the BBC could well be improving the quality of commercial broadcasting by existing. Thus those who only watch commercial TV (I have trouble believing anyone in the UK can actually stick to this!) are actually benefiting from the BBC without watching the BBC! It is hard to justify this claim especially if we are talking about the quality, but we can sort of see the effect on something that most people find irritating … the frequency of ad breaks on commercial channels.

When you watch American TV imports you can often see the pauses where advert breaks would have occurred had you seen the programme in the US; however over here we seem to have settled on having rather fewer breaks. Why? Well there is little commercial reason for doing so, except that if people get too irritated by ad breaks they can switch over to the BBC. So it seems that the existence of the BBC may have resulted in fewer ad breaks on commercial TV in the UK … which I’m sure most would agree is a good thing.

So we have decided that the BBC is good, but what about the license fee ? Well, the license fee is bad but it works … the BBC gets a fairly big chunk of money from it. Any change would risk how much money the BBC gets, and why break something that is not broken ?

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