The UK's Home Office has been running a consultation, entitled Keeping the right people on the DNA database.
I'm gravely sceptical about the entire episode and, throughout, the document tilts heavily towards keeping DNA for a long time because that will – supposedly – make us safer.
David Mery has had some choice words and a very thorough response to the Home Office's proposal. I am not so thorough, and kept my contribution to the section of which Ben Goldacre rightly asked 'Is this a joke?'.
The consultation closed yesterday, here is my contribution, written from the vantage point of my academic high horse.
More on UK DNA database consultation…
(As you'll have spotted, there's strong language here. If that offends you, I suggest you move along. I try not to swear with wild abandon, but instead I try and save it for abso-fucking-lutely deserving cases.)
A nasty thing happened to me seven months ago today, and for most of that time I've been avoiding talking about it, let alone writing about it. To the few friends I have bothered with this, you have my deepest thanks: for your thoughtful suggestions but mainly for patiently listening to me with a sympathetic ear, even when I was far from my normal self.
Just before Christmas last year, late at night in Soho, a number of things happened that were deeply shit. The nastiest bit wasn't any of these:
- being jumped in the street by three miscreants, while trying to make my way home with Mary
- that the attack was, to me, pretty clearly motivated by three young white thugs seeing a mixed-colour couple, and feeling some caveman-like desire to 'protect' the white woman, who was not in any threat, except inside their tiny little cave-brains.
- having my bag nicked, containing nearly every bit of portable electronics that I owned
The really nasty thing that happened was that at a moment where I felt victimised and in need of support and aid, that the Metropolitan Police turned up. That's when the evening went from being unpleasant to a proper fucking cock-up. Somehow they saw three white blokes laughing, and one distressed pale brown bloke, and assumed the singular guy in torn clothing, crying was the culprit.
More on Fuck the Police…
The police have been misbehaving. I'm angry about that, and would like to do something practical.
I'm pleased that people aren't sticking to the supposed ban on photographing the police. The videos of Ian Tomlinson being attacked from behind minutes before his death and the seemingly brutish attack on a woman at the memorial protest the following day show that we really do need some daylight here.
Update at 10:31 BST, 21st April 2009 – Added notes on how to tag things.
More on Police must not hide…
Tagged: Rants, Politics, Social, Police
Posted at 10:36 BST, 16th April 2009.
There's been some chatter recently about how Barack Obama isn't really black. The claim is that he's basically a privileged white guy.
I've a proper problem with that, and my basic difficulty is with a classification that is so damn crude.
Why try and jam Obama into one of the pigeon-holes of being exclusively white or black, but never both? I'm sure a large part rests with the media, in wanting a story that is simple to tell; I fear that a greater part is playing on America's more fragmented, near segregated culture when it comes to colour. Growing up as a kid with a mixed background made me feel no less British. I have a great love of Irish and Indian culture, but they aren't quite home to me. I'm not sure America, or perhaps just public identity there, allows such a tick-all-that-apply approach to cultural identity. I'm pretty sure living in London makes that much easier, which is why it is home now.
I hope people start the more nuanced conversation about Obama. He is black and white. He could be their first penguin president.
Tagged: Rants, Upbeat, Politics, Social
Posted at 09:17 BST, 5th July 2008.
Mary & I were both overcharged on a recent jaunt around London. The barriers beeped and didn't let me out, so the station staff opened the barrier to let me through. The barriers did let Mary out, but it turned out she had been charged two lots of the we-didn't-see-you-touch-out-so-we'll-take-four-pounds.
(Oyster is London's RFID-based ticketing system. You can put travelcards on them, but I use it as a pay-as-you-go card. It charges you for each journey and they promise not to charge you more than the equivalent travelcard. In practice this goes wrong a bit: it's a very complex system, and the software must be a nightmare.)
More on Oyster annoyance…
A couple of weeks ago, Matthew Cashmore of backstage.bbc.co.uk published a very interesting interview with Anthony Rose, head of Digital Media Technology at the BBC.
I was impressed by Rose, generally. He seems to be pretty clued up about what's possible with the technology, which I suppose is no great surprise given his background at Kazaa. I'll get into some of the contradictions I see in what he says in another post, but first there is one comment he made that particularly grates.
He says, just over 2 minutes in (emphasis mine):
The good news is, as you move to streaming, at this time, there's no requirement for DRM.
…
We put quite complex back-end controls to make sure that our rights-holders' rights are still protected. In other words the content is only available in the UK, and we make it hard to nick the stream.
More on Recording television is not theft…
A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).
One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:
http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary
I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.
My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.
I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.
That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.
I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.
[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]
So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.
Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:
- you have bought this
- you have borrowed this
- and, you have rented this
DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.
More on Google un-sells videos…
I'm a Harry Potter fan. I like the books, and I really don't want spoiling about the last book. According to Torrent Freak, poor quality scans of the book are already kicking about over BitTorrent.
Now I'm not surprised, but I think – in this case at least – the publisher is winning.
Update at 17:42 BST, 19th July 2007 – Tracing leaker via EXIF metadata
More on Harry Potter leaked…