Month: June 2005

The Sun newspaper published an article today by undercover reporter Oliver Hardy concerning the sale of the details of Britons’ bank accounts by Indian call centre workers.

Your life for sale

Cash for a villain … crooked Kkaran Bahree with Sun undercover reporter Oliver Harvey in Delhi

Crooked call centre workers in India are flogging details of Britons’ bank accounts, a Sun probe has found.

Our undercover reporter was sold the top secret information on a thousand accounts, and numbers of passports and credit cards.

But what happens once those details have been stolen? For answers we look to the following New York Times article. Black Market in Stolen Credit Card Data Thrives on Internet

But surely the introduction of a National ID card will stop this blight of identity theft. Well actually no it won’t, it could even make it easier for criminals to steal your identity and the consequences will be far worse.

Tags: ID cards, Identity Theft

A customer asked me today.

What is War of the Worlds?

What the fuck planet you been living on lady? Have you never heard of the book let alone managed to miss the media blitz that has happened about the new movie starring Tom Cruise.

Of course I didn’t say that but I am constantly astounded that I have to explain what the big summer blockbusting movies are. I’d understand if it was some obscure European movie and I’m quite happy to describe what they are about, but when it is a movie that is advertised many times a day on television, is on magazine covers and is being indirectly promoted by articles about Tom Cruise and his recently announced engagement to Katie Holmes I’m almost literally struck dumb.

See also:
The official movie website.
I’m really looking forward to seeing this movie as it is a favourite book of mine and although Spielberg does tend towards schmaltz he is a very able director.

Dark Horse The War of the Worlds comic adapted and abridged by Ian Edginton with art by D’Israeli. This looks damn good as well, D’Israeli’s art is beautiful.

There has been a slew of War of the Worlds adaptations in recent years, there has been another movie this unlike Spielberg’s set in the original period and there was the Alan Moore comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2, which was an interesting twist on the original.

Tags: books, movies

I caught a programme on BBC Two last night about punctuation, specifically bad punctuation and the poor placement of apostrophes.

It really is a hornets’ nest as can be seen from the comments about it at the BBC website.

How’s your punctuation? Test yourself, find out here.
Amazingly I scored 83%

Tags: punctuation, TV

Bad Wolf revealed

The series as a whole was a lot better than I was expecting. I thought that I would watch it regardless but probably not make that great an effort to see every episode but after the first one I was hooked and it became must watch TV for me.

I think Russell T Davies has done really well to craft this series as it had pretty much everything a long-time fan could want but also be a great introduction to the character for those newcomers.

I must say that the Dalek’s massacre of all on floor 0 was exciting and unexpected in an expected kind of way and a little scary too. They killed everyone, even the younglings!

DO NOT INTERRUPT! DO NOT INTERRUPT!

CBBC: Doctor Who Series 2 secrets revealed

In the first series we had the Bad Wolf running through, is there anything similar in the second series?

“Yes there is, and that word has already been heard on screen. And that’s all I’m saying. You’ll have to go back and trawl through 13 episodes to realise what I’m on about.

“You’ll hear the word in the Christmas special though”

Can you tell us a bit about the Christmas special?

“It’s going to be 60 minutes long. It’s the first story of the new Doctor played by David Tennant.

“I remember when I was young it’s very strange when a new Doctor comes along, and that’s exactly how Rose feels. Her mum gets involved again, but beyond that I can’t give anything else away.

“It’s as Christmassy as can be. It’s got reindeer, it’s got sleigh bells, it’s got the works.”

On a related theme BBC News reports that a New scientific model ‘permits time travel’.

Novikov self-consistency principle

Tags: Doctor Who, science, TV

David Rowan writes in today’s Times Copyright wrongs: we can’t let the music industry suits stifle creativity

The essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay understood the perils when a similar battle to extend copyright was being waged in 1841. Amid calls to stretch the protection to 60 years after death, Macaulay saw no public benefit from a monopoly lasting longer than 42 years or life. “Are we free to legislate for the public good, or are we not?” he asked in the House of Commons. “Is this a question of expediency, or is it a question of right? An advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.” Many valuable works, he argued, would be suppressed — and publishers treated with such contempt that the reading public would happily turn to “piratical booksellers”.

A 20-year patent limit forces other industries to innovate, so why should the innately risk-averse record labels need any more than a 50-year monopoly? If Mr Purnell truly wants to foster creativity, he ought to broaden his musical tastes.

It is in my opinion a well argued case that Mr. Rowan makes for not extending copyright if the goal is to foster further creativity.

Tags: copyright

Not only is Charles Stross a kick-ass sci-fi writer, whose new book Accelerando is now available for download (under a CC-license of course), but he also shares my views on the National ID card.

Go download Accelerando then wait til the book is published in print form and buy it, or check out his other books. Particularly Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, both of which I really enjoyed.

I was going to write yet another rambling post about the government’s transport scheme but Charles has written a much better piece in his blog which pretty much says what I would have written anyway. He seems to have buggered up his permalinks on his blog though so I’ll just link to the frontpage and ask you to scroll down until you find Stupid, stupid on Tuesday 14 Jun 2005.

Tags: books

It’s all very well pledging to refuse to register for an ID card but how should someone do it in practice.

This thread at the NO2ID forum has a few suggestions.

In addition Unity of the No2ID forum has posted the following at their blog, Tests of Integrity and Intent. Which goes in to greater depth of what they see as the second line of defence

As I see it we have three clear lines of defence…
1. Kill the Bill
2. Change the Bill to include much tighter constraints on Government, etc.
3. Resist using Civil Disobedience.

Tags: ID cards

Oustanding quote of the day is from Clive Thompson at his Collision Detection blog writing about the flotation on the London stock exchange of PartyGaming as reported in this Guardian article.

The company was founded by a woman who’d made her fortune in online porn, who hired a 25-year-old kid fresh out of an Indian comp-sci program to write her software. That’s surreal enough, but my favorite detail about the company.

PartyGaming’s head office is in Gibraltar; its computer servers run from there and from Kahnawake, a Mohawk Indian reserve within Canada; its marketing office is in London but most of its 1,000 staff work in a call centre and software development site in Hyderabad, southern India

Man alive. Porn, call-service-centers, Canadian Indian reserves — it’s like the wireframe model for a sci-fi novel cowritten by Cory Doctorow and Thomas Friedman.

Tags: books, games

Matt Locke’s report on the keynote speech at Institute for Public Policy Research given by James Purnell, the creative industries minister.[via]

The speech announced the successor to Chris Smith’s ‘creative industries task force’ – a new policy initiative to support the creative industries in the UK. Most of the speech was quite routine, but he did announce a new project to deliver the Government’s manifesto pledge to review the copyright/IP laws for a digital world.

It would be a shame if the DCMS assumed that a monolithic protectionist approach was the best model for the creative industries, whilst ‘older’ industries were moving towards models that maximised the return on IP through more flexible approaches. Creative Commons, Backstage and the BBC’s Creative Archive License are breaking new ground in this area, and the DCMS should be encouraging more experiments like this, not discouraging them.

Given this statement at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport website.

DCMS sponsors the music industry acting as its advocate within Government. The Department works closely with leading players and trade associations to identify what the Government and industry can do to improve its economic performance.

It appears to me that the Department sees only the monolithic protectionist approach as a model for the music industry. It would be good if the other side of the argument could be effectively given to the minister, that perhaps British culture is not best served by ever increasing terms of copyright protection. That creative works that pass into the public domain do not enter a black hole but are liberated to be reinvigorated and reinterpreted by other artists.

Tags: copyright

There’s nothing I like better in sporting terms* than seeing England’s cricket team giving the Aussies a stuffing. Yesterday’s match where we beat them by 100 runs in the Twenty20 version of the game was an excellent example of that and sets up an interesting Ashes tour.

Lawrence Booth of The Guardian thinks there are many reasons to be cheerful and I agree.

*Possibly beating Germany at football in an important match would surpass this.

Tags: sport