Posts by BJ

Cops slap ticket on Street View spycar

Reserved parking for doctors?

WTF! The handicapped parking here in the US is already bad enough but you guys have sunk to a new low with that one.

At least it gives those cameras on every street corning something to watch. "Hey, you there! Yeah, the bloke who just got out of the car parked in the DOCTOR spot. Hold up your General Practitioner license to the camera! What, no license!?!? Stand there and wait while we send someone to write you up."

No Orwell here, move along.

There's nothing Orwellian about Google and StreetView. In the context of surveillance, I would define Orwellian as, "The arbitrary monitoring of individual citizens by a state." (I tend to view pretty much all monitoring of individuals by a state as arbitrary, and therefore Orwellian, but some might legitimately argue that there are cases where a state should be monitoring individuals.)

Google is:

- not a state

- not monitoring individuals

Further, a state engaging in Orwellian surveillance would focus on collecting private information and would not share any of the collected data with the general public. The telescreens were in personal living spaces, remember? Or has no one at El Reg read the book?

Google is not collecting any private data (there's nothing less private than the public street, the timeless cliché for "a palce that is not private") and is sharing the collected data with the public. Indeed, the data is intended for the public. They are providing the world with virtual strolls down streets that one could see in person, where time and resources not limiting factors.

So, Limeys, please stop your griping and put your upper lip back in the posture we've been told to expect from it.

Flirty texting could land Scots in jail for 10 years

Did he really say...

..."stiff penalties"?

Equifax asks customer to email debit card photocopies

This happened to me as well

I placed an order with J.R. Music World via Amazon.com (in the US) using a Visa with a non-US address. About a day after I placed the order, I got an e-mail from JR requesting that I reply with a front and back scan of my credit card. They didn't want to process the order because of the international billing address.

I would not be surprised if this happens frequently. Mail-order companies ask for faxed copies of credit cards if they're not certain about the identity of the customer. The Internet equivalent is a digital scan/photo by e-mail.

The irony of this---increasing the risk of identity theft with extra measures to verify identity---is not small.