Posts by Francois

European 'standard' e-car power connector details emerge

And the plug plugs the tax hole!

A nice aspect (for the tax gatherer) of an universal 'smart' plug is that you potentially have the ability to tax "driving" electricity more, as you can do for fuel.

Indeed, you advocate an universal plug, for convenience. You then make sure that all the charging stations need a license, a meter, and a network connection (for service quality purposes, or "smart grid", whatever), that the car only starts charging when a licensed station is detected at the end of the cable (for safety reasons, of course!), and poof ! Electricity-for-the-car can be taxed as much as you'd like!

Sikh coppers request bulletproof turbans

@Roger H

Quite.

Vulture Central on total G20 terror lockdown

Bet the numbers?

I bet for more cops than protesters... It sounds all a bit too much like fear-mongering to discourage the non-hardcore protesters to show up.

Obesity witchhunt is a 'moral panic' - sense out of Texas

@Tony

Thanks!

NASA 'scope captures ferocious gamma ray burst

They should have listened...

Before starting that big accelerator of theirs.... luckily, on this planet, we know better

Info chief slaps Met on CCTV in pubs

but does it?

"We recognise that CCTV plays an important role in the prevention and detection of crime, and can help to reduce crime in areas of high population density, such as city boroughs"

Everybody talking about CCTV always put that disclaimer in, before talking about surveillance society... But, does it?

I remember seeing a lot of studies that seem to be saying the opposite. So why always say "it is useful but take care..." rather than "it is very likely to be useless, hence..."?

Mac users urged to ditch Safari

what is safer?

Use my brain to choose which sites to trust or let Google and Microsoft know of every site I'm visiting? 'Cause that's what you do with phishing filters, regardless of what your cookies settings are or how powerful your adblocker is, isn't it?

It's official: The Home Office is listening

@AC only the guilty....

Sorry, feeding the trolls but...

The problem, sir, is the amount of abuse and the ease of abuse the extension of surveillance systems allow.

The problem is how they make us *less* secure by encouraging laziness in the law enforcement communities... "it isn't on CCTV, let's dump the enquiry"

The problem is in the trust these systems get (very high) compared to what their reliability is (fairly poor)

Single example : ID cards. The ID card works very well as long as it is (relatively) easy to fake : people know fake cards exists, if someone fakes yours and do Bad Things with it, you can argue that it might not been you after all. But if everyone and their dog is told that ID are infalsifiable, the day someone does do something with a fake card or *pretends* you've done Bad Things and it's attested it's you "by the system" it breaks down.

To give you an extend of how all this technology doesn't work, google for facial recognition fooled by photographs, biometric hash collisions, oyster crack, dna hash collision, etc... (don't google for "etc...")

The problem is that faith in technology that is marketed as being perfect inverses the duty of proof and that we can all be flagged as guilty unless we prove we're innocent.