* Posts by blue

57 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2008

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Phorm woos browsers with personalised web

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Alert

A spade's a spade

Phorm: spyware at the ISP level.

Any ISP that implements it is scum.

Thank you for your attention. That is all.

Government rejects Lords' surveillance criticism

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Happy

Balance

I propose that we should be legally allowed to punch these authoritarian bastards in the face any time we happen upon one of them.

This will strike a balance between their right to life and our desire to murder them and is therefore fair and resonable.

BBC asks nicely to run second hacking demo

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Heart

Yawn

I guess the resounding victory that was achieved last time by the 'OMG teh illegalz' crowd wasn't so resounding. I mean ... if you have to keep banging on about it as if you hadn't won the debate.

Charges against London tube tourist snapper thrown out

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Don't Laugh

Once a paedo has photographed your child they're in posession of photons that have ACTUALLY TOUCHED your child and can do what they want with them.

Something should be done.

Google's email goes titsup (again)

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gmail vs googlemail

Regardless of whether you signed up early or not you can use your [username]@gmail.com and [username]@googlemail.com as if they were interchangeable.

Both addresses point to the same account (no one will ever know you're a n00b).

Apple buying Twitter!

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Flame

Twitter Is...

a cross between RSS status updates and BCC'ed instant messaging.

The only thing stupider than someone who uses Twitter is someone who bashes Twitter without having a clue about what it's useful for.

I've only followed one person who used it in an annoying way (updates about having a nice drink or going to bed and the like). Despite them updating on more interesting things (events, links etc.) that nonesense got on my tits and I stopped following them.

There are plenty of other people who use Twitter in a more valuable way - if you're interested in them. @stephenfry is an obvious one, but others such as @amandapalmer (assuming you give a hoot about her and her shennanegans) use it in a fun and entertaining manner.

If you don't 'get' twitter, get a decent desktop client (twhirl is ok on the PC) follow a few people and leave the app running for a week. If you still don't get it, try following some more interesting people instead. Maybe @guardiantech

UK fines for IP infringement to rocket

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Same Old Story (shouldn't it be in the public domain by now?)

Oliver-

>Sounds to me like they asked a bunch of interested parties. What kind of way is this to legislate anyway?

The way it has always been done with regard to copyright (and so much more). Copyright law is a protection racket for the copyrighted media producing industry. Big business = lots of cash = lots of power & influence = laws specifically crafted for them.

Government is for these people; to protect them from the likes of you and I.

Firefox users caught in crossfire of warring add-ons

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Stop It

Well, Maone did appologise (rightly) so I forgive him. It's easy to make mistakes and stupid to hold grudges once error has been admitted.

I visited the noscript site after his retraction and appology and decided as a show of support to whitelist his site. I clicked on the adblockplus icon in my statusbar and selected "disable on noscript.net" and ...

and...

Instead of the adblockplus icon turning green, like it does in every other whitelisted website, it stayed red. The only thing that worked was to whitelist on a page by page basis - then it turned green.

Congrats to the easylist people on breaking adblockplus. It's obvious who the bigger person is in this matter, and it's not Palant.

Can you talk and drive?

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Dishonesty

Presumably a driving game, where you simply avoid knocking people over whilst vocalising "yeah, uh-huh" undermined their case.

Counting people, assigning a different value to them on the basis of colour and keeping a running total in your mind is not driving. It is not automated in the same way driving is (or walking or picking up that coffee cup beside your monitor) you have to think in a very focussed way.

The way you do when you're first LEARNING to drive, in fact.

Keeping a running total of arbitrary colour-based numbers (for the first time) - is a very different process from avoiding knocking people down on the road ahead of you. Add to that a misleading and distracting environment (the video) where you might wrongly anticipate needing your driving skills (to not run people over or steer into a wall) and ...

Well, it's almost as if they wanted to design a game where they could guarantee a large percentage of failure.

And then draw a spurious conclusion from that so they can go "See! See!"

This is neither an equivalnt or fair test. It sets you up for failure. In the same way they use nearly all statistical data, surveys, etc. their intent here is to say that the test is equivalent to driving whilst on the phone, but this is untrue.

Business as usual for government departments with social engineering on their mind, then.

That's not to say that talking on the phone whilst in a built up area with lots of pedestrians and junctions is a good idea; it clearly isn't (my father who was a driving instructor always turned the radio down or off when entering a built up area so he could fully concentrate) but bullshit propaganda like this is not what we need.

I guess they just can't help themselves.

UK.gov to spend £2bn on ISP tracking

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Unhappy

Totalitarian State

Any criminal, spy or terrorist worth their salt knows that when communicating with co-conspiritors avoidance of the 'normal' means of mass communication - internet or telephone - is more secure and less likely to result in being found out.

What this bill, these measures, do instead is cover the entire populace of the UK in surveillance. This will allow the state, from ministers to councillors to know your:

- political affiliations: which newspapers you read; which party websites you visit; which protest sites you visit; which political causes you sponsor or are interested in.

- religious affiliations: spiritual beliefs; interest in converting to Islam?; support or opposition of contentious (or sometimes contentious) issues such as abortion; stem-cell research; homosexuality; same-sex marriage; membership of a non-mainstream religion

- sexuality; your sexual interests or pecadillos; how much porn you use; secret sexual inclinations that even your partner knows nothing about.

And so much more!

The government has no business knowing any of these things, and yet this information will become available to all sorts of agents of the state on the flimsiest of pretexts. Suspected (or wrongly accused) of fly-tipping? Say goodbye to ALL of your privacy and have the state trawling through your business.

This law should be repugnant to anyone who believes in a liberal democracy and is indeed the final nail in the coffin of an open, free and democratic state.

Music industry sites DDoSed after Pirate Bay verdict

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Pirate

@ Richard Kay 'Culture Wars'

I think you hit the nail on the head. The large media cartels want to turn the internet into 'interactive' cable TV. They supply the content, lock it down and allow you upload rights only on stuff they've approved of not infringing the laws they've bought and paid for.

Copyright is, at its heart an evil: a monopoly granted by the king on culture. The US Founding Fathers tried to ennoble this evil beast by training it to serve more lofty ideals, but its true nature always returns (and how could it not with the powerful and selfishly-motivated copyright corps. throwing their weight at easily lead, principle-less politicians).

The people making and crafting copyright laws - the cartels - are not democrats, they are sociopaths and they will bend all of society to their will (see the abomination that is ACTA) unless someone stands up to them.

It will be difficult with the current oligarchy also working against real democracy, though. I predict that the Pirate Party will have similar dirty tricks thrown at it as the Palestinians did when they exercised the 'wrong' democratic choice.

Touchy Google wraps protective arm around Chrome EULA

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Yawn

So ... not content with a story that bashes Google, the Register turns a non-story about an EULA and a clarifying response into a story that bashes Google.

I assume the Register has decided that Google-sniping is a way to set itself apart from the crowd: a brand distinguisher. For this reader at least, it's little more than tedious and almost always (seemingly) baseless.

Why not wait for a genuine reason to criticise Google and do your readership and credibility a favour?

Lawyer-client privilege no bar to surveillance, say Lords

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Pirate

Still some areas where Confidentiality is Guaranteed:

Just say 'State Security' or 'Commercially Sensitive'.

Some animals are more equal.

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

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Black Helicopters

New Labour

New Stasi.

Salesforce.com to empower corporate Twitter snooping

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Reg Doesn't 'Get' Twitter Shocker

Tweets are public - anyone - including people who don't follow you - can read them - thus there is no real snooping.

"Once your conversation on nipping out for a quick coffee's been hovered up by Starbucks, you can probably then look forward to the coffee giant's marketing goons Tweeting you with some helpful suggestions on the nearest location for that non-fat chai latte."

Nope - someone can't Tweet you unless you're following THEM. Thus - no spam (unless you want it).

Advertising watchdog okays 'gaming equals early grave' ad

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Arbitrary Standards Authoritay

There's a newspaper advert doing the rounds now for Vodafone. It states GET UNLIMITED* TEXTS.

The asterix points to the shameless contradiction "Subject to fair usage of 3000 texts".

The ASA is fine with this dishonest manipulation.

Health trust pushing on with record sharing

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Carte before the Blanche

By the time you're aware you need to opt out, presumably when you get some business touting cold-call/junk mail from BUPA, your privacy has already been breached, without your permission.

I can't see how they can legally say that they have decided to breach your doctor-patient confidentiality without your permission, but they'll resume it if you really want.

Oh wait a mo' ... they know best and will deal with all the difficult-to-think-about things on our behalf. I was forgetting.

Put down your pens: Cartoons next on censor block

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Singing Detective

In Dennis Potter's Singing Detective, the young, er, detective, sees his mother having sex in the woods whilst he is sitting up a tree (IIRC).

Presumably, the TV series of this would remain legal, whilst a graphic novel adaptation would now be illegal?

Can we just hang the fuckwit politicians who are destroying this country with their ill-thought-out, incompetently drafted laws, from the lamp posts sooner rather than later?

Great Aussie firewall claims first victim

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Re: Emigrating to North Korea

>Funny how all those taking liberties away, imposing censorship, restricting free speech, trampling on rights are the very same, allegedly, sowing the seeds of democracy and freedom around the world.

Jason, they're not spreading democracy, they're spreading corporatism. 'Democracy' is the butter on the enema.

BBC Click paid cybercrooks to buy botnet

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Choking on a Nice Glass of Bolleaux from El Reg

Click did pay money for the botnet, but at the end, they informed the owners of the infected machines that they were infected, what to do about preventing such things happening to them in the future, and then they REMOVED the infection from their machines.

Yeah .. in anyone's book, clearing up thousands of infected machines, educating those people who allowed their machines to become infected and cleaning up the mess, and preventing those machines being used for malicious purposes in the future ... truly a criminal act. What wicked people inhabit the BBC!

Get over yourselves.

MPs vote to keep addresses private (theirs, not yours)

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Pirate

FEAR

The more they monitor us, prying into our every movement, the more they cloak themselves in secrecy, cowering in their bunkers, afraid.

The more they fear us the more they try and control us to assuage their fear.

The more they try to control us the more they foster resentment and hatred;

the more resentment and hatred they sense, the more they fear us ...

A self-perpetuating downward spiral into tyranny.

College IT departments told to deploy anti-terror dragnet

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re. Minimum porn browsing requirement

>Religious fanatics (of all brands) don't like porn.

No. Fanatics (of all brands) don't like porn.

See the New Labour Party's™ secular hatred of porn and sex.

Take a photo of a naked 17 year old you're not married to or in a long term relationship with (merely shagging for a week or two) and you are a sex criminal in New Labour's UK.

Marriage and 'established long-term relationships' enforced by the full force of the law. Why it's almost like we were living in some puritanical country in the Middle East.

Pirate Bay supporters ram Swedish IFPI website

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Pirate

re. Wreckers wreck

>Wreckers wreck - The freetard mentality in action. We can so we will.

Mirroring your flamebait comment back at you: The mentality of the ignorant in action: thinking is hard, so we won't.

Content cartels are hell-bent of retarding any technological (or techno-social) progress or development that undermines their current status (profits, control, importance); they use their power, wealth and contacts to exert disproportionate influence on governments and thereon to the populaces they manage and rule (represent? Ha!).

The delightfully ignorant term 'freetard' ignores the seismic change that current technological developments have unleashed - that low-to-no-cost distribution destroys the cartel's imposition of artificial scarcity and strangle-hold on distribution channels, and reveals their attempt to maintain that status quo as little more than a greedy deceit.

Change has to occur. Strangely enough, in societies less entralled by the extremely damaged intellectual monopoly concept, these changes are occurring. And what is more, people are making money doing it!

Just not the same, bloated, controlling middle-men.

For your consideration: Technobrega

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7872316.stm

Photography rights: Snappers to descend on Scotland Yard

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Black Helicopters

Blatant Double-Standards Piss-taking

Meanwhile ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7883181.stm

You're barcoded: The sneaky under-25 route to compulsory ID

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Insane Despotism

Don't you also have to be over 18 to serve alcohol?

We should challenge the legality of those serving us, and when they tell us they're over 18, demand that they prove it. With a passport as the only acceptable form of ID.

Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity

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Gates Horns

required title cocks a snook at microsoft

I guess this is what (convicted) monoplists do to create the illusion of competition in the marketplace.

Personally, I'm loving the way there are fixes to a fairly common windows Vista problem posted on the internet that *can't* be run on Vista home 'premium' because it's crippled by an artificial exclusion of group policies. The problem itself, of course, is perfectly able to run on Vista Home Premium.

I wonder if Vista7 Home versions will again assume that fax facilities are only required by businesses?

Gmail goes offline to avoid flatline online

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title

Don't trip over yourselves to be the first to piss on Google's parade, whatever you do, people.

Unlike pop/imap this will also allow people to continue using the gmail interface, which some people quite like.

ISPs slam CEOP bid to rewrite RIPA

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Charity?

I take it everyone working for CEOP is an unpaid volunteer who can requisition anything they need from any business in their pursuit of the evil-doers, then?

No?

But, My God! Why not!? Isn't they thinking of teh childrens!

Govt uses Obscenity Law to stuff up cartoon sex loophole

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Sex is Bad, M'kay?

Personally, I'm expecting laws establishing the Junior Anti-Sex League will be in the next Queen's Speech.

Confusion reigns ahead of comms überdatabase debate

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Black Helicopters

It doesn't matter that it's imperfect

They don't have to get it right at the off set - this law is about establishing the legality of monitoring the behaviour of all citizens, all of the time. It is about establishing, in law, the right of the state to put all of us under surveillance, to note what we read and who we communicate with.

It doesn't matter that this law doesn't take into account webmail. It doesn't matter that IM is overlooked or that VPNs or TOR can get round this, it doesn't matter that you can avoid this surveillance by any number of different ways. Once this law passes, and remains in place, un-challenged, it will effect a change in the relationship between citizen and state and will say that ordinary citizens are subject to 24 hour surveillance of everyone they communicate with and everything they read (online) by the state.

Loopholes will be closed, protocols will be added. VPN use will be subject to regulation. The Surveillance State will have been established and will then, as little more than a matter of routine, go about perfecting its means of operation, tightening its grasp, under an already established 'mandate' of total surveillance.

The literature we read online will be monitored. Our political affiliations will be seen and recorded. Our religious bent will be noted. Our sexual pecadillos will be subject to government scrutiny.

This has no place in a democracy. It is the action of a police state. It is proof that we live in one.

All citizens, suspects. All citizens under surveillance. All of the time.

Online crime maps go live

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Added Value Reverse Engineering?

So can you use this service to find the best places for hookers (non-pimped, obviously) or weed?

UK.gov to push Obama for tougher rules online

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Child Only Internet

A centrally validated list of websites that have been vetted as approved for children (Disneyfied Pseudo Internet). A browser that will only connect to those websites. Parents can install the browser for their children. The children can (ostensibly) only use that browser and view only those approved websites.

Then the censorship-under-the-guise-of-protection double-talk despot wannabes like Burnam can fuck off and leave the real internet for the rest of us, whilst enjoying the empty plaudits of the Mail-reading 'we are right and will create a world that accords with our righteous vision' voters he's trying to snag votes from.

In the ditch with DAB radio

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Go

DAB+ FTW

To hell with the DAB crowd.

I bought a DAB radio a few years ago and I'm happy to have that investment junked to get a modern digital network going in this country, rather than leaving us like some digitally-backward 3rd world country.

Seriously, how can anyone justify using mpeg1-layer2 technology for audio in this day and age? Bin it! Move forward!

Next up - design digital radio that *fails gracefully* like anagolue radio (no interference my arse) - I'd rather have a little 'Hiss and crackle' than painful unlistenable burbling and glitching any day.

Corrupt cop abused police database to blackmail child abusers

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Re. Guidelines

>Does this mean - "There's a big sign up by the stable telling the horse in no uncertain terms not to run away while the door is open. We also have a large squad of officers ready to close the door at a moments notice should the horse mysteriously go missing, and then jump on quad-bikes to go fetch it back if they can find it." ??

Why yes. Yes it does.

Wonderfully reassuring, isn't it.

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

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Without Freedards, You'd All be Still Banging Rocks Together

Without bittorrent, there would have been no growth of internet speeds - ISPs would still be selling 512Kbps lines.

Also, IS bittorrent the major consumer of bandwidth these days? I read that video (You Tube, et al) had matched if not over taken it.

How long before Virgin starts throttling that, then?

That Virgin is proposing to strangle a protocol that competes with its own proposed p2p offering is surely tantamount to corruption.

Public support for ID cards dips to 55 per cent

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Intentional Duplicity

>"There were also a number of people who believed public and private sector organisations will be able to access their information (56%), but again this is a false statement."

What isn't a false statement is that the government have recently just given the Secretary of State the power to remove any and all barriers to data sharing, that may exist now or in the future, without parliamentary approval.

Why the IWF was right to ban a Wikipedia page

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Unhappy

Increasingly Waning Freedoms

I thought we lived in a country where the system of law was "that which is not prohibited is allowed" as opposed to the Napoleonic system, where "that which is not allowed explicitly is illegal."

When did we change over?

Seems like another turn of the ratchet toward despotism, here in one half-way decent Blighty.

UK e-tailers scurry to scrap dodgy Heavy Metal covers

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A Black & White Issue

I seem to remember a lot of naked children being portrayed in National Geographic and in documentaries of Africa. Even the film Powaqqatsi by Godfrey Reggio has a young African boy splashing through water, tiny penis bobbing in time to the Philip Glass score.

Surely a case for a ban! A good old-fashioned book and film burnin'!

Unless, of course, we're just protecting the white children?

Or is it more that digital media is being discriminated against, whereas 'old' media is given a free pass.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

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Obscene? Bah! It's No Nan Goldin!

Does nobody remember the Nan Goldin/Elton John/Baltic Art Gallery incident?

A photo of young naked girl doing the splits directly facing the camera, showing her va-jay-jay for all to see. Seized by Northumbria police for being obscene and then deemed by the CPS to be 'not obscene' and returned to the owner (Sir Elton).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/oct/26/artnews.art

If that image was LEGAL, then how can this one not be? It's almost prudish by comparison.

Arbitrary censorship, pehaps? Lack of oversight = law unto themselves = bad decisions?

Pirates pee on Amazon's MP3 parade

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Dear Rubbish Music

Ok, so they got rid of the DRM. Good job!

And they're selling 256Kbps MP3 albums for three quid? You just got a customer - for having the right price-point for the right product!

What? Whaddayamean Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin MP3 album costs £11.98? (Insert numerous others selling for the same price as full-quality physical media)

£3 is just the selected albums promo price?

They still don't fucking get it.

Microsoft opens Vista SP2 testing window

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Coat

sp1

But I've only just managed to install sp1 after being forced into a complete reinstall due to some audio drivers that even when uninstalled still prevented the install of sp1!

I had to figure out what was wrong and do it on my own. The assistance of Microsoft's advisors was an endless series of pointless time-wasting hoops to jump through.

Will I get this same great Vista experience - 'I'm not doing it and I won't tell you why although obviously it's a known quantity otherwise how would I know to do it' - with sp2?

*Hey, Bill, get your filthy hands outta my pockets!*

Grand Theft Auto IV PC debut gets SecuROM sideshow

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Pirate

Avoiding SecuROM? Don't get Steamed up ...

"All versions of the game will use SecuROM for Product Activation. Downloadable versions of the game will have additional code if the vendor requires it, such as Valve's Steam program. "

Did you get that?

ALL versions will use SecuROM.

Steam versions will have ADDITIONAL code [possibly].

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56133

The Tzu Chi Foundation – the world’s largest Buddhist charity

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Dead Vulture

Body Donations

It's touching to see the humanization of the body-donatees' cadavers.

Here in the UK, I would never sanction the use of my own or any relatives body (if I had a say). Too many stories of medical students throwing body parts about, or leaving severed parts on buses for the lolz; too many stories of medical establishments stealing organs from deceased babies and the like, etc: a serious lack of respect.

UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...

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Incompetence

They have pretty much one major task to perform, MPs - they do it all the time, even when it's not necessary, just to prove that they're in control and to placate the 'outraged' and 'offended': they write laws.

And they cannot do it. They botch the terms, throw open the consequences with abandon, broaden the remit to include possibly anyone and fail, unremittingly, to place proper restraints and boundaries on the powers they enact.

They cannot write laws to save their worthless skins. They are unqualified for their jobs and their wanton incompetence impacts upon the lives of us all, wrecking those of any number.

Where we may be prosecuted for fictional but realistic IMAGES of non-real POSSIBLE harm, there is rarely any negative consequence for the very real harm politicians do to us with their insane scribblings.

An itchy pox on the vast majority of them.

µTorrent for Mac is go

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Vista

Have they got it to work on Vista without locking up and needing to reboot?

Yet?

Beeb to cut the f**king swearing

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Freedom Fried

>So what happened to free speech?

The people who valued it didn't stand up to the authoritarian kill-joy 'I don't like it so no-one else should have it' types.

Porn doctor jailed for 33 years

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Not Enough Hate! He Must Be One Of Them!

It's interesting to note how all the people defending the possibility that 33 years may be too harsh for someone who merely looked at and posessed images of recorded child abuse, (with no evidence that he ever touched a child in an inappropriate manner) have felt the need to post anonymously after the hatred expressed at paul.

I think people who can understand the difference between *owning a photograph of someone doing something terrible to someone* and the *act of doing something terrible to someone* need to stand up and be counted and not let the pitchfork-weilding, witch-burning mobs of this world drive us to cower in anonymity and fear their irrational views.

As if we, with our lack of emotion-clouded knee-jerk hatred are the ones with something to be ashamed of.

Full disclosure: yesterday I happened on the internet to stumble upon a photograph of a naked child who had been flayed of her skin by people throwing chemicals on her. I did not report myself to the police for my deviancy. The child's name was Phan Thị Kim Phúc.

According to some foolish people I'm as good as someone who wants to spray children with napalm.

33 years is appropriate for someone perpetrating the acts depicted, not for owning images of such acts.

Prosecutors gather evidence on secret BT-Phorm trials

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There's One Explaination ...

... for the lack of a firm and decisive snuffing out of this aggregious assault on people's privacy by Phorm-BT.

The Establishment in the UK are fundementally sympathetic to the idea of monitoring and spying on everything that British people do, and therfore can't bring themselves to take action against such snooping even when they don't (immediately) benefit from it - without undermining their own objectives in this area.

Phorm will lower the expectation of privacy and allow the government to more easily implement its future plans in this area.

Who knew that modern China was going to be the model society for Western democracies?

Not me!

'Bloody' is an offensive word, declares ASA

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Bloody Idiots

>[...] but nevertheless considered that the word 'bloody' was a swear word, albeit a milder one than some others [...]

bloody - blud'i, adj or adv : as an intensifier, sometimes expressing anger, but often almost meaningless.

Not obscene. Not vulgar. Not a swear word. The ASA are autocrats.

Government finally names the day for porn ban

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Happy

A Glorious Day!

The New UK™ welcomes you, citizen!

Remember that you are always guilty of something.

Please keep your head down or we might have to take a closer look at you.

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