Posts by David Farrell

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders

Where's the proof?

Ok, so they have proof that you downloaded a file called "Stargate.Atlantis.S05E02.HDTV.XviD-0TV.avi", but where's the proof that this file actually contained said tv show?

Election watchdog makes ID card U-turn

Crazy system

The UK must be one of the only countries in the world that allows non-citizens to vote in national elections. Any citizen of a commonwealth country who is resident in the UK may vote. It must also be one of the only countries in the world that allows people to vote without providing any proof of ID. Most other countries not only require voters to produce a passport or identity document to vote, but also mark voters with an indelible ink so that there is absolutely no chance of someone voting more than once.

Thai court jails 'swirly-face' paedophile

@ Jason Clery

"Tell that to the peson who caught a knife in the lungs because a (jobless) addicted needed money for his next fix. Tell that to the parent who finds the corpse of their kid."

What I will tell the person who caught a knife in the lungs and what I will tell the parent who finds the corpse of their kid is that they would both still be alive if drugs were legalised. The continued criminalisation of both drugs themselves and drug addicts turns what should be exclusively a social and medical problem into a major criminal headache, forcing junkies into doing crazy things for their next "fix" and killing experimenting teens with impure and contaminated drugs.

It also fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of people who dabble in drugs do so recreationaly and responsibly without becoming addicts. This is of course a reality that most governments choose to deny.

It's ok feel up children as long as you're not carrying any drugs

It's a serious reflection on Thai and Asian culture when you can be hung for smuggling drugs but only receive 3 years in jail for fiddling little kiddies. Drug smuggling is a victimless "crime", and I use the word crime in inverted commas because I believe in drug legalisation and victimless because we all make our choices in life, and yet paedophilia is the ultimate victim orientated crime.

What kind of society put people to death for something as mundane as smuggling a chemical substance, and gives out a slap on the wrist for the sexual abuse of children?

EU project scans air passengers for terrorist tendencies

Just cover the camera

If I ever get on a plane that has a camera mounted in the back of the seat in front of me monitoring my every move I will immediately cover it with my jacket or some other article of clothing. I will then proceed to look for the other cameras covering the aisles and continually make rude gestures with my hands and fingers throughout the flight.

I hope I'll be allowed visitors after I've been gitmo'd.

Temp workers to get equal rights after 12 weeks

Stop moaning

As already pointed out, IT contractors working through their own limited companies (which are the vast majority) are not affected by this new legislation.

By the way has anyone else noticed how IR35 has just been completed ignored by contractors. Is Inland Revenue even bothering to enforce it anymore?

Spooks want to go fishing in Oyster database

Yeah right....

...are they honestly trying to make out like the security services haven't had full access to the Oyster database since day one? I find that very hard to believe.

In fact it wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole Oyster project was instigated by the security services in an effort to keep tabs on who, how, when and where people use the transport system.

Home Sec: British rings to be tightened against intrusion

Triple ring of security?

I'm sick and tired of seeing a sign saying "UK Border" when I arrive off a plane at Heathrow and Gatwick. It's not a border, it's a row of counters...in a hall...in a building...in the middle of Middlesex or Sussex.

And do we really need experienced police officers to work as immigration officers? I thought the brain-dead morons who currently do that job do it quite adequately if a little slowly.

Moroccan IT engineer arrested over fake Facebook account

Nothing learned from the Americans

To think of all the money spent by the CIA on training the Moroccon secret police in the proper use of waterboarding, nail pulling, dog collaring, cigarette burning, etc and all these guys could come up with was a bit of kicking and slapping?

Tiscali and BPI go to war over 'three strikes' payments

Who polices the police?

It's all very well the BPI sending screenshots of IP addresses downloading from a swarm to ISP's, but what does that prove? That a customer of the ISP was downloading a torrent?

But what about the proof that the actual torrent in question contained copyrighted material? Just showing a screenshot of the name of the torrent isn't enough. Who's listening to these torrents to make sure they actually contain the song in the name? Surely ISPs can't just take the word of the BPI that their screenshots of offenders were actually downloading a genuinely copyrighted file?

And then of course is downloading a fragment of a torrent the same as downloading the whole thing? A torrent's no use unless the whole thing has been downloaded. Can people be prosecuted for downloading 1/1000th of a song?

EU menaces migrants with border biometrics, dragnets

Why bother?

If the EU spent half the amount of time and money on trying to find solutions to the problems that cause third-world poor people to want to find better lives in rich countries instead of trying to create ever more imaginative ways of playing with their big boy toys, perhaps we could stop wasting all of this taxpayers money.

In any case, I still fail to see why biometrics are necessary for a system to record people's entries to and exits from a country. I've been to many third-world countries where passenger entries and exits are recorded quickly and effeciently into a computer system linked to a central database from a simple scan of a machine-readable passport. If these countries can create successful exit/entry recording systems, why has it taken the EU this long to even propose it?

Cynics might even question the motives of those in their ivory towers who wish catalogue, cross-reference and generally categorise us like museum exhibits. Fingerprints, facial scans, et al are quite frankly nothing more than unnecessary distractions and completely and utterly unnecessary.

ISPs demand record biz pays up if cut-off P2P users sue

By this same logic...

...Royal Mail needs to start opening people's mail to check for any illegal photocopies of copyrighted material too.

All reports like this do is to highlight how little the government and copyright enforcement organisations actually understand about the technologies they are trying to control. They can't even break into an encrypted packet, never mind actually establishing whether it's carrying encrypted content or not.

I certainly won't be losing any sleep about this.

Sky broadband customers blindsided by SMTP switch-off

Does anyone still use ISP mail accounts?

Who the hell still uses ISP mail accounts in this day and age? I'm surprised ISP still run POP accounts for all the hassle they cause.

Illegal immigrants spared the gamma-ray scanner

If I was France....

...I would tell the UK to take their juxtaposed controls and scurry back over the channel where they can nuke and scan as many illegal immigrants as they please AFTER they've entered UK territory.

I find the very concept of juxtaposed immigration controls to be unfair and in bad taste. Why should some wanker in a Home Office gimp suit decide, on French territory, whether or not I can enter my own country? And why are the French so compliant? It would be in their best interests to not allow the UK to check people while still on French territory.

German Wikipedia attacked over Nazi symbolism

@Rob

We ARE all entitled to free speech, that's the point. You either support free speech or you don't, but what you can't do is pick and choose who is entitled to it just because you might not necessarily agree with someone.

"Incitement" is a convenient tool used by dictators the world over to silence their critics. Robert Mugabe regularly uses it to silence and lock up his opponents. And where do you draw the line? Should Karl Marx be held responsible for the excesses of Stalin and various other crackpot communist dictators? Under today's laws he might very well be held responsible for some or other "incitement".

To paraphrase the anti-gun lobby: "Free speech doesn't harm people, people harm people".

Free Speech?

While I personally find the glorification of Nazi Germany and Nazism to be abhorant, I simultaneously support anyone's right to glorify whatever they choose. Do you remember something called "Free Speech"? There should be no such thing as "limits" on free speech. Free speech with "limits" is not free speech, innit?

I find it frightening that in the so-called "free" Western World it is possible to be arrested for denying the holocaust, glorifying terrorism and Nazism, inciting hatred and various other "thought" crimes. George Orwell really knew what he was writing about.

By all means ostracise, criticise and belittle people who glorify objectionable practises and ideologies, but criminalising people for expressing their opinions and thoughts, however objectionable they may be, makes us no better than the Nazis themselves.

Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail strike out Iran

What?

So if I get this right, they're simply removing Iran from the list of countries in the signup form? So if you're in Iran you can still sign up for an account, you just have choose another country.

Wow. That'll show those pesky Iranians!

Get a passport, enjoy casual sex with foreigners

Am I an old fuddy duddy?

Do young people really write text messages like that? Jesus, we're in more trouble than I thought....

Eurostar inaugurates UK high-speed track

Re: Couple of comments on comments and Open borders

Security checks have got nothing to do with the Schengen agreement. The Schengen agreement concerns the abolition of immigration checks and controls between a certain subset of European countries (the UK and Ireland being notable exceptions) but NOT security or customs checks.

Eurostar train security is unnecessary

Can anyone explain why you can get on a 4 and a half hour train trip to Edinburgh from London and not go through a single bit of security, and yet going to Paris on the Eurostar requires walking through metal detectors and having your luggage scanned through x-ray machines.

I don't buy the argument that "it's because it's an international journey". Why should a long train journey from London to Edinburgh require less security than a short train journey from London to Paris? Why do our continental cousins not feel the urge to introduce airport style security checks like Eurostar have felt the need to?

At Gare Du Nord one can walk onto the Thalys train to Amsterdam as if you were taking the Metro to Montparnasse, while trying to board the Eurostar at Gare Du Nord is like trying to get into Fort Knox.

Dolphins abandon Bay of Biscay

I'm not surprised

The surprising thing should be that ANYTHING lives near the European coast what with all the pollution, concrete development, overfishing and bottom-trawling. Perhaps the dolphins were just the last ones left...someone has to switch the lights off.

Biometrics tackle immigration abuse

What if you have no hands?

Do they take toeprints?

Planting trees will not save the planet: official

Don't blame the trees

Here's a thought, and I'll type slowly so people understand, maybe if actually STOPPED pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere instead of thinking we can negate it by planting trees there would actually be a reduction in the amount of CO2. Clever huh? But then it's always the obvious solutions that get overlooked.

As far as I'm concerned carbon trading, being "carbon-neutral" and all these other scams are the equivalent of an obese person trying to lose weight by convincing someone else to become an anorexic. But guess what? It doesn't matter how many people you convince to become anorexic, the obese person will still be a fat pig!