i recommend that you sign this

Who ever it is that actually reads this I suggest you sign this as woman should be well represented in politics.

back to revision with all its joys

More government optimism

Well looks like the government is shelving the database of all our communications idea (at last!) in preference of asking Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to log who connects to what and how - ie if you access Facebook from your iphone or similar. This seems to be an extension of the existing laws regarding telephone logs that allow the police and security services to see who called who when.

What strikes me about this is that it is a £2b scheme that will most likely be futile. Just as cheap pay-as-you-go mobiles have made telephone logging pretty obsolete because it becomes very difficult to log who calls who when the phone isn't registered it is very difficult to glean useful information from the internet when you can send stuff via a proxy and have the information of who your talking to disappear especially when systems like The Onion Router (TOR) exist that helpfully cover who your talking to and where without any real effort.

Basically this seems a lot of money on a system that will achieve next to nothing. If people want to organise via the net there are a hundred ways of doing it that make it near impossible to trace who spoke to who, asking the CSPs to log this information doesn't really help at all especially when you don't even have to route most of your stuff via your ISP - open DNS servers in other countries will allow alot of the useful (to the services) information to by-pass the UK utterly.

Yarr! a pirate's life in Somalia

This is (supposedly) an interview with a Somalian pirate by the bbc.

It's somewhat depressing as unsurprisingly they claim that they have been driven to it by loss of their own sources of income, the claim is illegal fishing and toxic dumping has removed their main employment as fishers. Which makes sense but I can't help but think that mainly it's greed. By the sounds of it the payout for three successful hijackings are significantly better than a lifetime of fishing. That being said given the difference it's a pretty understandable greed.

pah the world sucks

I did like the guys optimism that "Foreign navies can do nothing to stop piracy" having watched the US react to most things I think that sooner or later they will try - even if it just means training crews to kill and leaving escorts around Somalia.

ah well at least they didn't try and make a robin hood story from it.

How small is the modern world?

Found this linked to on New Scientist. It's a map of how far every point on the surface of the world is from a city (defined as population > 50k). Its pretty cool, firstly as a point of interest, secondly because its been keyed to magma colours so it looks like the earth is on fire.

More generally it is a wonderful description of how the world has accelerated technologically in the recent years, this sort of map 30 years ago would be very different and 100 years ago would be utterly different.

On a related topic this is a wonderful time sink and an amazing way of finding things out/settling disputes. It is a fairly simple but VERY powerful graphing device. Linked to world statistics it allows you to plot along several axis: x & y, point size, colour as well as time.

VERY interesting - although truly depressing in some ways (try watching a time lapse graph of the population of Rwanda).

Both well worth a look and gap minder is an amazing tool.