The Labour candidate I wanted to vote for just lied straight to my face. So I'm backing his Green opponent. Last night I attended a local hustings for the General Election. The two candidates I was most interested to hear from were Andrew Smith (Labour) and Ann Duncan (Green). The Tory candidate pulled out due to a family emergency, and UKIP didn't bother to show up. The LibDem candidate…
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I remember the first time I saw a Swastika in India. It was gaudy red, painted on the back of a dusty yellow moped. The driver wore a helmet, but the woman riding pillion had only her sari to protect her head. India is different. The rules of the road are different. The languages are different. The colours, spices, and clichés are different. Over there, the स्वस्तिक is a symbol of auspiciou…
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(An adaptation of my earlier blog post on the same topic.) This is a case study focusing on the usability of encryption systems as used by political dissidents in Apartheid era South Africa. Background - South Africa Between 1948 and 1994, the nation of South Africa was ruled by an ethnically white minority. They set in place a system of government – known as Apartheid - which suppressed, b…
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One of the sessions I lead at Open Data Camp was "Open Data Horror Stories" - we talked about some of the disasters we've had when requesting or using Open Data. This lead on to a session ran by Gaia Marcus on how to create the "perfect" FOI request. This is not an exhaustive guide to making FOI requests. I strongly suggest that you read WhatDoTheyKnow's recommendations and FOI Man's Top Ten …
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Who made your iPhone? Sure, the back of the box says "Designed in California" - but who were the men and women who assembled your phone? How well are they treated? Are they paid well? Are they trapped in a living hell where many of them feel the only way out is suicide? Christoph Lutz@lutzid"achieve productivity or the sun will no longer rise." #foxconn slogan "motivating" their workers;…
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For the benefit of those who are hard of thinking: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. One of the delightful things about living in Oxford is that there are a wide range of events going on. Events run by people who I like, run by people I vehemently disagree with, events run by intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals alike. I enjoy hearing from a variety of people …
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I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses". The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were…
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My father tells a story of when I was very young and helping him do the shopping in the local supermarket. As I started to lift apples into a bag, he told me to stop, "We don't buy fruit from South Africa," he explained. A woman near us in the aisle turned to him and said, "Quite right too! Imagine all your fruit being touched by black people." At the time, South Africa was control by…
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In 1987 MI5's former Assistant Director, Peter Wright, released his autobiography. Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. It was immediately banned by the British Government. Although the Internet wasn't around to facilitate its distribution, it was trivial to obtain copies imported from Australia. As a boy, I remember seeing the publicity about it on the…
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Well, it's not often I get to completely influence the UK Government's approach to open standard. GOV.UK is adopting .ODF as their official document standard! All documentation will be also made available in HTML & PDF. Sweet! Yeah, yeah, so I only played a small part in the (no doubt) hideously complicated process - but I'm happy to take full credit :-) Last year, the UK Government opened…
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We moved house recently. It's always fun to see what choices the previous owners made - orange paint in the bedroom? Yeuch! While some choices are purely subjective - those light fittings? - other choices are simply illogical. Let's take water meters. Anyone in the UK can get a water meter fitted for free. The alternative is that the water company literally make up your bill! "Hmmmm, four…
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My current ISP is Virgin Media. They get a lot of stick for being a bit useless - but I can't fault the speed of my domestic connection. They recently upgraded me for free to 152Mbps downsteam (and a less impressive 12Mbps up). As part of this upgrade, they sent me an email stating: now that your broadband has been supercharged, on the house, why not put it to the test? You've got the UK's…
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