Privacy, security and politics in the digital world

Digital rights news links from around the globe.

My digital photos

My bookmarks

A scary thing that spies on my music tastes.

Comments I have left around the intertubes

Social networking

My OpenID login on LiveJournal - used for keeping up with contacts and commenting on journals.

Groovy online news aggregator and personalised homepage.

My user ID on the Open Rights Group's wiki

News for nerds, stuff that matters.

The original blog search engine

What am I doing right now?

Online event aggregator

If it would save just one child, it must be worth it, right? Well, hundreds of children die on the roads every year, yet we do not ban motor vehicles; many children fall down flights of stairs and break their necks, yet we do not ban multi-storey buildings; and dozens of underage drinkers are hospitalised every weekend, yet we do not ban alchohol. If we did all these things, the results would be amazing: child casualty figures would drop through the floor. So why do we not? Surely, if it would save just one child… Our society does NOT make protection of its members its first priority, to the exclusion of all others. It is a system of carefully balanced benefits and disadvantages. In the case of wholesale surveillance of the population, the benefits are massively outweighed by those disadvantages. That's why it's still a bad idea, even if children die who might have lived if they were being surveilled.

This is me, but I no longer work for Thales. Don't try to contact me there.

A cool stream of web wonders. No longer maintained.

A frivolous passtime that used to entertain me. I got bored of my own voice so it's no longer maintained.

My University's union IT committee; now sadly defunct. I wrote their webpages from 2000-2001, and ran their BBS for a year too. Use the internet archive link (31-Mar-01) to see my handy-work.

A namesake moderator on this forum is a prolific poster with some Technorati authority (thanks to his postings of HDTV broadcast schedules, I think). He's not me.

This is actually quite a common misconception thanks to school registers being printed surname first. Despite my sharing a birthday with Richard Plantagenet, I'm not quite 849 years old yet.

I wish I were this good at photography, but I'm not. This is someone else.

I am not a Hollywood sound engineer, though I wish I were.

I enjoy snooker, but I'm not very good. This player is someone else.