Session acoustique de Scritti PolittiGreen packed his guitar and trundled off to lovely Paris in summerlike spring to do an acoustic session at Radio Planet Claire. You can visit the, ehm, rather quaint website and listen to the live stream at the 57 minute mark. Or you can just listen here!
Songs played: Snow In Sun, Robin Hood, Road To No Regret.
http://bibbly-o-tek.com/2006/05/11/session-acoustique-de-scritti-politti/
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA08117.mov
A beautiful rendering of the Huygens probe decent. With Bells and Whistles.
Okay as i mentioned earlier it is perfectly feasible to keep personal taxation at the local level, this would allow a more locally accountable spending of tax revenue etc, etc.
Now what if we increased that decentralisation further and said that individuals could offset direct contributions to local services against their tax. To keep things simple we don’t do this for basic rate tax payers. But for other tax bands you could allow a third-to-a-half of the tax burden to directly fund local services. To prevent fraudulent charities springing up this would be from a list audited (but not prescribed) by local government.
Why bother? Because such an approach could engender a philanthropic mindset amongst the majority of the population, people would be able to determine how their taxes are spent i.e. tax spending becomes more democratic. Service providers will become directly accountable to tax payers who will can legitimately demand to see how their tax money is used – if it is spent well the services are likely to get similar contributions the next year if not the money will likely go elsewhere.
Once you get people into a philanthropic mindset when they have small amounts of money to allocate to services and if this is seen as an opportunity not a burden then I believe they will be more likely to pursue such philanthropy (bolstering services that they may have previously allocated money to) if they become more affluent.
And why would common philanthropy be advantageous – because dispersed spending increases the likelihood of money being spent productively on services, rather than on schemes which bolster the State and its networks of favoured contractors and consultancies.
Well well well; another instance of everything being moved to a centralized database. Note how it says that the paperwork is not proof of you having your MOT, the only proof being held at the computer itself. If that is the case, why issue the certificate at all?
Clearly this is the desired end result of the NIR rollout; only your entry at the NIR will be taken as proof of your identity, presentation of a card will not be enough. The reason that will be given will be as follows:
If you want to rent a room to someone and want to be sure that they do not have a criminal record, we suggest that you use the new internet or telephone services. Think that this is a way out extrapolation? The Identity service already touts this as one of the things it will do for you, and it gives the example of a parent wanting to check if a potential nanny has a criminal record or not. They WILL allow you to do this by telephone, because the demand for this service will be so great it will be impossible to put people in charge of handling the requests.
Now, on to the subject of the MOT itself. On the reverse of this leaflet, it says that:
The MOT test is not a substitute for regular servicing, and passing the MOT test does not mean that your vehicle will remain safe for the following twelve months.
So, what on earth is the MOT actually for? It is not a guarantee of safety, it cannot be relied upon by a third party, so why are you compelled to do it every 12 months? It is totally absurd, and another tax, plain and simple.
Other countries do very well without this pointless exam; its just another way to fleece the car driving population.
You should not have to pay for an MOT unless you are getting something in return. That means that it should be voluntary, and that if you do decide to get an MOT, HMG should underwrite your car for faults for a period of time. ‘Not going to happen’ I hear you cry. I agree. Government has no business doing anything like the MOT.
But you know this.
… is now in charge of UK transport policy. He is “a professional politician, whose rise in Labour ranks has been relentless, from the moment he started to work as a researcher for Gordon Brown in 1990“.
A professional politicain. Uber-Gimp, he will dress in your favoured costume and perform un-nameable feats for your delight as long as it progresses his career.
He has no background in transport, knows nothing of running multi-billion pound turnover enterprises. Yet he now sets UK transport policy.
Uber-Gimp, most importantly, does not have the best interests of the public at heart. For one, he has no heart. And two, he does not believe he serves the public, despite being nominally a public servant. He believes, in fact, that the public are fortunate to have him to run their pathetic little lives for them.
Uber-Gimp believes only he can Make Life Better©.
And his first declaration is: to announce a £10m fund for the development of nationwide road charging schemes.
He hopes new technology will allow drivers to be charged by the mile.
[…]
What new technology, pray tell? Without even unwrapping our crystal ball we see through the swirling mists to a near-future Utopia, where your car is registered via the DVLA to your NIR entry.
In this heavenly, terror-free, fraudless hinterland every journey you make will be logged as your number plate is scanned at every junction.
Imagine the freedom that comes with such luxury! Imagine, some other upwardly-mobile Gimp sat at a console somewhere diligently refusing road access to all the undesirables. Imagine…
Uber-Gimp.
H L Mencken said it better.
>> When I use a shop with the “swipe and dock” design card readers (such
>> > > as Tesco) that read your magstripe, chip and ask for a PIN, I despair
>> > > that so many consumers are being taught to accept having their cards
>> > > skimmed in this way.
>> > >
>> > >
> > The PIN is encrypted in the keypad. So do the reports say how it has
> > been recovered?It is not encrypted in the keypad under the SDA system used in the UK. (There is a more expensive DDA system in which it is encrypted, using the card’s public key, but UK banks prefer not to pay an extra dollar for cards that are capable of public key crypto.)
The effect is that the PIN travels in the clear from the Tesco PIN pad to the swipe-and-dock reader on the side of the checkout girl’s PC. So it can be captured by the PC software, along with the transaction data (which even in the case of a chip[ transaction contains all the information you need to clone a mag stripe card). In consequence I will not use a card at Tesco.
It’s not even necessary to Trojan the keypad (and the Shell terminals were Linux-based, so might have been reflashed rather than had their hardware hacked – we’ll have to wait for the trial to find out).
The first such scam I came across was in Holland where a petrol station attendant got PINs by eyeball and for the card data from a network sniffer. That was in 1994. The same technology will still work fine today.
And I recall that when I predicted all this, a year or two ago, the APACS lady said I was speaking ‘tosh’…
You know, maybe someone should make a formal complaint to the police against APACS for fraud. Fraud is misrepresentation leading to prejudice, and 15 years of persistent lying about ATM system security – to enable their member banks to deny genuine claims from customers who have been the victims of crimes resulting from the banks’ own negligence – must surely fall within that definition.
Ross
[…]
This is yet another reason to not shop at Tesco.
News from non English speaking news sources, translated into English:
http://watchingamerica.com/index.shtml
for free.
ONE of America’s most famous fraudsters arrived in London yesterday to warn Britain about identity theft.
Frank Abagnale, 58, whose life story inspired the Leonardo DiCaprio film Catch Me If You Can, is to advise banks, utility companies and large retailers on how to combat fraud.
His advice to the Government is that identity cards will provide new and greater opportunities for identity theft. And he has told the public: never trust e-mail, buy a “criss-cross” shredder and employ a security company to monitor your bank account 24 hours a day.
Mr Abagnale’s CV includes a five-year spell in which he cashed $2.5 million (£1.3 million) from bad cheques, successfully assumed eight identities and passed himself off as a paediatrician, a lawyer and a pilot for Pan Am.
When he was finally arrested in 1969, Mr Abagnale was wanted by authorities in 26 countries and, after serving sentences in France and Sweden, was returned to the US and jailed for 12 years.
In 1974 he was released on the condition that he worked for the FBI. He has since worked for the US Government for 30 years and built a business advising American banks and companies on fraud prevention. He told The Times yesterday that identity theft, which began in America, was rapidly taking hold in Britain.
“I wrote a book about it in the 1980s,” he said. “There were few victims at that time, about 750,000. In 2000 I wrote another book called The Art of Steal. By then there were ten million victims. Now there is one every four seconds.”
In Britain, according to recent figures released by Cifas, the not-for-profit fraud prevention organisation set up by the credit card industry, identity theft rose by 17 per cent in the first three months of this year.
Besides being permanently suspicious of e-mails, Mr Abagnale said, individuals should regularly monitor their credit file — the information held by the credit reference agencies — to check which organisations have accessed it.
When destroying financial documents they should use a “criss-cross” shredder, which turns them into confetti, rather than one that cuts to strips as they can be reassembled.
In a list of 14 tips Mr Abagnale also urged people to take out “identity theft protection”. PrivacyGuard is one of a number of companies that monitor credit reports, alerting customers by text message if anyone attempts to tamper with or steal their identity.
If a theft is detected the company offers £10,000 of cover, which will also go towards the cost of reclaiming your identity. Three credit bureaus in Britain provide a similar service for between £50 and £70 a year.
Plans to introduce identity cards will be even more problematic because “there will be so much information about someone on one card”, Mr Abagnale said. “It’s more information to steal. You will be dealing with someone in a government office on a low salary. The details are going to be vulnerable. These sorts of cards are very easy to forge.”
Your treatment of an educated historian is beyond belief. You have persecuted David Irving just for having a thought process that differs from yours, in other words your thought police have struck again.How dare you jail a human for expressing free thought, because as free people, free thought is our right.If you disagree with what David Irving has said then I challenge you to dabate this issue with him, i.e. a confrontation of evidence provided by both side with an independent ‘judge’. Somehow however I think you have not got the guts for that.The free world condems your thought police and your repressive thought laws.
http://www.petitiononline.com/DavidI/petition.html
The pathetic Guardian is baying for some Egyptian Bloggers to be freed from gaol and for everyone to write to the Egyptian Government to make it happen; a ‘lights on’ commenter pointed out that David Irving was in jail just for thinking wrong thoughts, and that everyone should support him also, to the usual scripted written and unwritten howls of ‘he should burn in hell’.
It does’nt work like that. Either all are free to write or none are free. You cannot selectively support freedom of speech. Of course, The Guardian considers brown skinned people, the chinese, South Americans en masse etc as a sort of pet that needs to be protected, wheras Irving is a ‘full human being’ who really ‘should know better’. That is their nature.
They should be pressing for the absurd laws in the UK to be put down. They should be pressing for David Irving to be released immediately. Better that they should solve their own problems before they tell other people how to live.
Lead by example should be the motto, but Britian can scarcely do this anymore as it turns, at the hands of a very criminal few, into the very sort of country people died to prevent it becoming.
Petrol giant Shell has suspended chip-and-pin payments in 600 UK petrol stations after more than £1m was siphoned out of customers’ accounts.
Eight people, including one from Guildford, Surrey and another from Portsmouth, Hants, have been arrested in connection with the fraud inquiry.
The Association of Payment Clearing Services (Apacs) said the fraud related to just one petrol chain.
Shell said it hoped to reintroduce chip-and-pin as soon as possible.
Plastic crime
The racket is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police cheque and plastic crime unit.“These Pin pads are supposed to be tamper resistant, they are supposed to shut down, so that has obviously failed,” said Apacs spokeswoman Sandra Quinn.
She said Apacs was confident the problem was specific to Shell and not a systemic issue.
A Shell spokeswoman said: “Shell’s Chip & PIN solution is fully accredited and complies with all relevant industry standards.
Chip and pin cards are designed to prevent fraud
“We have temporarily suspended chip and pin availability in our UK company-owned service stations.
“This is a precautionary measure to protect the security of our customers’ transactions.
“You can still pay for your fuel, goods or services with your card by swipe and signature.
“We will reintroduce chip and pin as soon as it is possible, following consultation with the terminal manufacturer, card companies and the relevant authorities.”Shell has nearly 1,000 outlets in the UK, 400 of which are run by franchisees who will continue to use chip-and-pin.
BP is also looking into card fraud at petrol stations in Worcestershire but it is not known if this is connected to chip-and-pin.[…]
And of course, the braind dead imbecile ‘journalist’ who wrote this did not relate it to ID cards, which is the logical extrapolation. Let us now, BLOGDIAL style, recast it from the future:
The National Identity Authority has suspended the NIR after more than 1m identities were compromised and personal details were siphoned out of citizen’s accounts.
Eight people, including one from Guildford, Surrey and another from Portsmouth, Hants, have been arrested in connection with the hacking inquiry.
The NIR said the fraud related to a petrol chain, where the NIR terminals had been subjected to a networked hack.
The NIR said it hoped to reintroduce the Identity verification service as soon as possible.
Plastic crime
The racket is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police ID and plastic crime unit.“These NIR terminals are supposed to be tamper resistant, they are supposed to shut down, so that has obviously failed,” said NIR spokeswoman Sandra Quinn.
She said the National Identity Authority was confident the problem was specific to Shell and not a systemic issue.
A Shell spokeswoman said: “Shell’s NIR solution is fully accredited and complies with all relevant government standards.
ID cards are designed to prevent fraud
“We have temporarily suspended NIR availability to prevent further compromise of personal information.
“This is a precautionary measure to protect the security of our citizens data.
“You can show your card for level three verification of your identity to buy fuel, goods or services with your card by swipe and signature.“We will reintroduce full NIR service as soon as it is possible, following consultation with the terminal manufacturer, card companies and the system administrators.”
Shell has nearly 1,000 outlets in the UK, 400 of which are run by franchisees.
BP is also looking into NIR hacking at petrol stations in Worcestershire but it is not known if this is connected to the Shell hack.
heh… ‘Shell hack’!!
And there you have it. This WILL happen if the NIR is rolled out, and your data WILL be compromised if you join it.
Do not register for the NIR under any circumstances. There. I said it again.
As I sit in this cage, stressing with prisoners at a very young age thats protesting for freedom.The moon is invisible, with 4 corner walls America is miserable, she has slave them all.
Peace and love, no longer remain the best had corrupted the sanity of man.
Cage down with the key, that is thrown away with fences all around, so we won’t escape.
Capturing my freedom a day at a time that is overwhelmed by this cement, divating the mind.
Still my ambitionis optimistic is what keep me sane, with my mind realistic, that is forever the same.
This constant illumination has agitated the human species, detrimenting and corruping that individuals into picies, of freedom of thought, speech and conscious, is being control divided and conquer.
As I wake up in the morning unable to visual the sunrise I’m commanded to submit, just to stay alive.
As I write weekly letters to my mother I weep into emotion as I stare at her pictures.
Solitude has become the number one domination that compel individuals into a diabolitical segregation.
[…]
Poem by a prisoner suffering the SuperMax system in the USA.
In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK’s national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks.
He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology.
America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars. […]
Profile – Gary McKinnon
“I found out that the US military use Windows,” said Mr McKinnon […]
The defence rests, m’lud!
See also: Hacker fears ‘UFO cover-up’ … with video interview from today.
“In a planned emergency reshuffle, designed by the fanatical regime leader Blair to deflect attention away the disastrous election results and more importantly from the systemic rot that has taken over thereby evading the real point that nobody wants New Labour period, Blair has finally sacked his most useful pet: the porcine fabricator Charles Clarke:
“Charles Clarke has said he does “not agree” with Tony Blair’s decision to sack him as home secretary […] Mr Clarke told the BBC he could have “carried through” the reforms needed to the Home Office following the furore over foreign criminals in the UK.
The prime minister had to make “hard judgements”, Mr Clarke said, adding that he remained a supporter.” BBC
In a bizarre response to this long-overdue sacking of the hog-wild liar, Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti got it all wrong in describing Clarke as some kind of statesman and hero who we all dotingly looked up to during the London bombings:
“His finest moment was hours after the London bombings last July. As frightened people hung on his every word, he made vital distinctions between distasteful speech and cold-blooded murder and admitted that ID cards would not have prevented the atrocity. He forgot party politics and demonstrated what a home secretary could and should be”
That’s not how I remember it, I recall a grandstanding dungeon keeper telling the country how many civil liberties they needed to give up to win in the Clash of Civilizations. And who’s Home Office was deliberately and maliciously leaking stories about de Menezes’ visa to revise his death and then protecting the most flawed sociopathic cretin ever to head up the Met who tried to cover up the investigation and who misled the public about the state execution?
There’s a time and place for measured language but this wasn’t it, Chakrabarti is miles off course on this one. Clarke’s finest moment was in getting sacked today and then squeeling like the wild boar he is as he realises he has no purpose outside of whatever slops Blair threw his way. Sadly he has been replaced by ‘preventative war’ advocate, bruiser and Labour attack dog John Reid.”
[…]
More brilliance from Jultra.
Look at this page showing UK government expenditure and Tax Revenue;
You will see that expenditure that is necessarily financed centrally amounts to only about a fifth of the total. Even if you are an 0ld 5k00l p1nk0-c0mm13 and include all of Health and Education that’s still only about half of expenditure that needs to be centrally funded.
If you scroll down to how where this money comes from you will see that only about half of the revenue comes from direct personal taxation.
Now if central government were to rightly devolve to local government the responsibilities for raising and spending tax income for the 50% plus that does not require central funding(with a small amount of redistribution to account for poorer areas) ALL personal taxation could be gathered and spent locally, and if you can bear to devolve education and health then you could include a large dollop of ‘Other’.
Basically I am showing you that there is no absolute reason (or absolutely no reason) for central government to directly tax individuals even if you keep current Government spending levels.
Now isn’t that peachy?
Someone just sent me this by email:
Hi. You probably saw this, but tie it with ID cards and you get a recipe for disaster…
A deer hunter who took his photographs to a supermarket for processing was shocked to find himself reported to police.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/30/ntesco30.xml
Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, replied that staff had acted appropriately: “On being asked to view the prints, our store’s management team decided that there was cause for concern and as such contacted the police.”
A second letter on behalf of Sir Terry said: “Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community? We are confident that the actions of our staff were? within the law.”
Yet they set the police on someone who had not broken any law merely because the store’s management team decided there was cause for concern?
Imagine what they could do to you if you had to have your ID card scanned when you dropped off the film. […]
Imagine indeed. Someone of the level of a Tesco’s checkout counter staffer being able to affect your NIR record detrimentally. This will happen, there will be no avenue of redress, and the boss of Tesco thinks its ‘appropriate’.
It’s your own fault if this happens to you. First of all, you should not be shopping at Tesco. Secondly, if you are INSANE enought to enter the NIR, this and much worse will happen to you and it will be YOUR FAULT for OBEYING LIKE A SHEEP.
We got our electricity bill today; our provider announces on the envelope that it is now a member of Nectar.
Opening the envelope, we see that we have been sent a registration form, that gladly declares:
“We are already collecting points for you!”
To get you started we are already reserving Nectar points for you. Your reserved points are shown on the right hand side of this statement and wil be held until 14 January 2005…Over 1 million customers have already registerd their Nectar cards with us.
The form has your customer account number on it, and your post code under the space where you sign and date.
Now, if a national ID card scheme is introduced, (this translates to “If Labour win the next General Election” because the Tories have promised that they will scrap the idea…ha ha) Your NID will be connected to your Nectar card to your Electricity bill, to your postcode, to your telephone number etc etc, and all of this will be available to any one of the entities that you are getting a service from, and ALL of this will be available to Nectar, since they are clearly trying to forge relationships with anyone who sells anything to anyone on a large scale.
Nectar will have information on every shopper – fine grained information that would make any marketer faint with extacy at the prospect of the super detailed profiles that could be built with the data.
Imagine it; you already get personalized postcards from supermarkets, printed with your name made of flowers; imagine this data being used to tell you about things that you are 100% certain to be interested in. Its a very compelling and seductive idea – from both ends – because it would be useful as a shopper to be informed of things that you might want to eat or read, just like TIVO tells you what you might want to see on TV. Oh yes, they WILL be joining Nectar, them and SKY also.
You would never miss a bargain, a new product or special offer, and you get points for buying these things that you know you want. That is pure seduction. That is a cause to give up your privacy.
Of course, all of this could be done anonymously, but then the benefit would be purely to the customer, and the essential demographic analysis bussiness model of Nectar would be destroyed.
Privacy will be taken very seriously when Nectar is everywhere, and there is very little privacy; in other words, when it becomes scarce. When that happens, people will pay for privacy.
There will be legions of people and services providing privacy, in the same way that there are professional dog walkers in the major cities of the world. You will pay someone to do your shopping for you, in their name though the goods will be going to you. These Dorian Greys will take on all the sin of your shopping, and heap it onto themselvs, leaving your record clean and lean. Your ID will show that you never buy anything, except (if you are careless) the services of one or two people, who might not even be real people, who will seem to have the buying power of 100 human economic units.
Dont worry, this does not mean that you will loose your Nectar points. The Dorian Greys will keep perfect accounts of what was spent on your behalf, anynmoysly, and your points will be redemed for you on whatever you desire. You will get it all, the anonymity AND the privacy.
I personally know people who already do this. They use a network of friends to collect packages for them, who dont mind if their address is used on forms, and who know what to do when an unexpected package arrives for that “JANE EYRE” woman whose mail always ends up at the house unexpectedly. These people use cash only of course, and when they need to buy something from Amazon, they have a friend who does that for them, including recieving the books of course.
Obviously this being the age of the internet, there will be organized identity swapping sites so that you can break the trail that follows you around. “NctarSwap.com” register it right now. There is a problem with this however, if you have a Nectar card and swap it for one that was used to collect points when someone was buying someting fradulently, you could be swept up when you tried to use it. Also, these cards will have so much information on them that is personal to you, it would be …unwise… to swap it with anyone at all, so scratch that last paragraph. Partially. You get the picture; identity swapping will be organized on a massive scale, by the same type of vigilante that creates sites like bugmenot. Demand will make these services appear.
Scarcity.
Demand.
“Never before have we been so contented”*
[…]
From BLOGDIAL
That post was made on Saturday, the July 24th, 2004, at 7PM.
*Never before have we been so contented, never before has life been so satisfying…
A referendum of bliss, a fabrication of gratification sustained by the benevolence of authority…
the inadequacies of the human personality are rapidly being overcome by the social processes of advancing technology. Component lowness, a sophisticated stimulation is the answer.
The humanity of authority is proudly contemporary.
Control through companionship, combined with economic advantages of the mating structure far surpasses any disadvantages in increased perversions. A final…an infinite translate in the mathematics of tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary.
Stimulating rhetoric. Absolute. The theater of noise is proof of our potential. The circulation of autotypes. The golden talisman underfoot is the phenomenon approaching, and, in the history of now, our ethos of design.
(Institute for Fiscal Studies, April 2005)
The area under the line represents how much your life is p0wn3d by the State.
————————————————–
“Government, what long arms you have!”
“All the better to arrest you with, my dear.”
“Government, what big lies you have!”
“All the better to ruin you with, my child.”
“Government, what big fears you make!”
“All the better to scare you with, my child.”
“Government, what big cctv you have!”
“All the better to see you with, my child.”
“Government, what big taxes you get!”
“All the better to beat you up with.”
