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I love Twitter, the teeny tiny blogging platform. You get just 140 characters to post a link, a one-line joke, your mood, or whatever. The need for brevity and economy of language is a useful little mental exercise that can sharpen your writing and also produce a nice turn of phrase.

You can follow other Twitterers and interact/chat/argue with them. My Twitter feed is a one stop shop for nearly everything I do on the web. It amalgamates my posts from this blog, the photos on my moblog, and my link dump from del.icio.us, as well as being my miscellaneous brain dump, scratch pad and bullshit bucket.

As well as being a microblogging tool and a instant messenger doohicky, it’s also a great resource. You can sign up for updates from BBC News, Downing Street, and even the local weather. Third party software tools like Twhirl or Tweetr will squeak at you when new updates are posted by those feeds you are following.

I also follow the updates from Lib Dems. I suggested today that their Twitter feed was an automatic service or ‘bot’. Twitter is being rapidly infiltrated by spammers – who can easily be beaten – and I was rashly suspicious that the Liberals has resorted to similar nefarious tactics.

I’m glad to say I was wrong – I was sent categoric proof. The Lib Dem Twitter feed passes the Turing Test with flying colours.

Unless their publicity budget stretches to producing frighteningly realistic human simulacrums, that is.

Anyway, you should go and give Twitter a go. Let me know if you do and/or recommend me some good Twitter feeds. I’ll recommend Donald Strachan, Mike Power, and Robert Mugabe. And the very nice man on the end of the Lib Dem feed who isn’t a robot.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s giving one of those newly-fangled webchat things on April 17.

I’ve got a reasonable record on getting my questions asked of (if not exactly answered by) the Greater Good on these occasions. Margaret Hodge, David Miliband and even Tony Blair himself have failed to give adequate answers to questions submitted by me in the past.

So, let us address our concerns to the Home Secretary. I’ll award some form of prize for the best question submitted in the comments that actually gets asked of the Home Secretary.

Hey kids, ever wondered how new technology can help kill and maim people? Well, now’s your chance to find out!

Future soldier – from fiction to the frontline
Holographic quantum technology and acoustic sniper sensors may sound like the stuff of science fiction films – but they are actually new defence technologies which could soon be destined for the battlefield.

They were just a few of the gadgets and technologies on show at the Future Soldier event, held today at London’s National Army Museum to coincide with National Science and Engineering Week (7-16 March).

It’s a hearts and minds strategy to make our brave boys out in Iraqistan green with envy!

John Howe CB OBE, Vice Chairman of Thales UK, one of the industry sponsors of the event said:

“This is a marvellous opportunity to show young people how exciting science and technology are. Thales has world class capability in soldier systems, as the examples on display here today demonstrate.”

Soldier systems are marvellous, aren’t they? And exciting. That was exactly the emotion I felt looking at those pictures of that Iraqi kid with no arms. Excited.

Sir Kevin Tebbit, formerly part of the crew that outed Dr David Kelly and now Chairman of Finmeccanica UK, is boastful his company’s ‘vital role in support of the UK’s international security policy’:

We produce high quality equipment, have world beating technology, applied by a talented and dedicated work force…

You could certainly beat the world with a bunch of Finmeccanica’s ammunition or a brace of Target Drones. Or at least leave big parts of it feeling rather sore.

For budding young merchants of death and teenage fans of the old whizz-bang-AARGH! there are even resources for their teachers:

The MoD also provides support to teachers to deliver science and other key curriculum lessons via the free, online Defence Dynamics teaching resource. Covering themes as diverse as mapping, flooding, genetic engineering and survival skills.

All this use of the word ‘defence’ as a euphemism for firing hot and sharp pieces of metal into people’s bodies at high velocity. Not that there’ll be any explicit mention of the end result of ‘Defence Dynamics’ and ‘Soldier systems’. It doesn’t do to dwell on the effects on those on the receiving end, after all.

And co-opting kids into it, as well. Does that sound a bit creepy to you? Worry not.

[L]essons not only apply theory in the real world but also encourage students to debate the moral issues behind the introduction of new technology.

Even it if just kids as part of an indoctrination programme, thank God somebody is debating the moral issues. Maybe the arms dealers have outsourced it to them.

It’s difficult to know where to stand on the issue of water fluoridation. After listening to two days worth of pro- and anti- ‘experts’ shouting at each other on the radio, I’m still none the wiser.

Advocates insist that we need fluoride in the water if we’re not all to end up with cakeholes like Shane MacGowan. Those who are against say better that than bone cancer. Either alternative seems to have a grotty, unpleasant outcome.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson insists that ‘prevention is better than cure’. Fluoride in the water means fewer trips to the dentist. And with there being fewer and fewer NHS dentists these days, you can see why Alan might be keen.

When you think about it, adding chemicals to the water supply could cure all manner of ills. First, we should add Prozac to the water coolers on the floors of stock exchanges across the world, to stop the traders feeling gloomy and bringing about the self-fulfilling prophesy of a global financial crash.

Then it has to be LSD in the water supply for the general population – to make us all think we live in a magical wonderland where everyone is happy and performing their designated role with the optimum economic efficiency. Think of the money we could save on PR, spin doctors and all the other professional liars who are paid to tell us we’ve never had it so good and not to worry. Prevention is better than cure after all.

One of the side-effects of an excess intake of fluoride is apparently increased docility. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand. Personally, I hope Alan Johnson’s hands don’t shake when he’s adding the recommended dosage down at the water treatment plant.

Still not so worried about ID cards and their attendant massive database? Then how about this. This week’s Private Eye publishes extracts from Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, ‘[a]n explosive expose of the corruption entrenched in today’s media:

Reporters from the Mail to whom I spoke independently agreed that they had bribed not only police officers but also civil servants. For example, they targeted officials who had access to the massive database of the social security system, which registers the personal details of every British citizen with a national insurance number and every foreign national with a right to work in Britain – some 72 million private citizens. One reporter who has now left the paper recalled: ‘We used to use the social security computer as if it was an extension of the Daily Mail library. You phone your contact, have a chat, say you’re looking for such-and-such a guy, this age, rough location – is there any chance? Keep chatting. He says, “Oh, we’ve got five people of that name.” You say, “Well, givegive me all five.” You get home addresses, phone numbers, maybe workplace too. They get you information off the database, and you reward them with a dirty great meal or an envelope.’

Now, under the terms of the Identity Card Act 2006, if a person with access to the Identity Register who ‘provides any person with information that he is required to keep confidential’ can face ‘imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or [...] a fine. or [...] both’.

Why aren’t similar safeguards in place for the social security database? If not, why not? If they are, why aren’t they being enforced or acting as an adequate deterrent? Unless these provisions are made to provide the illusion of security for the public (see also, the towers of anti-terrorism legislation). There do seem to be measures of some sort in place. Davies again:

At one point, according to one Mail source, a reporter in the newsroom was bribing a Ministry of Defence police office who could access several databases, including Scotland Yard’s. Mail reporters separately claim that they also had regular access to what is arguably the most sensitive of all confidential information, the health records of some of their targets. As one Mail veteran put it to me: ‘If the Mail‘ go for you, they get every phone number you have dialled, every schoolmate, everything on your credit card, every call to your phone and to your mobile. Everything.’ Even if it is against the law.

My emphasis. This isn’t rocket science. Proper security would merely mean having to log every access to the database. That will take huge amounts of computer storage but, frankly, tough. Do it right or not at all. Then, if a person complains that their personal details have reached the public domain, it’s a simple procedure to review the access logs to see who’s been looking at that person’s details.

If the accesser doesn’t have a good reason, then it’s suspension, a trial and possibly ‘imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or [...] a fine. or [...] both’. You could sketch this idea on a napkin and have a small prototype system running in an afternoon. I should be in management consultancy.

The vital ingredient in this plan, of course, is political will. The will to implement the measures. The will to provide the resources to monitor and enforce the measures. And the will to prosecute transgressors. Oh, and a newspaper or two having the balls to a) shun these practices and b) blow the whistle on law-breaking rivals. Good luck.

Remember all this the next time you see a government minister defending the overall safety of our personal information. And remember all this the next time you see the Daily Mail bleating about the government losing our data and it maybe ending up in the wrong hands. We now know whose hands some of that data is ending up in.

Labour MP Tom Watson’s been promoted to the Cabinet Office in the recent reshuffle. He has some responsibility for government technology projects and is canvassing for ideas on his blog. Who knows if he’ll listen but the forum’s there, on the record.

If it were down to me I’d pretty much scrap nearly all government websites and start again. The Hansard site, for instance, is a disgrace, considering it’s the central repository for the record of our democracy. Have you tried using its advance search feature? It’s unbelievably awful and next to useless. TheyWorkForYou shows how it should be done.

In the meantime, there are plenty of tweaks that the existing sites could be given to at least give the visitor a little more confidence. At the minute, as I said in a piece for Liberal Conspiracy a little while back, the casual browser is very likely being put off at the outset and the serious information seeker needs tenacity bordering on monomania.

Not good for a government paying lip service to greater public engagement in the political process.

I love technology, I really do. I’ve got my iPod, digital camera, DVD player, bittorrent, mobile phone, tiny remote-control helicopters, blah, blah, blah. We really do live in the future. I first listened to the Beatles’ White Album on my parents’ radiogram some time in the early 1970s. Now, I carry those songs around in my pocket.

And now I’ve got my PVR – Personal Video Recorder. It’s basically a Freeview tuner bolted to a hard disc drive. You set the timer for a programme using the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and the box records that programme onto the hard drive for later viewing.

Except, what’s the point of an EPG that says a programme starts at X o’clock and ends at Y o’clock when the programme doesn’t start at X o’clock and end at Y o’clock? Or rather, what’s the point of a broadcaster who can’t begin and end a programme at the advertised time? It’s just as well bomb disposal experts aren’t so cavalier about time keeping. Imagine Olympic sprinting if everybody could start when they bloody well liked.

Video Cassette Recorders were clunky and the playback quality was naff but at least it would have recorded the end of ‘Three Men In Another Boat’ the other night and not cut out just before Griff Rhys Jones finds out how much his boat is worth. (I’m not proud I recorded TMIAB but I quite like Dara O Briain and it was the visual equivalent of Horlicks that brought my heartbeat back down to a safe level after having been to see I Am Legend.)

If I have to endure another session of tears from the kids because the PVR has clipped the end of Doctor Who or Robin bastard Hood, I’m going to find the home phone number of the Director General of the BB-shitting-C and phone him every time it happens so he can endure the lamentations of my children as well.

Like a government that was never going to be able to clean up the street of Basra when it couldn’t even scrape the dogshit off the streets of Brighton, surely we’re unlikely to see the cure for cancer (and, more importantly, jetpacks and flying cars) until we can get a television programme to begin and end on time?

The BBC are speculating about five cutting edge technologies that are expected to make the breakthrough in 2008. There are actually a few imminent innovations missing from the list. Here’s what else will make us glad to be alive in 2008.

Dry Unroasted – A genetically engineered, sexually transmitted disease that destroys the libidos of Premier League footballers.
For many years the holy grail for women, this development is all but ready for human trials after conclusive tests on tomcats. It is hoped that young women will be once more able to attend nightclubs and social functions in total safety and without being badgered into ’servicing’ the Manchester United midfield. The disease should have been ready several years ago but the laboratories were firebombed a number of times by tabloid newspaper editors.

The Rechargeable Twattery – An ennui-powered fuel cell.
Scientists – in conjunction with Rupert Murdoch’s News International – believe they have harnessed an almost inexhaustible new power source to replace dwindling fossil fuels: the apathy of the British public. Research has shown that that the higher the body count, the bigger the political crisis, or the more sickening the assault on our way of life by our elected representatives, the less of a shit the average British citizen actually gives. This process has the beneficial side-effect of generating gigawatts of apathy. By careful manipulation of newspaper headlines, soap opera storylines, lottery rollovers, lager prices and Ginsters sausage roll output, Britain will still be aglow long after more engaged and enlightened nations have slipped into the dark ages.

Aspiration Reduction and Sagacity Exchange – A brainwave manipulation device that significantly reduces the hopes and dreams of asylum seekers as a means of solving the immigration ‘crisis’.
Developed by government scientists in consultation with a coalition of right-wing thinktanks and newspaper editors. Administered at points of departure worldwide, the ARSE acts upon the optimism centre of an asylum seeker’s brain and makes them think they are coming to a miserable, unwelcoming and xenophobic land where they will be exploited for a pittance, rather than the sunny, welcoming, fair-minded and ripe-for-the-pillaging country – that they read about in Daily Mail – where they will get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

The Candom – A condom that turns into a can of export-strength lager after use.
Experts are confident that this innovation will solve the UK’s teenage pregnancy problem at a stroke. The device works by way of the heat and movement generated by the sexual act which triggers an accelerated fermentation process. The condom will be marketed under the slogan, ‘No Glove, No Glug‘.

alliswell™ – A revolutionary new anti-depressant drug.
Scientists have recently discovered an extremely rare chemical produced only in the brains of New Labour prime ministers. This chemical blocks the reality receptors in a person’s brain giving an overwhelming sense of never being wrong along with feelings of supreme confidence and control. Biochemists have been able to synthesise the chemical into a medicinal drug. Once in mass production, it is hoped alliswell™ will aid the wider public in dealing more easily with everyday pressures such as their incompetence, wars and criminal investigations.

Remember Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov and his lawyers Schillings wielding the big stick against Craig Murray’s and others’ webhost and bringing their sites down? Well, the virus is out in the open and mutating. This will sound familiar:

Dr Andy Lewis runs a website called Quackometer: he criticised the Society of Homeopaths (Europe ’s largest professional organisation of homeopaths) in no uncertain terms.

…

In his opinion, and he amassed some examples: they do not enforce their own “Code of Practice” (you’re not even allowed to imply you can cure a named disease!) it is a figleaf; and they fail to censure their members over dangerous claims.

…

Did the SoH engage with these criticisms? Reflect on them? Challenge and rebutt them? No. They sent a threatening legal letter. Did this threatening legal letter say what was wrong with Dr Lewis’s post? No. It wasn’t even sent to him, it was sent to his hosting company Netcetera, demanding they take his page down. He contacted the SoH, very politely (I mean incredibly politely, read it here), to ask them what the problems were with his comments. No response.

Instead their lawyers sent another angry letter to his hosting company, who of course cannot investigate this in full, are strictly speaking liable, and so – good call – the page was taken down. Corporate conspiracy silences the little man: except of course his piece has now been replicated a hundred times across the internet by an army of smirking bloggers.

It really is time to close the loophole in our libel laws that make webhosts liable for the content of their servers. You don’t blame the postman when bad news arrives in the mail.

Peter Risdon has more.

Remember Fastshosts, the webhost of Craig Murray’s and Tim Ireland’s (amongst others) websites? They folded faster than George Bush playing Snap after threats from Alisher Usmanov’s lawyers?

Well, their excellent service continues:

Cybercriminals are attempting to tarnish the reputation of a website designed to fight online money transfer frauds and other scams. UK hosts Fasthosts unwittingly played into their hands by temporarily suspending Bobbear.co.uk over the weekend in response to fraudulent emails.

I get ‘Joe Jobbed‘ from time to time. It’s a minor pain in the arse – I don’t have a reputation protect after all – but like warts tends to go away if ignored. Having a very professional, calm and collected webhost, unless their servers are being hammered by the attack, there’s no bother and things sail on as smoothly as before. Fasthosts should try it.

(Via PDF)

UPDATE: Tim has more.

Like a five year-old who’s learned to whistle, now the Tories have finally discovered the joys of animated web adverts, they just won’t shut up. They’re everywhere, howling away, thinking they’re clever, managing to make Facebook even shitter. What next? ‘William Hague invents the wheel’? ‘Look at my new dance, it’s called The Twist, says Cameron’?

However, Firefox users, a remedy is at hand:

Select a filter subscription when Adblock Plus starts up the first time…the filter subscription will block most advertisements fully automatically.

Your web-browsing experience is now free of condescension and pre-chewed political platitudes.

Added value: It also blocks Messagespace’s dross as well. Double bubble.

The database, which goes live next year, is to contain details of every one of the 11 million children in the country, listing their name, address and gender, as well as contact details for their GP, school and parents and other carers. The record will also include contacts with hospital consultants and other professionals, and could show whether the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether he or she needs extra help.

It will be available to an estimated 330,000 vetted users. Some of those allowed to check records, such as head teachers, doctors, youth offender and social workers, are uncontroversial, but critics have questioned why other potential users, such as fire and rescue staff, will have access to the database.

read the rest

(via Tim W.)

Update: And then there’s this:

Concerns have been intensified by the admission that, while every child under 18 in England will have a record, ministers have allowed some children to be given extra protection. The “shielding” mechanism will mean that information on the offspring of some politicians and celebrities could be left off the main database.

Over 500,000 names on the DNA database are false, misspelt or incorrect, the Government has admitted.

Ministers have disclosed that one in seven of the genetic profiles on the controversial database is a “replicate”, raising alarming questions about the integrity and accuracy of the entire system.

read the rest

(Via Philip)

There goes the day.

This via Ten Percent:

British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new “super weapon” to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday.

The “enhanced blast” weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US “bunker busters”.

There are, needless to say, nicer ways to go than being caught in a thermobaric blast:

According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, “The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant…. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.”

A second DIA study said, “shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue… it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.”

But it’s all ok:

The MoD said in a statement that it was buying “a small number of enhanced blast munitions for use on operations”. It added: “These have been procured in full accordance with the UK’s obligations under international humanitarian law.

Yay! for humanitarian thermobaric weapons! And, what’s more…

Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs were different. “They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]“, one said, adding that it would be misleading to call them “thermobaric”.

Sounds familiar. Anybody else remember then Defence Secretary John attempting to argue the moral merits of ‘fire bombs’ over napalm, the last time questionable military tactics were discussed? Afghan civilians must be praying that it’s a nice cool British thermobaric weapon that hits their house as opposed to one of them nasty hot American ones.

A few years back I got some spam email from a bloke saying he was from the future, his time machine was broken, and he needed funds to repair it. Does anyone know what happened to him?

This reminded me of him, and I wondered if he was still around:

The world’s most fearsome carnivore, Tyrannosaurus Rex, would have been able to chase down David Beckham, according to research.

Just asking, that’s all.

Still, it gives us the opportunity to imagine other useful comparisons.

‘Pterodactyls would have been able to beat Richard Littlejohn at Scrabble, according to research.’

‘Mammoths evolved into Chris Moyles, say scientists.’

‘Velociraptors had the morals of Rupert Murdoch, according to a new study.’

Update: And here it is! The race of this, and any other, century*.

*David Beckham was a non-starter.

And so, to Devil’s Dyke yestereve to witness The Perseids, the annual meteor shower created by the Earth passing through the tail of the comet, Swift-Tuttle.

The shower’s unalloyed cosmic joy and beauty was somewhat tempered by the accompanying shower of idiots on the ground. There was the berk who thought it a sensible idea to set up his motorised telescope using a torch that blazed with the power of a thousand suns. He took an age and then it turned out the telescope’s batteries were flat. Then there was the stupid guitar-toting hippy who nearly trampled us because he was walking across the ground with his eyes shut.

Lying on our backs, as the majestic arc of the Milky Way wheeled above us and the shooting stars leapt through the sky like tigers defying the laws of gravity, the soundtrack to the spectacle was provided by the man some way off to our left who complained incessantly. His stiff neck, the evening’s temperature and the fact that he was only getting a mere one meteor a minute as opposed to, presumably, an aaargh-my-eyes Day of the Triffids style spectacular.

When we got back to the car we found that, in the darkness, we’d laid the blanket on top of a massive dog egg. Never before had I longed so hard for the heat death of the universe.

Please say no.

What’s this Facebook all about then?* I only signed up because I’m vain, someone was linking to here from inside it and I couldn’t find out who it was without joining myself.

I now find I have two friends there. The estimable island-traversing Nick Barlow and rolly-smoking posho J. Clive Matthews (he’s very sweet really). Two blokes I know and like in the real world and who I could probably have pint with at almost any time if only I could be arsed dragging my sorry carcass off the settee.

Nick kindly informs me that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. Which, no offence to Nick, fills me with that free-floating end-of-days ennui that’s doing the rounds these days. Not panic as such, just a resigned sinking-feeling that it largely really is all over for us, culturally at least.

Are our egos so damaged in the swirling mass of eschatological turds that is modern life that we fluff them with online lists of ‘friends’? Christ, at least with MySpace you run the risk of stumbling over a decent tune or two.

Facebook, however and unless I’m missing something pretty fundamental, is culturally devoid of such rare treats. It merely serves the same purpose as a pen and paper and the nagging suspicion that you’re not as popular as you think or would like to be. Dammit, you’re going to make a list to prove it ain’t so. It’s a pissing contest against yourself. Grow up.

*If someone says it’s a ‘networking’ tool, they are banned from this blog forever and I will hunt them down and bludgeon them to death with a table leg. Networking, as I’ve said before, is the hateful and misanthropic practice of pretending to like someone you don’t in order to extract from them something you want.

Bored and following this post from Chris, I’ve discovered the wonders of Twitter. It’s blogging via your mobile phone as far as I’m concerned.

You send up to 140 characters via text message to a given number and it appears on your Twitter page. Something to keep me amused for a bit.

Those who wish to can receive a Twitterer’s posts via their mobiles or Instant Messenger. A little jiggery pokery lets you post your ‘tweets’ on your blog as well – see in the sidebar on the right under ‘out and about’.

I think I might liveblog my trip to the pub tonight. Bet you can’t wait.

Terrible news arrives via Devil’s Kitchen that blogger’s blogger and all round good egg Chris Lightfoot died unexpectedly and long before his time on February 11th.

I wondered if something was in the wind last week when somebody reached Chicken Yoghurt by googling Chris and him having died. I then heard him mentioned in a podcast shortly afterwards and so assumed that he was alive and well. Sadly, not.

I knew Chris only vaguely via his excellent blog, the fantastic websites he would build to help foster political engagement, and his occasional kind offers – to webhost sites for other bloggers looking for a home – that would circulate various email groups.

You can read here and here just what an impressive man he was.

Tom Steinberg of MySociety says of Chris: ‘It doesn’t stretch the truth an inch to say that with his death the whole of the UK’s citizenry, not just his family, friends and colleagues, will be worse off’.

Update: Tim Ireland says it better. And a heartbreaking number of tributes are coming in.

Update 8/3: A comprehensive list of tributes is being kept on Chris’ site.

Futurama was The Simpsons’ much misunderstood younger cousin, running for four seasons before being being cancelled by dullard Fox Network suits. The show, it would seem however, remains influential.

In the episode, ‘Crimes of the Hot‘, as the planet looks doomed at the hands of global warming, malevolently dweebish scientist Ogden Wernstrom announces:

‘I have placed in orbit a giant mirror that will reflect 40% of the sun’s rays, thus cooling Earth.’

The plan comes unstuck when a piece of space debris hits the mirror, spinning it so it becomes a giant magnifying glass, scorching a furrow across the planet.

I guess the Bush administration turned the episode off before it got to that part:

The US government wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.

Of course, if that doesn’t work, they could always go with a Futurama Plan B from the same episode:

‘…we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.’

Sorted.

Update: How US government scientists hope the Earth will look in 2050.

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Patricia Hewitt’s got a little list…

At the beginning of November we had this:

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.

Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added. The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

Now, (via the excellent Philip), at the beginning of December, we have this:

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government’s reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for “full consideration”.

‘Full consideration’. The Secretary of Health would like to give you her full consideration. Sod the privacy of patients frightened of what an authoritarian government, that has been shown time and time again to be darkly mendacious and comedically incompetent, might be capable of. Patricia wants to know who you are.

Just what that ‘consideration’ will involve other than creating another little database, this time of dissidents, and then tossing the letters in the trash, isn’t clear. The Government’s response seems to be a polite ‘get stuffed‘:

The department’s response to people [...] explains that it will not agree to their request to stop the process of adding their information to the new NHS database. The department does not believe that processing their information in this way is a genuine reason linked to substantial and unwarranted distress.

This form letter (pdf) sent out to all those good enough to submit their misgvings, along with their names and addresses, to the authorities is full of warm reassurance:

While a few doctors have said that the Spine could have been designed in a different way, the majority – including some of the most senior and respected doctors in the country – are supportive and believe that it will improve delivery of healthcare to patients.

There are those who disagree. You have to wonder how much of a comfort that is to Helen Wilkinson who…

…was mistakenly labelled an alcoholic after a simple computer error by the NHS. An unknown official at a hospital was updating her medical records and inputted a wrong code. The mix-up meant she was recorded as having received treatment for alcoholism, instead of surgery.

Wouldn’t you call that ’substantial and unwarranted distress’? And how about this:

She was also angry that the records had been shared with a private company which distributes personal medical records to academic researchers [...] In 2003 she was contacted by researchers a week before she was due to have an operation.

The thing is, and it can’t be pointed out enough, the people forcing this on us are the last people who are going to have to rely on it. Are you seriously telling me that Gordon Brown’s son will have nothing but the finest care for his cystic fibrosis? That he’ll suffer the vagaries of the system as pointed out by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust? (Word document). Tony Blair was lucky enough to get the catheter ablation he needed to sort his dodgy ticker. Others haven’t been as fortunate.

Is it any wonder that people refuse to sign OurPetition, the petition asking ‘elected representatives of all UK political parties voluntarily refrain from self-paid or insurance-paid medical care treatment’. The former Tory leader Michael Howard was just the latest:

I cannot sign your petition for a number of reasons. First, the number of letters I receive from my constituents suggests that very many people have to use private healthcare not through the desire to jump the queue and the system, but because it is necessary for their own health. Such is the state of NHS dentistry, for example, that many people have no option but to use the private sector.

It looks, once again, that we’ll have to put our faith in governmental incompetence and hope the system never sees the light of day in full ‘working’ order. That you have to hope your government is as stupid as you suspect it is in order to secure peace of mind just shows how low we’ve come.

In the future, said British politics’ very own Lawnmower Man, David ‘Dave’ Cameron this week, political battles will be fought in cyberspace. As he strapped on his virtual reality goggles to launch the Conservative’s new down-with-the-kids ‘Sort-It’ website, he declared the ‘internet revolution’ is ushering in ‘a whole new age of political communication and engagement’ where ‘the old answers will not work’.

Now, to run the terrible, if unlikely, risk of sounding less cool than Cameron, we’d like to ask if the ‘old’ ways of political communication and engagement have really had their day. You know, the quaint, unfashionable stuff like going out and talking to people. Obviously, neither Cameron nor Blair like meeting the public face to face in uncontrolled situations because there are too many variables and too many chances they’ll be made to look like idiots. But it’s a problem of their own making.

(more…)

Like a Chinese puzzle, fiendish but beautiful in its simplicity. From Silicon.com we have:

Biometrics cut pub brawls by a quarter
A biometric scheme that scans drinkers’ thumbprints before they enter a pub has helped cut alcohol-related crime in the South Somerset town of Yeovil.

Then (via Jamie) we have this from the Register:

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide
[Julia] Bradburn [principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council] could not say if fingerprint security in Yeovil had displaced crime to neighbouring towns, but she noted that domestic violence had risen in Yeovil.

There’s the rub. Out of sight out of mind. Just what a violent man would do with himself when turned away from the pub doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody. Let’s put him under house arrest where he can contribute to his very own 7/7 (or two).

Chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences. Or, if you like, crude utilitarianism. Are fewer women killed by their partners each year than punters in pub fights?