Alternate Seat of TYR

Well this is impressive; Polly Toynbee arguing that anyone who disagrees with ID cards is objectively pro-illegal immigrants being beaten up. Seriously; the argument is not that we need ID cards to keep the immigrants out, but that we need to cut the government some slack in order to stop them beating up illegal immigrants.
This [...]

I can’t begin to imagine why LibDem polls are up; especially as at the same time more of the population now oppose than support ID cards.

The Biggest Data Fart In The World Ever (BDFITWE) just keeps on getting better/worse. Check this out:
Sir John Bourn, the outgoing comptroller and auditor general, told a secret session of the public accounts committee that a senior business manager at Revenue & Customs had authorised the information to be released in its full form. His [...]

It’s usually the Home Office that leads the way in the British government’s eternal Olympics of stupidity; but now and again, someone is inspired to go that bit further, to be a tiger, to raise the bar.
Having built a monster centralised database of every last child in the UK, the Revenue burned it to a [...]

In Texas, a man suspected of homicide has escaped from prison. How he did it tells us something about the inevitable failure of ID cards, and the importance of false positives. Via Bruce Schneier.
What happened? Well, the suspected killer was in a cell with another remand prisoner, a car thief named Garcia. He memorised Garcia’s [...]

If you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds [...]

Except when they’re from Sony, of course. Sony, the company that offers you peace of mind; you *know* who hacked your stuff! I can’t think of anything particularly intelligent to say about this except that it’s bloody obvious something like this would happen. Recalling the original Sony rootkit, didn’t someone very quickly demonstrate it was [...]

There is no reason for anyone to think that the National Identity Register will not be compromised. Nobody serious in IT thinks that any networked computer system is immune to hackers, and that’s before you consider extrusion rather than intrusion; it’s a horrible misuse of English, but it’s the term used for attackers who come [...]

Climate-change denier and quack weatherman Piers Corbyn writes to the paper:
The problem for global warmers is that there is no evidence that changing CO2 is a net driver for world climate. Feedback processes negate its potential warming effects. Their theory has no power to predict. It is faith, not science. I challenge them to [...]

The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Agency, BKA) recently decided to try out one of those face recognition programs on CCTV cameras placed in a railway station in the city of Mainz. And what happened? Well, having installed the software in October last year, they recruited 200 regular travellers as volunteers, whose faces were recorded in [...]