Archives: Politics (Page 3)
Bad Phorm
September 22, 2008 at 23:44 by Mike McQuaid
So apparently the UK government doesn’t care about a private company wiretapping its citizens and giving them to another company (for money) as long as when they roll it out to everyone they are sure to ask for permission first (i.e. most probably at the end of a huge EULA).
I can’t say I’m surprised but I am pretty disappointed. When it first emerged on The Register that Phorm had been monitoring the internet communications of BT customers I was a BT employee. When it came out that BT outright lied on to those tech-savvy customers who raised the issue my opinions of my employer had sadly dropped to an all-time low.
I’m not someone who believes in publicly criticising the company I am currently working for (partly because the company I work for currently is awesome) and didn’t want to straight after I left at the risk of seeming bitter or unprofessional but I feel it needs to be publicly stated that I did not at any time agree with the actions that were being taken by my current employer and everything negative I found out second-hand and eventually was part of the reason I left.
I’m not sure what the management of BT that thought that Phorm was a good idea were up to at the time but I feel they may need a little reminding that massively alienating a huge portion of your technical user-base is probably not the best way to run an ISP, considering how much influence we have on our non-geeky friends’ technology choices.
As for their “anonymous” technology, if I’m “anonymous” enough for you to be able to track me across multiple IPs then I’m not “anonymous”!
Aged 15, Life Over
July 15, 2008 at 22:36 by Mike McQuaid
I saw an interesting article on BBC News today, I encourage you to read it before continuing.
Maybe it’s just me but when I was 15 I did some very stupid things. Some involved girls, some involved computers and some involved fire. I was a bit of an idiot.
Thankfully I was never in the wrong place at the wrong time and never did anything as stupid as throwing a grenade at an American soldier.
Even if this kid did what it is claimed he did, he was 15 at the time. 15! 3 more years of being a child. 8 more years before he can drink in the US. This Canadian citizen has been held for 6 years now and awaits the potential of life in prison. He is being held in a camp that seems to live outside international law and claims to have been tortured, something I don’t think many would be surprised by, given past reports.
After watching stuff like this I feel physically sick. It genuinely terrifies me that the US feel they have any even slight moral authority over any other regime with this torture camp still running. It sickens me to the core and I’m glad it does too.
Is it just me or should children be cut more slack than grown adults? They screw up and one (albeit huge) screw-up shouldn’t destroy their life.
Residents of the US, I really hope your next leader closes this camp down before the rest of the world becomes more disgusted that we already are at your flagrant abuse of human rights.
Posted in Politics
