You know those full body scanners in airports that peek under your clothes? Well they now are in the street too, perving at you and your car/van/truck and indeed passing school bus for those security personnel of a Pedobear persuasion…and the AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van™ (ZBV) are seemingly sold to anyone, not just government, who in the US and foreign government agencies have bought 500 already.

Really next time I go to the airport – and it’s gonna be a big if, or where I choose to fly from, I’m requesting a pat down, and won’t go through one of those machines…and you know Little Brother/TV detector/X-Files style not to trust those big white vans passing by the neighbourhood unmarked with people with laptops at the front…Me paranoid? Well when it comes to any force wanting to see me naked because ‘you iz a terrist’, I get very paranoid. And very worried for the state of the world today…not that I think I will appear in some gay porn full body scan site, no fear of that!

Really although there is a few journeys I want to make that will include flying, over the last year or two I’ve flown far less than I used to (Ethiopia/South Africa in November was the last time, and you can’t get there overland and it takes a month by sea!) this is intentional as every time the security protocols get more and more draconian and puts me off flying entirely. I don’t think I am alone in this – which is strange the airports and carrier companies are putting up with it in this recession. The short hops we and I used to do over to the continent aren’t worth all this hassle and stress. I wish Eurostar wasn’t so hella expensive, otherwise I’d take that route. Far more preferable, although they are starting to go the scanner route too.

Via Jez CMP.

Yes it’s happened – Is Faboy Slim a DJ? by an anonymous pair of DJs and a rather interesting (if sad) backstory. Excellent video by Aardman Animations too. I think this might actually be a hit. It’s silly enough (at first I though oh it’s the new Fatboy Slim single, but it’s not his style. Young Punx, Cuban Brothers or someone more like that…yes)

‘You know that thing with a scratchy record that Malcolm McLaren used to do? What is that all about?’

If the Salmon Dance can be a hit, then this can be too…and the proceeds go to MacMillan Cancer Charity.

Followers of my Twitter and Livejournal will know I wrote to Glenda Jackson, my MP about the stupid ’3 strikes’ rule that EU (not just UK apparently) are trying to pass with the Digital Economy bill, where if you’re caught 3 times filesharing they can cut off your internet.

Thinking ‘I don’t fileshare’ or ‘I use military grade crypto dark nets’ or ‘I use only mediafire or blogspot’ so it doesn’t affect you?

Well it will…pretty sure it means say goodbye to free WiFi in the EU (who is going to risk disconnection by strangers filesharing, like this example from the States where a whole town’s WiFi was shut down over ONE download?) which doesn’t bode well for the government’s other aims for a ‘Digital Britain‘, also the likes of Talk Talk (the ISP) threatening to sue the Government over this, and BT claiming the costs of policing will cost more than the losses, or at the very least will put up internet costs drastically (an estimated £25 EACH).

WiFi hacking will go up – people will just use other people’s connections, and let them take the rap – and as far as the current bill stands that would be tough, you’ll be disconnected without judge nor jury even though the popular WiFi standards now WPA and WEP have been hacked. In fact public sharing will go either way – either mass disobedience, or more likely all shared networks will go private for fear of disconnection…so no leeching off a neighbour’s network – or at least networks will cripple their connections and not allow any file or torrent downloads (not an easy nor simple thing to do atm).

People will use encryption more and more – like Tor. This might be a good thing, but interesting that M15 are against these proposals realising a mass move to crypto will make finding criminals harder, especially as the tools will probably get easier to use in response. More ambivalent about this one – but I don’t like the idea of say, child porn or actual terrorism (rather than ‘domestic extremism’ LOL) going unmonitored and more underground, do you? Not happy about making the police and M15′s job of tracking us all, Big Brother style easier though…I’m a fan of crypto but it’s an all-in or all-out situation, no use using PGP emails if none of your friends do.

One up side is apparently same legislation might make mashups legal – but only in your own home, don’t SHARE them, Nanny will now allow you to make them – even though you always could, like CD-ripping without sharing because no-one would know nor care. Silly huh?

Anyway I wrote to Glenda and unsurprisingly she is against signing the EDM and is anti-filesharing given her acting past and relationships with the movie industry, but she did write to Lord Mandelson on my behalf. So we’ll see.

I think the points about criminalising the wrong people, better licensing and also threatening the growth of legal digital uses as well are pertinent ones for Mandy – legislation like this is ALWAYS abused and misused, and will have knock-on freezing effects in other areas too. It’s definitely not a case of ‘I’m alright Jack’ because Jack will be made to pay for his own monitoring, chastisement and will lose more digital freedoms, rather than gain more.

And yes I’m sure filesharing mashups will be as illegal and probably as ’3-strikes’ gaining as sharing whole movies and albums. And ignores the fact that people who share music also buy a lot of music also.

Well those in the UK are – and should be concerned because Orwell’s predictions (and even Alan Moore’s in V for Vendetta) are seemingly comng true. With The Fear this time being terrorism – despite a terrorist attack happening last nearly 4 years ago – they are clamping down on a variety of things. They might seem small, even trivial – but the right to photograph protests, or anything you like in a street – have already been eroded, and if they think you might be a terrorist however spurious they can lock you up for a long time – stop me if you can see the way this can be politically used to oppress people?

And if they take any DNA off you, they can store it in their beloved police database against EU law:

And now with the new Coroners and Justice Bill the State want the right to use that information, or any other information they collect however spuriously for anything they like and use it for something else – as Boing Boing put it:

Clause 152 allows any Minister to take any information gathered for any purpose and use it for any other purpose

So now councils can spy on you to see if you’re emptying the bins correctly (ooh you terrorist) you can guarantee this clause WILL be misused, whatever they say – they said that about the anti-terrorism laws and there is a mounting pile of abuses that go FAR against the intention of that law and with all this CCTV, DNA databases and soon to be ID cards, we have become the most snooped country in Europe, if not the whole world.

What can you do? Well those in the UK can write to your MP – no don’t yawn and switch off it’s REALLY PISS EASY, I mean a muppet like me could do it, so can you – I did it and got results and a shiny letter from Glenda Jackson AND a big warm feeling that I had actually DONE SOMETHING – so can you. You can do it by email via WriteToThem and takes a few minutes. And you can join this Facebook group. – publicise, Twitter about this, bother friends, talk, phone – get the word out.

That’s not hard is it? Or are you going to be the kind of stupid person that Pastor Niemoeller wrote about? These are YOUR laws, if you just sit there eating your grub and shrugging then don’t moan at me when they come through your door.

Also word to my pirate radio bruvs (and gals out there – they’ve just raided about 30 of them in the UK and shut them down, heard via John. Keep going, keep the faith, don’t let em win. And that bullshit about emergency frequencies – they still using that as an excuse? As a former frequency scanner and radio geek, I can tell you the ambulance and other systems moved to higher frequencies from publically accessible radio waves (ie. on your dial) back in the 80′s – they use special frequencies with digital encoded systems for the ambulances, and obviously the police realised being listenable on a normal radio wasn’t really a good idea, so they did too. So I don’t see how the pirates could affect this unless some faulty transmitter is sidebanding. I call bullshit on that until I hear otherwise.

You see what I mean? It’s easy to shout fire in a crowded theatre, but since before Gordon Brown and that Weapon of Mass Distraction called a war where they ignored us, politically things have been shifted to make a whole bunch of people seem they are a potential threat, rather than the necessary watchguard (and yes the watchers?) to try and keep an increasingly distant and corrupt set of politicians accountable…ignorance and apathy just gives them the power to eventually really fuck up your day (or life).

This current state of affairs is really bugging me, there is a real danger we are going down the path of 1984 – you may scoff but do some research about what laws have been passed recently – and it will chill your blood.

Beggar’s dog – Hoboken (LOC)

I usually cover copyright issues of a different nature; ones regarding audio. But as a keen photographer and designer I love images, and know how hard it is, or was, to find open source images. One big addition to this is Flickr Commons – several big museums and collections have gotten together with Flickr to share imagery that has no copyright, old photographs or has governmental uses like the legendary FSA and wartime images. The collections are good – from Smithsonian who started this, to Library of Congress, George Eastman House, Bibliothèque de Toulouse and so on.

Sadly I’m surprised (although not shocked having dealt with these organisations via John) that there are no British museums or collections yet taking part. Certainly governmental ‘public’ works has a different stance here – Crown copyright vs the US model where if public money is used it rightly stays in public domain – and a non-sharing approach with British galleries and museums means yet again America and Europe lead the way in copyright advances and public amenity. Sigh. I hope that changes – because I know the likes of the V&A, British Museum, British Library, The Hulton/Picture Post archive and the Tates have amazing treasures to share.

Will we ever be allowed to, though?

Paris Exposition: ship, Paris, France, 1900