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If I’d Known You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked A Cake

Amsterdam, Blogs, Meta, War on Terror
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A crisp, fresh, sunny European good morning to all and to any visiting Atriots. ( I wondered by the hitcounter’d suddenly shot up.)

As is bloody typical when unexpected visitors arrive, we haven’t had time to plump up the cushions or tidy at all so you’ll just have to imagine that there’s the smell of fresh coffee and muffins and there is no, repeat no cathair on the furniture; we’ve been here a long time, it’s a little lived in.

I’m doing the Sunday Morning newspapers and coffee thing and then it’s actually a dry day for the first time in 3 weeks so we’re going to make the most of it by popping across the river to Oosterdokseiland (see above) to the new Amsterdam Central Library, which opened officially yesterday. It has all the technological bells and whistles allied to the kind of back catalogue you’d expect a world city like Amsterdam to have, plus incredible views across the old city and river IJ. I hope to post some pictures later on.

In the meantime the read of the morning has to be this from the new UK security minister Admiral Sir Alan West, who suggests that we should be all snitches now:

In his first interview since his surprise appointment by Gordon Brown as security minister, Sir Alan called on people to be “a little bit un-British” and even inform on each other in an attempt to trap those plotting to take innocent lives.

“Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone,” he said. “I’m afraid, in this situation, anyone who’s got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life.”

If you want a good idea of where European ‘war on terror policy’ is likely to go, that’s the one to read today.

A Blog Is Born

Blogs, Meta
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I’m very, very pleased to see that a group of the late Steve Gilliard‘s News Blog’s most perceptive and readable commenters, Lower Manhattanite (whom people have been nagging for a long time to blog himself ), Hubris Sonic, Sara (Orcinus) Robinson and Jesse Wendel, have started their own blog, The Group News Blog, motto:

Blogging because if we didn’t, Steve» would totally kick our asses. RIP, Brother. And eff the effing Yankees.

However, speaking as another, but non-USAnian, regular commenter at the News Blog (and I’ve featured, their comments Comment of the Day during the last few years too) – dammit, I hate to be a whiner but you know, a blogroll link would’ve been nice, guys. International solidarity and all that.

Whatever, they’re going on the blogroll, but I’m sad to see them being so insular; America is not all there is, though you’d think so from the way many US bloggers are turning in on themselves.

Nothing to see here, move along please

Meta
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I’n not feeling at all well today and I had a very rough night with not much sleep so I’m taking the day off blogging. Here is a picture of a cat one of the guilty parties:

do not be fooled by his current Buddhaesque serenity.

Anyway if you’re looking for something good to read, you could do much worse than start at Orcinus with David Neiwert’s coverage of the pro-immigrant trip, or if you want a snarky, we’re-all-insiders-here type snort of coffee down the nose, there’s the ineffable Sadly, No.

For hilarity of the more twee kind I Can Has Cheezburger? rarely disappoints, or if it’s something more substantial you’re looking for, why not browse the back issues of Harpers, particularly the pre-Iraq ones. Even just the titles of articles are very illuminating when you want to try and figure out how it is we got where we are now.

Oh look, I seem to have blogged anyway. Bugger.

UPDATE: Also there’s a bunch of new del.icio.us links in the righthand sidebar. About there —->

I Have A New Toy

Meta
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It’s not very exciting, just a pay as you go Bluetooth camera/internet phone, but it’s something I’ve beenwanting/needing for a whiile.

Anyway here’s my first efforts. Our senior cat, Monty, looking vaguely interested:

Testing the zoom, Sophie sitting on Chomsky:

My comfy chair in the garden:

Need to fiddle with the settings yet obviously, but at least we have pictures. We’re a full-service blog at last since I killed the Canon in the snow.

Now if I can only find a billboard ad for the Braun Cruiser electric razor… The tv ads have been cracking me up – ‘brown cruiser’, sounds like ‘brown floater’ hahaha. You may’ve noticed that the sense of humour in this household tends towards the cloacal. The Dutch like loo jokes, and so do the British; put them together and everything becomes a potential double-entendre. Shame that ‘Arse’ the butchers closed down, or you’d get a pic of that too.

Is Google Malign? And Do You Care?

Blogs, Civil liberties, Democratic (in)action, Internet, Meta
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The trouble with search algorythms and databases is that although they’re useful tools they’re also horribly double-edged; they can be turned right back on us by the politically or economically unscrupulous.

So it’s proved.

If you don’t read anything else today, read Privacy International‘s report ranking internet search companies – can you say Google? – on how they invade or protect their users’ personal privacy. I think it’s safe to say they don’t do well.

Google was so concerned about this report, say Privacy International, that they’ve embarked on a media smear campaign against them. From an open letter to Google’s CEO:

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

You may be aware that Privacy International yesterday published its first privacy ranking of leading companies operating on the Internet. Google Inc performed very poorly, scoring lowest among the other major companies that we surveyed.

I am writing to express my concern not just at this unfortunate result, but also at communications between Google Inc and members of the media during the period immediately prior to publication of our report. Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that “Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft”. I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings.

Read open letter to Google in full

Google, Yahoo and their fellow data-handling corporations are big enemies to take on. So why are Privacy International doing this? They say:

We are increasingly concerned about the recent dynamics in the marketplace. While a number of companies have demonstrated integrity in handling personal information (and we have been surprised by the number of ‘social networking’ sites which are taking some of these issues quite seriously), we are witnessing an increased ‘race to the bottom’ in corporate surveillance of customers. Some companies are leading the charge through abusive and invasive profiling of their customers’ data. This trend is seen by even the most privacy friendly companies as creating competitive disadvantage to those who do not follow that trend, and in some cases to find new and more innovative ways to become even more surveillance-intensive.

We felt that consumers want to know about these surveillance practices so that they can make a better-informed decision about how, whether and with whom they should share their personal information. We also believe that companies need to be more open about how they process information and why it is processed.

Most importantly, we wanted to indicate to the marketplace that their surveillance and tracking activities are being scrutinised

Their interim rankings are available as a .pdf here. I’ll be posting some stuff from it later on, for you lazy sods who can’t be bothered downloading.

Some of us were born naturally suspicious and paranoid: we’re not all asleep at wheel, googling with abandon as though every search term is forgotten once done.

It isn’t, everything is logged somewhere. That’s the nature of the digital world and anyone who forgets that is a fool. There’s plenty of those about, blithely blundering through life thinking no-one knows what they’re doing, until the knock on the door or the heavy hand on the shoulder comes.

Many of these call themselves progressives, and blog, sometimes about data protection and civil liberties. But they also run Sitemeter, which collects saleable data via the specificclick cookie – consequent to your visit to their blog, the cookie’s tracking your movements around the web. I wanted to name names, but Martin persuaded me not to. Suffice it to say if you have Sitemeter, you’re datamining your readers, even though it may be unconsciously.

Do these bloggers know? Do they even care that are colluding with the very forces they rail against? If so, why not? Dammit, even the wingers have picked up on it. Why are so-called ‘progressives’ being so wilfully blind?

The issue of datamining and lack of data privacy, when combined with the authoritarian and draconian police and data surveiilance powers that our governments are abrogating to themselves, are a danger to anyone who dissents from received political wisdom or who challenges the status quo. If you really call yourseldf a progressive you should remove Sitemeter today.

Google, now that’s a much longer-term project.

I’ll be mortified if it turns out I’m foisting a tracking cookie on someone via this site, but I’d also be grateful that someone pointed it out. I’ve done my best, getting rid of Sitemeter for instance, but I’m not really technically adept enough to know if anything is lurking in the undergrowth. Not many of us are, and therein lies the root of our problem.