1984
Perhaps a bit of a cliche title, but Mr Orwell did have a point :) The same thing seem to be happening here now in Europe after the horrible attacks in London last week, as were happening in the US after the 11-9 attacks: it is used as an excuse to take away civil liberties.
The European Commission, and also the national parliaments, have been discussing for some time the idea of forcing ISPs and telecom companies to store traffic data - records that contain the websites your visited, the email addresses you send mail to and whom you called at which time from which cell tower - and this all in the name of fighting criminality. Although that's a noble cause, they forget a couple of things (examples from the Netherlands):
The governments are not paying for the huge investments that ISPs need to make to store this traffic data for three! years. The costs for this are millions of euros per ISP which they will never see back, and will likely cause them to charge more to their customers.
All research that was done on this subject in the Netherlands show that collecting this data does not buy the autorities anything.
In the news today I read that "UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke" now wants to accelerate this hole process because of fighting terrorism. But with these regulations, the European People will also get stripped of important civil liberties, for something that is proven to be useles. Luckily the European Parliament's civil liberties committee doesn't agree with these new regulations either. One MEP said that "...introducing measures which sounded tough did not mean they would be effective. Fears were also raised about intrusion into privacy."
Besides this, it seems that some countries are giving up on the Schengen treaty, that allows freedom of travel inside the treaty's area.
Comments
Well our freedom is the most important thing we have. To protect it you have to be willing to give up some freedom.
I hope I'm not the only one seeing Lukas' sarcasm. On the other hand, it seems that the OCSE is holding a meeting on this same subject (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4681313.stm).
Hi!
It seems to me that this records will not save us from terrorism. Unless the police runs some random searches, they will never know what to look for unless an attack is made! It is likely that the situation will evolve to search the contents of conversation to search for keywords (more jobs at google?). That will be a GREAT loss of liberty, and I think you will agree...
1300 cameras are now being installed in Montreal subways ostensibly to deter terrorists. Seems our "protectors" will not be happy until there is a camera watching us all 24x7 (but who is going to be watching??).
Our "Justice Minister" is telling us that we are "not psychologically prepared" (1984'ish sounding) for a possible terrorist attack. This is the same person who is ultimately responsible for putting in all these cameras. I suspect the next step is for our "protectors" to start generating a bunch of media buzz about terrorism so that we will be more acquiesent to the new limitations on civil liberties that they will want to impose so that they can appear to be doing their jobs.
Read 1984 in high school. Probably should be required reading in high school if we want to keep some civil liberties and detect the slippery way in which they are often eroded.
Life Line
TIL that Kingfishers can hover just like hummingbird. I'll hopefully have some reasonable shots after I've gone through my nearly thousand shots today...
I hiked 9.8km in 3h40m47s
Updated a restaurant
Updated a vacant business
I walked 7.1km in 1h16m56s
I walked 3.9km in 45m56s
I walked 1.1km in 10m47s
I think this was my favourite photo of the set that I took. It's not at maximum coverage, but it does have a sun spot group (4508) just on the cusp of the terminator.
#eclipse #eclipse2026 #SolarEclipse #London #Astronomy #AstroPhotography #Photography
No totality here in London, but still had a great evening out in the local park and taking some snaps.
I did have a nice Solar Filter that I made for my lens, and had many conversations with people from different backgrounds. Kids loves to look through my filter after I was done (ran out of battery power).
More photos later...
#london #eclipse2026 #eclipse #photography
I walked 0.9km in 9m28s
I walked 1.2km in 19m05s
Merged pull request #1100
Fixed issue #2267: Application slow when debugger is not listening on…
I walked 4.7km in 48m18s
I walked 3.0km in 1h10m24s
Is there somebody who runs PHP on native windows (with Xdebug) and can run a simple script for me?
It must be in a file (`test.php`):
```
<?php
echo microtime(true), "\n";
xdebug_connect_to_client();
echo microtime(true), "\n";
```And run like:
php -dxdebug.log_level=11 -dxdebug.log=c:\temp\xdebug-i.log -dxdebug.client_host=localhost -dxdebug.client_port=9111 -dxdebug.mode=debug c:\temp\test.php
With the port 9111 not open.
Would love to see the output and log file (in a DM).
I walked 5.5km in 55m06s
@harry_wood This is this list of 100 Go-mistakes that I was talking about: https://100go.co/
Updated a crossing
I walked 2.1km in 20m08s
Enjoying my afternoon and evening out at Lords for some cricket!
I walked 3.2km in 38m54s
I walked 9.1km in 1h34m28s
Updated a gate
Updated a bakery shop
Shortlink
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