London 2600 meeting on Friday 1st December 2006
Here is a flavour of a few of the things we discussed or overheard. This is not a substitute for the real face to face meetings:
- Continuity '06 and DNScon 9 in Manchester this weekend - how many London 2600 people are up in Manchester at the moment ?
- 23C Chaos Computer Congress, Berlin, between Christmas and New Year
- PGP woes - Windows, Hushmail, GNUPG and extra spaces pre-pended to the message block by digital signatures,
- Computer Misuse Act amendments in the Police and Justice Act - on the Statute Book, but now in the tansitional period, awaiting a Commencement Order Statutory Instrument.
- Babar Ahmad High Court Appeal against extradition to the USA failed, which does not set a good precedent for the similar Gary McKinnon case.
- Vodafone SMS software upgrade cockup this morning, took all their Home Location Register computers offline for several hour.! So much for alleged 99.999% telecomms uptime, and "no single point of failure".
- News of the World "Royal Editor" and private detective plead guilty to conspiracy and to offences under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, for intercepting mobile phone voicemail messages.
Do any of the UK mobile phone networks still allow access from a landline phone or another mobile phone, apart from your own, if the default PIN has not been changed ? Vodafone and Orange do this ok, how about the others ?
- Censorship by Haloscan third party blog comments, of Tor users "due to abuse" - stupid IP block based censorship which taints all the customers of an ISP. The same sort of "colateral damage" will happen when European Union censorship of "terrorist" or "child porn" or "copyright infringement" websites gets underway. - the Great Firewall of Europe.
Transport for London Oyster SmartCard. - Transport for London have admitted via a Freedom of Information Act request, that, as we suspected, they do not switch off their Automatic Number Plate Recognition camera feeds, at night and at weekends and holidays, when the Congestion Charge does not apply. Utter incredulity about their claim:
In addition, it is not possible to automatically turn cameras off and on remotely in the Central London zone. To switch them off and on would require an individual to visit each camera twice a day. This would impose a large cost on the operation of the scheme.
What about cheap time switch hardware, or software cron jobs ? Since the ANPR is done centrally, why can they not simply switch off the ANPR computer system if they really cannot switch off the camera video feeds ?
Apart from the privacy and security issues, how does this admitted waste of energy, running the cameras and infra-red floodlights all might and aat weekends, square with the alleged "green" energy saving policies of Transport for London and Mayor of London Ken Livingstone ?
What about the Western Expansion zone into Kensington and Chelsea staring next year ? Can these cameras be switched off centrally ? Of not, then why not ?
- Massively parallel supercomputers and problems not suited to being run on them efficiently.
- Ideas for a phased array mobile phone antenna - see the Roke Manor/ BAE Celldar research.
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- Thanks to the people who spot mistakes in this report - how about contributing your own observations ?
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