Here is a flavour of some of the sort of things we chatted about this month.. This is not a substitute for coming along to the meetings in person:
- Ben Goldacre debunks the BBC Panorama tv programme and the Independent newspaper media scaremongering over WiFi "radiation" and Electrosmog fraud and quackery.
- Solar cell battery chargers from Maplins
- SOCPA Section 128 Designation of the Palace of Westminster and Portcullis House as "Protected Sites" now in force - with warning signs. You can now be arrested by a Police Constable in Uniform, simply for visiting Parliament to see your MP, just by crossing the boundary, even if you are not protesting or demonstrating, in the formerly public areas of Parliament.
- Gary McKinnon's USA extradition case has had two points of law certified by the Administrative (High) Court, so that his lawyers can appeal to the House of Lords. However, there is no guarantee that the House of Lords will hear this appeal, let alone find in favour of Gary and natural justice.
- Automatic Fingerprint Recognition technology - not as shown on CSI tv programmes.
- Oyster Card swapping
- How to be "off the grid" under our surveillance state. Is it better to try to be invisible, or to confuse the data warehousing snooping trails with inaccurate data ?
- New, probably Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras appearing midway up existing traffic CCTV camera poles in central London.
- Debunking the spoof six channel WiFi bonding and WEP cracking WiFi Slurper box featured on BoingBoing etc.
- Countdown London bus information system which uses WiFi. Some of the Arriva buses are badly configured and do not use WEP ! They seem to have FTP, HTTP and other ports open.
- Emergency SMS text message systems and Access Overload Control
- DNS denial of service attacks
- Why spend £50,000 on specially synchronised cameras for multiple views in CGI motion capture (for computer games etc.) ? You could just hack some LEDs and a circuit board, to flash in sequence 400 times a second and a couple of times a second, to provide a visual metronome to time synchronise several camera views ?
- Astute class submarines and the UK nuclear deterrent.
- Personal encounters with NuLabour politicians
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- Thanks to the people who spot mistakes in this report - how about contributing your own observations, either by email or in the Comments below ?