e-nsecure.net blog - Comments on IT security and Privacy or the lack thereof.
Rat's Blog -The Reverend Rat writes about London street life and technology
Duncan Drury - wired adventures in Tanzania & London
Dr. K's blog - Hacker, Author, Musician, Philosopher
David Mery - falsely arrested on the London Tube - you could be next.
James Hammerton
White Rose - a thorn in the side of Big Brother
Big Blunkett
Into The Machine - formerly "David Blunkett is an Arse" by Charlie Williams and Scribe
infinite ideas machine - Phil Booth
Louise Ferguson - City of Bits
Chris Lightfoot
Oblomovka - Danny O'Brien
Liberty Central
dropsafe - Alec Muffett
The Identity Corner - Stefan Brands
Kim Cameron - Microsoft's Identity Architect
Schneier on Security - Bruce Schneier
Politics of Privacy Blog - Andreas Busch
solarider blog
Richard Allan - former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam
Boris Johnson Conservative MP for Henley
Craig Murray - former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, "outsourced torture" whistleblower
Howard Rheingold - SmartMobs
Global Guerrillas - John Robb
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Vmyths - debunking computer security hype
Nick Leaton - Random Ramblings
The Periscope - Companion weblog to Euro-correspondent.com journalist network.
The Practical Nomad Blog Edward Hasbrouck on Privacy and Travel
Policeman's Blog
World Weary Detective
Martin Stabe
Longrider
B2fxxx - Ray Corrigan
Matt Sellers
Grits for Breakfast - Scott Henson in Texas
The Green Ribbon - Tom Griffin
Guido Fawkes blog - Parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy.
The Last Ditch - Tom Paine
Murky.org
The (e)State of Tim - Tim Hicks
Ilkley Against CCTV
Tim Worstall
Bill's Comment Page - Bill Cameron
The Society of Qualified Archivists
The Streeb-Greebling Diaries - Bob Mottram
Your Right To Know - Heather Brooke - Freedom off Information campaigning journalist
Ministry of Truth _ Unity's V for Vendetta styled blog.
Bloggerheads - Tim Ireland
W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al.
EUrophobia - Nosemonkey
Blogzilla - Ian Brown
BlairWatch - Chronicling the demise of the New Labour Project
dreamfish - Robert Longstaff
Informaticopia - Rod Ward
War-on-Freedom
The Musings of Harry
Chicken Yoghurt - Justin McKeating
The Red Tape Chronicles - Bob Sullivan MSNBC
Campaign Against the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Stop the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Rob Wilton's esoterica
panGloss - Innovation, Technology and the Law
Arch Rights - Action on Rights for Children blog
Database Masterclass - frequently asked questions and answers about the several centralised national databases of children in the UK.
Shaphan
Moving On
Steve Moxon blog - former Home Office whistleblower and author.
Al-Muhajabah's Sundries - anglophile blog
Architectures of Control in Design - Dan Lockton
rabenhorst - Kai Billen
(mostly in German)
Nearly Perfect Privacy - Tiffany and Morpheus
Iain Dale's Diary - a popular Conservative political blog
Brit Watch - Public Surveillance in the UK - Web - Email - Databases - CCTV - Telephony - RFID - Banking - DNA
BLOGDIAL
MySecured.com - smart mobile phone forensics, information security, computer security and digital forensics by a couple of Australian researchers
Ralph Bendrath
Financial Cryptography - Ian Grigg et al.
UK Liberty - A blog on issues relating to liberty in the UK
Big Brother State - "a small act of resistance" to the "sustained and systematic attack on our personal freedom, privacy and legal system"
HosReport - "Crisis. Conspiraciones. Enigmas. Conflictos. Espionaje." - Carlos Eduardo Hos (in Spanish)
"Give 'em hell Pike!" - Frank Fisher
Corruption-free Anguilla - Good Governance and Corruption in Public Office Issues in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the West Indies - Don Mitchell CBE QC
geeklawyer - intellectual property, civil liberties and the legal system
PJC Journal - I am not a number, I am a free Man - The Prisoner
Charlie's Diary - Charlie Stross
The Caucus House - blog of the Chicago International Model United Nations
Famous for 15 Megapixels
Postman Patel
The 4th Bomb: Tavistock Sq Daniel's 7:7 Revelations - Daniel Obachike
OurKingdom - part of OpenDemocracy - " will discuss Britain’s nations, institutions, constitution, administration, liberties, justice, peoples and media and their principles, identity and character"
Beau Bo D'Or blog by an increasingly famous digital political cartoonist.
Between Both Worlds - "Thoughts & Ideas that Reflect the Concerns of Our Conscious Evolution" - Kingsley Dennis
Bloggerheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair - the rich Uzbek businessman and his shyster lawyers Schillings really made a huge counterproductive error in trying to censor the blogs of Tim Ireland, of all people.
Matt Wardman political blog analysis
Henry Porter on Liberty - a leading mainstream media commentator and opinion former who is doing more than most to help preserve our freedom and liberty.
HMRC is shite - "dedicated to the taxpayers of Britain, and the employees of the HMRC, who have to endure the monumental shambles that is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)."
Head of Legal - Carl Gardner a former legal advisor to the Government
The Landed Underclass - Voice of the Banana Republic of Great Britain
Henrik Alexandersson - Swedish blogger threatened with censorship by the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA), the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishement, their equivalent of the UK GCHQ or the US NSA.
World's First Fascist Democracy - blog with link to a Google map - "This map is an attempt to take a UK wide, geographical view, of both the public and the personal effect of State sponsored fear and distrust as seen through the twisted technological lens of petty officials and would be bureaucrats nationwide."
Blogoir - Charles Crawford - former UK Ambassodor to Poland etc.
No CCTV - The Campaign against CCTV
Barcode Nation - keeping two eyes on the database state.
Lords of the Blog - group blog by half a dozen or so Peers sitting in the House of Lords.
notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society - blog by Dr. David Murakami Wood, editor of the online academic journal Surveillance and Society
Justin Wylie's political blog
Panopticon blog - by Timothy Pitt-Payne and Anya Proops. Timothy Pitt-Payne is probably the leading legal expert on the UK's Freedom of Information Act law, often appearing on behlaf of the Information Commissioner's Office at the Information Tribunal.
Armed and Dangerous - Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life’s simple pleasures… - by Open Source Software advocate Eric S. Raymond.
Georgetown Security Law Brief - group blog by the Georgetown Law Center on National Security and the Law , at Georgtown University, Washington D.C, USA.
Big Brother Watch - well connected with the mainstream media, this is a campaign blog by the TaxPayersAlliance, which thankfully does not seem to have spawned Yet Another Campaign Organisation as many Civil Liberties groups had feared.
Spy on Moseley - "Sparkbrook, Springfield, Washwood Heath and Bordesley Green. An MI5 Intelligence-gathering operation to spy on Muslim communities in Birmingham is taking liberties in every sense" - about 150 ANPR CCTV cameras funded by Home Office via the secretive Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) section of ACPO.
FitWatch blog - keeps an eye on the activities of some of the controversial Police Forward Intelligence Teams, who supposedly only target "known troublemakers" for photo and video surveillance, at otherwise legal, peaceful protests and demonstrations.
It wouldn't make any difference if your proxy hid your IP address: Google can't trust what the proxy says. If Google says your 'computer or network' is making requests that annoy it, then it's very likely that someone else on your network (ISP) is doing just that.
If Google is blacklisting the IP of one of your ISP's proxies then you should speak to your ISP and ask them if they have any problems with people flooding Google, and if so, whether they have done anything about it. If you have a decent ISP, they'll probably already have terminated the offender's contract and you'll just have to wait for Google to like you again, or perhaps your ISP could talk to Google to get it sorted.
P.S. Would you consider stopping using bold to place emphasis on every other word, perhaps using a colour other than black for hyperlinks, and maybe not merging all paragraphs of a comment into one?
Thanks, Rik
Ok it's just the preview that has all paragraphs merged. Not really a preview, then.
Thanks for the feedback Rik: "It wouldn't make any difference if your proxy hid your IP address: Google can't trust what the proxy says."
If the ISP was running an anonymous proxy, then there might be some justification for Google's capcha policy, as all they would be able to blacklist would be REMOTE_ADDR
However, there is no particular reason to assume that the *last* proxy in a chain is faking HTTP_VIA or HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR if that proxy server is run by a major ISP.
Google should either treat all requests from the ISP as "infected" or none of them, but not some of them, some of the time, within a window of a few seconds.
Are the chocolate coloured links easier to read ? Presumably you have the underlined links option turned off in your browser.
Apologies about the strange default Movable Type comment preview setting.
I do, however, disgree with you about presentational markup, and will continue to use it - there are very few physical "bold" tags on this site, they are mostly logical "strong" ones, even though expecting humans to write consistent and meaningful meta data is a silly idea.
I agree that Google should be smarter about major ISPs, though I'm sure if they could be, they would. There must be many problems for them to deal with when trying to cope with flooding from bots.
For example: Perhaps they do not have an easy way to map netblocks to owners in a short space of time. If attacks have only just begun from behind your ISP's proxies, then the address(es) used may be in a queue for investigation.
As for the intermittent nature of the 'you're being naughty' pages, I'd guess that your ISP's load balancing is causing some requests to go via one proxy, which is marked as bad by Google, and/or Google are only showing the pages for a short period after they have been flooded. This would make some sense, as 'banning' an IP permanently would be really annoying to those on a fixed IP who really had cleaned up their machine (or one on their network).
You could ask them what's up, of course. Perhaps they'll tell you to shout at your ISP for letting such flooding through their proxies.
Links are underlined on the web page, but sometimes bold text is underlined when it's not a link, which makes things pretty confusing - see http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/2005/06/no2id_i_will_re.html and http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/2005/06/tony_mcnulty_no.html
For some reason, whoever wrote my feed reader (Sage) thought it would be a good idea to make links bold, then underlined on hover. This means that links and bold text look virtually identical. I can fix this one for myself, though, by editing the stylesheet used to display the feed.
I cant stand the google catchas ... i use the firefox g-bar...and now it has driven me to use yahoo now and again ...aargh. if this happens on a global scale surely google will notice a migration. Their soft needs to be smarter ... or they need to invest in being able to handle bot traffic ... what are they doing with all those Phd's!
"Google seem to be intent on destroying their $78 billion dollar market capitalisation by blocking innocent users or customers from their search engine."
That's a ridiculous assumption. Google was attacked by a Virus, it was either "filter the good from the bad and stop the attacks" or "allow the bots to continue attacking." It takes simple common sense to figure out DDoS attacks, and you'll find it's actually very easy to counter these attacks by a combination of techniques.
To say that Google just shot itself in the foot intentionally is completely absurd. Microsoft's Windows platform is constantly under attack and exposed to vulnerabilities. Does that fact alone mean Microsoft is wrapping the noose around their neck intentionally?
Bad article opening. Stop trying to mislead people.
@ Jared - in what way is technically inept victimisation of innocent customers a good thing for the reputation and market value of any company ?
i noticed google does this on my pc when i select on advanced preferences more than 10 results per page.
If you didnt have Captchas, bots would subscribe to the email services and use them to send out vicious email containing spyware, adware and viruses.
@ James - this particular use of "Captchas" has nothing to do with such email account subscriptions.
It is to do with, inconsistent and incorrect categorisation of a simple Google search engine query from a computer which has been falsely assumed to be virus infected.
You know I'm a huge fan of Google, and I have more than 9 years of professional dDoS attack prevention. This is the stupidest method I've seen used by far. My entire organization can not access Google at the moment some workstations they are given the "type the phrase" some others aren't.
They are all sharing one internet IP and we are receiving tons of calls about this.
Google messed up big time with this move without testing it in a real-life enviroment. To be moving forward without the remote thinking that a virus will be using their search-engine before is simply obsurd, their lack of planning ahead is what caused this chaos.
I'm in the UK and hadn't seen this captcha thing until this week, now almost every other search spits up this annoying little creature. I don't mind blogs that use them to trap spammers, but I don't want to have to type in distorted passwords while I'm doing time-critical research on a deadline! Is there a petition we can sign to get the big G to stop doing this?
You don't want to see this page anymore? Ask your provider/ proxy
administrator to ban/block the hacker/infected system causing this....
"Ask your provider/ proxy administrator to ban/block the hacker/infected system"
Google provides no response when asked for additional information to assist administrators in solving the issue. Hey David, you sort a million+ hits on Google and tell me which one is the cause!
Google's reply when requesting more info was:
"Providing more information on this individual
user is beyond the scope of our capabilities."
Thanks Google (jack@$$). Your technology is awe inspiring.
Very annoying to say the least. Especially when you are doing time critical research argh!
Has anyone noticed that if you fetch your POP emails thrice in succession (which you have to do coz of their stupid batching of POP emails) your account gets blocked : /
Your IP address reveals your point of entry to the Internet and can be used to trace your communications back to your ISP, your employer's network, your school, a public terminal.
Use our Free Web Proxy to surf the internet anonymously at http://peak40.com
I'm in Naples FL in the US, I started encountering this error this week. It is horribly annoying, my entire school district(!!) is effectively blocked. This is ridiculous!
I don't have an IT background ,but that captcha thing is a pain in the proverbial.Plus, in my opinion,google is becoming senile.The amount of drivel it throws up is irritating let alone the amount of sites that are connected to malicious code or scams.I've started using alternative search engines and getting more concise results.I'd rather use Live search and thats poor.You may be interested to know that last week there was an article on www.theregister.co.uk on captcha having already being compromised by "hackers".
yours sincerely
David