There are car rental companies that have "black boxes" in their cars that keep track of how fast you go, where you go, etc. If they wanted to, governments could mandate that sort of system be added to all new cars...

Given that you were complaining about the impracticalities of using GPS (satellites can't see you / you can hack or tamper with the GPS "black box") when the issue of road taxing came up, I don't really see what's wrong with tracking number plate movement. It's already an offence to display incorrect number plates so for once, the Blair government doesn't have to invent a random new law just to show they're tough on crime, the technology has already been tested on Londoners, this means we'll actually get more data about where people drive to and from than the annoyingly unsubtle "this road here looks pretty packed", and it makes road pricing pretty easy without requiring tolls that take up loads of space and add unwelcome bottlenecks.

Yeah, the terrorism thing is a just the random buzzwords people have to mention these days - so what? It's still a decent idea. Plus, it makes it easier to solve car theft (which I believe is currently pretty much insolvable - needle in a haystack territory). Unless the joyriders then torch the car, of course, but you never going to get it back anyway. It should at least find stolen cars whose number plates haven't been replaced too well, which is a start.

Edited by author 12-23-2005 08:01 PM
I hope that any Americans participating in this discussion are card-carrying ACLU members. The ACLU is the only organization with any clout who would routinely oppose this kind of stuff. Plus, an ACLU membership card in your wallet is a great prop -- guaranteed to set off any conservative you might want to tweak.

Re education, my 4 children all went to an excellent new high school of ~2000 students that opened in 1990. They filmed the administrators the 1st day and showed it on local cable. I was very surprised to find that their primary concern was security -- who is watching the students when and where?

Re the traffic cameras, Charlie has already been on this, yes? The stone cows story?

Re Big Brother, for the last few years since webcams, Wired et all have been more talking about Little Brother, i.e., bored netizens monitoring everything. Given the recent growth of distributed web intelligence systems such as tagging and wikipedia, this may be the more interesting thread ...

Edited by author 12-24-2005 02:38 AM
About six weeks ago, I was spotted parking in a supermarket carpark in Barking, staying over the posted timelimit. The Car Park Management company contacted DVLA with the number, got my address, and sent me the bill.

Except, the vehicle was a combine harvester, which I'd sold two years ago and was, I'm told, exported to Cyprus. I doubt you could even get it down the streets in Barking.

And why, if DVLA still had me on record as the keeper, had they never sent me the Tax/SORN notification?

Nobody seemed to be interested in following up the possibility of a false numberplate, and, interestingly, when the Police access the database they get a different result: "No Trace". I get a feeling that the ACPO and the politicians don't realise how unreliable the DVLA database is.

At least the parking company backed down.

Now, imagine the screaming when the fake numberplates and the blatant database errors start triggering summonses against law-abiding drivers.

Anyone get the feeling that Tony Blair has drifted into the Thatcherite way of thinking, too accustomed to power to use it wisely after winning three elections?

To oversimplify, the Anglo-American governments under co-emperors BushBlair have been repurposing the informational aspects of "public" space for a combination of allegedly antiterrorist and admittedly profitable purposes.

Example 1: U.S. Federal authorities have decreed that 17 February 2009 shall be the last date of conventional television. After that, all analog TV broadcasts end, and the glorious all-digital TV era dawns. 2 coupons, $40 each, go to household without digital TV, for purchase of converters. Well, okay, House and Senate preliminary approval. The former analog TV frequencies get auctioned off for an estimated $10 to $30 billion $US to the U.S. Treasury, so that cool new wifi video and stuff can be done optimally by the invisible hand.

Example 2: Garbage, placed on the street, properly bagged/binned for pickup, no longer has any legal presumption of privacy. "Garbologists" dig through Bob Dylan's trash. Analysis of your supermarket purhcases, correlated with your garbage, allows automated estimate that your diet is bad, so we'll automatically increase your health insurance charges. Dumpster divers recover corporate publications in hardcopy. Sale of cheap shredders skyrockets (I was given one by a wife and son optimistically eying my several hundred thousand pages of paper as notes for stories, novels, screenplays, and science papers in progress).

Example 3: Multiple video, RFID, non-publicized automobile "black box" inferring location by integrating velocity and turns; and other channels proliferate for tracking cars on streets and roads (when will they forbid sales of cars sans GPS trackers?), people on public streets, automated interpolation of peoples' social network by who goes into whose home when, or correlated going into restaurant or public meeting place. People start buying homes with tunnels networking, invisible to eyes in the sky. Next generation, nanospiders infiltrate all tunnels.

Example 4: Okay, for national security, since the laws of nature abruptly changed on 9/11, spy on US citizens without even retroactive warrants. Testmarket the notion of logging all phonecalls and emails to build said social network. Use that to filter enemies of the state. Sell arrest of same as per Ray Bradbury's bigscreen TV shows (he invented reality TV a step beyond Eric Blair's Big Brother infrastructure).

Paranoid? Naaaah. I'm enjoying the improved chocolate ration subsidized by sale of what was once considered private property.

Chris Heinz: these days the ACLU's primary mission appears to be the removal of all traces of Christianity from public places and political debate in the USA. Threats to civil liberties are a low priority, better handled by other groups. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would take a hand in resisting anything similar to the "panopticon" project in Britian; civil rights issues raised by new technology are exactly their concern.

Michael Brazier: My read on the ACLU's current primary mission is that it is gay rights, as gays represent the last major minority (oxymoron?) whose rights are routinely denied.

Re civil liberties: the ACLU is chartered to protect the Bill of Rights -- period. They have been very active and vocal in their opposition to the Patriot Act. I routinely read about supreme court rulings where the defendants were represented by the ACLU, haven't seen this from EFF -- not that they are not also worth supporting.

Re removal of all traces of Christianity: as a flaming atheist, I wholeheartedly support all efforts to keep any of my tax dollars from being spent on any subsidization of religion, however minor.

I've already come across a stretch of motorway that used average speed readings for speeding penalties (or at least they said that they did). Presumably they timed you entering and leaving the section and worked out the speed.

It was a section of the M1 with roadworks, so I was happy to see people slowing down more than usual.

Yes, the ACLU is chartered to protect the Bill of Rights. That doesn't mean they actually do protect the Bill of Rights in toto. They don't spend any time protecting the Second Amendment, for instance. And in the Kelo v. New London decision, an outrage against the Fifth Amendment, the national ACLU didn't do anything either.

But it must be said for the ACLU, they were so "very active and vocal" about possible abuses of the Patriot Act that no actual abuses seem to have occurred. Good for them! Now I must go and join a protest against hurricanes, lest my city fall victim to one next summer.

Back when the 407 toll highway opened here in Ontario, it was pointed out that the same computers that issued toll bills based on plate camera recorded or transponders could issue speeding tickets if a driver's average speed exceeded the speed limit. The private company that runs the highway apparently nixed the idea on the grounds that it would be bad for business.

Jonathan VP, that digital TV story sounds a lot like what is planned here, but with a headlong rush.

The UK possibly jumped in a little too early; the technology has improved to cope better with transmitters using the same frequency, so using bandwidth more efficiently. And, when the proposals for a switchover were first made, some crazy fees had been paid for bandwidth rights at other frequencies. But there's been no hard date set.

Havinbg said that, digital coverage in the less populated regions is still erratic. Current planning is to switch the BBC2 analogue frequencies to digital TV, which will boost the available power enormously.

Another factor is that cable TV has been competing with direct satellite broadcasts, while subscription digital terrestrial crashed and burned. So now you can buy a decoder box, plug it into the TV with a SCART lead, and get a lot of subscription-free TV.

Technically, I'd say digital TV can beat analogue, except in the very best conditions. But that's watching PAL analogue pictures, and using a SCART connection which feeds an RGB signal set to the TV, rather than RF or composite video. And SCART will also give you auto-switching between 4:3 and 16:9 picture formats.

It doesn't hurt that the BBC is heavily committed to digital broadcasting, and the system carries a good range of audio only channels (though some people will complain about the low bit-rates being used for audio). And there are the CBeebies and CBBC channels for the rugrats, which are almost reason enough on their own.

In short, in the UK a digital TV decoder can make a huge difference: it's worth getting. But the US approach, both to digital conversion and to TV content in general, comes across as crudely exploitative. You can have subscription channels on digital TV, and I don't expect to see the number of free-to-view channels in the US to more than triple, as they have here.

Edited by author 12-25-2005 11:05 AM
Voyeurism. Rob Halford from the band Judas Priest formed a band in the late 90s called Voyeurs which I thought was very applicable for the 10th dimension generation.
A little positive news? The French government has voted to take a hands off approach to P2P file sharing asking only for a one time fee to the government similar to their television program. Not sure how their 'television' is defined though. That's a novel idea.
Stateside we don't get taxed by the government on the Internet probably because of ICANN, so they say, yet we can't wathc certain media without the 'proper' player. So supposedly if everyone gets the Internet and uses that for media then we can escape the government right?
Now they want to tax the Internet, this is the same for eco-cars as well because of not getting enough tax money from Oil, I think.
So really there is no escape from The Hand unless we use services that are not completely contracted by the government at all like Free Software or Media or just services that don't reqire large sociatal costs such as Hydrogen power and recyclable materials instaed of plastic. Might be able to use nano-bots to decompose the plastic though.

If they aren’t contracted and taxed by the government they don’t feel they own a piece of it and can’t monitor it.
No, I don’t trust the government here. I don’t trust closed source governments.
Maybe if the roads were owned by a non-profit group Gov wouldn’t interfere. I think a group of companies could come together and purchase the roads and form an open standards body. The government mainly owns the roads here. Everything else is sort of in between so that would be a good start and then public land. I would love to tee the fuight.
I think if more non-govs owned land we could cut down the cost of exes housing and live in a less congested environment. openland.org and openroads.org

Also I am upset about the the new ‘because we can’ generation also. Bring back the Dodo? The idea is as stupid as the bird. Why? Bring back the Mammoth? These animals were at the end of their evolutionary tree. Too big and furry. Maybe a dragon would be cool but like I read in some recent fantasy novels they would have to be stored Indoors. Maybe if we selected a natural habitat; but do we have room for this type of circus and for what purpose other then it’s cool? Save it for cyberspace unless it's a real help of course.

Another evolutionary oddity. The fullscale robot. Are they to replace us? When was I informed of this? If they are running closed source hardware/software they apparently have already won out since they'll know what we are but we sure as hell won't know what they are.
The year is 2010, the .NET framework has been consolidated into the .GOV framework and now is simply referred too as the Frame-Work. There are no more programmers anymore because it has been decided that control and structure is most important then simple ‘coding.’ People are not allowed to choose to live outside the Frame-Work because it has been defined by the Frame-Work that this is not a choice in the online FrameWorkpedia hosted by acadamia.

Isaac Asimov didn’t like robots to be around in his Foundation books at least as I think he snapped them out of evolution somewhere down the line for safety(trust) concerns. At the time of his writing in the 50s he didn’t perceive the nano-technology mankind would have to monitor them for safety but he might have been a little pessimistic, which is understandable considering the post industrial nightmare after WW2, as he had the unpredictable ‘Mule’ which I think represented a closed source ‘black box’ system but didn’t perceive free standards or maybe he did because they seemed to win out in the 4th book I think. Read: Encyclopedia Galactica(Wikipedia). He seemed naturally mistrusting of the government which is understandable from a guy emigrating from the U.S.S.R. and entering the Cold War in the United States. He was against the Star Wars program.
I was against the Illigeal Immigration policies that fueled the unrealistic crimewave that nearly destroyed me and my family.

Also, I feel W.H.O. has done allot and is doing much more about the flu outbreak then any government or U.N. ever could.

OTOH, without all those cameras, how are you going to find any petrified cows? (add hot grits to taste)

Seriously though, I find the idea of the idea of the American Police State(tm) gaining a foothold in Europe by way of the UK fairly scary. I'll decide when and where I want to be monitored, all right?

Still, I'm going to London just 'because I can'. In my mind, Red Ken presides over an enclave of enlightenment just as Munich is a fairly left-wing city in the overwhelmingly rural, conservative and Christian Bavaria. Feel free to dispossess me of this notion, but after the 6th of Jan if you please :-)

Edited by author 12-27-2005 06:25 AM
A small victory over little brother.
Mapping sites like local.google.com are now restricting their Satellite Zoom on Maps to a few hundred feet higher it seems.

I like this, regardless of it not being on video I don't like snoops peeping over my backyard fence at my layout. It could also entice criminals. I am talking about satellite mapping like a picture and not regular street maps.