If wanting to encourage people and websites to opt out of Phorm, if wanting to stop any and every incidence of business intercepting my traffic across the internet in order to make money means that I am a ‘privacy pirate’ (see previous post), then it’s a label I am delighted to wear. Conditions for re-use: [...]

Phorm have set up a website to battle those people who it perceives as people who are against it, which it has begun by smearing these people as ‘privacy pirates’. Over the last year Phorm has been the subject of a smear campaign orchestrated by a small but dedicated band of online “privacy pirates” who [...]

Does anyone else remember the Scottish Sunday Express castigating the now 18-year-old Dunblane survivors for erm… behaving like perfectly normal 18 year olds? Come on, you must remember it: I blogged about it, Justin blogged about it, Tim blogged about it and Graham did too. Yes, Paula Murray used Facebook and other social networking websites [...]

I knew I would like this book. It’s the same sort of thing as the book Risk, which I loved, and Freakonomics, which I loved. It’s not so much a book, as a toolbox. In that sense it is similar to Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World: Science as a candle in the Dark. A toolbox [...]

…in related news, David Davis MP comes over as a thoroughly reasonable chap. By some rather bizarre leap of logic, Derek Barnett, vice president of the Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales, says about the police violence reported and the general unease with the policing methods that… we ought to put that in some [...]

Recap: Phorm is a company which seeks to offer targeted advertising by monitoring browser behaviour — they scan websites to see what they contain and they monitor users’ browsing behaviour to see which sites they visit, in order to serve up what they believe will be more effective advertising. Some people have privacy concerns over [...]

The policing of the G20 has caused a lot of news coverage. Firstly, there’s the Ian Tomlinson affair, and the way the Metropolitan Police appear to have tried to deal with this by throwing up a smokescreen to attempt to put themselves in a good light, irrespective of what actually happened. There was no mention [...]

Let us see what gives you cancer these days, eh? Or at least increases the risk of you getting it. Eating grapefruit increases the risk of breast cancer Dairy products increase the risk of prostate cancer one glass of wine per day increases the risk of many cancers long term use of nutrient supplements increases [...]

I’ll start with the Daily Mail, which I’d normally take the trouble to disagree with. However, I’m big enough to overcome my innate prejudice against them when they say something I agree with, and in relation to whether or not Ian Tomlinson had been drinking, the Daily Mail hit the nail on the head. And [...]

I have no doubt that you will already be aware by now that Ian Tomlinson, who was simply walking home from work, not being disruptive, and not attacking the police or anyone else in any way whatsoever, and simply strolling along with his hands in his pockets was viciously shoved to the ground by a [...]