How is this not a violation of basic data protection laws in numerous jurisdictions (like, say, pretty much all of Europe)?
This is the curse of social networking sites generally: you don't have to be the person providing personal information about yourself, because chances are your well-meaning friends will do it for you.
You sir, are making the wrong argument, in the wrong discussion on the wrong web site.
Perhaps, and I don't intend to pursue the point very far because as you say this is not the place for that, but I do dislike people trying to twist discussions by using inflammatory terminology or comments.
Most of this discussion is indeed about the censorship issue, and that is what I came here to read and perhaps comment on, but if you check the posts in this particular subthread, we seem to have diverged somewhat. The grandparent post for my reply suggested a connection between censorship of anti-government sites and censorship of sites that help people to break the law. To me, these are completely different issues (and whether the law is itself appropriate is a third issue). I have no problem with the government cracking down on people who break the law as a general principle, nor on using the term "cracking down" to describe it. If some particular law is itself broken, then of course it should be fixed, but again, that is a separate issue.
The parent post to my reply, unfortunately, seemed to miss this distinction entirely, and went off on some sort of thinly disguised apologist crusade for copyright infringers everywhere. Either that, or they lazily posted a general comment in a thread with a specific context and didn't even bother changing the thread title, in which case I don't have much sympathy if their intent is misinterpreted.:-)
Please do not use the term "cracking down" with respect to peaceful, voluntary activity. This implies something wrong or immoral about what the victims of the "crackdown" are doing.
Apart from breaking the law by ripping off the people whose products they apparently value but won't pay for if they can get away with it, you mean?
There's plenty to debate about copyright both in theory and in practice, but let's not pretend that the kind of person who uses TPB is an honest, upstanding citizen and not an antisocial freeloader who thinks they'll get away with it. Cracking down seems an entirely fair description to me.
ISO may have lost credibility in the vast part of the pseudo-technical community who doesn't know what standards-setting organizations do.
Ah, yes, those of us objecting are all stupid and/or ignorant.
It offers one (or more) standards that individuals or organizations can adopt in its processes/products, such that other individuals or organizations can rely on a basic level of documentation, interoperability or performance being present in the standards-marked processes/products, should they choose to follow the standard.
Exactly. And in the case of OOXML, other individuals or organizations can't adopt it or rely on a basic level of interoperability. AIUI, Microsoft themselves don't actually implement the variation of OOXML that has been recognised by ISO. Given how ill-specified parts of that OOXML "standard" are, no-one else has any chance at all.
And while in theory you would be right about what standards bodies are for, there is no point sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that endorsement by a major standards body such as ISO doesn't have other implications. Many governments require that their work is consistent with standards, for example, and any contractor who doesn't use the appropriate "standardised" software may find themselves out of luck when seeking any future government-funded work.
I'm sorry, but I believe you have spectacularly missed the point of the complaints here. There are basically two separate issues that have upset people.
The first is that we don't have a standard we can work from. Have you looked at the OOXML documentation at all? It isn't just big, it's pretty much ill-defined. What's the point of an ill-defined standard? If you want backward compatibility, it should say that certain features must work as documenting in another standard that you cite. OOXML says they must work like various previous bits of software with unspecified behaviour.
The second is that despite these glaring technical flaws, the standard has been approved because Microsoft have basically paid for enough people to join formerly opposed national standards bodies to swing the votes. This demonstrates that a single group with enough financial power can subvert the mechanisms for independent peer review that groups like ISO are expected to follow.
It is hardly surprising that in the final tally of national standards bodies, most approved OOXML. The point is that many of those did not approve it until the last minute, when numerous companies with an obvious affiliation to Microsoft suddenly started sending representatives along just in time to get voting rights, and then voted the standard through, with no evidence that they had even read it. There is considerable opposition to OOXML in most of these places, particularly from those who have actually read the material, but they have been shouted down by money and procedural flaws. That just means the affected national standards bodies also need to revise their processes or become irrelevant.
MS has already stripped ISO of legitimate credibility, by proving that it can be bought.
I don't see why undermining them as a standards organisation means Microsoft win. There are other bodies that can serve the same purpose, either recognised with some sense of official standing in a community, or simply producing de facto standards that people follow by mutual consent or from practical necessity.
For example, while there actually is an ISO standardised version of HTML4, most of the "web standards" are not ISO recognised at all. And yet, here you are, reading this, and it probably looks pretty much how I and the Slashdot admins intended on your screen just as it does on mine. The W3C itself uses the term "recommendations" rather than claiming to define "standards", which I think is good form on their part, but almost everyone who makes browsers except for Microsoft treats the W3C as a standards-defining body in practice, and even MS acknowledge the W3C's existence.
Other effective standards have come about because of sheer industry power, with Microsoft's own, IE6-compatible flavours of HTML and CSS probably the most common example in the WWW area.
I agree that you are describing reality, but this is exactly why ISO has now lost credibility in the technical community.
If a standards body acts only as a known library where you know you can go to look up useful information — a channel for communication between interested parties, if you like — then it is useful for compatibility, avoiding reinventing the wheel, and similar laudable goals. But if being an "ISO standard" confers some sort of status, making some sort of statement about the value or relevance of the standardised item, then there are standards (in the ethical sense) that must be upheld for the ISO standards to mean anything. One of those needs to be independent, peer-reviewed audit, and that clearly hasn't happened here.
Most CEOs are not stupid, but most of them probably are naive on technical matters, because that's not what they do. If CEOs cannot trust the technical merit of ISO standards then ISO is a liability, because it gives a false sense of security.
I've pretty much said my piece now, so I'll probably stop after this post, but FWIW, I have no problem at all with debating how to react to a situation. I think it is far more interesting and potentially useful to have an honest and open discussion with points made by both sides than to shut up and assume that any one person's own view is the whole truth.
I confess that my own view on these issues is heavily coloured by having been on the wrong side of a trivial human error in a government department (in my case, tax-related rather than criminal) that basically turned my life upside down for far too long. The fact that the system could make such a mistake was uncomfortable: the database in question represented data that was obviously wrong the moment any human looked at it, but apparently there weren't sufficient checks in place to stop it being set that way. The fact that the system automatically affected me, and without any advance warning, was deeply disturbing: the first I knew of a significantly short pay packet was when my employer's payroll people acted on a letter from the tax people, without either group so much as sending me a form letter first. But the thing I find most worrying of all is that despite the obvious absurdity of the data and the immediate and serious problems caused to me, it took me literally months of being bounced between multiple tax offices to sort it out: none of them could tell me why the change had been made; in fact, to start with, they wouldn't even talk to me, because while they were happy to send letters to my employer demanding that they deduct more tax from my salary, the computer their agent was using didn't know that I worked for that employer, or where I currently lived, so the staff wouldn't accept that I was who I said I was!
All this was caused by a tiny data entry error by some low-paid local government administrator who probably types thousands of numbers like the one they got wrong every day. The fact that a total systematic failure could happen so easily, with such serious consequences, and without the slightest useful process for correcting it, leaves me rather disillusioned about trusting the government with automated systems and databases.
And no, as far as I'm aware, nothing whatsoever was done to address the numerous failings that led to the horrible situation. They never so much as wrote me an apology, never mind offering any compensation, and in law such government departments are completely immune from any sort of prosecution and therefore completely unaccountable for such mistakes no matter what harm they may do to anyone.
I guess it won't surprise you to learn that I oppose the increasing scope of the national identity database and cards, the DNA database, automatic number plate recognition cameras and the like either. It's not that I don't see that there are constructive possibilities, I'm just of the "when in doubt, it's better to let a guilty man go free than to imprison an innocent" philosophy, and on the evidence to date, such measures already seem to be causing a significant number of people terrible problems while costing a lot of money and not really doing much to help. That cost/benefit ratio is all wrong.
This is why I believe that as such technologies become more powerful, we must implement strong, transparent, effective controls on how they are used, and practically useful mechanisms to compensate victims of errors and to punish those responsible, all before we even consider allowing governments and private businesses to have that kind of power over us. And since government isn't very good at this sort of thing — they can't even keep confidential information on millions of people without leaking it out due to basic security failings, so goodness knows what kind of paradise for identity thieves and organised criminals the National Identity Register will be — I don't hold out much hope of those safeguards being implemented, and therefore by default I oppose the database/surveillance state.
OK, one more try, directly addressing your specific points...
1) tracking and identifying criminals is a great boon in solving crime and obtaining convictions - surely that is a good thing
Sure it is, if you consider it in isolation. So is arresting violent people and putting them in jail before they hurt someone, and so is killing suicide bombers before they blow innocent people up. It's not the potential good I'm worried about.
But you can't just consider this in isolation. There is also the problem of all the people who are going to wind up wrongly labelled as suspects, which then gets treated as a synonym for criminal, when we come to depend on such measures too much. As I've said, the only thing really protecting us at the moment is the fact that current systems are so absurdly unreliable that they would probably be discredited in court. But how much does it take to be convincing? Something with an error rate of just 0.1% still gives the wrong answer for thousands of people. And several technologies already being actively deployed by the authorities have much worse error rates than that.
And of course we know that the guys responsible for using this technology really are incompetent enough to confuse a suspect with a suicide bomber about to blow himself up, not least because they shot a man dead in the middle of a crowded tube station as a result of a well-documented and scarily long chain of screw-ups that started with this surveillance culture. And while probably the most high profile, that is hardly the only publicly documented case where things have gone catastrophically wrong.
2) a camera combined with a speaker certainly could be used to stop a crime in progress, without a single police officer getting off his ass
That demonstrably isn't true. They've tried it.
Moreover, a high proportion of the public asked felt it was creepy. This is one of the things you often don't notice about people who defend privacy violations: they rely on statistics and surveys saying how much the public support their latest invasive measure, yet when opponents have conducted proper surveys of the public they have found that many people didn't appreciate the significance of the original questions and changed their answers when fully informed.
3) the camera can't jump down, but it will act as a deterrent and it will greatly extend the range of actual police officers
A camera only acts as a deterrent within the area it can see (or to be more precise, it acts as a deterrent for people who don't want to get caught, within the area those people think it can see). That is a long way from saying "it will act as a deterrent" without qualification.
The only way to overcome this is to put cameras everywhere, which increases the risk of abuse or simply human error.
But stating outright that CCTVs can't be a useful tool is just silly and ignorant, IMO.
It probably would be, but if you look carefully, I don't think you'll find anywhere that I said that. My essential claims are that: current CCTV and related technology is implemented too poorly to be of much use in fighting crime; current CCTV and related technology is not therefore a cost-effective use of taxpayers' money; and as the technology improves to become useful for these things, there is a danger that it will also become a central part of an overall government surveillance and monitoring system that collects and stores far more information about citizens than is appropriate in a free country, which will inevitably lead to bad things happening to innocent people because even if the technology dramatically improves, the people using it are still only human, and no measures of the kind we're discussing are ever likely to be 100% accurate.
It seems disingenuous to argue that such a technology enforced police state is a likelihood while that same technology will never be advanced enough to combat crime.
Perhaps I've said something to offend you or you've misunderstood a previous comment I made somewhere, but in this case, I don't understand your objections here. There is no paradox: it would, unfortunately, be realistic to operate an improved CCTV network in a way that supports state surveillance, yet which still isn't a cost-effective means of preventing crime. A CCTV camera can help to track someone, and perhaps with improved technology that would make it more useful for identifying who committed a crime after the fact, but it still can't jump down off a post and help if you're being mugged.
The reality right now is that CCTV resolution and coverage is too limited to be of much use for anything, though things like traffic cameras are reliable cash cows for the government because of the mandatory display of licence plates on all cars. The rest of the cameras are mostly just a big waste of money.
However, the stated intent of various policing and other government units goes far beyond what we're seeing now. New technologies that will inevitably become reliable enough to be convincing are being heavily funded, and numerous trials of some particularly invasive or disturbing measures are already underway.
Note that there is no guarantee that these new technologies will be any more effective at net crime prevention than what we have today, since the major arguments against CCTV effectiveness are based on things like displacement, disguise and delayed response. Nor is there any guarantee that technologies that have become credible enough to be adopted by government authorities will actually be reliable enough to use fairly, without a significant risk of certain types of people being falsely accused or worse.
If we just turn a blind eye to things like CCTV now because the people behind it are mostly incompetent, and ignore the pace of change and the implications when they cease to be completely incompetent... Well, that's why the Information Commissioner called it "sleep walking". The principle is dangerous, and the fact that the current people trying to implement it are inept is not a sufficient safeguard.
The only way you beat this sort of threat is to have effective regulation, oversight and public accountability in place before the technology reaches viability. Once it has, if it's already in use, it is very difficult to stop it.
In a culture where data collection, storage and mining is as easy as it is fast becoming, we need to reevaluate what we mean by "privacy" and what reasonable expectations are. It is normal that if you walk down the street, others walking down the street see you, momentarily. It is not normal that every time you leave your home, you are tracked everywhere you go and your every movement is recorded for future examination by unidentified, unaccountable parties with the power to destroy your life.
Don't think it could happen? CCTV provides a mechanism for the authorities to track anyone they want covertly, with effectively no accountability at all. Combine that with the rapid advances in technology for facial recognition and even recognition through the way someone moves, the trend to store everything ever known by the government in databases for future reference, the increasing dependence on so-called intelligence-led policing that is itself often based on profiling techniques driven by those databases, an increasing yet still misplaced trust in the reliability of such measures by the front-line grunts who are increasingly employing paramilitary tactics, an everyone-is-a-suspect culture in the police and security forces, and a complete and utter disdain for the basic rights and freedoms of the average citizen exhibited publicly and overtly by numerous senior government, police and security service representatives, and you find CCTV at the centre of a police state where quite literally no-one is safe from The System.
If you think they are smarter than this, try looking, in detail, at the reports on what happened at Stockwell tube station in London on 22 July 2005, as a direct consequence of a catastrophic failure of communication and of numerous separate processes by authorities conducting covert surveillance who panicked in a climate of fear.
There's no magic to either system... nothing in life is free. You either pay for it now (by taxes), or later when you need it (medical bills). The difference is in how the system treats poor people. For the average Joe with a decent income, it works out about the same under either system.
And for those above average, socialised health care is more expensive, both because they literally pay more and because statistically they are less likely to need expensive treatment.
There is always a loser in any socialised system, and it's always the people who have been more successful. Socialism is a tax on success (which often means just putting in an honest day's work and earning a decent wage for it) to subsidise those who are unwilling or unable to support themselves.
(This isn't to say I don't believe in any socialist measures at all nor that I support pure capitalism; actually, neither is true. I'm just rebutting the one-sided claim that "the difference is in how the system treats poor people".)
Great! Where do I sign up for my free NHS eye tests and dental check-ups? My asthmatic friend will be pleased to hear about the free prescriptions, too.
Oh, wait. While we both earn decent salaries in full-time jobs, and therefore pay well above average NI contributions, we still have to pay for basic preventative care as well. You'd think after we paid a few thousand pounds a year in NI contributions, they could at least give back a few tens of pounds in treatment costs. But they only do that for people who aren't very well off financially, and therefore don't pay much if any NI.
Except that whenever the CCTV evidence could be used to help with that sort of thing, the cameras are mysteriously switched off. This has been infamously been the case both for London protests, where large numbers of peaceful protesters (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) were detained under very dubious authority for several hours by the police, and in the case of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, where not a single camera on the London Underground managed to catch any of the events beyond his initial entry into the station. There has been no shortage of reports from campaign groups either, each with basically the same story: while police now seem to routinely film peaceful protests with camcorders, protesters attempting to film the police behaviour similarly have been threatened and forced to stop.
There is precious little evidence that CCTV actually helps in fighting crime overall. Privacy International's FAQ has a few comments and sources.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that despite high profile CCTV being installed here in Cambridge (hardly the crime capital of the UK), it did not help a woman I personally saw being seriously assaulted: there was no coverage in the alley where it happened, so the police came only when I called them. Nor did it help when a substantial sum of money was stolen from a community group's storage at a local church hall: despite reporting the incident within 24 hours and knowing within a fairly small window when it must have happened, there was no evidence that the police even looked at the CCTV camera footage covering the only main road access to the premises. Nor did it help on either of the two occasions when I have been called on to give serious first aid in recent years, despite both areas being covered by CCTV cameras and the casualty obviously being hurt each time. It doesn't even seem to help with traffic, where there are cameras overlooking busy road junctions that get clogged up for everyone when a few selfish drivers don't follow the rules.
They did have a good story in the local press about cameras mounted on buildings on one of the main shopping streets being turned to look into students' bedroom windows on the opposite side of the street a little while back, though.
I'd settle for not giving them billions of our taxpayers' money each year so that they can act as a forum for our government to impose laws it couldn't get away with at home, and not letting an open-ended stream of people from other countries come to ours because we're "all part of Europe" when the damage being caused is staggering. (I have nothing against free movement between countries in principle, but in practice it only works when the countries have broadly similar economic standards, which clearly isn't true between "old" and "new" Europe. Contrast with people moving either way between "old" Europe and the US/Canada, as we're discussing here, where everything is broadly in balance.)
I agree completely, but unfortunately, there is still that assumption. FWIW, it's prevalent in places like the UK as well. I suspect the very top universities produce outstanding graduates in many subjects more because they get the cream of the crop in the intake than because of any teaching merit. It's a common problem at all levels of an education system, but perhaps most telling at university levels.
Except that we're not talking about reparations for slavery, we're talking about abuses of the current populations of these and other countries by the current administrations in these countries...
That wouldn't be a perfect world, because like most GPL fanbois, you have failed to notice that no-one would be producing top class games in that environment. The GPL and commercial reality are fundamentally incompatible without some sort of mitigating factor, and high quality games are probably the single best example of this.
As I said pretty clearly, I thought, in my previous post, it's not that simple at all. There are plenty of examples where a particular graphics card has never become useful.
Sometimes a pattern of poor quality has become apparent only a few months after a model has been released, not because the card was OK to start with, but just because it took a while to track down the problem. ATI cards and Asus motherboards had some slightly out-of-spec problems with the power connections for a while, for example.
Sometimes the vendor has just never got the drivers up to scratch and certain games have therefore always been unplayable with that card.
But because each individual fault has affected only a relatively small part of the market (players of certain games that triggered driver problems, people whose PCs used certain hardware with less tolerance for out-of-spec graphics cards...) the graphics card companies have basically ignored anything that seemed like too much effort to fix. Being cutting edge really doesn't have much to do with it.
"Scripting language" is certainly ill-defined, but I'd suggest that the concept is an interpreted language with minimal overheads in the syntax. The latter tends to mean dynamic typing, but that's not really the important thing IMHO.
IMNSHO, the quality control at both companies has been terrible for several years now. What's the point of paying a premium for a good graphics card, if hardware problems make your system unstable as soon as a demanding game is loaded or the drivers take out your operating system at random intervals? It's not like this has happened only on bleeding edge cards with new drivers, either: several entire models have had basic incompatibilities with other common system components, and sometimes drivers have been unacceptably poor for the entire useful lifetime of a gamer's card.
Contrary to the marketroid reports, it is not in any way unavoidable that new cards with new drivers have to crash a significant fraction of the hottest games at release time. It's not like these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing, and it's not like the card vendors couldn't co-operate with the game vendors on a beta test programme. This happens because commercially, it makes more sense for them to race to market with inadequately tested hardware and poorly engineered driver software and hope they can patch up any widespread problems later with a minimal PR hit. As long as both the big names are as bad as each other, consumers in the target market are pretty much screwed anyway.
It's about time something like this happened and one of the companies took a major financial hit as a consequence. Perhaps then we'll move back towards supplying hardware and drivers that actually, you know, work. Gamers the world over (other than those currently suffering from these problems, of course) should probably be happy about this, because it might be serious enough this time to make a difference to future quality control, which is much better than a significant fraction of people being disappointed with each new model but never enough of a critical mass to really punish the company that supplied substandard kit.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this not a violation of basic data protection laws in numerous jurisdictions (like, say, pretty much all of Europe)?
This is the curse of social networking sites generally: you don't have to be the person providing personal information about yourself, because chances are your well-meaning friends will do it for you.
You sir, are making the wrong argument, in the wrong discussion on the wrong web site.
Perhaps, and I don't intend to pursue the point very far because as you say this is not the place for that, but I do dislike people trying to twist discussions by using inflammatory terminology or comments.
Most of this discussion is indeed about the censorship issue, and that is what I came here to read and perhaps comment on, but if you check the posts in this particular subthread, we seem to have diverged somewhat. The grandparent post for my reply suggested a connection between censorship of anti-government sites and censorship of sites that help people to break the law. To me, these are completely different issues (and whether the law is itself appropriate is a third issue). I have no problem with the government cracking down on people who break the law as a general principle, nor on using the term "cracking down" to describe it. If some particular law is itself broken, then of course it should be fixed, but again, that is a separate issue.
The parent post to my reply, unfortunately, seemed to miss this distinction entirely, and went off on some sort of thinly disguised apologist crusade for copyright infringers everywhere. Either that, or they lazily posted a general comment in a thread with a specific context and didn't even bother changing the thread title, in which case I don't have much sympathy if their intent is misinterpreted. :-)
Please do not use the term "cracking down" with respect to peaceful, voluntary activity. This implies something wrong or immoral about what the victims of the "crackdown" are doing.
Apart from breaking the law by ripping off the people whose products they apparently value but won't pay for if they can get away with it, you mean?
There's plenty to debate about copyright both in theory and in practice, but let's not pretend that the kind of person who uses TPB is an honest, upstanding citizen and not an antisocial freeloader who thinks they'll get away with it. Cracking down seems an entirely fair description to me.
ISO may have lost credibility in the vast part of the pseudo-technical community who doesn't know what standards-setting organizations do.
Ah, yes, those of us objecting are all stupid and/or ignorant.
It offers one (or more) standards that individuals or organizations can adopt in its processes/products, such that other individuals or organizations can rely on a basic level of documentation, interoperability or performance being present in the standards-marked processes/products, should they choose to follow the standard.
Exactly. And in the case of OOXML, other individuals or organizations can't adopt it or rely on a basic level of interoperability. AIUI, Microsoft themselves don't actually implement the variation of OOXML that has been recognised by ISO. Given how ill-specified parts of that OOXML "standard" are, no-one else has any chance at all.
And while in theory you would be right about what standards bodies are for, there is no point sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that endorsement by a major standards body such as ISO doesn't have other implications. Many governments require that their work is consistent with standards, for example, and any contractor who doesn't use the appropriate "standardised" software may find themselves out of luck when seeking any future government-funded work.
I'm sorry, but I believe you have spectacularly missed the point of the complaints here. There are basically two separate issues that have upset people.
The first is that we don't have a standard we can work from. Have you looked at the OOXML documentation at all? It isn't just big, it's pretty much ill-defined. What's the point of an ill-defined standard? If you want backward compatibility, it should say that certain features must work as documenting in another standard that you cite. OOXML says they must work like various previous bits of software with unspecified behaviour.
The second is that despite these glaring technical flaws, the standard has been approved because Microsoft have basically paid for enough people to join formerly opposed national standards bodies to swing the votes. This demonstrates that a single group with enough financial power can subvert the mechanisms for independent peer review that groups like ISO are expected to follow.
It is hardly surprising that in the final tally of national standards bodies, most approved OOXML. The point is that many of those did not approve it until the last minute, when numerous companies with an obvious affiliation to Microsoft suddenly started sending representatives along just in time to get voting rights, and then voted the standard through, with no evidence that they had even read it. There is considerable opposition to OOXML in most of these places, particularly from those who have actually read the material, but they have been shouted down by money and procedural flaws. That just means the affected national standards bodies also need to revise their processes or become irrelevant.
MS has already stripped ISO of legitimate credibility, by proving that it can be bought.
I don't see why undermining them as a standards organisation means Microsoft win. There are other bodies that can serve the same purpose, either recognised with some sense of official standing in a community, or simply producing de facto standards that people follow by mutual consent or from practical necessity.
For example, while there actually is an ISO standardised version of HTML4, most of the "web standards" are not ISO recognised at all. And yet, here you are, reading this, and it probably looks pretty much how I and the Slashdot admins intended on your screen just as it does on mine. The W3C itself uses the term "recommendations" rather than claiming to define "standards", which I think is good form on their part, but almost everyone who makes browsers except for Microsoft treats the W3C as a standards-defining body in practice, and even MS acknowledge the W3C's existence.
Other effective standards have come about because of sheer industry power, with Microsoft's own, IE6-compatible flavours of HTML and CSS probably the most common example in the WWW area.
I agree that you are describing reality, but this is exactly why ISO has now lost credibility in the technical community.
If a standards body acts only as a known library where you know you can go to look up useful information — a channel for communication between interested parties, if you like — then it is useful for compatibility, avoiding reinventing the wheel, and similar laudable goals. But if being an "ISO standard" confers some sort of status, making some sort of statement about the value or relevance of the standardised item, then there are standards (in the ethical sense) that must be upheld for the ISO standards to mean anything. One of those needs to be independent, peer-reviewed audit, and that clearly hasn't happened here.
Most CEOs are not stupid, but most of them probably are naive on technical matters, because that's not what they do. If CEOs cannot trust the technical merit of ISO standards then ISO is a liability, because it gives a false sense of security.
I've pretty much said my piece now, so I'll probably stop after this post, but FWIW, I have no problem at all with debating how to react to a situation. I think it is far more interesting and potentially useful to have an honest and open discussion with points made by both sides than to shut up and assume that any one person's own view is the whole truth.
I confess that my own view on these issues is heavily coloured by having been on the wrong side of a trivial human error in a government department (in my case, tax-related rather than criminal) that basically turned my life upside down for far too long. The fact that the system could make such a mistake was uncomfortable: the database in question represented data that was obviously wrong the moment any human looked at it, but apparently there weren't sufficient checks in place to stop it being set that way. The fact that the system automatically affected me, and without any advance warning, was deeply disturbing: the first I knew of a significantly short pay packet was when my employer's payroll people acted on a letter from the tax people, without either group so much as sending me a form letter first. But the thing I find most worrying of all is that despite the obvious absurdity of the data and the immediate and serious problems caused to me, it took me literally months of being bounced between multiple tax offices to sort it out: none of them could tell me why the change had been made; in fact, to start with, they wouldn't even talk to me, because while they were happy to send letters to my employer demanding that they deduct more tax from my salary, the computer their agent was using didn't know that I worked for that employer, or where I currently lived, so the staff wouldn't accept that I was who I said I was!
All this was caused by a tiny data entry error by some low-paid local government administrator who probably types thousands of numbers like the one they got wrong every day. The fact that a total systematic failure could happen so easily, with such serious consequences, and without the slightest useful process for correcting it, leaves me rather disillusioned about trusting the government with automated systems and databases.
And no, as far as I'm aware, nothing whatsoever was done to address the numerous failings that led to the horrible situation. They never so much as wrote me an apology, never mind offering any compensation, and in law such government departments are completely immune from any sort of prosecution and therefore completely unaccountable for such mistakes no matter what harm they may do to anyone.
I guess it won't surprise you to learn that I oppose the increasing scope of the national identity database and cards, the DNA database, automatic number plate recognition cameras and the like either. It's not that I don't see that there are constructive possibilities, I'm just of the "when in doubt, it's better to let a guilty man go free than to imprison an innocent" philosophy, and on the evidence to date, such measures already seem to be causing a significant number of people terrible problems while costing a lot of money and not really doing much to help. That cost/benefit ratio is all wrong.
This is why I believe that as such technologies become more powerful, we must implement strong, transparent, effective controls on how they are used, and practically useful mechanisms to compensate victims of errors and to punish those responsible, all before we even consider allowing governments and private businesses to have that kind of power over us. And since government isn't very good at this sort of thing — they can't even keep confidential information on millions of people without leaking it out due to basic security failings, so goodness knows what kind of paradise for identity thieves and organised criminals the National Identity Register will be — I don't hold out much hope of those safeguards being implemented, and therefore by default I oppose the database/surveillance state.
OK, one more try, directly addressing your specific points...
1) tracking and identifying criminals is a great boon in solving crime and obtaining convictions - surely that is a good thing
Sure it is, if you consider it in isolation. So is arresting violent people and putting them in jail before they hurt someone, and so is killing suicide bombers before they blow innocent people up. It's not the potential good I'm worried about.
But you can't just consider this in isolation. There is also the problem of all the people who are going to wind up wrongly labelled as suspects, which then gets treated as a synonym for criminal, when we come to depend on such measures too much. As I've said, the only thing really protecting us at the moment is the fact that current systems are so absurdly unreliable that they would probably be discredited in court. But how much does it take to be convincing? Something with an error rate of just 0.1% still gives the wrong answer for thousands of people. And several technologies already being actively deployed by the authorities have much worse error rates than that.
And of course we know that the guys responsible for using this technology really are incompetent enough to confuse a suspect with a suicide bomber about to blow himself up, not least because they shot a man dead in the middle of a crowded tube station as a result of a well-documented and scarily long chain of screw-ups that started with this surveillance culture. And while probably the most high profile, that is hardly the only publicly documented case where things have gone catastrophically wrong.
2) a camera combined with a speaker certainly could be used to stop a crime in progress, without a single police officer getting off his ass
That demonstrably isn't true. They've tried it.
Moreover, a high proportion of the public asked felt it was creepy. This is one of the things you often don't notice about people who defend privacy violations: they rely on statistics and surveys saying how much the public support their latest invasive measure, yet when opponents have conducted proper surveys of the public they have found that many people didn't appreciate the significance of the original questions and changed their answers when fully informed.
3) the camera can't jump down, but it will act as a deterrent and it will greatly extend the range of actual police officers
A camera only acts as a deterrent within the area it can see (or to be more precise, it acts as a deterrent for people who don't want to get caught, within the area those people think it can see). That is a long way from saying "it will act as a deterrent" without qualification.
The only way to overcome this is to put cameras everywhere, which increases the risk of abuse or simply human error.
But stating outright that CCTVs can't be a useful tool is just silly and ignorant, IMO.
It probably would be, but if you look carefully, I don't think you'll find anywhere that I said that. My essential claims are that: current CCTV and related technology is implemented too poorly to be of much use in fighting crime; current CCTV and related technology is not therefore a cost-effective use of taxpayers' money; and as the technology improves to become useful for these things, there is a danger that it will also become a central part of an overall government surveillance and monitoring system that collects and stores far more information about citizens than is appropriate in a free country, which will inevitably lead to bad things happening to innocent people because even if the technology dramatically improves, the people using it are still only human, and no measures of the kind we're discussing are ever likely to be 100% accurate.
It seems disingenuous to argue that such a technology enforced police state is a likelihood while that same technology will never be advanced enough to combat crime.
Perhaps I've said something to offend you or you've misunderstood a previous comment I made somewhere, but in this case, I don't understand your objections here. There is no paradox: it would, unfortunately, be realistic to operate an improved CCTV network in a way that supports state surveillance, yet which still isn't a cost-effective means of preventing crime. A CCTV camera can help to track someone, and perhaps with improved technology that would make it more useful for identifying who committed a crime after the fact, but it still can't jump down off a post and help if you're being mugged.
The reality right now is that CCTV resolution and coverage is too limited to be of much use for anything, though things like traffic cameras are reliable cash cows for the government because of the mandatory display of licence plates on all cars. The rest of the cameras are mostly just a big waste of money.
However, the stated intent of various policing and other government units goes far beyond what we're seeing now. New technologies that will inevitably become reliable enough to be convincing are being heavily funded, and numerous trials of some particularly invasive or disturbing measures are already underway.
Note that there is no guarantee that these new technologies will be any more effective at net crime prevention than what we have today, since the major arguments against CCTV effectiveness are based on things like displacement, disguise and delayed response. Nor is there any guarantee that technologies that have become credible enough to be adopted by government authorities will actually be reliable enough to use fairly, without a significant risk of certain types of people being falsely accused or worse.
If we just turn a blind eye to things like CCTV now because the people behind it are mostly incompetent, and ignore the pace of change and the implications when they cease to be completely incompetent... Well, that's why the Information Commissioner called it "sleep walking". The principle is dangerous, and the fact that the current people trying to implement it are inept is not a sufficient safeguard.
The only way you beat this sort of threat is to have effective regulation, oversight and public accountability in place before the technology reaches viability. Once it has, if it's already in use, it is very difficult to stop it.
In a culture where data collection, storage and mining is as easy as it is fast becoming, we need to reevaluate what we mean by "privacy" and what reasonable expectations are. It is normal that if you walk down the street, others walking down the street see you, momentarily. It is not normal that every time you leave your home, you are tracked everywhere you go and your every movement is recorded for future examination by unidentified, unaccountable parties with the power to destroy your life.
Don't think it could happen? CCTV provides a mechanism for the authorities to track anyone they want covertly, with effectively no accountability at all. Combine that with the rapid advances in technology for facial recognition and even recognition through the way someone moves, the trend to store everything ever known by the government in databases for future reference, the increasing dependence on so-called intelligence-led policing that is itself often based on profiling techniques driven by those databases, an increasing yet still misplaced trust in the reliability of such measures by the front-line grunts who are increasingly employing paramilitary tactics, an everyone-is-a-suspect culture in the police and security forces, and a complete and utter disdain for the basic rights and freedoms of the average citizen exhibited publicly and overtly by numerous senior government, police and security service representatives, and you find CCTV at the centre of a police state where quite literally no-one is safe from The System.
If you think they are smarter than this, try looking, in detail, at the reports on what happened at Stockwell tube station in London on 22 July 2005, as a direct consequence of a catastrophic failure of communication and of numerous separate processes by authorities conducting covert surveillance who panicked in a climate of fear.
There's no magic to either system ... nothing in life is free. You either pay for it now (by taxes), or later when you need it (medical bills). The difference is in how the system treats poor people. For the average Joe with a decent income, it works out about the same under either system.
And for those above average, socialised health care is more expensive, both because they literally pay more and because statistically they are less likely to need expensive treatment.
There is always a loser in any socialised system, and it's always the people who have been more successful. Socialism is a tax on success (which often means just putting in an honest day's work and earning a decent wage for it) to subsidise those who are unwilling or unable to support themselves.
(This isn't to say I don't believe in any socialist measures at all nor that I support pure capitalism; actually, neither is true. I'm just rebutting the one-sided claim that "the difference is in how the system treats poor people".)
Great! Where do I sign up for my free NHS eye tests and dental check-ups? My asthmatic friend will be pleased to hear about the free prescriptions, too.
Oh, wait. While we both earn decent salaries in full-time jobs, and therefore pay well above average NI contributions, we still have to pay for basic preventative care as well. You'd think after we paid a few thousand pounds a year in NI contributions, they could at least give back a few tens of pounds in treatment costs. But they only do that for people who aren't very well off financially, and therefore don't pay much if any NI.
Except that whenever the CCTV evidence could be used to help with that sort of thing, the cameras are mysteriously switched off. This has been infamously been the case both for London protests, where large numbers of peaceful protesters (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) were detained under very dubious authority for several hours by the police, and in the case of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, where not a single camera on the London Underground managed to catch any of the events beyond his initial entry into the station. There has been no shortage of reports from campaign groups either, each with basically the same story: while police now seem to routinely film peaceful protests with camcorders, protesters attempting to film the police behaviour similarly have been threatened and forced to stop.
There is precious little evidence that CCTV actually helps in fighting crime overall. Privacy International's FAQ has a few comments and sources.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that despite high profile CCTV being installed here in Cambridge (hardly the crime capital of the UK), it did not help a woman I personally saw being seriously assaulted: there was no coverage in the alley where it happened, so the police came only when I called them. Nor did it help when a substantial sum of money was stolen from a community group's storage at a local church hall: despite reporting the incident within 24 hours and knowing within a fairly small window when it must have happened, there was no evidence that the police even looked at the CCTV camera footage covering the only main road access to the premises. Nor did it help on either of the two occasions when I have been called on to give serious first aid in recent years, despite both areas being covered by CCTV cameras and the casualty obviously being hurt each time. It doesn't even seem to help with traffic, where there are cameras overlooking busy road junctions that get clogged up for everyone when a few selfish drivers don't follow the rules.
They did have a good story in the local press about cameras mounted on buildings on one of the main shopping streets being turned to look into students' bedroom windows on the opposite side of the street a little while back, though.
Fantastic! They could sublicence it to everyone who ever added a power switch to their computers for extra cash, too.
I'd settle for not giving them billions of our taxpayers' money each year so that they can act as a forum for our government to impose laws it couldn't get away with at home, and not letting an open-ended stream of people from other countries come to ours because we're "all part of Europe" when the damage being caused is staggering. (I have nothing against free movement between countries in principle, but in practice it only works when the countries have broadly similar economic standards, which clearly isn't true between "old" and "new" Europe. Contrast with people moving either way between "old" Europe and the US/Canada, as we're discussing here, where everything is broadly in balance.)
I agree completely, but unfortunately, there is still that assumption. FWIW, it's prevalent in places like the UK as well. I suspect the very top universities produce outstanding graduates in many subjects more because they get the cream of the crop in the intake than because of any teaching merit. It's a common problem at all levels of an education system, but perhaps most telling at university levels.
Except that we're not talking about reparations for slavery, we're talking about abuses of the current populations of these and other countries by the current administrations in these countries...
Yeah, but... But... In the UK, our government is only screwing us! Nyeeeeh!
That wouldn't be a perfect world, because like most GPL fanbois, you have failed to notice that no-one would be producing top class games in that environment. The GPL and commercial reality are fundamentally incompatible without some sort of mitigating factor, and high quality games are probably the single best example of this.
As I said pretty clearly, I thought, in my previous post, it's not that simple at all. There are plenty of examples where a particular graphics card has never become useful.
Sometimes a pattern of poor quality has become apparent only a few months after a model has been released, not because the card was OK to start with, but just because it took a while to track down the problem. ATI cards and Asus motherboards had some slightly out-of-spec problems with the power connections for a while, for example.
Sometimes the vendor has just never got the drivers up to scratch and certain games have therefore always been unplayable with that card.
But because each individual fault has affected only a relatively small part of the market (players of certain games that triggered driver problems, people whose PCs used certain hardware with less tolerance for out-of-spec graphics cards...) the graphics card companies have basically ignored anything that seemed like too much effort to fix. Being cutting edge really doesn't have much to do with it.
"Scripting language" is certainly ill-defined, but I'd suggest that the concept is an interpreted language with minimal overheads in the syntax. The latter tends to mean dynamic typing, but that's not really the important thing IMHO.
IMNSHO, the quality control at both companies has been terrible for several years now. What's the point of paying a premium for a good graphics card, if hardware problems make your system unstable as soon as a demanding game is loaded or the drivers take out your operating system at random intervals? It's not like this has happened only on bleeding edge cards with new drivers, either: several entire models have had basic incompatibilities with other common system components, and sometimes drivers have been unacceptably poor for the entire useful lifetime of a gamer's card.
Contrary to the marketroid reports, it is not in any way unavoidable that new cards with new drivers have to crash a significant fraction of the hottest games at release time. It's not like these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing, and it's not like the card vendors couldn't co-operate with the game vendors on a beta test programme. This happens because commercially, it makes more sense for them to race to market with inadequately tested hardware and poorly engineered driver software and hope they can patch up any widespread problems later with a minimal PR hit. As long as both the big names are as bad as each other, consumers in the target market are pretty much screwed anyway.
It's about time something like this happened and one of the companies took a major financial hit as a consequence. Perhaps then we'll move back towards supplying hardware and drivers that actually, you know, work. Gamers the world over (other than those currently suffering from these problems, of course) should probably be happy about this, because it might be serious enough this time to make a difference to future quality control, which is much better than a significant fraction of people being disappointed with each new model but never enough of a critical mass to really punish the company that supplied substandard kit.