matt-helps

Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.

via BBC NEWS | UK | Website age ratings ‘an option’.

An interesting idea came out of the UK government this week, the idea of applying film-style age ratings to websites (here in the UK that is U=Universal, PG=Parental Guidence, 12=12 years old and older, 15=15 years old and higher and 18=18 years old and higher) as a means of protecting kids.  As a father of 2 small kids I can understand the desire to create a safer internet but I think they may be entirely misunderstanding how the net works as such a system for the whole net would be completely unworkable.

The internet is almost un-policable without cross-border cooperation between governments.  It is not known whether the internet was designed to be unpolicable or whether it just evolved as it has but data is stored and services are run on servers all over the world including in many countries that would not offer cooperation with the UK government.  Not only that but websites appear and disappear with almost disturbing speed – how do you regulate that?  What about websites that are full of safe stuff in one area, but have inappropriate content elsewhere on the same site.  What about user-posted content?  Not just pictures, but graphic text also?

No, the only way to get even close to what the government would like to do is to create a whitelist of websites that are safe for kids that have no user-posted content and are regularly policed.  A whitelist operates like a walled garden – you can roam around inside the garden but you can’t get out – you can visit any site on the whitelist, but no others.  Perhaps sites would apply to be part of this whitelist and volunteer themselves on there, but I can’t imagine that the take up would be at all high considering the punishment the government would dole out if something nasty slipped through their own censoring.

No, the only way for young kids to use the internet is to do so closely supervised.  And if my kids think they can have a computer in their own room before they’re 32 they’ve got another thing coming…

You may have noticed but I’ve converted this site to a wordpress site, added a few features and removed a few too.  This is mainly because I’ve decided to focus matt-helps.com entirely on techie things (computers, programming, linux, internet, and techie stuff in the news) – mainly because these are the things I have the experience in but also because I think most of my subscribers probably aren’t interested in football or cars!  (Not that I’m that interested in the latter one either).

What you will find is that the RSS feed http://feedproxy.google.com/matt-helps now publishes the full text so that you don’t have to come to the website to read the whole article – we can do this now because we can put google ads into RSS feeds – hooray!

Last week we had profoundly good news on the abuse of human rights in the UK that we call the police’s DNA database. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled unanimously that holding the DNA & fingerprint details of people that have no criminal record is a breach of their rights. The biometric data of about 4.5m people are held by the police in a national database and one in five of them does not have a current criminal record.

Personally I find this an affront to personal freedom – sure, if you’ve been convicted of a crime then you give up that freedom, but until that point our DNA & fingerprints must remain off the record.

The government maintains that DNA & fingerprint records are vital for catching criminals and state that 3500 matches are made each month. I do not dispute the value of such a database but I do dispute their statistics as they are not relevant – what proportion of those 3500 monthly matches are:

a) perpetrators of the crime, as opposed to innocent people using the same environment.

b) from the 1/5 of the database who have no criminal record – I bet it is not even 1/50th.

c) solving crimes that couldn’t be otherwise solved.

They also leave out the number of failed checks/tests they actually do each month to get 3500 matches. The statistics are worthless – they’re just a device designed to enable this government’s ideal of a police state. Yes, there will be some people that get away with crime because of this, but the end does not justify the means. Freedom and maintaining human rights does come at a very real cost, but it is one that we must pay: simply because a few people offend because they can get away with it does not mean that we should infringe everyone’s rights to privacy. If someone does get away with it they will most likely be caught the next time or the time after that – because typically people don’t just offend just once, and any DNA found in previous crime-scenes (of unknown origin) is stored for future cross-reference anyway – making this entire debate pointless.

The problem is that the police, like all public departments, are target driven and statistical goals always distort the vision & values of an organisation.

So I am thankful that the government’s infringement upon our freedom (in the name of our protection) has been halted on this front for now. Haven’t we seen this all before anyway? In the name of protection the Republic allows Senator Palpatine to create an army which then goes on to subjugate the galaxy into the new Emperor Palpatine’s empire…

There’s a bug in Tesco Direct’s website that makes it almost unusable to firefox 3 users.  It keeps trying to download the aspx files instead of running them on the server – strange and utterly useless if you’re doing some shopping for groceries or a kettle & baby monitor as I was.

Tesco themselves are promising a fix as soon as they roll out a new version of the website which could be 2010 from my experience of rolling out software…  It took a bit of searching but I found a workaround and thankfully it is quite easy.  In the Firefox 3 address bar type:

about:config

and enter the advanced settings.  If you’ve not been here before you’ll need to click “I’ll promise I’ll be careful” or whatever that button says!  Then in the “filter” text box type in “network.http.keep” which should reveal the following option which you should double-click and set it to FALSE:

network.http.keep-alive

Then restart firefox 3 and tesco direct should work just fine.  By the way, the best tip I can give you for online grocery shopping in the UK is to switch between providers often.  Do one at Tesco, one at Sainsburys, one at ASDA because after a month the ones that you haven’t used for a while will often send you a voucher for free delivery or something.

I’ve also noticed that ASDA put hardly any of their offers on to the website whereas almost all Sainsburys offers seem to be available on their site which meant that I bought more food for less at Sainsburys last  time I compared them with a like-for-like shopping list.

Ok, my last article for a while on netbooks!  I found this quote in business week – its a decent article about the trouble netbooks are causing for the computer industry.  Anything that causes trouble for Microsoft makes for interesting reading if you ask me.  I would be really interested in hearing about Microsoft’s reaction to this…

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. PC makers surmised that netbooks would complement bigger PCs. They would appeal to weary business travelers, for example, who wanted to get online and send e-mail from a hotel room. But in many cases, consumers are opting for netbooks in place of laptops, PC manufacturers say.

Full article on Business Week.

Here’s a bit more from thevarguy At $349, Dell’s low-cost Ubuntu Linux system is “giving Microsoft fits,” according to one source familiar with the Microsoft-Dell relationship. “It’s one thing to have Dell ship Linux to consumers,” said the source. “It’s quite another to have Dell advertising Linux to millions of consumers in a Sunday newspaper heading into the holiday season.”