* Posts by Adam

25 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008

Man accused of arranging wife's rape on Craigslist

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Rape fantasies

Academic surveys over the last 30 years suggest 30% to 60% of women have rape fantasies, although the definition of rape varies.

Judge backs Halifax in Chip and PIN clone case

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Not as bad as it first seems

Text of judgement here: http://www.alikelman.com/jobhbos.pdf

HBOS destroyed the evidence that would have shown if the chip or the mag stripe had been used. The judge takes pains to point out that he isn't ruling on chip and pin in general, but more on the balance of evidence in this particular case.

Gordon 'to sacky' Wacky Jacqui

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Sure this is a good thing?

Jack Straw was a less liberal Home Sec. than Michael Howard. Blunkett was less liberal than Straw. Clarke and Reid were just ineffective. Smith was less liberal than Blunkett.

There's a pattern there that doesn't look good.

UK2 brings support back to Blighty, culls execs

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Ditlev is the problem

Not his management or support team. He's the one who decided to start charging for all the "free forever" services that came bundled with their hosting and destroyed the company's reputation for cheap but honest hosting.

That said, customer service has been better than before recently, although it was non-existent before.

Women coppers eager to drop trousers

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@Karim

It isn't a case of looks. The issue trousers really are awful, putting the waistband around you waist puts the seat somewhere below the knees, and it isn't possible to run apprehend criminals if you keep tripping over your trousers. Moving the waistband higher is the best option but is really uncomfortable under a stab vest.

You'll note that Thames Valley, now with a female chief constable, is moving to more sensible clothing for all officers.

London cops extend virtual justice trial

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I'm with Daniel

It isn't the physical court that's the problem. The problem is with the number of agencies that don't talk to each other. Take a simple ABH, witnessed by a constable and captured on CCTV:

PC makes statement in notebook. Witness makes complaint. PC visits witness to take statement. PC visits CCTV. CCTV operator makes statement. PC takes CCTV into evidence. Evidence receipt written. Evidence statement written. Evident transferred to property store. Receipt written. Transfer statement written. Suspect arrested. Arrest statement written. Use of force form written. Meeting with CPS sought. CPS can't make it until tomorrow. CPS arrive late for meeting. CPS re-write, by hand, all the above statements into file. CCTV passed to CPS. Receipt written. CPS statement written. Suspect charged.

That's before you've even started to book witness availability, court time, judge availability and had everyone turn up at court but be turned away because the Court Service have rearranged without telling anyone.

Torture case against Boeing subsidiary resuscitated

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@Torture is illegal

"Torture is illegal. There are no circumstances whatsoever that make it legal."

Not really. Not in the UK. Torture is routine and used by police services on a daily basis. Don't want to give a fingerprint on arrest, you'll be tortured until you do. It's much easier to inflict pain on a prisoner until they comply than it is to get sufficient officers involved to force them physically.

Meet Phorm's PR genius

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Libel insurance paid up?

Very brave to write article about one of Goldsmith's friends.

ASBO woman cuffed over raucous rumpy-pumpy

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Remanded?

The only reasons to remand someone are if they:

1. Might abscond - no evidence of that here

2. Might interfere with a witness - doesn't seem likely

3. Need to be protected - nope

4. Might reoffend

So it would seem she's been remanded to prevent her from having sex again. Which would seem to be somewhat excessive abuse of judicial power in contravention of Article 6 of European Declaration on Human Rights.

Darling's £0.5bn offshore windfarm 'leccy-bill stealth levy

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Weapons research

"a lot of the early research into nuclear tech was for the purpose of weapon an military use"

So we'll be ignoring the cost of the Dounreay fast-breaders then. Must have cost a fair whack to build and currently looking at well over three billion pounds on the decommissioning project.

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

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Who else

So now that linking to copyright material has been found to be criminal, should we now expect Swedish prosecutions of the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft directors?

'Let me use poo-flinging Roman siege engine against burglars'

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Notts pol

Presumably Nottinghamshire Police were too busy using "SAS-style" tactics to arrest 114 people for the thought-crime of thinking about protesting at Ratcliffe-on-Soar to go looking for arsonists.

Which one is a disproportionate use of force?

Nottinghamshire's also the force that famously felt that it didn't have enough resources to investigate all the murders on its patch.

One in ten PCs still vulnerable to Conficker exploit

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@Ron Haworth

opendns say infection rates are:

Russia, Malaysia 3%; Italy 4%; USA, India 5%; Algeria 7%; Indonesia 10%; Philippines 11%; Brazil 12%; Vietnam 13%

and all other countries less that 3%, so it looks like those Chinese, Indian and Russian computers aren't any worse off than the North Americans.

DNA database grows faster than forecast

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@ Shennanigans

"is this truly representative of the ethnic backgrounds of criminals in this country?"

Possibly, but the DNA database isn't a database of criminals so it's impossible to draw any conclusions.

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

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Not suspicious

"However, failure to walk through an arch on request is, itself, suspicious - and therefore grounds for a s1 search. QED."

IIRC failing to submit to a search is specifically mentioned in the Home Office PACE guidelines as *not* being grounds for a s1 search.

Police law-interpretation: What next?

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Not so much in ruralshire

It's worth noting that most of these incidents relate to the Met and GMP. Those two forces tend to take the "assume the worst" approach (possibly because they've been burnt a few times), whereas other forces assume that the public as a whole is friendly.

Unfortunately it's a vicious circle for the Met, you assume everyone is out to get you and treat them aggressively and you find that you're not welcome in any communities (and that includes the other emergency services - the Met are almost at war with London Fire and are non-too popular with the Surrey, Hants, and Thames Valley forces)

Vulcan appeal in emergency tin-rattling

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@John Bayly

Who is the "them" that you refer to?

I don't know if the Vulcan people are a charity, but a charity that unincorporates typically has to donate its assets to another charity in a similar field, nobody gets to keep the money personally.

Three months on, you still can't get off the DNA database

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@Wize re: Inadmissable

You should read the UK government's submission to the Grand Panel of the ECHR (there was even a video of it on the ECHR website) which basically boiled down to "even when it was illegal to retain samples the police did so anyway, and the domestic courts didn't stop them so there's no point in making it illegal because we'll just carry on doing it illegally anyway."

Airline pilots told to switch off mobile phones

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@Alistair

Ok, you've made me find the AAIB bulletin:

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources/dft_avsafety_pdf_500594.pdf

"the source of the interference was subsequently confirmed to be from the commander's own personal mobile telephone which was active and located on the flight deck."

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Phones affect black boxes

The is at least one documented instance in the AAIB reports of a pilot's mobile phone garbling the data on the flight data recorder.

So mobiles do interfere with in-flight systems. That doesn't necessarily equate to causing a crash, but it may mean that the cause of a particular crash can't be discovered until it causes another one.

Hackers: BitDefender site exposes private data (yet again)

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Input parsing

I'm with Anonymous on this one. Why on earth are web developers letting the presentation layer access data in the database layer at all? That's what stored procedures and parameters are for.

Brum laid bare on OpenStreetMap

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as of when?

A city the size of Birmingham isn't a static object, it is constantly changing with new housing, new footpaths and new buildings, so I very much doubt it is completely mapped and up to date.

Keeping something like Wikipedia up to date and accurate is fairly easy (because an expert can just read the article) compared to checking OpenStreetMap (which requires some form of survey).

MI5 head calls for comms data access

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@help he's got a knife

"Vast majority? Bullshit.

No they don't. You're not for a second telling me that there were half a million calls to 999 where the person is able to call, able to ask for help but unable to give their location. That nobody else present can give their location and that the 999 operator then gets a senior policemans written consent to obtain data under RIPA section 22."

Yes I am. Any call to 999 is treated as a call for help, deliberate or not. Remember there are several million silent 999 calls each year - any one of them might be the next Hannah Foster - so if there's any suspicion at all a subscriber check is done.

How do you suppose someone else present is located unless you get the location of the original call? Remember that people calling 999 aren't always in the most stable frame of mind and quite often drunk.

On top of that every call centre has got its collection of regular nutcases who put 999 into their speeddial.

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re: Half a MILLION times

Yes, the system of getting call and subscriber records is automated and happens daily.

Or would you rather the 999 call that starts "Help! He's got a knife..." and then dies gets ignored?

The vast majority of RIPA requests fall into this category and get approved by the control rooms inspector.

UK comms intercepts up by half - and it isn't the council

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The majority of those requests

I can explain where at least 2 of those requests came from with a simple example:

P: "Police Emergency"

C: "Help he's got a knife and he's about to kill...." bzzzt.

P: "Hello caller"

P: "Hello caller"

P to Inspector "May I do a RIPA subscriber check to get the address details for this number?"