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Freebie

I've received a couple of emails about a short film called Blackpool: The Las Vegas of the North. Presumably a tongue-in-cheek title.

Anyway it's on today on VBS TV so it might be worth a look if you're interested.

Here's the blurb:

In January of this year, Vice editor Andy Capper and filmmaker Leo Leigh (son of director Mike Leigh, no less) spent a fortnight in the North West resort of Blackpool. In amongst the fish’n’chips and fruit machines they got to know the characters who make up the area, and uncovered the unique charm behind the seaside town.

Once Britain’s number one holiday destination, Blackpool has been growing old disgracefully. The refinement and grace has given way to a certain romantic grit, as pigeon fanciers, 80 year-old tattoo addicts and hotel talent shows mask the backstreet slums and high rise buildings characterise the area crippled by 90% unemployment.

“Blackpool: The Las Vegas Of The North” is an intimate snapshot of the people behind the local legends, showing there is more to this corner of Britain than blue comics, soft porn pedlars and immigrant strippers. And not a Big Dipper pun in sight...

The sky is the limit

"Fly to Europe for only £9.99!"

You've probably seen these adverts on the television or in the newspapers, and indeed probably used one or more of the airlines as well. I certainly have.

But having today booked some flights to Spain I was going off the wall: firstly about the difference between the advertised price and the actual price and secondly the way they remove standard essentials from the flight and then charge you for them as an extra.

Get to the airport and check in and on these budget airlines you cannot reserve a seat like you used to be able to. They'll happily charge you for the privilege though.

Luggage is another example: you have to pay extra to take a suitcase. They say it's a saving for those that don't need to carry any luggage, but it's not. It's an increase in price for those that do.

Then there's the in-flight meal. Generally you got a light meal of some kind on any flight longer than an hour or so but now you have to buy it for a ridiculous price. This is something I don't particularly mind because aircraft meals are terrible but the price never went down because of it.

Ryanair announced that using the toilet will soon be a chargeable extra and further ahead they are intending to convert portions of their aircraft to standing room only so they can then charge you extra - for a seat!

The result is when you see advertising for different airlines you can never compare them at face value because they all drop various standard features and charge you extra for them.

Jet2 have been advertising flights to Spain for £9.99 on the TV all the time recently. They quoted me £160 return. They might as well have said the flights are free - except for all the extra stuff we add on.

And don't even think about bringing any extra luggage home....

Ruling the airwaves

If you could get away with committing an offence knowing that from the point of view of the authorities someone else did it, would you?

I opened my netbook today and decided to search for wifi access points within the vicinity of my home and discovered a total of 14 unique networks including my own. I was surprised by this as I don't live in a particularly densely populated area.

My first impression from the list of network names was of slight bewilderment that some of them were named after either the operator or their house number and street. Free information.

Not especially useful to me really, but now that I knew some of their names I decided to see how far I could potentially go in order to become one of these people from the comfort of my chair.

Approaching this, I knew that many of the wireless routers supplied by ISPs are configured by default to use a weak security algorithm called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) rather than the much more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

WEP was determined to be an insecure security algorithm in 2001 and was deprecated by the IEEE because it did not serve the purpose it was designed for - to secure your network. It can be cracked within a few minutes with freely available tools. In fact my own ISP, O2, supplied me with a router that was configured with WEP enabled by default, leaving my network wide open for anyone with a few minutes spare.

Knowing this, I decided to boot my netbook into Backtrack:a linux distribution focused on network auditing and security. It's a nice distribution and can be burned on to a USB stick or DVD for use as a "live" system. Opening kismet I discovered some more details about the wireless connections in my area.

I was interested in finding out whether they were using WEP or WPA. It's possible to brute force attack a WPA secured network but it could take longer than the universe will exist to crack. Anyway, within minutes I had retrieved the keys for all of the WEP secured wireless networks in my area. The Aircrack website details how to use the tools to do it if you're interested.

At this point I could bridge all of these networks and load up any of my favourite peer-to-peer software with lots of music, films and games shared and from the point of view of the BPI or any other organisation that attempts to monitor our internet usage it would be my neighbours who were doing it. As a result, they'd get the BPI threat letter and any resulting court action. Perfect!

It's surprising in these days of fraud, identity theft, ID cards and 24/7 surveillance that people have such a blase attitude towards protecting their own identity. I do however think it's bad sport for ISPs to supply hardware that is preconfigured in such a way that your home or small business network can be compromised by anyone that wants to use it.

Is it fair to assume that an ISP will supply hardware that is as secure as it can be upon installation? I think so. Consumers should not be expected to be knowledgeable about the technicalities of wireless encryption methods. Indeed, the consumer may not even have a wireless enabled computer yet their network would be wide open and they wouldn't even know.

I await the case whereby someone that didn't do anything wrong actually gets prosecuted based on what they are perceived to have been sharing. Who would be liable? The consumer or the ISP for supplying hardware that permitted anyone to use it?

Top of the Phorm

Success! Shares in Phorm dived 40% yesterday when BT said it wouldn't be using their system (although they have not fully terminated their agreement with them).

Phorm is a company started by people that made money by infecting your computer with spyware that now offers a similar service that you can do nothing about. At the ISP level, they spy on your web usage and provide targetted advertising based on it.

Carphone Warehouse/Talktalk have also pulled out and the only remaining ISP with a commitment to Phorm is - you guessed it - Virgin Media.

Apparently Phorm are now focusing their business on Asia and have gained a foothold in South Korea. I suspect they are probably used to being spied on though.

ReCycle

In 2008 Blackpool was officially named a Cycling Town. Apparently "The Cycling Towns programme aims to help Blackpool meet the challenge of the modern leisure market’s needs, by making cycling an essential part of its tourism offer."

It seems quite a tenuous link between tourism and cycling and I have yet to see a hen night cycling down the promenade, but I'll go with them since it's still a £6million work in progress to turn the town into this utopia of cycling.

The impression I gained from the name Cycling Town was that the town would be awash with people on two wheeled transport. It isn't: there aren't many cyclists at all in Blackpool at the moment. As a driver and motoring enthusiast I'm obviously happy about that given the general lack of respect for road rules that cyclists have, such as failure to signal properly, jumping red lights and riding on the pavement when it suits them, but as a taxpayer I'm questioning the allocation of funds. Where on earth has the money been spent?

Lets say for some bizarre reason I decided to get on my bike and cycle to the town centre to buy something. Once I got there, where could I put my bike? Off the top of my head I can't think of any bike shelters and bike parking areas like places such as Oxford have. The ridiculous thing is Oxford is not a Cycling City despite being flooded with students on bikes. This whole Cycling Town thing is starting to sound a bit gimmicky...

Cycling to work? For a kick off you would need somewhere to leave your bike at work and in addition to everything else carrying a suit in a bag to work isn't and never will be practical: it'd look terribly crumpled unless they decide to set up ironing and changing rooms there. Unlikely I feel. I also wouldn't want to run the risk of cycling down roads without proper provisions for cyclists such as cycle lanes. As a result I don't even think it would be possible to cycle to work.

I would seriously question the criteria by which a town is branded a Cycling Town. For a start, I'd expect a large percentage of roads to have cycle lanes either marked or constructed parallel to the roads. In Blackpool this is not the case. I don't want to have to cycle 50 miles out of my way in order to stay on a cycle lane for the duration of my journey. I would prefer for my journey to be at least equidistant to that in a car but preferably shorter.

I would prefer that Police officers enforce the law upon cyclists that abuse the pavement. Offenders can be issued a £30 fixed penalty, but the maximum if taken to court is £500.

When I was 16 and cycling on the pavement down Waterloo Road I was stopped by the Police and lectured about it being a danger to the public. The Police car proceeded to follow me as I cycled on the road and then in typical Police fashion decided to floor it past me and into the sunset (must have been their tea break then). Jollity aside, I'm not aware that the law on this has changed. People complain - rightly - about cars parking on the pavement and I find cyclists that use the pavement as a road to be no different.

The Promenade may well end up being a cyclist's paradise after all the current works are completed but it always has been as far as I can remember. Fundamentally since you can't cycle to work on the promenade and you can't cycle home on the promenade its value to locals is pleasure only.

For me I find the Cycling Town brand to be somewhat pointless, somewhat gimmicky and just another channel the Government can use to force councils into spending money on certain things. In this case the link is very weak and the money was allocated based on the resurfacing and in some places redesign of the Promenade.

Democracy - whats the point?

I spoke to a mate of mine the other day and asked him who he voted for in the European elections a few weeks ago. "I don't vote" was his defiant response, as if it was his way of protesting that he believed it didn't make any difference who he voted for.

It's quite sad that in Great Britain only 50% of the population - plus or minus 10% - can be bothered to vote; be it European elections, local elections or even general elections. In the recent European elections it was approximately 40% and in the last general election it was approximately 60%.

Taking the general election as an example: over 20 million people didn't vote.

Why?

Disillusionment?
Protest?
Main parties all have the same policies?
Assumption that Labour would get a majority anyway?

Personally I believe, like my friend said, it's because people feel their vote doesn't really count. What difference will it make to them? Will their lives improve, degrade or stay the same? When the Government says it's pumping money into something, who notices? Who benefits?

I've been thinking about this over these past few weeks as the misdemeanours of various MPs have become apparent thanks to the Telegraph and it's struck me that in the UK we really don't have a proper democracy in the true sense that the people have the power.

Does every vote count in a general election? The answer is it doesn't, due to the First Past the Post system. Let me give a quick example.

In a constituency of 24,001 people, 12001 people vote Labour and 12000 vote Conservative. Labour wins, the Conservative votes are discarded. Now, assume that the first 12001 people that went to the ballot box all ticked Labour candidates. At this point, it really doesn't matter who the other 12000 people vote for because Labour has already won. Therefore it can be said that their votes did not count.

Yes, this can work to the advantage of any party and you could say where one party gains in one place another gains in another place, so it's swings and roundabouts. It's still not a truly democratic and fair system though, because it can be manipulated. If there are two constituencies next to each other whereby one is traditionally weak and one is strong in terms of a party's domination of the vote, parties can orchestrate some voters from the strong constituency to vote in the weak one.

For the past 12 years we've been in a position where Labour, who got only 3% more of the total vote share than the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, have had a huge majority in the House of Commons and therefore you can say that all the other parties and all the other votes were irrelevant.

The result of first past the post is that representation in the House of Commons does not reflect the actual vote. You could have come second or third in the overall vote share yet still end up dominating the House of Commons because you won more constituencies.

I don't believe it's a great system, I don't believe it promotes democracy and lately with Labour's domination in the House of Commons it has given the Prime Minister an almost presidential role, though Mr Brown is falling from this pedestal quite rapidly (if he ever really climbed on to it in the first place).

So what do we need to sort it out?

Michael Jackson coming back from the dead to sing us all into the sunlight?

Kim Jong Il to nuke us into oblivion?

The other popular alternative to first past the post is proportional representation which shares the seats in the House of Commons proportionally to the number of votes for each party.

This means that every vote counts so radical parties, racist parties, one-policy parties and lots of independents will get seats there, and the domination of the big two parties will be lessened.

It sounds good on paper, but in practise it means that anything passing through the House of Commons would be voted on by these minority parties and their votes could make or break the outcome.

Some say that's a good thing, and some don't. The Government is against it: they say it would be a pointless coalition of a large number of small parties that never got anything done. Whilst that might be correct, it would in my view still be more representative than the current system.

It's not something I believe will happen unless the voting figures drop even more than they have already. I do believe that when the Prime Minister calls the next election, we will see a rise in voting simply to get him out but it could easily go the other way.

There can't be many people that still won't vote Conservative "because Thatcher closed the mines", can there?

Am I bovvered?

Everyone's got a website these days, haven't they? I once swore I'd never make a blog, but here we are.

Blackpool Council has not one, not two, but ten websites. Ten.

That might not be such a surprise to some; large companies have more than that in some cases. It was, however, a surprise to me, a lifelong resident, because I had only heard of one of them.

Here's a list:

Visit Blackpool
The official tourism website for Blackpool

Blackpool4Me
Has the amazing hook line, "where local people and communities create the site". This site allows local clubs and organisations to have a page on it. From the site, "Blackpool4Me is not your average website - it is loads better! It is a website of websites, in fact its the website of websites." Ok.

BSafe
Blackpool Community Safety and Drugs Partnership. Lots of pictures of Police officers on the street. Sightings of the loch ness monster are more common. "BSafe Blackpool is committed to reducing crime, disorder and substance misuse in the town, reassuring the public through a series of innovative projects and sophisticated intelligence." Not very good at it then, looking at the figures.

Blackpool Coastal Housing
An "Arms Length Management Organisation" created by Blackpool Council. They soon wont be arms length when they move into the town centre. Manages Council houses.

Blackpool Unlimited
An online portal supporting business in the town.

ReBlackpool
Site listing various projects relating to the regeneration of Blackpool.

Blackpool CPS
No, not Crown Prosecution Service, but Corporate Print Services.

Blackpool Build Up
A 3-year project run by Blackpool Borough Council and Blackpool and The Fylde College, aimed at training adults in construction skills.

R U Bothered
Aimed primarily at Blackpool's yoof with some forums and some information about yoof services.

BSFBlackpool
Building Schools for the Future. Where these schools are I do not know, but according to them it's a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Am I about to start slagging them off for having loads of sites? Surprisingly, no, I'm not. I will say, however, that despite some of them sporting web design company names at the bottom, none of them are particularly well designed and there is no house style, indicative of delegation to various Council departments to do their own thing.

The main issue I have really is the underpublication of these sites. I had a look on the R U Bothered site, as I had no idea what it would be but assumed it would have something that related to youth issues. There's a forum on there with 10 topics spanning around 18 months. Thats how under used it is, because nobody knows about it.

Had I wanted to start a business, would I have known about Blackpool Unlimited? No. Did I know what the Blackpool Build Up project was? No. Did I know that Blackpool was apparently building next generation schools? No.

Branson Pickle

According to the Evening Gazette, Blackpool's "broadband connection" is about to become "one of the best in the country".

These opening words in the article left me a bit confused. Is journalist Nick Hyde telling us that Blackpool is so behind the times that it has only one broadband connection? Or maybe, just maybe, he is a lousy reporter that has been fed by Virgin Media's publicity machine and knows absolutely nothing about the subject he is writing about.

The latter, I think.

So lets digest the article. Mr Hyde is saying that people in Blackpool can now acquire "one of the best" connections in the country. Best in terms of what?

I can tell you now that Virgin Media is far from the best Internet Service Provider in the UK at the time of writing. My history with them is well documented on this blog: to summarise:

• I've been a customer since the year dot
  
  
• I was very happy to pay premium price with Telewest due to second to none reliability and completely unlimited connection.
  
  
• Virgin took over and offered me a 20MBit package, then applied throttling across the board once I was locked in a 12 month contract.
  
  
• Their Chief Executive declared that net neutrality is "a load of bollocks".
  
  
• They proceeded to sign deals with music/film lobby groups to monitor internet usage.
  
  
• They are more interested in sucking up to lobby groups and the Government than they are about their customers' privacy.
  

Anyhoo, according to the article in the Gazette we "have only been able to get broadband speeds of between 8Mbs and 20Mbs" in Blackpool. What the hell is a Mbs? A Major bullshit story? I'm sure we get more than 20Mbs in Blackpool from the Gazette alone if that is the case. Another sign that the author, Nick Hyde, is completely clueless about the subject and by this point his journalistic oesophagus was probably full of the advertising that Virgin had sent him.

Next we have a cracking technical case for Virgin being a "massive boost" for business.

Steve Pye, chairman of the Blackpool-based Federation of Small Businesses, said: "My connection at the moment is 8Mb and sometimes it can be a little slow and even crash." Time you switched from Virgin then Steve? Internet connections don't crash: computers do.

He follows on to say: "When you are part way through putting a deal together this ("crashing") is not a good thing." How is 50MBit going to help then? If your connection sucks, increasing the bandwidth will make no difference; you will just be paying more for a connection that still sucks.

I'll give him the benefit on that but it's still not all good with Virgin. Lets say the 50MBit was needed to conclude the deal: with Virgin Media's Stalinist throttling policies the deal could similarly be lost if the connection was used for for more than 30 minutes at full speed. This is because after that point Virgin Media has decided that you are in the top 5% of users and as a result your bandwidth is cut by 75% for the next five hours. It's automatic, there is no discretion and it will not be revoked. Bye bye deal.

I am absolutely baffled as to why our local newspaper is freely advertising Virgin Media and clearly the article writer has done very little of his own research. Given that it's not uncommon for the Gazette to publish Government policy and agenda as news, a part of me believes it's an active push for Virgin to be the preferred provider of broadband services because they are currently the only ISP to have caved in to the Government and the BPI.

Virgin's 50MBit rollout isn't even news. It has been available for ages and in fact I was offered it a few months back when I left them. The only reason to have it is if you have lots of money to waste on having the "fastest".

For normal web browsing and average iTunes use, you don't need it.

For heavy downloading, there are much better and significantly (5 or 6 times) cheaper products around.

Andy Murray Top 10

I accept Andy Murray is a good tennis player, even though he may be about to be despatched from Wimbledon by some guy I have never heard of.

Regardless, here are my top 10 reasons to hate Andy Murray.

10. His fake American accent.

9. His annoying fist pumping.

8. His typical dour Scot personality.

7. The "Come on Tim" annoying middle class toffs that for some reason are waving Union Jacks at him.

6. He hates England.

5. "Murray Mount"

4. His clone like failed tennis player mother that groomed him because she was crap.

3. His gold digging girlfriend.

2. The fact that they are touting him as the winner of Wimbledon and it's only the third round. For the Scots, it's like England being touted as World Cup winners before a match has been played. And I know how much you hate that.

1. That if he does ever win any Grand Slam competitions, particularly Wimbledon, we'll never be allowed to forget it.

Skool iz kool

The schools in my hometown of Blackpool apparently have the fifth highest truancy rate in the UK.

Not a good statistic. Blackpool also has below average figures for GCSE passes and it can be said that the product of schools in Blackpool are low quality.

In true Labour style, their implementation of an education system is out in force blaming someone else: the parents. In this case it is for taking kids out of school for holidays, and apparently they are thinking of locking up parents of truants. Hmm. Stopping parents going on holiday by sending them to a holiday camp. Not sure about that.

I'm baffled as to how - even if the parents took the child out of school for the entire holiday - a few weeks missed can cause grades to be so poor and cause truancy to be so high. Well, unless the parents are extremely rich and they are constantly going on holiday. Call me a snob if you want but rich parents tend to know better than that.

Parents do try to take their kids out of school towards the end of term time, just before the holidays in order to save quite a bit of cash on the holiday itself, because clearly holidays are expensive when all the kids are off school. Toward the end of term, exams are done, the curriculum is basically complete. Why does it matter if someone takes a week off?

I think the schools are looking for an easy way out by passing on the blame. Kids skip school because they are bored, because they think it's cool to skip school, and in Blackpool at least, there's no inspiration or aspiration driving through the system to bring people back.

I was taken out of school a few times and I don't think I came out any worse off for it but I didn't skip school at any other time because I didn't want to and because my peer group was not doing it.

It's simply not feasible to blame family holidays for poor grades, and it's not feasible to say that families in Blackpool go on more holidays in term time. It's a bizarre statistic not linked with anything.

The boss of "childrens services" in Blackpool, David Lund, states the obvious when he says there is "a clear link between pupils with high attendance and those achieving well in exams". Is there a clear link between authorised absence (holidays) and really poor grades?

At Palatine School, or Palatine Sports College as it is called now, one in five pupils were persistently absent in 2008. That means they were absent for more than 20% of the term time. And they're trying to attribute that to too many holidays?

Try looking closer to home.

Boring lessons
Low quality teachers
No classroom control or discipline
No out of school activities
Low quality parents

...

Total Recall

Lately I am liking more and more the idea of being able to recall Members of Parliament, or in laymans terms, kick them out if we get sick of them.

It's how Arnie got in in California: a percentage didn't like the existing Governor and forced a new election, and he won.

This would be particularly useful right now with all these expenses related resignations, or rather steppings down. As you will know, all of those MPs that have been caught with their snouts in the trough are "stepping down at the next election", although they all say they were intending to step down and that the expenses scandal is nothing to do with it. Right.

They are hanging on because they will receive a £70,000 "readjustment" payment if they simply quit being an MP.

Had they gone now, they wouldn't get it. Had they been recallable, they would most certainly not get it, and I think there should be an option to recall their pension to spend it on something more useful.

Bore draw

So Andy Murray has been slagging off British tennis because 9 of the 11 Brits went out of Wimbledon in the first round. He should have admitted that he was almost the tenth, having been taken to the wire by a no hoper.

It looks like Murray has the easiest draw ever seen, you know, almost as if they have set him up to win the competition. I don't think anyone outside the top 20 is actually in it.

I don't know why they don't just have him play Federer now. I was there last year and was hoping to watch Spanish ace Nadal wipe the floor with Murray. But Nadal destroyed him so fast that I ended up getting the womens semi finals which were just a Venus and Serena cruise.

British Hero

Looks like Andy Murray won today, after scraping past Robert Kendrick who looked like he could have beaten him.

I was all ready for the Scottish Loser headlines as well.

Maybe Gordon Brown will do me a favour and make a speech.

Mother of the Free?

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.

Sounds like the UK.

I'm voting Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Vive la Legislation

Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for "Digital Britain".

• Application of a £6 per year phone line tax to fund the 2MBit broadband expansion into rich suburbs.

• ISPs are forced to hand over customer details on request to Ofcom which can be dished out to media conglomerates so they can monitor and sue you more easily.

• All peer to peer is illegal, full stop and Ofcom is tasked with blocking it.

• "Online piracy is wrong" and "unacceptable", and anyone caught "downloading illegally" will be shot at dawn.
  

Superb. Another double helping of spin complete with the bitter aftertaste of legislation. I thought this report was supposed to take us forward. Taxing everyone to pay for old copper wire technology to be rolled out whilst everyone else on the planet is rolling out fibre is a sure fire winner!

If you check out what Ben Bradshaw said in the Commons today, it's clear he was just reading his script and had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Bullshitting it about fibre rollout when it's not even on the radar and there is no incentive for any company to take a lead on it.

I was under the assumption this report might be a really important step in making Britain a digital leader. In fact, having read the report, all it proposes is a new tax and a few analyses. No doubt incorporating more and more reports from Lord Snooty, more taxes and even more legislation.

So, they intend to eradicate their perception of online piracy by providing Ofcom with powers to obtain your personal data from ISPs to give to third parties so they can sue you. Currently this cannot happen due to the Data Protection Act. I really am against this action, as I believe most ISPs are. It's just another step to policing the internet and is a burden they do not want.

We've had Feargal Sharkey on again, totally missing the point and pushing his own agenda to make himself more money from his single hit song. Yes, he is chief executive of British Music Rights: another self serving music lobby group that labels all music downloaders as thieves.

He obviously has no idea of reality when he talks about a small number of people not being happy about this. Nobody is happy about it, because its the music industry pressuring the Government to push legislation through to support their failed business model. We don't need these aging, overgrown, monolithic music companies any more given the other means of distribution for music.

Apparently piracy in the UK costs music companies £175 million. The Government has already handed banks hundreds of billions, so why doesn't he just subsidise the music industry like he does for manufacturing, farming, and so on.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And If it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

If you download music or movies, the BPI try and convince you that you are wrong, that you are the problem and that you are a criminal. You've no doubt seen the "Knock off Nigel" adverts and associated parodies: likening people that download a few tunes to someone that would rob their grandmother is just bizarre and laughable. It also implies that there's something wrong with doing things on the cheap: something I would vehemently disagree with.

The Government reckon that their measures will reduce "illegal downloading" by 80%, but there is no such thing as illegal downloading. It's like labelling people that buy fake brand name clothes as criminals. They're not. The crime is in the distribution: in the case of file sharing it's the making available of contents and not the downloading of it. For those that use peer to peer, the technology relies on sharing and most peer to peer clients enable sharing by default.

I am sick of people like Feargal Sharkey and BPI boss Geoff Taylor labelling internet users as criminals for downloading something that was available online. I am sick of the Government pandering to these industries. Unfortunately the Government and media lobbies are so far behind on all this, that by the time they legislate for Bittorrent, it'll be yesterday's technology anyway.

I also feel some sympathy for the many businesses that distribute their software and updates using Bittorrent, because they will have to go back to old style leased line technology to provide this to their customers if the Government decide to force ISPs to block it.

I personally believe that these draconian measures will simply benefit other more liberal countries with a more modern attitude to business. Should they ban and block Bittorrent, peer to peer users from the UK will purchase remote servers hosted there in order to operate peer to peer software under different legislation. They will then use a virtual private networking connection in order to download their content from it. In fact, this already happens and is something I certainly would consider if the UK Government bans peer to peer as it suggested in the Commons today.

They should take a look at the case of Comcast in the USA. They blocked Bittorrent and ended up being sued because of it. They lost and the FCC forced them to stop it.

Maybe some day once someone in power actually thinks for themselves and has a background in the subject (rather than getting all their opinions from a board of self serving quango sitters) they will make progressive legislation to improve everything for everyone. This smokescreen only benefits music companies. Everyone else gets taxed or sued.

Vive la Revolution?

So, Lord Carter today will be announcing a £3billion "Digital Britain" project for delivering broadband internet to every home in the UK as well as plans for "combatting" piracy.

Their benchmark for bandwidth is 2Mbit which, yes, compared to dialup is fast but compared to all broadband connections in the UK at the moment is the slowest and is certainly not a speed that will provide good content delivery for much longer than a couple of years.

In some countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the norm is 100MBit with some homes able to have 1000MBit. Investment was placed in better, future proof technology and they are benefitting from the foresight of their Governments by having the means to deliver high speed data into almost any home.

In the UK we are stuck with DSL: if you can get a BT telephone line - which everywhere other than extreme rural cases can - the chances are you can easily get 2MBit already and have been able to for 4 or 5 years. Standard broadband speeds in the UK are between 8 and 20MBit depending on what you want to pay for. Yes, there are a few rural villages that consist of a few giant farmhouses, mansions and barn conversions that are so far away from urbanisation that they can only get dialup, but having seen some sob stories from these people about it my conclusion was that they probably have enough money to buy the entire internet.

So where's the story?

The story, I believe, is that the "broadband in every home" chunk of the forthcoming statement is a whitewash for the underlying business deal that I suspect has occurred between the music industry lobby groups and the Government in relation to the other part of the story.

Remember I said it would cost £3billion for the broadband project? Well, that money has not been allocated by the Government, which means somebody else is paying for it and I believe it's the music industry.

But what would be in it for the music industry? Simple really, the license to continue to bully people into believing that downloading a few tunes turns them into a criminal with the percieved backing of the Government and Police.

I would even go further and suggest that these internet connections that the Government is wanting to put into homes would come with a caveat - that the music industry can monitor them and can freely acquire personal details and surfing habits of users in order to build a case against them.

Currently this isn't possible, because ISPs are not allowed to disclose details of their customers due to the Data Protection Act. Most of them do not want to either. The only reason anyone would even want to pay for a premium 20 or 50 Megabit connection is to download movies, music and games and if ISPs decided to hound them about it, they'd either leave or cut their subscription to a cheaper one.

Richard Branson's Virgin Media is "leading the way" on this so called anti piracy jaunt. Given their love affair with the BPI I was not shocked to hear that they are now promising to disconnect people that they percieve to be downloading copyrighted content.

We already know that the BPI crawls torrent sites, tries to download complete files from people and then sends a threat to Virgin who pass it on to their customer. I have had one myself, and due to my own anger at that and Virgin Media's throttling policy I am now an O2 Broadband customer. I suspect this is how Virgin will continue to determine someone that is using their network for distribution of copyrighted content, but given their acceptance of spying services such as Phorm I would not be surpised if their statement that they will not spy on users is a complete lie.

In fact, Virgin said they wouldn't disconnect users for file sharing less than a year ago but a quick wave of the wallet from Universal and they have gone back on that promise.

Thankfully they are the only ISP as yet that is persecuting its users in this way and actually there are plenty of superior ISPs in terms of performance these days. When I phoned them to cancel I was told all other ISPs throttle like they do and they started offering TV packages and so on. I was leaving anyway.

As I said I am with O2 Broadband (also known as Bethere/Telefonica) now. I was told I'd get 13MBit down my phone line, and I get 13MBit so I am happy about that. I got about 14MBit with my 20MBit Virgin cable line. The big difference is that after 30 minutes of downloading on Virgin, they cut the bandwidth by 75% for the next five hours, completely nullifying the point of having a high speed "unlimited" connection.

Working it out, it appears that in any 5 and a half hour time bracket on Virgin Media, I was able to download about 10GB. 3GB in the first 30-40 mins and the rest across the next 5 hours. On O2 Broadband I can download 26GB in that time and the best bit is I'm paying four times less for it than I was for Virgin Media. Winner!

I hate Ruth Kelly

Yeah, this snooty pompous Brown "babe" is on the expenses gravy train too.

She claimed thousands of pounds for damage to her second home caused by flooding.

If my house were flooded and damage ran into large sums of money, the first thing I would think is to contact my insurer about it.

But, like all MPs, Ms Kelly first thought "I'll claim it on expenses".

I also find it quite interesting how MPs from all parties are coming out in support of the change in the rules to permit Gurkhas to live in Britain. If they have all supported this for a long as they claim, why does it only happen when support for the Government is at an all time low? Answers on a postcard..

Serallan

You're a twat

More bad news

This week we have heard that a baby was orphaned after its parents both died after they jumped into a river to try and rescue their dogs. A sad story, but I am surprised that we've not had the standard Government kneejerk - ban rivers. Or dogs.

On North West Tonight there was a story about a child that had hanged himself, and his father blamed "high energy drinks" such as Red Bull, calling for a ban on all energy drinks. Again a sad story. His father stated that the child was "bouncing off walls" and always hyper. I'm not really sure what hanging yourself has to do with high energy drinks though. He also declined to say who was buying the child these drinks and why he didn't do anything to stop it.

Finally what's the best way of gaining permanent residence in the UK if you're a Gurkha? Die in Afghanistan. Sad but true.

They are all ripping us off

So, finally the grand old tale of how much of our money the Members of Parliament are creaming off to feather their nests is exposed. After all, in a system that allows you to fund a second life on expenses it is not surprising to see all members taking part in it.

The News of the World came up with a cracking promotion this week; just collect tokens to enter a competition to "live like an MP" - food bills paid, mortgage paid, gas and electric paid, home improvements paid. The only downside was that they were only offering £75,000 - about half what an MP claims on expenses every year.

I find it quite funny that over the weekend a special hotline was set up for MPs to come clean about expenses that they feared would be exposed and pay them back before they were. It's a whole web of deceit, and certainly a very very long gravy train. Why is our entire so-called democratic system so institutionally dishonest?

The MPs that have been caught are all coming out now claiming that they never supported the system and how they believe it should be changed. That is mightily convenient. They didn't seem to think about that when they were milking it dry for things such as sit on lawnmowers, under soil heating for their tennis courts and trimming of foliage around their helipad.

One in particular that I despise is Barbara Follett, who apparently is the Tourism Minister (although I would hedge not for long). She happens to be married to a best selling author who himself earns around £15million per year from his books. She claimed £25,000 for security patrols at her second home because she "didn't feel safe".

Some of them are paying the money back but it is important to note that this is only happening because they got caught.

Blame, according to MPs, is planted firmly at the door of the Fees Office for approving claims made, however the Fees Office in turn blames the MPs for submitting claims for frivolous items and says it is not their job to decide whether something can be claimed for or not. Hardly the shock of the century, I know.

Both are at fault.

There is also group of MPs that switch their second home repeatedly around the multiple homes in their property empire in order to claim expenses on each one for renovations. It is a disgrace.

I for one cannot believe Hazel Blears is still an MP after her cynical switching of homes both for expenses purposes and tax avoidance purposes. If it were anyone else they would have been arrested for tax evasion, but since she is Member of Parliament she will no doubt get away with it scot free, disappearing to the back benches in a reshuffle.

The salary for being a MP is hardly paltry, yet I would not be surprised if in the case of most of them their salary goes directly into the bank, unspent. The ease with which some of these MPs are able to pay back tens of thousands of "misclaimed" expenses tells you that most of them have feathered their nest. Mind you, the fact that even unknowns have multimillion pound country retreats and live like aristocracy tells you that.

There was a classic interview on Sky News with former MP Lord Foulkes yesterday where his agenda was clearly to ignore the fact that MPs are lining their pockets and ignore the fact that the Speaker Michael Martin is also doing it and trying to block publication of further expenses claims, but instead assault the interviewer and tell them they don't offer as much value as an MP.

Foulkes is also Scottish and clearly he is friends with the Speaker as he spewed out some rehearsed nobody-to-somebody rhetoric about the Speaker being from Glasgow, where according to him not many people get to the "top". More like he is trying to appease the hard working people from Scotland because he knows they will be livid to see a so called hard Labour man from a Labour heartland living the life of riley at their expense and trying his utmost to prevent anyone finding out about it.

When Foulkes was interviewed on the BBC, he was told the presenter earned £92,000 which according to him is almost twice as much as an MP. He does sort of have a point there in that the BBC is also funded by taxpayers albeit by an optional tax. However, she is not stealing money to supplement her earnings whereas all MPs are. To say an MP earns £67,000 is not the whole story - that all gets banked, and their living costs and any luxuries are all claimed on expenses.

If I got a job in London, I'd have to move there and buy a place to live. If you're a MP, you get it all for free. In fact even if an MP already lives in London, they can and do still claim for another house. That in itself tells you that it's "worth it" for them to do so, if only for the giant profit that they will pocket when they sell it. And it should not be.

They should be provided with a flat in London and the second home allowance should be scrapped. All current second homes should be sold and the profit split in proportion between the public purse and the MP. Paying for food should be scrapped, and paying for any furniture or renovations should be scrapped. This would remove any second home switching in order to abuse the system for more gains.

Even Gordon Brown has made an apology about all this; but why now? He knew about it all along and indeed he was part of it. Same for David Cameron: apparently he went ballistic at some of his party for their expenses claims.

He will have known about it, so please "Dave", give up with the publicity stunts.