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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.