A slightly depressing development in Christmas Tree decorations.

As an aside, do we still need signs in shopping centers etc that CCTVs are in use? Considering how ubiquitous they have become,  I’d have thought most people would now automatically presume they are being monitored by cameras when in such places.

Does your employer copy documents, books or magazines without permission? Report them and earn (up to) £100,000.

Such is the exhortation from a UK organisation called CopyWatch, which is an arm of the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Why am I writing about them?

Well – I saw an advert for their “report your boss” thing and thought I’d have a look to see who they are and what they are up to. In case you are thinking what I think you are thinking – I am self-employed – so, no I am not planning to report myself to them!

I typed their name into Google and got a very odd result.

Thinking “gosh what a clever firm to cloak their google searches so IT staff might not suspect anything”, I clicked through and saw a fairly clean page. Now, that is actually a bit odd as Google wouldn’t highlight the “cloaking” normally, so I had a look at the source code for the web page (or click on the Google cache to see what Google sees).

Oh dear – it seems that their website has been hacked by someone and now the anti-copyright theft body is doing a sterling job in boosting adverts for Viagra, and related products on another website.

Would you trust an organisation which promises anonymity to anyone who reports nefarious evil bosses – but can’t secure their own website?

If you know anything about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you’ll know that Google favours links to websites from other sites with a high Page Rank – and indeed, the CopyWatch site has quite a high page rank, being 7/10.

If you are a website owner, then you should really be signed up to the Google Webmaster platform, and they will actually try to contact you via email if they detect this sort of thing going on. Of course, making sure you apply security updates to your webserver would help in preventing this from happening in the first place.

Oh dear!

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/mar/16/uksecurity.terrorism/print

Now that the Oyster card can be hacked, we learn that MI5 thinks the system is good enough to assist in preventing terrorism.

The two situations don’t quite sync.

Rather a good cartoon seen via Digg which is timely in todays world where privacy rights are reduced to increase state security.

Nicely, it doesn’t make a judgement as to whether that is a good thing or not – simply delivers the message in a simple manner.

Personally, I think it is a bad thing – and excessive to the scale of the threat.

Think about it – how many people do terrorists kill, and then wonder how many people are killed in random murders by “ordinary people” over the same period of time. But which one gets all the attention?

Via Digg