Toms View of the World

Well, a branch of the UK government has shown it can’t look after personal data of it’s citizens.  Firstly, why haven’t HMRC been prosecuted under the Data Protection Act - after all, they clearly didn’t take steps to protect personal data - specifically, sending 2 CD’s (yes, ordinary CD’s) with the personal data of every parent and child in the UK via an un-recording delivery service run by a 3rd party company, without taking any basic data security precautions at all.

There needs to be a public enquiry which will answer the following questions:

• Who was responsible for this gross act of negligence, and when will they lose their job?
• Why does a government department post CD’s of data from one office to another - is their IT network not up to the job of transferring it securely?
• Why, if the government needs to send information by disc, is the data not encrypted?
• Can the government be trusted with any personal data of it’s citizens (I’m thinking passport records etc)?
• When will the government be scrapping the proposed ID card and vehicle tracaking schemes (or “Road Charging” as they call it) - as clearly our data isn’t safe with them
• When will HMRC be prosecuted under Data Protection laws?

If your bank screwed up in such a massive fashion, most people would vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere - as we can’t do that with our incompetent government, lets have a general election now, and show them what we think of them.

Now, it’s not often I start a rant by being supportive of religion - however this time it’s a classic example of what’s wrong in our education system…

“We want the children to think about the true meaning of Christmas, which is about helping others less fortunate.” 

Now, noble as that idea is - that Christmas is about helping others, more surprising is that erroneous quote comes from non other than the headmistress of a primary school in Wales, who are making the bold (and positive) move of discouraging the exchange of Christmas cards in favour of donation to Charity.  That idea is excellent - however the problem is that statement I quoted above is so very wrong.

“The true meaning of Christmas”

No matter what you’re religious beliefs, the “true meaning” of Christmas (lit. “Christs Mass”) is to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the central figure of one of the world religions. (for those unaware “Mass” is a type of Church service in some denominations of the Christian Faith - see wikipedia for a fuller discussion).

It’s just shocking that a head teacher in a school in a (nominally) Christian country doesn’t know that.

Facebook have introduced a new data harvesting system to assist in targetting advertising to it’s users, using 3rd party websites to gather data on their behalf.

With the help of some clever javascript, and some co-operative 3rd party websites who have embedded this javascript into their pages, they can now update your facebook profile for you when you do things.  At the moment this is done with your consent - the little popup (if you spot it) gives you the option to deny - but you can’t completely block the facility from within your facebook privacy settings - you can block it on a site by site basis, but only after the fact -a site has to have already sent an update to your account before it appears in your privacy settings.

Scary stuff. How to stop this happening to you is after the “more” link… Continue Reading »

This week, it’s BRAKE’s annual Road Safety week - this year focussing on the safety of children, both on foot and on bikes.

Now, a lot of this is about education, not only for the children, but for their parents so that the kids are properly equipped when they are outside.  My suggestions for this that parents must ensure before their kids are allowed out on bikes…

• Make sure you know where they’re going, and why
• Make sure they’re wearing suitable, light coloured, reflective clothing.
• If they are likely to be out on their bikes once the sun goes down, make sure they’ve got lights, and explain to them that the lights are there to help other road users see them, as well as to help them see where they’re going.
• Make sure they have  read the highway code, so that they know which side of the road they should be on, and how to signal their intentions to other traffic.

Now, to people driving larger vehicles - simply be aware of kids, be aware that most children have no road-sense whatsoever and are likely to be riding on the wrong side of the road, at night, wearing black, with no lights.  They will also make sudden changes in direction without looking or signalling.

See the Pledge for Drivers for other suggestions for ways to improve your driving skills