Longrider

It seems that Google has decided that Longrider and Felix Domesticus are both distributing badware. If you search on Google, this is what you see. These sites are not distributing badware. Felix Domesticus suffered a corrupted database following a failed upgrade of Wordpress. Otherwise, nothing has changed with the sites.

According to stop badware.org, the reasons for this warning are:

1. Badware available for download on your site

2. Badware available on sites that you link to

3. Badware distributed through ads running on your site

4. Badware links posted in user-generated areas of your site

5. Hacking attacks to your site

I don’t offer any downloads. I link to other blogs and news sites and I don’t have ads. I always checkout links posted by people who comment, so can confirm that they do not lead to badware sites. That last one sent a chill down my spine but a check reveals no evidence of hacking. Indeed, the only recent change in circumstances was the failed Wordpress upgrade. Generally when looking for a fault, the last thing that went wrong is where it is to be found. A check with AVG confirms what I already established – there are no threats on my sites. Google is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it is verging on the paranoid.

Seriously, I’m pissed off with Google – if their bots can’t tell the difference between a corrupted database and malware, and consequently tarnish the whole site, then I am not impressed. I’ve requested a review, so we will see what happens. Interestingly other search engines are fine. It’s Google that sees badware where none exists and blackens my name with no good reason. If they don’t fix this quickly, I’ll simply block their bot from the sites completely. I’ll be losing nothing by doing so.

Bastards!

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Update: Google have done the decent thing and removed the warning. Thanks chaps. I withdraw the bastards comment. However, there is a caveat; you still got it wrong, there was never any risk to peoples’ PCs from my sites.

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Boody hell! it’s happened again – after they gave me the all-clear. I’ve asked my host to double check, but they won’t find anything. In the meantime, I’ve had it with Google. If they can’t program their bots properly, the bugger can fuck off from my site. Robots.txt is now blocking googlebot.

Seumas Milne in comment is free:

But it’s also clear that the kind of progressive coalition and policies that Livingstone favoured - on transport, housing, privatisation and redistribution - are a good deal more popular with voters than the rudderless triangulation currently on offer from Gordon Brown.

Having been trounced because they steal from those who earn and give it to those who don’t, or piss it up the wall on special interest minorities and quangos, because they snoop and pry into our private lives, bully and fine us for petty misdemeanours – because, frankly, they are poisonous bastards, the way back is…

…more of the fucking same?!?

Fuck me, but they are thick.

I notice, too, that Milne is trying the same misanthropic and patronising tack displayed so admirably by Neil Harding and blaming the press. No, you thick fuck, people are not so stupid as to vote on the basis of a headline – they voted the way they did because the Labour party has treated them like shit.

Jesus, but the so called progressive left in this country is a monster to behold. They didn’t get it wrong – the voters, blinded by the evil press barons got it wrong. Listen, chaps; you got it wrong. The voters rejected your candidates. Some genuine introspection – should you be sufficiently intellectually honest  – will provide you with an answer. Don’t blame the press, don’t blame the electorate, don’t blame “posh” people. Blame yourselves, for there is no one else.

Has anyone been inundated with Spam from a company calling itself The Trading Floor? Ordinarily, I rely on my Spam filters to get rid of junk and don’t bother to unsubscribe – unless, of course, I know that it is a reliable company. I know exactly how this company got hold of my details; I asked for a credit report from Experian a year or so back. Since then, the Trading Floor and the suckers who bought into their mailing list have flooded me with unwanted junk on pretty much a daily basis. As others have discovered, unsubscribing from these people simply doesn’t work.

Looking at their website, they try to present an appearance of a legitimate company. The underlying message though is that they harvest people’s details in order to sell them on:

The Trading Floor is a revolutionary means of buying and selling risk-based customer/enquirer information through a centrally managed data pool containing millions of detailed customer records. It has been created specifically for the insurance and financial services sectors in response to rising costs of traditional routes to market and decreasing response rates.

In other words, no matter how they seek to dress it up, they are Spammers. If you run a company that is thinking of getting into bed with these people, I suggest that you bear in mind that this is by far the quickest way to get your email details onto Spam blacklists. Bombarding people with unwanted junk emails – despite them making you aware that they do not want them, is unethical business practice. Is that what you want?

The owner of the company is sponsoring his son, Myles in his karting endeavours:

Hi - my name is Myles Collins.  I am 13 years old and my passion is Karting.  I race in Juniormax and drive a Maranello Kart with a 125cc Rotax engine which is capable of nearly 75mph. I am currently sponsored by www.thecomparisons.com and www.thetradingfloor.co.uk .

And…

yes, my dad owns the two business’ of http://www.thetradingfloor.co.uk and http://www.thecomparisons.com . without those sponsors i couldn’t of got to where i am now (racing professionly)
thanks,
Myles .

Well, that’s very nice for you Myles. However, could you please remind your dad that spamming is not legitimate business practice. There are no circumstances where I will buy anything as a consequence of unsolicited emails. So, please, tell him to stop. He certainly hasn’t taken any notice of me asking politely.

The Royal College of physicians is treading into the murky waters of politics – as opposed to the area with which they should be concerning themselves; health. Of course, they will doubtless argue that this is about health.

Increasingly large pub measures are pushing customers towards unsafe levels of drinking, the Royal College of Physicians has warned.

RCP president Ian Gilmore accused the pub industry of acting irresponsibly and urged it to put its house in order.

I’m inclined to suggest the the RCP practises what it preaches and puts its own house in order before criticising others.

The Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers hit back that it was in the business of offering customers choice.

Well, yes, quite. We are all big boys and girls; we can make up our own minds about the amount we drink – or not as the case may be. If the RCP wants to provide accurate information about the effects of alcohol consumption, then so be it. Then, on the basis of accurate information, we can make our own decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions, can’t we? What we don’t need is nanny telling us what to do.

BBC correspondent Keith Doyle said there was even anecdotal evidence that some pub staff were under pressure to maximise profits by encouraging customers to opt for larger drinks.

Quite possibly. That is what businesses do – seek to maximise profits and encourage the customer to buy products that do just that. Standard business practice. So what? Being adults, we can either resist or go along with it according to our own preferences – it’s called making an informed choice. Making informed choices is what adults do.

Jeremy Beadles, Chief Executive of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said: “Our view is that customers should be offered a choice of different wine glass sizes when they are drinking in a pub or restaurant.”

Jeremy Beadles is quite right. As a non-drinker, I use the tongue in my head to utter the words “no, thank-you”. It really isn’t too difficult. We can all do it – and we likely have do so often enough in our lives. What we do not need is the RCP doing it for us. I am not an infant and deeply resent the inference that I am.

However, as fears about a binge drinking epidemic mount, the trend has triggered a backlash from senior doctors and politicians.

Frankly, binge drinking is a piece of hyperbole on a par with climate change. Sure, there are people with drink problems, sure some people can’t handle it. It has always been thus. It is nothing to do with the RCP, though – and certainly there is no evidence to suggest that the vast majority of social drinkers are “problem” drinkers.

Professor Gilmore warned: “There is no doubt at all that many people are drinking significantly more than they realise.”

Because they are stupid little proles, presumably…

“People are aware of units, they want to stay within safe limits, but they are being pushed up way over those limits by just not realising what they are drinking.”

Ah, yes, the good old units – the figures that doctors plucked out of their collective arses. And the stupid little proles just don’t realise how much they are drinking without nanny to tell them. Jesus, what arrogant bastards these people are.

“I think the industry is being irresponsible and needs to put its house in order.”

No, professor Gilmore, it is the RCP that needs to put its house in order and keep out of peoples’ private affairs. This, though is a peach:

Greg Mulholland, a Liberal Democrat health spokesman, has introduced a bill in the House of Commons to amend weights and measures legislation to force all bars, pubs, clubs and licensed restaurants offer the 125ml measure.

This tells us two things; firstly, that the Liberal Democrats are nothing of the sort, and that politicians have way too much time on their hands.

“Quite simply it’s profiteering,” he said.

“It’s getting people to trade up, calling a 175ml measure - which is really a large - a standard glass, and calling a 250ml a large - when in fact it is a third of a bottle of wine, nearly half a pint.”

“All I’m saying really is people should have a choice. If they want a smaller measure they should get it.”

Why, thank-you for that, Greg. Being adults with tongues in our heads, we are perfectly capable of exercising choice without politicians making it for us with new regulations. We can ask for a smaller measure should we want one – however, it seems that the industry has already responded to what the customer wants and that is the larger measure. After all, none of these buffoons appears to have considered the alternative possibility that people might just drink fewer large measures in preference to more smaller ones – they presume that people will buy the same amount of drinks and get unintentionally pissed because they are stupid little proles.

If a pub does not serve the smaller measure, and we really, really, want that small measure, we can take our trade elsewhere – that is what choice means, not using the power of legislation to restrict peoples’ choices and calling it choice.

I didn’t feel too inclined to comment on the Max Mosely affair when it first surfaced. Partly, I think, because I really don’t care what his predilections are and I have no pressing desire to make a judgement. However, the more I ponder, the more I feel the need to point out something that is pretty obvious to any objective observer.

Before I continue, though, a couple of lines in the sand. I am not going to get into the relative merits or otherwise of whether he should resign. Quite possibly the revelations have damaged his credibility to the point where his continuance in post becomes untenable. So be it. I care not. Nor am I concerned about “damage to F1”. Formula 1 racing is, as far as I am concerned, just another pompous, overblown, self-important professional sport that is mildly less tedious than football. I couldn’t give a flying fuck whether the incident has damaged it or not. It isn’t important.

Nor am I going to be dragged into the multifarious issues of prostitution. As far as the facts have been presented, the five women involved accepted payment. That makes the activity consensual. Unless you have verifiable evidence that these specific women were forced into prostitution and were therefore not willing participants, please do not regale me with any “prostitution is abusing women” arguments – I’m not interested. That is not what this discussion is about.

The scandal here, is not what Mosely did with five prostitutes; it is the prurient, foaming at the mouth, salacious voyeurism of the News of the World. This despicable little rag – I won’t demean the word by calling it a newspaper, because it isn’t – claims the high moral ground from its natural home at the bottom of a mile-deep cesspit with vertical sides. Spying on people to create a story is not by any remote stretch of the imagination or perversion of the English language; journalism, and it certainly isn’t investigative journalism. Any suggestion that this is in the public interest is pure fantasy. It is not. What a public figure does in the privacy of their own home – or bordello – is no one’s business but theirs and the other participants; providing those activities take place between consenting adults. The wheeling out of the professional victim brigade to claim that Mosely’s “disgusting” and “perverted” activities were offensive to them would be laughable if so many stupid people didn’t take it so seriously.

This man was acting out a kinky sex fantasy. So what? Fantasies are just that. Role playing doesn’t make it real. It does not mean that he is an anti-Semite. The assumption that I have seen proffered in the interminable, self-righteous condemnations of the man since the revelations last weekend; that private fantasies reveal what one really thinks about others is to over-simplify the human psyche. We are complex beings and all of us have hidden depths. Before you leap to judge another, what lurks in yours? And, importantly, how would you like it splashed across the front pages of the News of the World? And, if you do like a bit of the kinky stuff, does this mean that you plan to abuse others, or that you regard, say, women, as lesser beings because you like to put one across your lap occasionally? Of course not – one assumes you wouldn’t be doing it if she didn’t enjoy it.

The News of the World’s editorial team and its reporters claim in print that such kinks are perverted and disgusting. If you can stomach it, you will see these terms cropping up on a regular basis. Well, if that is so, no one has forced them to watch, have they? No, they chose to watch in the name of salacious gossip. I cannot believe for one moment that the organisation is staffed by dedicated martyrs. I can only conclude therefore, that they get off on it. That, frankly, is far more perverted and disgusting than anything Max Mosely has done.

Jacqui Smith demonstrates her facile, shallow intellect when talking about plans to control sex offenders’ access to Internet sites:

 Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she wanted children to be “free from fear”.

Quite apart from not appreciating the difficulties these proposals mean when they attempt to put them into practice – throw-away email addys anyone? That statement is, without doubt, one of the most stupid I’ve heard coming from the mouth of a politician for a while – and, it is not without some stiff competition.

Fear is good. Fear is what keeps us alive. Fear is nature’s survival mechanism. A little fear instilled into children will prepare them for the realities of life in the real world. The real world is a big bad place and there are people out there who want to do bad things to us – so a little healthy fear keeps us on our toes. A world where we have no fear is a world where we are wrapped in cotton wool and, cosseted by a loving, caring, controlling state, we suffocate to death.

What a stupid, stupid woman.

Yesterday, I was offered a sandwich for lunch by my client. It was one of those packaged ones, probably purchased from the local Tesco – there being one a few minutes walk away. On biting into it, I was sharply reminded why I don’t buy these things anymore.

There was a time when you could buy a decent sandwich from a local shop – I used to buy them from W H Smith at Temple Meads station when I worked as a signalling manager and they were tasty, juicy things too. Now, however, what you get is two slices of dry bread plonked either side of whatever filling resides inside. In yesterday’s case, cheese salad. The cheese was okay and the salad was nice and crisp as salad should be. But the bread was bone dry to the point of being virtually inedible. I don’t much like mayonnaise, so have always sought sandwiches with butter.

These days, it seems a chore to find even mayo in a sandwich and butter, being a dairy product and presumably swilling in cholesterol, is verboten it seems. The health fascists have decided that butter is not in our best interests. The sandwich makers appear to have fallen in line and simply stopped using it. The consequence of this is sandwiches that are, frankly, dreadful. That’s the trouble with all this health freakery – anything that tastes good is bad for you. The healthy option tastes like cardboard.

There is, of course, a solution. I don’t buy sandwiches, I make my own and I spread a nice chunk of butter on each slice of bread before putting in a decent slab of English Cheddar.

“Nobody,” he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
“Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!”

A A Milne

David Aranovitch, writing in the Times, appears to be auditioning for the Guardian, positing as he does, a highly illiberal approach to our liberty. Indeed, the every title of the piece sets the tone (but, so does my riposte…):

Ignore the paranoid fantasists

Ah, yes, the cry so often used by Neil Harding; those of us who oppose the database state are mentally ill. No, we are not mentally ill, we can see perfectly clearly the dangers inherent in the obsessive data gathering going on. Accusing us of being paranoid is merely a cheap trick designed to shut down dissent.

It has become an intelligentsia default position, or IDP for short, that we in Britain are - as one of my favourite intellectuals put it the other day - “sleepwalking into a surveillance society”. The Oxford academic and writer Timothy Garton Ash told a BBC interviewer that more information was now collected by the State on British subjects than was available to the East German secret police, or Stasi, from their army of informers.

Hmm… Anti-intellectual, too. That we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society is not some sort of paranoid fantasy, it is an observable fact. That this administration has not used it in the manner that, say, the East German one would have, does not mitigate the situation. We cannot know that future administrations will be benign. Better, therefore, not to give them the opportunity in the first place.

I hear this all the time. A very clever person said to me at the weekend that the ubiquity of CCTV meant that she felt “constantly watched”. This too is an IDP.

No, it is not – indeed, the term intelligentsia default position is a construct of Aranovitch’s and I’ll not recognise it as being a definition at all – it is a piece of bunkum this man has manufactured in order to undermine the position of those who disagree with him. It fits into the same camp as “islampohobe” – designed as it is to shut down debate. There is no such thing as IDP. The reason this “very clever” person feels constantly watched is because CCTV has become so pervasive it creates a panopticon effect. Those who dismiss this feeling of unease as paranoia display their own ignorance of human psychology – Aranovitch being one such.

It shouldn’t have surprised me then that last week a pitbull national radio interviewer failed to ask the most basic question of a woman who was arguing for the dismantling even of the DNA database that we currently possess.

He could have asked her about the case of the Dearne Valley rapist, for example. Between 1983 and 1986 James Lloyd raped four women and attempted to rape two others in South Yorkshire. He was never caught, his victims never received any kind of justice, nor was society protected from him. Until, in 2006, a cold case review led to the attacker’s DNA being closely linked with 43 samples on the national DNA database. One of those was Lloyd’s sister, whose DNA had been taken when she was convicted of drink-driving in 2000.

I’m inclined to say; “so fucking what?” to this piece of nonsense. One case does not make an argument for eroding the privacy of a whole population. It is disproportionate. Those of us opposed to expansion of the DNA database are not arguing for its removal, we are insisting that it should only carry information on people convicted of crimes. That is a reasonable position to take. As I pointed out a day or so ago, keeping the DNA of 60 million people will create unnecessary noise and lead to false positives and inevitably miscarriages of justice. To those who believe that it could not happen to them, it being a simple matter of someone else’s problem, there is a nasty shock waiting in the wings. Well, I for one, have no desire to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure for years on end awaiting the outcome of an appeal because plod got it wrong. Far better that they do not have my DNA in the first place, that way they can’t make the mistake and I get to keep my liberty. After all, we have this quaint concept of innocent until proven guilty. Not something Aranovitch seems to value.

The use of DNA evidence in tracing and - last week - convicting both the Ipswich murderer Steve Wright and the necrophiliac Mark Dixie was further proof, as far as they were concerned, of the benefits of as large a database as possible.

Bollocks! It is proof of no such thing. David Aranovitch appears to think that CSI is a documentary programme. DNA is useful as a form of evidence. It can, at best, demonstrate that an individual was at the crime scene. It does not “prove” guilt. The larger the database, the more noise is introduced. The more likely that innocent people will be pulled in and questioned for no good reason. It will make for lazy policing. And, I cannot reiterate this enough – such is the faith that people have in DNA, juries will convict the innocent because their DNA at the scene “proved” their guilt.

This officer was then accused by Ms Chakrabarti, in a display of genuine chutzpah, of “using high-profile cases like the murder of Sally Anne [Bowman] to showboat”, and a spokesman from another group, Justice, spoke of the “grave injustice” of using the Wright case to argue for the taking of samples from “innocent” people.

The only chutzpah I see here is from Aranovitch who demonstrates his own lack of rectitude with each dismal line that he writes. The man is an idiot and Chakrabati was spot on.

But what of the trade-off? Garton Ash hinted that there was one when, in a recent article, he rather uncharacteristically told “nanny” that she could “eff off to East Germany. I’d rather stay a bit more free, even if it means being less safe.” In the case of shrinking the DNA database that preference would certainly leave Lloyd still unpunished for rape and Steve Wright quite possibly could have killed again.

See? We must be “safe” no matter what the cost to innocent people who may be locked up while the guilty go free. Garton Ash is right, the illusion of safety is not worth the loss of liberty and only a terminally ignorant fuckwit would think otherwise. Step forward, David Aranovitch, you win this month’s Neil Harding award for totalitarian fuckwittery. Well done. Now go fuck off to some totalitarian hell-hole that practices the type of illiberal behaviour that you appear to wish imposed upon the rest of us. Oh, and while you are at it, have you nipped down to your local nick and volunteered your DNA? If not, why not?

So would Garton Ash really rather be freer and less safe to the extent of having less chance of catching a rapist or murderer?

Yes. Absolutely. Unequivocally. Rather free in the jungle and taking my chances than life in a gilded cage.

It’s a brave position, but he and other upholders of the IDP should now be asked to spell it out.

It is not brave, it is pragmatic. It is a realisation of just what the alternative means. And I did just spell it out.

Then we would see that one problem is how to assess the rights of victims of crime, as well as potential victims. How do we measure my right not to feel discomfited by CCTV or DNA testing, against that of, say, Justine Kelly, who was 18 - one year older than my oldest daughter - when she was raped by Lloyd, and who said that seeing him sentenced “and facing a life sentence has helped me to finally feel at rest”.

This is a non sequitur as well as an appeal to emotion. Such decisions should be devoid of such consideration - that is how law is supposed to work. There is no “right” not to be a victim of crime. If we become victims of crime, then it is reasonable to have in place a criminal justice system that identifies the perpetrator and punishes them. Removing them from society if necessary. A nationwide DNA database is not only fraught with technical difficulty as pointed out by one of the commenters on this article:

DNA testing does not profile the whole genome, just a few markers on it. That means it is not infallible - there’s about a one in 10 million chance of two strangers having the same DNA match. That chance is much higher for people who are related especially siblings and parents/chlidren. So stick 60 million people on a register and for each crime you’re going to throw up 6 matches from random people unconnected to the crime and probably a few more from relatives of the individual. All but one of whom are innocent but will inevitable be treated as suspects - not because they were seen near the scene of the crime, or had a motive or connection with the victim, but simply on the basis of a random DNA match.

A point Aranovitch appears too stupid to comprehend, but is massively disproportionate – the general population is no more inclined to be criminally minded than any other population.

As it happens I don’t feel “watched” by CCTV

Well, bully for you.

and I think it is a paranoid fantasy to imagine that we are “under surveillance” in the way that informers kept the Stasi up to date with the conversations of their subjects.

Ah, yes, the old Neil Harding trick again – we are all mentally ill. It is not paranoid fantasy; it is observable fact. We are under surveillance. Some of us would rather that we were not. Where we go, with whom we go and what we do when we get there is no one else’s business.

I also believe it is perverse to shun biometrics that merely give real effect to ineffective measures we have long taken in this country, such as insisting on car numberplates and passport photos.

Oh what a bollockbrain this fuckwit is. Biometrics are not a holy grail. They are at best, a juvenile technology. The government’s own trials revealed that they were unreliable. Our biometrics belong to us, it is up to us how we use them. So, for example, I’m happy to use my thumbprint instead of a password on my computer, while I would vigorously oppose any attempts by government to obtain that information. It is mine, I share confidential information only with those who are trustworthy. Government does not come into that category – again, this is an observable fact.

“We should not hold information on innocent people,” says that unlikely IDPer, David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, lest we become “a nation of suspects”. On that basis let us burn our passports and smash our numberplates.

Well hello Arty McStrawman, it’s been a while since I saw you. Aranovitch appears to have been taking debating lessons from Neil Harding and makes as much sense. David Davis is absolutely right; the government does not need this information and should not be gathering it. That the state gathers some information is not an excuse for them gathering yet more. Such an argument is arrant claptrap.

As to innocence, well most of us are innocent. But Lloyd’s family never suspected him of rape, Wright’s wife was sure he couldn’t be a murderer, and Dixie’s friends had not an inkling of his capacity for extreme sexual violence. There has never yet been a would-be bomber whose family didn’t proclaim his normality.

This is a variation of the old nothing to hide, nothing to fear mantra so beloved of the hard of thinking. We must prove to the state that we are, indeed, who we say we are and prove to the state that we are indeed, innocent. Bollocks to that. I am under no obligation to prove any such thing.

A database of existing offenders in particular categories also means that certain ethnic groups are far more likely to be recorded than others, and therefore are far more likely to be successfully prosecuted in future. The Sheffield appellants case is partly based on a claim under Article 14 - the right to non-discrimination - of the convention.

This was why, in September 2007, Sir Stephen Sedley, one of the judges at the original appeal, argued that the existing system was “indefensible” and called for an extension of the database to all British citizens and UK visitors. For which, of course, he was immediately set upon. But I think he was right; and no, I won’t eff off to East Germany.

Sedley was wrong, too. You do not deal with discrimination by extending the discrimination, for fuck’s sake.

Well, no, effing off to East Germany won’t do much good, the Stasi ain’t there any more. I recommend North Korea, it should be much more to your liking. Much as I despise politicians (you noticed) journalists such as Aranovitch come a close second. I can tolerate ignorance and stupidity – but ignorance, stupidity and the blatant flag waving for totalitarianism in a national newspaper is a disgrace.

David Aranovitch, totalitarian idiot and fuckwit.