More heat than light...

When I was a student, one of my contemporaries came back from a first-year engineering lecture with a question for me: "If you want to heat a room, and the only appliance you have is a fridge, what should you do to generate the most heat from it?"

Naturally, being a first-year philosophy student at the time, I riposted in the style of CEM Joad: "Well, I suppose it all depends what you mean by 'heat', and what you mean by 'room'..." (ducking smartly as I did so to avoid the incoming engineering textbook).

Apparently the (engineering) answer is that you turn the fridge up to full power and leave its door open. Viewing the fridge as a 'black box', this will maximise the energy going in in the form of electricity, as the fridge struggles to cool its interior, and thus result in the maximum output in the form of heat.

The next philosophical answer was "What kind of idiot sets out to heat a room by using a fridge?". I ducked again.

I thought of this again today when I read that the Shadow Environment Minister, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, is concerned that, as conventional incandescent light-bulbs are phased out and low-energy fluorescent ones become compulsory, it will cost people more to heat their homes. The physics of it may be sound - in a comment on a previous post (long ago and far away), bnitz observed that 95% of the electricity which actually reaches the light-bulb comes out of it in the form of heat rather than light - but it does rather smack of heating your house with a fridge.

However, my concern with low-energy lightbulbs is a different one. If our local waste disposal centres are anything to go by, there is little or no provision to prevent dead low-energy bulbs from going into landfill rather than being recycled. This is an issue because of the bulbs' mercury content, which far exceeds the European Waste Directive's levels for acceptable landfill disposal. Indeed, current UK recommendations are that if you happen to break a low-energy bulb in your house, you should clear it up only under well-ventilated conditions and preferably wearing a breathing mask. Nice.

Mercury Recycling Group, who make their money reclaiming the nasties out of these bulbs (disclaimer: I have no financial interest in their company) have a useful and interesting page setting out some of the background, in terms of legislation and the availability of licensed sites for mercury disposal:

"In July 2004, new regulations stemming from the Landfill Directive , meant that the number of landfill sites permitted to take Hazardous Waste fell from 240 to approximately 10-15 with only 1 or 2 of these able to accept mercury bearing waste."

In practical terms, this means that the average householder will either have to accept the fact that their local waste disposal centre will put low-energy bulbs, unsorted, into landfill, or will have to find somewhere (presumably involving a longer drive) which does sort and recycle the bulbs.

For all the years of talk of 'joined-up government', this looks like one of those depressing instances where the headline policy looks good, but the practical implications have neither been thought through nor catered for in terms of legislation or funding.

New link to website, and a privacy tweak

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a minor change to the layout of this blog.

In the sidebar I've added a link to the new Future Identity website, which I have set up to give people some more information about the new company, its aims and what it can offer. I've put a couple of recent white papers on there already, and hope to add reports from consultancy engagements as that becomes possible. Have a look around the site, and do let me know if you find anything which is broken.

Also, a quick note about "Following" the blog. I was going to remove the "Followers" display, as I felt a little uneasy that opting to 'follow' the blog resulted in your details being displayed. However, it turns out that I don't have that option... if I remove the "Followers" gadget you can't 'follow' the blog.

The good news is that when you opt to 'follow', you can specify that you want to do so anonymously, in which case you won't show up in the side-bar. So please feel free to continue following, and remember that you have the option to do so anonymously if you prefer. I have also added the "Subscriptions" gadget which will allow you to subscribe using various standard feeds.

Blogging like there's no tomorrow...

I don't think I've ever used the phrase "blogging up a blue streak" before, but there's always a first (or now) a second time: over on his ComputerWeekly-hosted blog, Toby Stevens is blogging up a blue streak.

Well worth a read, too, if you haven't been over there lately; lots on public sector data breaches and Freedom of Information. Highly recommended.

Keeping it all in perspective

As we enter, almost simultaneously, the Obama presidency and the Year of the Ox, Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless was kind enough to point out that Obama and I are close enough in age to share the same sign (in both astrological systems).

Nothing says "You Have Under Achieved" quite like the news that, by your age, someone else is ruling the Free World...

Meh - I wouldn't want his job anyway ;^)

Seriously.

It's real...!

OK, I suppose over the last few years I have become increasingly used to seeing my name on a conference badge... though in a couple of instances it has provoked an unexpected response. For example, I went to one event where a number of MPs were present, and couldn't work out why I was getting a rather frosty reaction from some of them. It turned out that on my badge it just said

Robin Wilton
Sun

and they assumed I was a journalist from the mammary-obsessed tabloid newspaper.

Well, I just emptied my pockets after the conclusion of the workshop in Davis and looked down at this on the table:


It's still my name, but this time the one under it is my own company. It must be real...!

Strange feeling.

Communication, Transparency and Freedom of Information

I'm in California at the moment, at a really interesting workshop being hosted by the Computer Science department at UC Davis. I'll blog more about the identity and privacy-related aspects of the workshop once it has ended...

In the meantime, arriving yesterday on Barack Obama's first day in his new job gave me a chance to listen to the radio reports about what he did during the day. To a notable extent, the day's activities were clearly choreographed to send a carefully-weighted series of messages: he went to church; he held an 'open house' reception at the White House for 200 friends; he 'requested' the suspension of trials at Guantanamo (though presumably it would be a brave military judge who decided to ignore a request like that...); he met military chiefs of staff to discuss the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, and had closed-door sessions on the economic crisis. He also announced new government transparency measures, and added to the 'transparency' theme by saying that White House staff on more than $100,000 would have a pay freeze while the economy is in trouble.

In parallel with this, the White House website was overhauled and used to re-inforce the President's commitment to Communication, Transparency and Participation. Electronic media continue to be an important part of Obama's approach, including his insistence on keeping his palm-top email device. He was quoted in one radio piece, saying that he 'didn't want to be getting advice just from those people who merely worked for him', and that he wanted 'someone in Chicago to be able to email or text him if they thought he was getting it wrong'.

That, in particular, made me smile at the memory of Gordon Brown reportedly phoning someone at home at 6am. "Luckily the man was a shift worker and was up at the time". By some definition of "lucky", perhaps.

I hope Obama manages to live up to his promises of transparency and communication in government, but it may not be easy. One reason his advisers didn't want him to keep his personal email device (as well as the encrypted one he's been issued with for work) was because of concerns that if there is work-related traffic on it, it is likely to be subject to Freedom of Information requests. So presumably easier just to keep the two sets of traffic completely separate (as Sarah Palin would no doubt confirm, in hindsight).

Meanwhile in Westminster... former cabinet minister Peter Hain was criticised for "serious and substantial failures" in not registering donations to his failed leadership campaign, and justice secretary Jack Straw was found to have been in 'clear breach' of the same rules, having been reminded in 2006 and 2007 that he should have registered a donation received in 2004.

It probably was not a good day for MPs to try and vote themselves exempt from having to publish the receipts of their own expense claims.

'Achieving Privacy' paper

You may recall that back in December I heard that a paper I co-authored with Susan Landau and Hubert Le Van Gong had been accepted for presentation at the 2009 Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. I'm delighted to follow that up by letting you know that you can find a copy of the paper here, on Susan's site, or here, on Hubert's.

You're welcome to download the paper, but please note the following copyright statement:

The article, "Achieving Privacy in a Federated Identity Management System,'' is from Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2009.

©2009 Springer. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the publisher, Springer.

Bailing out (some) banks (again)

Gordon Brown's willingness to pump money into the banking sector seems to have had its second wind... though apparently he is 'angry' at banks' 'irresponsible mistakes' and says that banks' customers have a right to be angry about that too.

I may be able to offer him some insights into the matter of consumer anger. I paid into a personal pension plan with Equitable Life during the period when Gordon Brown was responsible for regulation of the UK financial services market (a period, let's not forget, when he missed no opportunity to encourage us to be prudent, to provide for the future, and to save more). I have suffered directly from regulatory failure, the government's refusal to prevent Equitable Life from raiding the deposits of the prudent investor to pay those people it had offered guaranteed annuities no matter what, and the government's subsequent refusal to offer compensation to those who had lost out.

Last Thursday, Treasury Minister Yvette Cooper admitted that there had been maladministration. She apologised to the 1.5m savers who had lost out as a result, but talk of compensation was heavily qualified: it would have to "take account of the position of the public finances", and would compensate only those "hardest hit" (according to some criteria yet to be announced, but potentially including means-testing).

Just in case you're under the impression that this is a voluntary apology, bear in mind that an ombudsman's report was published in July 2008 documented ten years of regulatory failure and as many instances of maladministration. When that report was published, the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration endorsed it and "said the government should accept 'without delay' the findings of maladministration by the former Department for Trade and Industry, the Government Actuary's Department and the Financial Services Authority".

So, while one part of the government "shelters banks from the consequences of their own fecklessness", another part is busy trying to wriggle out of compensating prudent savers who have fallen foul of its own regulatory failures.

Angry, Mr Brown? Why would I be angry?

The reconstruction of Gaza

In a masterpiece of succinctness, the New York Times today manages to distil into one opening paragraph the position of the four main players in the Gaza tragedy:

"Israel acccelerated its troop withdrawal from Gaza on Monday with the aim of finishing by the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday, as Hamas reasserted control over the rubble-filled streets and tens of thousands of Palestinians sought to cope with destroyed homes and traumatized lives."

The numbers tell a stark story.

UNWRA estimates that 100,000 have been made homeless. With the border blockades still in place, 143 trucks of aid supplies were allowed into Gaza on Monday. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths still stands at around 100 to 1, but 400,000 people in Gaza are reckoned to have no access to running water, and sewage flows in the streets (which is, regrettably, nothing new in the territory); dead bodies continue to be recovered from the rubble, and medical supplies and food remain critically scarce; to that must be added the ongoing risk from unexploded munitions. It is impossible to conclude that the civilian death toll in Gaza has reached its peak.

The indications are that the European Union continues to be unable to find an answer to the question of how to deal with the presence of Hamas: it promises humanitarian aid, but says that no funds will be contributed to the 'rehabilitation' of Gaza while Hamas is still in power. That is a political deadlock which requires more urgent and effective attention, if the reconstruction of Gaza's civilian life is not to become a pawn in the political game.

Presidents and emails

"Birds do it, bees do it... even interns on their knees do it..." - as long as you're talking about 'falling in love', that is.

When it comes to emailing, though, it seems that Presidents don't do it.

There's an interesting piece here on CNET today about the email proclivities of Presidents Clinton and Bush, and President-elect Obama (only a week to go, and counting). Clinton, we're told, has never got the habit. He evidently prefers the human touch to the impersonal message. Apparently Obama is an email junkie, and is keen to keep at it - by means of a security-approved wireless palm-top if necessary. In his case, the concern appears to be over the risk of outsider attack - i.e. that someone might eavesdrop on his mail.

George W Bush, according to the article, used to be a keen emailer, but stopped after he took office, saying that he didn't want his "private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass".

In fact, as the article goes on to point out, there's an FoI (Freedom of Information) exemption for personal emails which are nothing to do with the office-holder's official role - though as Sarah Palin discovered last September, email accounts are not necessarily inviolate. What's more, in her case the revelations led to allegations of the use of 'personal' email accounts to shelter behind that very exemption, which was an embarrassment it might have been well worth avoiding.

In George W's case, given that exemption, the risk of FoI-based access to personal emails seems unlikely to have been the real basis for the decision. President Bush himself, in his final press conference yesterday, opened by acknowledging his own propensity for opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. Perhaps those around the president thought the safest approach would be to remove the option of his opening his mouth and inserting a keyboard...

When is an opt-out not an opt-out?

I got an email this morning advertising online access to the electoral roll, and extolling the virtues of being able to check names, addresses and postcodes at the click of a mouse... This is a downstream consequence of the practice whereby local councils (who have a statutory duty to compile the electoral roll as part of their responsibility for running elections) sell name and address information on to - well, anyone prepared to buy a copy, for - well, whatever they want to do with it. Mostly what they want to do with it is spam me with mail-order catalogues for all-in-one dog lead, poop-scoop, bag dispenser and 'special compartment with freshener', if today's mail is anything to go by. Nice.

Naturally I headed over there for what is possibly the most unrewarding form of vanity surfing ever, and typed in my name and home town. Sure enough, it returned a record for me, and also named my wife as a registered co-resident at that address. This came as a bit of a surprise, as we've been diligently ticking the opt-out box ever since it appeared in 2003.

According to Eurodirect, an offshoot of the Skipton Building Society, the percentage of people opting out of having their electoral roll details 'sold on' has been rising steadily since the option was introduced, and currently stands at around 43%. That's an average across the country, though, and opt-out rates vary extremely widely - for instance, Eurodirect's figures say that in 2007 the highest rate of opt-out was in Kennet Council in Wiltshire (79.81%), and the lowest was in North Tayside and Angus (5.89%). I have no idea whether that reflects a greater awareness on the part of Kennet residents, greater trust among the Taysiders, or whether some other incentives are at work behind the headline figures.

Either way, I was somewhat miffed to see that opting out appeared to have had no effect, and emailed the advertisers to ask where they had got my record from. The answer was blindingly simple: it's from the roll of 2002, when we didn't have the choice of opting out.

If I really want to try and put the toothpaste back in the tube, I'd have to find out who bought copies of the electoral roll prior to 2003 and chase round them all requesting that they delete my records from their system. In other words, the opt-out might sound great in principle, but in practice it's worth a lot less than it seems.

Occam's razor loses a blade...

I always think its strange when someone's instinctive reaction to unexplained aerial phenomena is to assume that the most logical explanation is extra-terrestrial activity - and this news story is no exception. One of the turbines on a wind farm in Lincolnshire is two blades short of a full set, after an as yet unexplained bump in the night.

What strikes me as odd is this: here we have the assumption of alien travellers with the inclination, the technical and intellectual capability to travel unimaginable distances to Earth, and the cunning to remain undetected... And yet they are incompetent enough to lurch straight into a man-made structure which, by my reckoning, is about 60 metres high and has a 40-metre diameter fan on top.

Illogical, captain.

Just one number: 112

Somehow, this had completely passed me by... but as it might be useful to you in some slightly bizarre set of circumstances, I will pass it on to you.

As of Dec. 15th 2008, dialling 112 in any EU member state will connect you to the emergency services.

This should work from any land-line or mobile handset*. In December 2007, the UK telecomms regulator Ofcom gave service providers notice that, as of September 2008, UK VOIP users should be offered the same facility.

I don't remember this ever being publicised in the UK - though I think we're still suffering from the confusion over the piecemeal regional implementation of the SNEN (Single Non-Emergency Number - 101). That seemed like a great idea to me, much like the Dutch scheme of having a "local information number" prefix. I can't track down the details of the Dutch scheme just now, but the idea was that if you dialled any area code plus a consistent, short suffix (like, as it might be, *17) you would get a local information service for that area. Neat.

Incidentally, isn't it ironic that the pan-EU 112 number has been introduced in the era of push-button, tone dialling. Wouldn't 112 have been a bit more convenient, in olden days, than 999? It always struck me as strange that, in an emergency, we were expected to dial the second-slowest number on the phone... three times. Only 000 would have been slower, but at least it would have had the advantage of being less fiddly to find if you couldn't the dial and were having to do it by touch.



*The laws of physics still apply. Apparently just after the 7/7 bombings, an email went round saying that if you dialled 112 on your mobile while on the Tube, it would connect you to the emergency services via a satellite link. Telecomms operators had to correct this impression and point out that, even if your handset could talk to satellites, if you're underground and can't see any signal strength bars, your phone will not connect you to the emergency services no matter what number you dial.

Cluster Munitions ban

On December 4th 2008, in Oslo, some 45 countries - including 18 out of 26 NATO member states - signed a treaty banning the production, stockpiling, transfer and use of cluster munitions. It's not unqualified good news: for example although the UK and FRance both signed up to the treaty, there will probably be extensive policy-level haggling about exactly what constitutes a "cluster".

Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction, and better than no step at all.

Meanwhile, as Israeli ground forces enter Gaza, the news photos suggest the deployment of incendiary bomblets. Cluster bombs used in the 2006 invasion of Southern Lebanon continue to render the landscape unusable to the civilian population, and this report from Landmine Action gives detailed descriptions of the long-term consequences of previous cluster bomb deployment in 1978 and 1982. You may well find the details distasteful.

Now, I'm not saying that cluster bombs and incendiary bomblets are the same thing. Nor am I saying that the news sites are carrying photographic evidence of cluster bomb deployment.

What I can say is that Israel was not among the signatories to the cluster munition treaty in Oslo in December.

Over the last nine days, nearly a quarter of a million people have signed the petition here, on the Avaaz website, calling for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza.

Welcome...

I'm hoping that some (most?) of the people to read this post will just have followed the link from my Esoterica blog at Sun. This is the new home of racingsnake's blog.

Why the change? Well, I've moved on from Sun to set up my own consultancy company, Future Identity Ltd..

What does the future hold? Who knows... but I plan to build on the last 5 years' experience with work in the same kind of areas - digital identity, privacy and public policy. All being well, I start 2009 with some work lined up already, and when I populate the website, it will be with practical experience and materials from the consulting engagements.

I'm also on the Reference Groups for a couple of interesting identity/privacy-related projects: PrimeLife (sponsored under the EU's FP7 programme) and EnCoRe (part funded by the UK Technology Strategy Board), so I hope to stay very much at the leading edge of innovation and thought leadership in this area.

It should be quite a ride...