Heh, just read this Exam bosses target faster cheat takedowns article on El Reg.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which is responsible for producing national curriculum assessments and the security of papers, said it was worried that normal procedures for removing illegally posted copyright material online were not fast enough.

“Previous instances of unlawful publication of QCA copyright material have demonstrated that the usual public routes for the notification of a copyright breach (which may be sufficient for dealing with post-exam publication of papers) may not react swiftly enough to limit the damage in an emergency pre-test publication,” the QCA wrote.

To help speed up the process, the authority has asked hosting firms to supply it with an emergency hotline phone number, staffed by employees authorised to take down pages. It also asked for the hotline to be manned outside working hours.

So, they can’t manage to prevent information being leaked, but expect UK web hosts to have staff on call 24/7 ready to jump into action to remove any pages they want removed?

What planet are they on?

Oh, do fuck off: Swine flu name branded offensive

The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, an Israeli health official has said.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Just fuck off, how pathetic can you get?

Apparently, Neilsen has disabled reply-all for all their Outhouse users, to “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

What an incredibly stupid idea. Removing a very useful feature, just because a few people use it incorrectly? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If people were CC’d on a mail you receive, then that mail was relevant to them, and contained info they needed. There’s a good chance your reply will also be something they should read; if that’s the case, you hit Reply All. If your reply is only relevant to the original author, just hit Reply. Really not that hard, is it?

Just read a post likening shutting down websites to eviction (see also the follow-up here).

I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, assholes, to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.

I’m sorry, but I think that’s a terrible idea. If a site or hosting service is free, you have no rights to demand things from it. If the site/service owners cannot afford to continue running it, or do not want to do so, it’s their prerogative. It would be nice and polite of them to do whatever they can to help you retrieve any content you had submitted there, but bollocks should it be a legal requirement.

Making laws like this will achieve one thing: dissuading people from knocking together valuable sites, for fear of the hassle of having to follow these laws if they ever want to shut it down. It’s not at all uncommon for sites which are huge these days to have started out as a one-person operation hacked together in their spare time.

At the end of the day, if a site/service becomes unavailable, the very most you should be legally entitled to is a refund of the amount you paid (pro-rata for the remaining paid-up service term). Morally, if the site owners are able to keep the data about for a while for people to download, that’d be a very nice gesture, but should certainly not be required.

The author of the posts above cites a few “heartbreaking” comments by people who used AOL Hometown, which shut down. AOL provided four week’s notice of the closure. Who the hell treats data placed online as their only copy? I’ve uploaded a fair number of photos to Flickr and Facebook, but the originals stay on on my hard drive (RAIDed and backed up to another drive also). If Flickr or Facebook had to shut down for whatever reason, I’d not have lost anything, and wouldn’t consider them responsible for my data.

Ministry of Justice spends over £130 million to refurbish an office block.

Continue reading Ministry of Injustice wastes £130 million →

Protestors on runway halt flights at Stansted airport.

How the hell were these idiots able to even get on the runway? Surely there should be enough security to prevent them from being able to reach the runway.

More puzzling, the article says:

“Due to this event the runway is closed and will continue to be so until further notice. The advice to passengers is to contact their airlines directly who can advise them but we are expecting delays.”

How bloody long does it take to get the police in to haul them off the runway and off to a cell? It certainly shouldn’t take long!

These two lazy freeloading bastards are a perfect example of what’s wrong with this country.

They make me sick. Am I being a muppet by working my damned arse off to earn money, so that a sizeable portion of it can be taken off me by the government to give to lazy fuckers like those two?

Ugh.