Category: Rant

Twitter hiking across the world

Imagine trying to hitchhike from Newcastle in the UK to New Zealand in… New Zealand; not an easy task. Well Newcastle blogger and media guru Paul Smith is going to do just that.

twitchhiker

The plan is to travel from Newcastle Tyne and Wear to the other side of the world with no other help than the kindness of the global network of twitter users. I have meet a number of people on my own doorstep using twitter and I believe that it is possible to complete such a mammoth task based on the kindness most twitter users give. The internet is an amazing place for making the maddest of tasks possible; remember “one red paperclip” and the Million dollar website. All became possible because people from all around the world talked about it, blogged about it and told their friends. The media circus that followed help drive what seemed like an impossible tasks to become possible. The task that Paul is going to undertake maybe an adventure for him; but more so, it is to raise awareness for a good cause – charity: water.

My idea to help the process along is to shout about it on twitter, I don’t just mean to re-tweet about it, but focus the shouts towards the twitter big guns. Celebrity’s like Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Kevin Rose and God! The more noise directed toward people like this will puch them to talk about it and the quicker the world will find out about and support such a great idea for such a good cause.

Please… if you do one thing today…. Donate towards this great cause

If you do two things today make the second to follow and tweet about Twitchhiker to any and all of the celebrity’s you follow on twitter.

http://www.twitchhiker.com/
http://www.justgiving.com/twitchhiker

Come on Cops check out my hard Drive!

The plan from the Home Office (driven by the EU) is to allow Police to remotely access peoples computers with out having to apply to the courts for the privilege.

Now I’m all for a easier and quicker way for the Home Office and the Police to track down things like Paedophilla and Terrorism while bypassing the court for the purpose of evidence collection.  The word is that they will have to get authorization from a Chief Constable before being allow to do this but the problem with this is the police having access to technology/software to access people’s computers remotely.  How do we know they aren’t going to be looking for naked pictures of peoples wife’s?

I’m not saying that the Police are going to be running around “looking though peoples windows from the helicopter” but giving them the tools to “hack” and lowering the rules on when and how they can do this; may open up a risk in peoples privacy that is not necessary.  Information released by the home office say that in 2007/8 the Police hacked into 194 computers in the UK, all of them with a court order.  What they haven’t released however is how many of these “Hacks” resulted in an arrest.  So why would they need to bypass the courts when in two years they have only needed to hack into peoples computer around 8 times per month.    Even if the number of times they need to do this triple in the next two years it will still be a small blip on the bigger picture.

Read the full storey at: http://tinyurl.com/9ytubw

Do you think the Police should be able to access people computers remotely and when is it right to do this?