from the hip

The little, otherwise relatively liberal country of Denmark, known perhaps especially for its liberal attitudes towards pornography,  may well be one of the most control-oriented states  in the world as far as the Internet is concerned.

Since 2005, the Danish state has monitored everything everybody has been doing on the Internet. The Danish newspaper Politiken writes:

According to metroxpress, the state is monitoring everyone’s behaviour on the internet as a result of legislation that requires all user names and passwords to be lodged with the State and University Library and the Royal Library. The libraries file everything from children’s scribblings on Arto.dk to love letters and profile pictures on Dating.dk.
The technology is known as Internet Harvesting and the Net Archive currently harvests all Danish sites four times per year.
However, some news, dating and other social network sites are harvested daily, according to Eva Fønns-Jørgensen of the Net Archive at the State and University Library in Århus.

Code release
“Danish sites have a legal duty to provide access codes and we have been harvesting text, pictures and audio since 2005,” she says.
At the moment, researchers are the only ones allowed to see the extensive personal material grabbed through Internet Harvesting. But 70 years after the death of, for example, a person with a dating profile, all information comes into the public domain.

The thinking behind this is that people themselves have chosen to place materials on the Internet, and that once it is one the net it is publicly available.

So there we go. Public nudity and liberal rules about pornography. But Big Brother is watching. And letting others watch as well!

1984 has come and gone.

See also: Inventor of the Internet warns against ‘Big Brother’ systems that track the sites you visit

I have downloaded and  tested Chrome. It is fast, has a number of great features, and looks great. However, it has bugs!

Chrome is not fully CSS and HMTL compliant. Like Internet Explorer it does not display all settings like they should be displayed. For instance, Chrome does not take into consideration “max-width” and “min-width” settings. This means that web pages that are fluid, but has set max and min widths so as to limit line widths will not display properly.

There may be other bugs as well, but those were the ones I noted.

This means that web programmers now have to find and implement “fixes” and “hacks” for yet another non-compliant web browser if they want pages to display properly.

Ouch!!

Telegraph (newspaper, UK) reports that increasing numbers of middle-aged men are going off sex, according to relationship experts. They report it is an universal trend, but I suspect it may only be a British trend:

Counselling and sex therapy charity Relate says it has seen a 40 per cent increase in men who simply cannot be bothered to make love to their wives and partners.

The findings are a world away from just ten years ago, when hardly any men contacted them with a loss of libido. The main sufferers who call its helpline with the problem are generally aged between 30 and 50 and are married.

Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice, said: “Men used to come to us with impotence – now known as erectile insufficiency – but Viagra has sorted some of that problem. What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the 1950s: ‘I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’.

An English professor thinks he has the explanation:

Professor Michael King, of the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, has completed a study into mental illness across six countries which found that the rate of major depression and panic syndrome was highest among men in the UK.

I am not able to question his conclusion. But I do feel sorry for all those beautiful, attractive, suffering English ladies out there. And I feel confident that there must be men, somewhere within the common labor market of the EU, who may be convinced to move to the UK to help them out.

After all, there must be lots of fun to be had in the once Great Britain these days. And if the natives are not willing to do it, somebody has to…

Awaiting your mail, ladies!

I always get very suspicious when governments, at whichever level, are eager to block, halt or close down fraud investigations. Now Gordon Brown is eager to close down the fraud investigation against BAE Systems.

It is a strange case. Tony Blair pressed Robert Wardle, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, to drop the investigation into secret payments by the arms company to Saudi Arabia. Then the case was brought before the high court. On Thursday, the high court, according to Guardian, 

rejected claims that the inquiry had had to be closed down for security reasons because “lives were at risk” if Britain no longer received intelligence on national security from Saudi Arabia.
…  Lord Justice Moses, .. with Lord Justice Sullivan attacked the government’s interference as unlawful.
In their ruling, the judges said: “We fear for the reputation of the administration of justice if it can be perverted by a threat … No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice. The rule of law is nothing if it fails to constrain overweening power.”

Gordon Brown and the Conservatives in England are trying to hide something. For the moment it is difficult to know exactly what. But that it is something that would be hard to defend publicly is clear.

I don’t think Gordon Brown will be able to stop the investigation. I don’t like it when politicians place themselves above the law and above the high court.

From freeinternetpress.com:

The court said that the Saudis should have been made to understand “the enormity of the interference with the U.K.’s sovereignty, when a foreign power seeks to interfere with the internal administration of the criminal law. It is not difficult to imagine what they would think if we attempted to interfere with their criminal justice system”.

The high court will reconvene in a fortnight to decide what remedy to award the two groups of anti-corruption activists who brought the judicial review of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) decision to end the inquiry.

The UK activist groups Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House have done a great job in bringing this before the high court and winning. They deserve support in the continuation of this story as well.

I certainly will support them!

_____________________________

Here is a little background on the case:

The arms company BAE secretly paid Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia more than £1bn in connection with Britain’s biggest ever weapons contract, it is alleged today.

A series of payments from the British firm was allegedly channelled through a US bank in Washington to an account controlled by one of the most colourful members of the Saudi ruling clan, who spent 20 years as their ambassador in the US.

It is claimed that payments of £30m were paid to Prince Bandar every quarter for at least 10 years.

No, even that doesn’t bother me very much. Until recently, under UK law, even this was legal. Indeed, it was tax deductible, so legal was it.

This is the bit that does worry me though:

It is alleged by insider legal sources that the money was paid to Prince Bandar with the knowledge and authorisation of Ministry of Defence officials under the Blair government and its predecessors. For more than 20 years, ministers have claimed they knew nothing of secret commissions, which were outlawed by Britain in 2002.

See also: BAE corruption investigation switches to Tanzania

Among the few very certain things in this world, is the fact that Mugabe has been a disaster for Zimbabwe. Fraud, corrupsion and poltical terror have been a fact of live for people in Zimbabwe for many years.

A land rich on resources and fairly well off at the time of independence have been reduced to one of the poorest countries in the world. Its GDP per capita have fallen with more than 80% since independence.

Now there may be a light in the tunnel, despite the fact that the desperate Robert Mugabe recruited dead voters (The Times) to rig the election.

According to The Guardian, the opposition claims that they have won the election in the country:

Zimbabwe’s opposition party claimed an overwhelming victory against President Robert Mugabe in yesterday’s presidential election, saying that the flow of results showed its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, had ‘massacred’ the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) defied a government ban on pre-empting the official announcement of the election results and released the count from polling stations that showed Tsvangirai beating the man who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, even in the president’s home territory of Mashonaland.

‘We’ve won this election,’ said Tendai Biti, the MDC’s secretary-general. ‘The results coming in show that in our traditional strongholds we are massacring them. In Mugabe’s traditional strongholds they are doing very badly. There is no way Mugabe can claim victory unless it is through fraud. He has lost this election.’

The government’s electoral commission has yet to release the counts formally. But the MDC said that declarations posted at polling stations across Zimbabwe last night, and gathered from its agents observing the counts, showed Tsvangirai ahead of Mugabe in every province where results were available. The most dramatic gap was in Mashonaland West, where the MDC candidate had 88 per cent of the vote to the president’s 12 per cent.

However, it is still too early to say. And even if the opposition should win, the likelihood of a peaceful transition of power is probably very, very small. The most likely outcome is that Mugabe will cling to power and a civil war will ensue.

In my opinion, that is.

PS: The election results are not forthcoming. Election observers now fears that this means that Mugabe is yet again doctoring the results. Journalists have not so far been able to ascertain when the results will be made public.
PS2: Read about some of the local election results from The Independent.

Some good readings about the election in Zimbabwe:

The Independent - Mugabe: the writing’s on the wall, Opposition leaders go into hiding as poll result is delayed
New York Times: Zimbabwe Opposition Insists Mugabe Lost
The Guardian: Zimbabwe opposition fears vote-rigging, Secret Mugabe meeting ponders military move or fixed result
Information (Danmark - in Danish): Dødt løb efter valg i Zimbabwe