Daily Archives: 25/7/2005

World events

More fun with the proposed ID cards

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I do find the debates about the proposed ID card scheme very interesting, so here’s another link to The Register that discusses the state of play:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/25/id_card_goes_icao/

For non-UK people, the UK government has been proposing for sometime that giving everyone in the country an ID card will be in everyone’s best interest, stopping fraud, fighting crime, helping old people cross the road, and will also save small kittens from trees. Wishy washy liberals like myself have been asking repeatedly how exactly the ID cards differ from passports and credit cards, and how exactly uniting things into one place makes anyone more secure rather than more easy to impersonate… Without much of a decent answer.

Here’s my personal highlight from the article:

supervision of enrolment would “reduce” (sic) the likelihood of fake biometrics being successful, and details of how the Government proposes to stop this becoming a simple key to ID fraud cannot be provided “in order to protect the integrity of the National Identity Register.”

Effectively, it’s a system which by design puts all of its eggs in one basket, and is dependent on that basket being made impregnable via measures which the Government will never reveal or discuss. Trust us…

Doesn’t that inspire confidence?

Stuff, World events

MSN’s google, sorry, ‘search’ for Apple is fruitless, but the WTC can be found

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The Register, one of my favourite websites for their rather odd blend of abject paranoia, cynicism, and good reporting, has pointed out something rather odd.

Micro$oft have decided to get in on the Google Maps game and so have launched their own version, but it appears to be missing the headquarters of Apple Computers, instead showing a plain field. That’s a bit odd…

The World Trade Center is still there too, which is odd and bordering on insensitive. It’s strange to see the towers casting their shadow down towards the river. From the angle of the sun you can tell that the satellite photo was taken during the morning, and the green of the parks suggest it was during the summer, so probably around breakfast time. It feels slightly strange to see this insignificant moment of history resurfacing so many years after the event that changed so much of the political landscape of the world over the last four years. I once read the entry for Hitler in an encyclopaedia written in 1934. There was a strange sense of ‘if only you knew then…’

On a less philosophical note, it would appear that if you want a map that’s at least vaguely recent then Google is still the place to go. Let’s face it, we ‘google’ for things, we don’t ‘MSN’ for them, and there’s a good reason for that. Still, a bit of competition always helps keep people on their toes.

The source article.