The Magnificent Frog

Internet data-retention law comes into force

Internet service providers will have to retain details of Internet communications, including email, under UK law which came into force on Monday.

The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009 require service providers to retain details of user Internet access, email and Internet telephony for 12 months. ISPs must also be able to respond to access requests by law enforcement and other designated authorities.

The details of UK citizens’ communications to be retained include which websites people have visited or attempted to visit; the sender, recipient, date and time of emails; and the caller and recipient of Internet telephone calls.

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What this means is that every web site, email and telephone call that you make not only can be monitored if you are suspected of some heinous villainy but will be monitored and retained for 12 months. 

Quite how this will help to stop terrorism or organised crime escapes me.  I could take a laptop to a Witherspoon’s pub or other free Internet access location such as almost anywhere where people have set up free wifi access points for me to use. (Thank you).  I could use a free Internet mail account with some bogus details to plot my nefarious activities.  If I wanted to I could set up a simple device on my laptop to mask my network card’s MAC address.  A simply dongle, router or disposable mobile phone would do.  I would be anonymous again.

Presumably the EU is operating on the assumption that people who want to blow things up are stupid as well as misguided.  The two do not automatically go together. 

I wonder what happens when I email one of my American, Canadian or Australian chums?  They can track my sending an email but not what happens to it?    If I send it to a googlemail account it could literally go anywhere and remain private.  Actually I could set up my own email server, dial into an Australian ISP and route messages that way.  I believe that there are still Aussie Internet hosts that operate out of remote sheep farms and such.  I don’t want to stretch the bounds of national stereotypes too far but I’m sure there are a few.

This law is simply an invasion of my privacy and the privacy of anyone else in the EU.  I will be writing to my MP and MEPs (you can find your’s here and here) asking them to campaign to repeal this pointless and intrusive law.

Can I go home and sleep for the rest of the day please?

This post isn’t just an excuse to pun “tire” with “tyre”, I’m genuinely tired and in need of sleep.

I’m not in the mood to be at work.  I’d rather go swimming or a thousand other things that are more interesting than office politics and bad tempered staff bitching about each other.

So, I ask again, can I just go home and leave them to it?

Jen posted a photo on her blog taken at a Chinese zoo.

As I mentioned almost a year ago in my post on What’s wrong with Pandas? the bear relative is an embarrassment.  These tiny cocked failures in natural selection will soon die out, leaving an evolutionary niche to fill for most ridiculous large mammal.  Arguable humans could take this role but we’ve proven to be quite successful with our opposable thumbs and clever minds.  After pandas, who is even close to being the mammalian species of scorn?  Who will nature next select for the rubbish dump?

An obvious choice is the manatee.  Like pandas they are, shall we say, plump.  Unlike pandas this is an advantage in the water than they live in and their shape allows them to move swiftly through the water in search of prey.  Admittedly their prey happens to be sea grass, algae and mangrove leaves.  An environment that we humans are quickly destroying with pollution and building on the land that provides for mangrove trees.

We humans are also adding to the destruction of manatees by running them over in our speedboats.  Sensitive skin and blubber may protect them from the aquatic elements and those few predators who risk attacking the large mammals but it’s no protection from the cutting blades of a rotor.

Sadly for the manatee, little children like to cuddle toy pandas but the sight of the foam filled leather sack of a toy manatee will just make your kids hate you.

The fabled armadillo is another popular choice for the evolutionary waste bin.  Although heavily armoured and equipped with strong claws for digging these creatures are generally peaceful.  They tend to eat a variety of grubs and insects unlike the crap pandas who eat only bamboo and happy thoughts.  Leeching the latter right out of the hearts of small children until they reach their teens.

Some armadillos live in borrows which protects them from predators while others flee from them into thorny undergrowth, using their plated hides for protection.  Sadly it is humanity again that threatens these gentle creatures.  Not only to we encroach on their environment but we make use of armadillos in experiments to study leprosy since they, along with mangabey monkeys, rabbits and mice (on their footpads), are among the few known non-human animal species that can contract the disease systemically.  We also use them to test different diseases and cures as they reproduce four genetically identical quadruplets in each litter.

What about our cousins on the evolutionary tree: the great apes, specifically the gorilla?  Unlike humans these creatures are rarely violent and prefer to keep to themselves.

Despite sharing 98% of their DNA with humans they are very different from us socially, preferring a simply life of foraging.  They are capable of complex communication, even learning sign language to communicate with humans.  Why they’d want to is beyond me.  I’m human and I barely want to communicate with most other humans.

Once more it is humanity that threatens this mammal.  We destroy their habitat and hunt them for their body parts.  We even expose them to our diseases, wiping out thousands of the gentle creatures.  Perhaps it is the fact that they remind us of ourselves that makes us destroy them?  Pandas at least have the error of being ridiculous, while apes have only the error of being related to us.

It would be easy to list tigers or any of the great cats as evolutionary dead ends but these magnificent animals engender so much sympathy that it is hard to imagine us allowing them to become extinct.  Besides which the only real reason for their decline is human over hunting.  All we need to do to allow them to thrive is leave them alone. 

Who’d want to mess with anything that could bite your arm off anyway?  Pandas can barely manage to sit on someone as their method of defence.  The big cats are dangerous.

Tigers are so… very… pretty. They are just too pretty for God to let them die. Huh?

So, which mammal is doomed next?  Should we do anything about it or let nature take her course?

I read this with a strange sense of disbelief.

US President George W Bush has urged China to begin dialogue with Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Mr Bush called his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao to raise his concerns about the unrest and to urge him to ease access for journalists and diplomats.

The same George W Bush who set up a torture camp in a foreign country to bypass the Geneva Conventions is asking China to treat people better.  Too little, too late, if you ask me.