No geek
is an island

Frustrated with the lack of progress from gentle dialogue with the parliamentary authorities, those marvellous chaps at mySociety have launched their Free Our Bills campaign, which I’ve just signed up to support.

They want to see Parliament publishing bills in an improved electronic form that will allow more automated processing by services like TheyWorkForYou (which helps power the LibDems’ new Iraq site, Hold Them to Account), making the issues being debated by MPs and peers more accessible to normal people like you and me.

mySociety estimate the programming work required would cost around £10,000, so it only needs one MP to sacrifice a new kitchen to pay for it.

You can register your support for the campaign on the Free Our Bills website.

While we’re having a go at online news stories… The Telegraph demonstrates the problems that can come from updating an existing news story.

Last night, they posted the welcome news that missing boy Ben Smythe had been found ’safe and well’. In a story about the search for him and his recovery, a photo caption that previously provided useful information suddenly goes a bit Private Eye:

The Channel 4 News website has an article about a new IPPR report on children’s use of teh internets (Young people ‘are being raised online’). The news story avoids much of the usual scaremongering, although it’s typical of the IPPR to suggest that because “parents need to be reassured about what they are looking at” the Government must intervene.

There’s some high class, in depth research in the report too:

The researchers found that on YouTube, a search for the term “happy slap” delivered 117 videos posted in the last week and “street fight” 312 videos.

My motivation for highlighting this story, though, is to draw attention to Channel 4 News’s own bizarre interpretation of the law online, as revealed in the final paragraph:

Unlike television programmes, internet content is not subject to any legal restrictions such as the Obscene Publications Act, Sexual Offences Act, and laws relating to race hatred, defamation and libel.

Really? I mean, really?

Some of these laws may be enforced in different ways, and some specific to other media (for example, video classification laws) may not apply, but the idea that I can state that Jon Snow eats newborn babies in order to feed his unquenchable bloodlust (important legal disclaimer: he doesn’t) and not be risking a libel action is absurd.

Of course internet content is subject to legal restrictions, although these will vary from country to country. That’s how file-sharers swapping copyrighted material have been prosecuted; that’s how a UKIP parliamentary candidate won a libel action over posts on a Yahoo! forum. To suggest that these laws don’t apply is pretty irresponsible.

*Just to be clear: I have no reason to think TV treasure Jon Snow eats babies.

Facebook users now have more control over their privacy as you can now base privacy settings on groups of friends.

This uses the recently-introduced “Friends Lists”, which lets you classify your friends into groups - something which naturally appeals to a library type like me. So you can have a group for university friends, for school friends, for work colleagues, or for those people you don’t really know but you didn’t want to turn down when they asked to be your friend.

You can choose for any given type of information (e.g., your Facebook wall) to specifically allow or excluse a group of friends, an addition to more general settings controlling what’s visible to all of your friends and what’s visible to your networks.

So, for example, you might not want work colleagues to be able to see your status or photos of you behaving drunkenly at university (or last night for that matter). But you might be happy to give them access to your wall, which you don’t want to let your mum see. The new privacy settings are sufficiently granular that you can exclude a whole friends list from seeing photos tagged of you, but exclude just one friend (e.g., your mum) from viewing your wall.

The new system succeeds the all-or-nothing approach of “limited” profiles - and anyone who you’d previously set to limited will now be on a “Limited Profile” friends list. The changes also include a “Friends of friends” concept in case you want to make some information available to that group.

As referendums are in the news of late, I thought this excerpt from The Times of March 1911, which I stumbled upon yesterday (as you do), might be of interest:

With regard to Lord Balfour’s Reference to the People Bill, it is expected that at least two days will be occupied by the second reading debate. It is probable that in Committee amendments will be moved limiting the scope of the measure, which as it stands would not only allow either House to demand a Referendum on any legislative proposal, but also gives that privilege to a minority of 200 members in the House of Commons. Some Unionists think that the purpose of the Bill will be served if it is confined to the setting up of the machinery for the Referendum, leaving for definition in further legislation the occasions on which it is to be resorted to.

There’s a long preview of Brian Paddick’s autobiography Line of Fire in today’s Mail on Sunday. The book will, the article says, “offer an insight into police culture and practice - from the era of Life On Mars to the era of the suicide bomber.”

Paddick is, of course, the Liberal Democrats’ candidate for Mayor in May’s London elections. His thirty years in the police force make him the ideal person to lead the fight against crime in London, and those three decades of experience are charted in his book, from the Brixton riots to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Here’s a morsel from the Mail:

Whenever I went out on night patrol with one particular pandacar driver, the first stop was the “tube station” - the off-licence.

We would buy a couple of “tubes” of Foster’s lager which we stowed under the front passenger seat. We would wait for a lull, go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and then sit in the car eating and drinking lager.

In those days the unofficial policy was to try to avoid arresting people for drink-driving - because police were drink-driving themselves.

Line of Fire is released on March 25th.