The Register reports that Wacky Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is pushing ahead with plans to implement one of the biggest (if not the biggest) intrusions into the privacy of the UK population.

This batty "anti-terrorism" measure seeks to monitor all communications, including telephone, mobile phone, internet and email.  The claim is that content of communications will not be recorded, merely the details of who is communicating with whom.  But don't forget the tendency of function creep.

New Humanist magazine has published some amusing "cut out and keep" trading cards (God Trumps), each focussing on religions (oh, and atheists and agnostics).  I particularly like the Scientologist card, especially as I am just re-reading Russell Miller's excellent 1987 biography of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.  I also rather like the agnostic card!

Well, it turns out BT have decided to censor their broadband fora and remove all traces of discussion about the vile Phorm/webwise system by which they planned to spy on all their customers' internet habits.  Their somewhat pathetic announcement can be read here.

There have been several threads to which all messages concerning Phorm/Webwise have been consigned.  Messages elsewhere concerning Phorm/Webwise get edited to remove such references. 

Well, of the three machines upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 that I blogged about the other week, I've been mostly using the Sony Vaio notebook.  Some issues have come to light (some good, some bad):

The new Network Manager (see the previous post for getting it to work) is brilliant, it's so easy to switch between wireless networks, and between wired, wireless and 3G networking.  It's a joy after previous versions.  So, definitely a huge improvement over 8.04.

More details of the European OLPC G1G1 offer now released. Seems as though transactions will be in sterling, and via amazon.co.uk.

For  full details of the OLPC laptop, and the background to its development, see the official page.

Well, it seems I was premature in my triumph at escaping the clutches of BT as my broadband provider.  Having switched from BT to Zen on the 10th October, I was surprised to see a credit card charge coming through from BT Openworld dated 14th October.

I rummaged about on the BT web pages for an appropriate phone number, and found it spectacularly byzantine.  Or possibly labyrinthine.

BBC News has a story that the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) will be available in Europe on a Give 1 Get 1 basis via Amazon.

I've written about the OLPC project before - this is the project started by Nicholas Negroponte to develop a low-cost laptop for educational purposes, aiming to produce the devices for $100.  Last I heard, they'd got the cost down to $189. The OPLC runs Sugar  Linux (I have Sugar running under VirtualBox, and it's a neat and innovative OS), and has a number of innovative technologies, notably in the low power screen which is usable in sunlight, and the dustproof and waterproof keyboard.

One week on, and I've got to grips a bit more with the iPod Touch. 

• I don't like iTunes!  (but perhaps I will ge used to it)  It doesn't seem terribly intuitive to me.
• My digital music files live on a Linux box upstairs, and I stream them to the hifi via a Logitech Squeezebox.  As I reported in the last iPod post, I was able to access these files for use with iTunes using Firefly, but this wouldn't let my sync them to the iPod.  Samba wasn't a bundle of use either.
• Disk space being limited due to the small partition used for Windows XP on the only machine available for iTunes, I resorted to making copies to a portable hard drive, this worked pretty well.
• Why can't Apple make a Linux version of iTunes?
• iTunes could only identify cover art for a very small proportion of my mp3s.  This is probably more a reflection of my musical taste, however!
• To be honest, I don't find browing the album covers an efficient way of locating an album when thereis over 29Gb of music files on the device!
• Having access to the MS Exchange mail/calendar is very useful
• My grown up sized finger tips are a bit on the large size for accurate tapping on the screen keyboard!
  

Perhaps I should look into jailbreaking this iPod so I can just use the Linux box for transferring files...

Some recent developments regarding the obnoxious Phorm:

The Telco 2.0 conference feature discussions from the CEO of a web marketing company.   Because the meeting was held under Chatham House rules, individuals and companies could not be named.  However, it's a reasonable assumption this was someone from Phorm.  The Register reports.