Adzilla, another vile company aiming to use deep packet inspection to monitor internet users' browsing behaviour to deliver targetted adverts has bitten the dust, according to to a report at Wired.com (Another ISP Ad Snooper Hit With Lawsuit).  This follows the demise of Nebuad's plans to carry out similar nefarious activity.  Adzilla may be no longer with us, but a class action lawsuit has been launched against it and its ISP partners.

In early June of 2007, Susan Simon noticed odd things happening to her internet connection and traced the troubles to an outfit called Adzilla that turned out to be spying on everything she did online. 

As usual on our annual trips over to ride the Port Talbot Wheelers two-up '25', we take the opportunity to visit antiquities.  This time we visited two castles in the Towy valley near Carmarthen.

Dinefwr Castle is located in the grounds of a National Trust property (so car parking is £2 - admission to the house is more still, though it wasn't open when we visited).  There's a nice tearoom in the House.  The castle itself is perched on a  craggy rock overlooking the valley, and is in quite good shape considering what it's been through, including being remodelled into a "romantic ruin" in the 17th century and having (bizarrely) a summerhouse added to the top of the round tower.  The picture below shows the view up to the castle, plus a couple of tetchy sheep.

The BBC reports (Protest officers seized balloons) that some unusual items were confiscated from a power station protest group.  Supposedly items are meant to be confiscated to prevent offences being committed, but a FOI request reveals that along with the aforementioned balloons,

items taken included blankets, a walking stick, a clown outfit and soap.  [...]  A mountain bike, cycle helmets, bin bags and party poppers were also taken from protesters entering the camp site.

The Register reports (Phorm unleashes legal attack on critics) that much-criticised former spyware company Phorm has unleased legal missives in the direction of Which?, who conducted a user survery which supposedly found that internet users were deeply unhappy about the intrusive and possibly illegal Phorm system, which scans all internet activity in order to extract keywords for targetted advertising.  According to The Regiser,

News articles based on a survey indicating public opposition to Phorm's web snooping and advertising system have been withdrawn after the firm made legal threats to their publishers.

This event has become Team Grumpy's annual season-starter.  It's a well run two up team time trial event run on the R25/24 course.  This course uses a dual carriageway section for the first half, before switching to the old road running roughly parallel to the dual carriageway, but which is quite a bit hillier, with several short but quite steep climbs.

Over at the Team Grumpy blog, we'd been doing a count down to this event, ruminating on training and preparation.  In the event, we finished our "rigorous" training programme off with quite a lot of Belgian beer, takeaway curries and (on the evening before the event, pasta).  Two evenings-worth of system abuse was not, perhaps, the ideal fine-tuning of our finely-tuned physiques (in particular, I've had trouble keeping and/or getting the weight off), so we were feeling a little apprehensive and 'inwardly disturbed' on the way over to the course.

This morning, Ben Goldacre, the Guardian columnist and Bad Science blogger) has written on the difficulties and dangers of datamining to identify criminals and terrorists (Datamining would be lovely if it worked).

He's written this on the back of an IPPR report (The National Security Strategy: Implications for the UK intelligence community), and he's raising issues of accuracy and false positive rates - clearly analogous to evidence-based medical trials, which are closer to his usual blog fare.  Goldacre quotes the author of the report:

I'm visiting friends in South Wales, and I'm using their BT internet connection.  This gives me the first check that the BT-Phorm warning system is still working (it is - if you're on BT, you'll see the grey box with warning script on the right.

If you see this warning, click on the  InPhormation Desk link for more information about what Phorm, BT Webwise and deep packet inspection are, and why yo should be worried.

The Cramps' Lux Interior died earlier this month.  There's a story at the Mojo website (Lux Interior: October 21, 1946 - February 4, 2009)

I've inserted a video of my favourite Cramps track below the fold

Two reports in the press highlight the database dangers the UK is sleepwalking into.

The Guardian reports (DNA details of 1.1m children on database) that the details of over a million children remain in the national DNA database,  despite over half of these individuals having no criminal convictions.

Here's a clip from Newsnight, in which Jeremy Paxman chairs a debate about the dangers of social networking.  Baroness Greenfield doesn't come out of it too well.

 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8LlUME-IM 480x295]