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Zarquan

Listed below are comments made by Zarquan between Friday, 4th July 2008 and Friday, 17th April 2009.

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Pirate Bay beached but not sunk 12:47pm on 17 Apr 2009 clankylad wrote :
"To me, 'file sharing' just seems to be a nice way of saying 'passing round stolen goods'."

Actually - 'file sharing' is a nice way of saying ... um .. 'people sharing files with each other'.

'file sharing of copyrighted material without permission' is a nice way of saying 'passing round stolen goods'.
Can we block child abuse sites? 10:28am on 24 Feb 2009 Cadazian wrote :

"Britain is turning into the HQ of global pedophilia."

Citation please.
Can Virgin satisfy the need for speed? 01:14am on 17 Feb 2009 If you want to test the download speed, try a BitTorrent stream of a popular Linux distribution - say RedHat Fedora.

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

But as several people have already pointed out, the 50Mbps figure is the potential peak bandwidth, not the sustained data rate. Use your high bandwidth connection too often and you will very quickly run into their monthly limit.
Spotify versus last.fm 1:01pm on 12 Feb 2009 "If you want music streamed to your computer for free there's already a big choice."

You missed an important alternative, music published under the creative commons license.

http://www.podsafeaudio.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://magnatune.com/

You also didn't mention _how_ CBS might be trying to make money from last.fm - by collecting and selling user profile data collected from their listeners.

If you are comparing online services, you should not only list the features, you should also describe the costs too. The services may appear to be 'free' as in money, but they often have hidden costs in terms of privacy.
Google, privacy and Street View 5:04pm on 17 Jul 2008 @56

"A major element is whether a person is recognizable. "
Isn't that a bit of a hazy (no pun intended) definition for the law ?

Who decides 'whether a person is recognizable' ?
Does it make a difference if the viewer already knows the person involved (is being recognized by Joe Public different to being recognized by family and friends) ?

Would it be based on the ability of a human viewer to recognize the subject ... or a computer ?

What if a webcam revealed other information that could be used to recognize someone ?

A quick Google for 'image recognition walking gait' found these :
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1289340.1289386
and
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gait_recognition

Quote : "Gait is one of the few biometrics that can be measured at a distance, and is hence useful for passive surveillance as well as biometric applications .... and works well with low-resolution video"

Ok, these particular papers are looking at walking gait and would require a video sequence (webcam) rather than a static picture (Google StreeView), but the issues are the same.

At what point would/should we (or the law) define 'recognizable' ?
Google, privacy and Street View 4:09pm on 07 Jul 2008 @53, John

"In the particular case of Google, where they are automatic recording images and using them for commercial purposes, their use is very much non-personal, nor is it done for artistic purposes, as such the DPA is in full force."

So what implications does this have for live webcams like these ?

http://www.camvista.com/england/london/trafsq.php3
http://www.abbeyroad.com/visit/
http://www.streamdays.com/camera/view/oxford-street-london

Is it just a question of camera pixel resolution ?
In a few years time, webcams will be capable of much higher resolution ....
Google, privacy and Street View 4:57pm on 04 Jul 2008 @Philip

Indeed lots of fun and crazy things we could do :-)

Particularly if we could predict which street they were going to go down next. Assuming they go up one street and down the next, you could have people waving placards that spelled out a rude message if you put them together in the right sequence :-)

However, I did think of one slightly sneaky and probably less fun idea.

What would Google do if a well known rival search engine and software supplier were to guess which city they were going to do next, buy up all the advertising space they could and plaster the place with large and colourful advertisements for their particular brand of search engine and software products.
Google, privacy and Street View 3:50pm on 04 Jul 2008 @27 SilverCapo

"Ultimately, you're asking whether you trust the authorities to not view / disclose potentially sensitive or private information about you ; so you solve nothing by proposing to always disclose everything!"

I'm not concerned about the authorities we have now, nor what they might or might not view or disclose now. It is the amount of data that will be available to the authorities we may have in 20 or 30 years time and the potential uses of that information in the future.

I found this discussion interesting because people were concerned about pictures of us (the public) being seen by us (the public) on the internet, but seemed to accept (undisclosed) authorized personnel recording CCTV images of us (the public) with much less disclosure about what is recorded and how it is used.

The results of Google street view are public, and only shows static images of a single snapshot in time. I work in IT, developing large scale data storage and data mining tools for a science project and the technologies for collecting and analyzing this type of information are improving rapidly. I can quite easily imagine a similar street view system (for authorized eyes only) that records live images from all of the CCTV cameras in a city, complete coverage 24/7, with the ability to automatically identify and follow a single individual as they move through a crowd. I don't think we have a choice about whether such a system will exist. I think it is inevitable.

My own feeling is that if we pretend it isn't happening, try to restrict it, or put legal limits on who can see it and what they are allowed to do with it, we would be fooling ourselves.
Looking 10 or 20 years into the future I see three choices.

a) No surveillance at all
b) Ubiquitous surveillance, open to all
c) Ubiquitous surveillance, controlled by a few

I don't think a) is an option any more, it is already happening.
Option c) potentially puts a *lot* of power in the hands of a few.
For me, option b) seems to be the most pragmatic.

If we decide we want option c) then we need to do a *lot* of thinking about what the system is allowed to do, who is allowed to use it, and what they are allowed to use it for.

Interestingly, I haven't seen anyone mention webcams in this discussion yet.
A quick Google for 'london webcam' found these :
http://www.camvista.com/england/london/trafsq.php3
http://www.abbeyroad.com/visit/
http://www.streamdays.com/camera/view/oxford-street-london

So a question to all those raising objections to Google street view.
I'm curious, why are these webcams acceptable and Google street view isn't ?
Google, privacy and Street View 2:48pm on 04 Jul 2008 @27 SilverCapo

"would you want your boss checking out the camera near your home to see if you were picking your nose in the car?"

It wouldn't matter if I could check out the camera next to the wine bar and get an image of my boss looking very ill after a long 'business meeting' that lasted to 2am.

Who cares. We are all human, we all get drunk or pick our noses or scratch our bums. All of us, we are all scruffy grey faced bum scratching nose picking humans, and we need to accept that and live with it.

If someone did have a snapshot of me picking my nose, what are they going to do with it ? In an open society, showing it to others would demean them more than me.

It only has value if they can use it to embarrass me without the danger of me responding in kind.

If we all have access to the same information (e.g. it is posted on Google street view for all to see), then it looses its value and no one has an unfair advantage over anyone else.
Google, privacy and Street View 2:28pm on 04 Jul 2008 @27 SilverCapo

"would you want your boss checking out the camera near your home to see if you were picking your nose in the car?"

An interesting example.
The obvious answer to that *specific* question is no.

But it isn't that simple.

If the camera is in the office car park, then it (and the information it gathers) is owned by the company, and available to people sufficiently high up in the company to qualify as "authorized".

So if you and Sandra from accounts were caught on camera kissing in the car park, your boss would have access to the images.
He would not need to publish the images, just knowing that you and Sandra may be having a relationship would give him a political advantage.
e.g. If he wanted to transfer to a team that you didn't want to join, by placing Sandra in the same team he may be able to influence you without you being aware of it.

But if your boss was caught on camera passing a brown envelope of cash to someone from accounts, you would not have access to the images. If he is aware that the camera is there are what it records, if he has sufficient authorization, he could review the images and remove any incriminating records of his activities.

So, re-phrasing the question, I would ask you :

Given that your boss already has access to the images from the car park cameras, and can use the information to his/her advantage. Are you happy with this, or would you want equal access to the same information ?

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