For context; I recently received a very threatening letter over a council-tax bill from well over a year ago. It seems they’ve been trying to track me for ages to no avail (Hey, Islington council: The next time you try to contact someone, try googling their name. Mine is unique enough and easy to find, which means you would be able to find an e-mail address that I check semi-obsessively), and so passed it to a debt collection agency.

So, whilst I’m sorting that mess out, I figured I’d get a copy of my credit report, to see if it has gone far enough to send me into a spiralling mess of doom.

I Googled ‘Credit report’, found Experian, and decided to request my ‘statutory credit report’, which they (apparently, grudgingly) offer to anyone who requests one, at a relatively easy-to-swallow £2.

As I go through the process, they give the impression that you can see your credit score as a paper version or online for £2. So, I figured, ‘Hey, Online is faster’, so I picked the online option. Then, they tell me that they have to send me a passcode in the post, ‘to protect my privacy’.

‘Shit’, I think. ‘I’ve just gone through this hassle, and I still won’t get it any faster. Oh well’.

So, today my letter arrived. It turns out that to get my credit report, I have to type in my postcode (which, of course, is at the top of the letter), and my pass code (which is also in the letter). I’m not being funny, but that hardly seems like it’s the best protection of my privacy & data.

Anyway, as I am logging in, I am vaguely worried what might have happened if someone else had opened the letter. Surely, the data protection act would have something to say about sending what is essentially someone’s username AND password in the post – especially if it’s something as personal as their credit report?

Luckily, I needn’t have worried: As I tried to log in, it appears that their servers are down, and I’m still unable to see my own credit report, despite having paid for it, and waited oh-so-patiently for the not-very-secure security letter to arrive. Of course, I sent an e-mail to their support team, who inform me that “We aim to respond to your query within three working days”.

Thanks guys…

It bears keeping in mind that Kristopher Schau is famous for things that have very little to do with political commentary. He’s a comedian first and foremost, and if you’ve heard of him outside of Norway, it is probably for him being part of a 3-piece rock group Hurra Torpedo, who did a stirring, kitchen-appliance cover (!) of Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Without further ado..

“Court notes, week 1″ by Kristopher Schau

Translated by Haje Jan Kamps

“What’s it like?” people will ask me. One thing they’ll ask is what it’s like to be present in such a huge court case. The other question is what it’s like to be this close – physically – to Anders Behring Breivik. The answer to both questions is that it’s exhausting. Extremely exhausting. But the most exhausting is the feeling of having to hold back, and the feeling that we don’t even talk about the most important things anymore; the feeling that the most important things are being lost in all the noise.

The important thing: What happened, must never happen again.

After a week of the focus being on Breivik’s examinations, I have to admit that the court case has been an exercise in concentration. Having to sit there, looking at him as he coolly explicates a mission he calls “spectacular” and “grand” without being able to do anything but listen, is a trial in itself. Not being able to grab him, look him in the eyes and say “You have got to be kidding, you can’t actually believe this?”. I constantly feel a basic need of forcing him to have some sort of responsibility, in addition to his studied, well-articulated, almost politics-like rhetoric.

The above is included under UK Fair Dealing / News Reporting copyright law. For the rest of the article, I will unfortunately have to refer you to the woefully inadequate Google Translate version of the article. Sorry.

One of those fantastic books that makes you re-consider everything around you: Why do things look the way they do – and most importantly – why are some things easier to use than others?

Filled with great examples and more than a little bit of common sense, I think this is a must-read for everybody – designers and mere mortals alike.



View all my reviews

It is true: Most people would agree that sexual assault is not a laughing matter. We all know, or are aware of people who have been subjected rape. In the US, more than 25% of college age women report having experienced a rape or rape attempt since age 14.

Rape is the most denigrating and one of the most cowardly of crimes: Committing a crime hideous of nature, that often takes the victim longer to get over than that the suspect spends in a jail cell – if they are ever actually convicted of their crime, that is.

Repeat after me: Rapes ruin lives. Rape is not funny.

Why is Prison rape OK?

And yet, when it comes to prison rape, the tune is very different. It appears that people are more accepting of it. “Don’t bend over to pick up the soap”, they’ll say. “He’ll be bunking with Bubba at Broadmoor”, or “He’ll be someone’s bitch soon enough”.

What in the world is going through your mind, people? The criminal justice system has a whole array of penalties – Fines, community service, prison sentences, mental facilities and (in some cases) capital punishment. There’s no civilised society that has “rape” on the menu as punishment for a crime.

Rape is rape. It doesn’t matter if it is committed in an upstairs bedroom at a party, a park after dark, or in a prison cell. It’s revolting, wrong, and should be strictly punished.

I don’t care what a person has done to land themselves in prison – there is no crime that is punishable by rape, and as a society, we cannot be standing idly by and ignoring that this is being done. The fact that in some prisons, rape is the rule, rather than the exception, makes it only more disgusting.

Rape is rape. Rape is not funny. Enough with the jokes about prison rape, already.

…As aptly confirmed by the nightmare of an ordering scenario a friend of mine, Sarah, had just before Christmas at the tail-end last year.

What happened?

Sarah lives in London, but her parents live in California. She decided to order a couple of cameras (given how much cheaper camera equipment is in the US, that makes sense), and have it shipped to her parents address. Sound pretty straightforward, right?

It probably would have been, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she decided to try and use 42th Street Photo to place her order. Here’s what happened;

On December 17, Sarah ordered a Canon Powershot S95 and a Canon EOS Rebel Digital T2i, but because her shipping address (in California) was different from her invoice address (in London), the order was blocked. Fair enough, I suppose, there’s a lot of credit card fraud out there.

Dodgy card charges

So instead of trying to confirm with Sarah that this was a genuine order, they call the shipping address, where her mother answers the phone. Now, I don’t know much about credit card security, but it sounds to me as if they are worried about that, they should call the invoice address – not the shipping address. I’ll leave this thought for you: If you were a fraudster, would you be at the shipping or the invoice address? Exactly.

Interestingly enough, Sarah’s card was charged on Friday December 17th, so they clearly didn’t care much about the security anyway. Also, by the time the 18th rolled around, the order status on 42 Photo had already updated to ‘shipped’. So why did they call? Well.. when they spoke to Sarah’s mother on the 21st (four days after the card was charged and the cameras had supposedly shipped), they tried to upsell to faster shipping (even though their website, they said that shipping was only going to be ‘less than 10 days’) so the order could get there in time for Christmas. Then, they tried to add memory cards to the order, stating that “the camera wouldn’t work without them”.

Weird upselling

Parents come in all sorts of shapes and sizes – and amounts of photography knowledge. It just so happens that Sarah’s mother’s photography knowledge is, well, shall we say, somewhat lacking. So when somebody calls her and tells her that Sarah must have made a mistake, and that she must have forgotten to order a piece of the camera which is needed for it to work, what should she do?

I find it curious anyway, that a phonecall to someone at a delivery address should potentially be enough to add additional charges (shipping; memory cards) to a credit card that was already charged and authorised via a website, but that’s by the by.

In addition, if you check the 42nd street Photo website, you’ll find their terms and conditions state “Although you have received an email confirming your order, we do not charge your credit card until the item is ready to be shipped and all customer adjustments if any are applied” (emphasis mine). Since the card was charged on the 17th, and 42 street Photo started calling Sarah’s mother on the 21nd, that was clearly ignored as well.

Shipping… Too late.

Then, eventually, Sarah receives a shipping confirmation on the 22nd of December, via UPS, stating that the items had been shipped, and were scheduled to be delivered on December 30th – 3 days later than expected.

Now, most people are perfectly happy to wait for another three days, but there was an itsy-weeny problem: Sarah was going to leave the country on the 29th, and needed her cameras with her. Since the order was placed on the 17th, and the 42 Street Website promised a 10-day delivery (at most), Sarah figured she would have a couple of days leeway. Instead, the cameras would arrive two days too late.
What have we learned?

Between the slow shipping (5 days to ship an order of cameras that are marked in stock?), charging the credit card too early, breaching their own terms and conditions, trying to upsell memory cards and shipping (the latter, presumably, to cover their own ass for being too slow in shipping the items in the first place), trying to get a person unrelated to the transaction to authorise additional spending on a credit card, rude one-line replies to genuine customer service woes, and an apparent lack of care about fraud prevention…

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ll be turning to 42 street photo for my photography needs in the future…

There was no note. There was no message. There were no warnings or problems that anyone knew of. Only she knew why she did it, but she didn’t tell anybody.

I went to the church service. “God chose to take her back”, the minister said. “He takes the ones he loves the most the soonest”, he pondered. “She’s in heaven now, in a better place”, he mused.

The Obituary was a finely crafted piece of writing which I still have somewhere. It’s been nearly fifteen years, and I don’t think about her all that often anymore, but whenever someone mentions suicide, I’m caught in that memory, of sitting on a hard, cold church bench in February, listening to a priest.

I wasn’t so bothered about the God speak (although she wasn’t religious in the slightest – and nor was I), but what caused me a lot of pause for thought was that nobody mentioned – or even acknowledged – that she had chosen to take her own life. She was an intelligent girl. She made a conscious decision to kill herself, for whatever reason.

And yet, everywhere you looked, it was “She was goo good for this world” (maybe), “God chose to take her back” (nope – she decided to make a Dutch exit), and “Why did she have to die” (because she chose to)

I know suicides are awkward, painful, and taboo, but if someone makes the conscious choice to end their life, who are we – the living – to take that away from them by glossing over it, euphemising the events, and pretending it didn’t happen?

In my opinion, when someone decides to suicide, it is our duty to acknowledge it. Find out why, if possible. Talk to each other. Give each other support. You cannot grieve for someone unless you’ve truly faced what was ailing them. Having someone close to you die of cancer makes you think of diseases and how you can help your remaining loved ones look after themselves better. Having a friend or a family member die from a car accident helps you re-assess your own behaviour on the roads. Why should a suicide be any different?

People; stop turning suicide into such a huge taboo. It happens. It’s devastatingly fast. But you have to acknowledge what happened in order to be able to deal with the tsunami of grief that invariably follows.

If you haven’t played the game, basically you are a mobster, who tries to fight him (or her-)self up in the world. You get in fights, you do jobs, and you fight bosses. Part of all of this is that you use the money you earn to buy property, which then, in turn, makes you more money.

Properties explained

Take an apartment in New York for example. The first time you buy one, it will cost $200,000, and will earn you $5,000 per month. That means that for every dollar you spent on the apartment, you earn 0.025 dollars per month. That’s $0.30 per year, and $3 per 10 years.

Now, if you buy an apartment, the price for the second apartment jumps to $220,000. A third one costs $240,000. A fourth will set you back $260,000. Keep buying single apartments until you have bought 10, and the 11th will cost you $400,000. So, your Nth flat will cost X+(X/10*N), where X is the base price of the first flat you buy.

Buy in bulk!

When you buy 10 single flats in Mob Wars: La Casa Nostra, you end up paying 200,000 for the first, $220,000 for the second, etc. The first 10 flats will set you back $2,900,000.

However, you have the option of buying 5 or 10 apartments in one fell swoop. Now, if you buy 10 apartments, the 11th apartment will still cost 400,000, however, you didn’t pay the premium of all the intermediate steps.

So, the first lesson: Always buy in bulk. If you buy 10 single flats, you pay $2,900,000. If you buy 10 single flats in one go, you pay $2,000,000. That’s almost a third less – so you’re making some huge savings.

Compare carefully

The fact that the prices rise rapidly on the properties you buy means that the market changes as you are buying them.

Since you only make $5,000 per month from an apartment, it’s easy to overlook them. But remember, apartments are very cheap to buy, so you get a lot of bang for your buck.

This means that if you have never bought any property at all, the cheap properties in New York give you the most bang for the buck.

In fact, you know the residential highrise in Chicago? That only starts making sense after you’ve bought 140 villas in London.

I’ve created an Excel document that you can use to plug in all your properties. You can download the document here.

The 2 rules for careful investment

1) Always buy property that has the highest possible income per $ per 100 years (use the Excel document to determine this)

2) Always buy 10 properties at the time.

Anyway, on TV, these warnings are often rattled off at incredibly high speed. If you take a closer look, however, you’ll see that the two apparently similar warnings are different. Very different. The Miranda rights in the US and the Police Caution in the UK are, in fact, the exact opposites of each other.

The Miranda Warning

A quick refresher, in case you aren’t completely up to speed with your cop shows:

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you.

To break it down:

“You have the right to remain silent” is pretty clear. Basically, it’s cop-speak for “shut the hell up”.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” outlines the consequences of not listening to the first bit: If you don’t shut the hell up, we’ll write down anything you say, and find a way of using it against you later.

“You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you.” is also pretty clear. It means “Get professional help before you talk to us. If you don’t have a lawyer, we’ll find you one.”

So, to translate the whole phrase:

Shut the hell up. No, really, shut the hell up, nothing good will come of talking to us. Get a lawyer before you say anything.

The Police Caution

The police caution, in all its grammatical clumsiness, is as follows:

You don’t have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if, when questioned, you fail to mention something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

Wow, that’s a bit of a mouthful, but let’s do as above and translate it:

“You don’t have to say anything” is pretty clear. Keep your mouth shut if you want to. (But it’s worth noting that this is not an explicit right as such)

“but it may harm your defence if, wen questioned, you fail to mention something you later rely on in court” means something completely different than not having to say anything. What we are saying here is that “If you have anything to say in your defence, you should bring it up when you are being questioned, rather than in the courtroom”.

The inference is that if you forget to explain something that’s integral to the thing you are being accused of (like “I wasn’t breaking into the house, I was housesitting for my neighbour and locked myself out. I had to break in so I could feed the cat”), that we will use your silence against you. It’s easy to see how this could transpire in a courtroom: “Really? You were housesitting? Why didn’t you tell the police officers about that when they arrested you?”.

“Anything you do say may be given in evidence” basically explains what happens if you say anything.

So, again, translated;

You can keep your mouth shut if you want, but if you don’t tell us everything relevant to the case, there’s no use in crying about it in court. Oh, and we can repeat anything you say in court.

What’s the big deal?

So, let’s take a look at the translated phrases:

In the US, they tell you “Shut the hell up. No, really, shut the hell up, nothing good will come of talking to us. Get a lawyer before you say anything.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, it’s more like “You can keep your mouth shut if you want, but if you don’t tell us everything relevant to the case, there’s no use in crying about it in court. Oh, and we can repeat anything you say in court.”

The quirk here, of course, is that in the UK, “When Questioned” will usually be at a police station, with a tape recorder running. At this point, you’re offered legal assistance, and you are perfectly entitled to say nothing until you have a solicitor present. UK police guidelines are to not do any questioning between arrest and the formal interview at the police station, unless they are urgent questions relevant to the case. (“On which road did you hit the child, we have to send an ambulance” or “Was there anybody with you in the car that’s now sinking to the bottom of the lake”).

The main difference, then, is that in one country, they’ll tell you to keep your trap shut, while in the other country, they’ll tell you of the bad things that may happen to you if you do so.

It’s funny, how two relatively similar societies can be so different on something this basic.

True terrorists have no qualms about going on suicide missions, but are frequently screwed by being really bloody unintelligent. There’s are sure-fire way of getting a bomb on board a plane, which nobody would be able to do anything about, and which current detection methods can’t even track.

Basically, whenever patients go through major surgery which includes installing hardware (Say, a knee or hip replacements), they are issued with a letter from a doctor stating that they have metal embedded in them, and that this might cause a metal detector to go off. If you’ve ever seen an x-ray image of a bilateral hip replacement, you realise that these are pretty high-end operations, which involve huge amounts of metal to be inserted in someone’s body.

As such, once the surgery is healed, all you have to show for it is some awesome surgery scars, and setting off metal detectors.

Because these patients have to get through airports somehow, they are issued with letters from the doctor explaining why they have detectable metal in them.

Now, you don’t actually need a lot of explosives to take down a plane – high explosives are remarkably potent.

Combining all the points above: There are a lot of places in a human body where you could hide a bomb. Simple options that even a less skilled surgeon would be able to complete is the abdominal cavity, or to remove a lung and place the explosives there. If you want the surgery scars to be healed before the terrorist boards the plane, you obviously need a surgeon who is skilled enough to keep a passenger alive for eight to ten weeks after the operation, but if you don’t care about that (and, as a terrorist, why would you), a botch-job would do.

More advanced, it would be possible to do an actual hip replacement, and use an long, hollow piece of metal in the body, filled with the explosives, a trigger mechanism etc. Shy of doing an actual X-ray (which they don’t do at airports… Yet), this would be completely indistinguishable from a real hip replacement. Again, if you’re a terrorist, you don’t give a damn if you’ll ever actually be able to walk again: A wheelchair and a ton of pain-killers would get you through security and to the airplane, and from there onwards, well, who cares.

In short: Everything we’re doing at airports right now is done to keep us scared, and to cover air travel with a thin veneer of security blanket. It’s hogwash: We’re not 100% safe. But then, we never will be. What annoys me more than anything is the crumpling of privacy and personal liberty we’re willing to accept in the name of (an illusion of) safety.

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to(…)”

Read the full article here.

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Personally, I’d love to see this in context.

“Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.” sounds to me like the heimlech manouvre.

“Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.” Uhm, yes, that’s the standard way of getting someone to let go of you if they’ve got someone else in a bear hug.

Only the headline one (drive fingers into groin) I can’t find any sort of defence for.

All the stuff in there is pretty standard self defence. As with everything else, you’d have to keep human rights in mind (with ‘PLAN – Proportionate, Legal, Accountable and Necessary use of force).

I completely agree that urging people to use force is disgusting, but from that particular guardian article, I can’t see anything hugely wrong. What they forget to mention is that ‘jailed youths’ some times are violent little thugs, and occasions may occur where people have to defend themselves.

Take any self-defence manual out of context, and you can make it sound like a torture recipe.

As far as I can tell, this is piss-poor journalism from the Grauniad…