Go Compare - Go Fuck Yersel

Just to be clear, the point of this piece is that I want to live in a world where anyone can freely graffiti billboard adverts without fear of prosecution for vandalism or hate crime. We are bombarded by outdoor advertising with no choice as to whether we see it or not, if people could freely amend adverts as they see fit, marketeers would be forced to take into account the views of local communities.

It makes me gag with frustration, there are actually people out there who think that this is a spontaneous eruption of hatred and vandalism against one specific car insurance comparison site, and not just a slightly edgy marketing job.

I'm genuinely concerned that people think that out of all the things in modern life that a spontaneous uprising of graffiti could be about, it would be about one TV advert.

Not the Aleksandr from compare the meerkats, or Churchill the disagreeable/agreeable bulldog or that dapper Admiral.

A lot of people think that its genuine amusing vandalism, then so be it.

What I think would be awesome if if some lads with spraycans went out and cranked the Go Compare graffiti up a notch and added their own unauthorised graffiti. "Go Compare - Go Fuck Yersel", "Go to Compare the Meerkat", "Go back to Italy", "Go anorexic you fat fuck"

If this is the reality that folk think they live in, then embrace it. I eagerly await the same graffiti creeping into other adverts, a wholesale takeover of billboard advertising by lads with spraycans, inspired by Go Compare.

Especially around the Olympics

That would be awesome.

Any advert that annoys you or rubs you up the wrong way, just grab your cans, don't say it, spray it. If anyone stops you, tell them you have implicit permission from the PR company to purely and genuinely express the feelings of the local community towards advertising.

When I used to stay round Shields Road in Glasgow, an area with a large Muslim community, whenever the clothing companies put up posters of scantily clad women wearing £4.99 bikini tops, a few days later the skantily clad woman would find herself covered up. Someone had been out with a ladder, a tray of black Dulux and a paint roller, and covered her modesty.

This happened a few times until the advertisers got the message that you don't do scantily clad women in some areas.

I guess in a sprawling metropolis like London, it doesn't matter if an advertiser pisses off a large section of the eyeballs.


A few weeks ago the same thing happened in Walthamstow (and Tower Hamlets according to the Evening Standard), with this year's H&M £4.99 bikini tops adverts. By Blackhorse Road underground someone had tried to paint over the skantily clad women and failed miserably, only one of the four ladies was covered.

Our awesome MP tweeted about it, we have different views on this. I think its a pure and genuine expression of a community's distaste for advertising that's vulgar in their culture, and she thinks its a hate crime. Some people feel threatened by it.

I was tweeting about it yesterday and received this

I don't really want to invoke Venn, but it is possible for graffiti to be both vandalism and hate crime, and also for vandalism to look like hate crime when it clearly isn't, in much the same way that a marketing job can look like vandalism when it clearly isn't.

One person's hate crime is another's censorship. If you're going to mush all these concepts together to match whatever your worldview is, then you'll find me up a ladder painting beer bellies on posters of Olympic Team GB and complaining that they're already airbrushed to unrealistic perfection and encourage the youth of today to develop eating disorders.

Anyhoo, the Go Compare graffiti campaign is a rather sweet anachronistic affair, harking back to a time when people did things differently.

We don't use ladders to deface adverts now, these days we use software, like on MyDavidCameron and the anti-terror hotline remix

 Alas, if Go Compare created a macro generator website, no one would use it, no one feels strongly enough about their adverts to actually go out and vandalise them.

Only in the dreams of marketeers.

Am I Spartacus?

At the weekend there, in the aftermath of Paul Chambers losing his appeal on the #twitterjoke this, there was a great outpouring of something on Twitter, thousands of people retweeting his original 'menacing' tweet about blowing up Nottingham's Robin Hood airport. It was a great show of solidarity.

But something bugged me, there was something that didn't feel right about tweeting

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!! #IAmSpartacus

Its that bit at the end, appending the hashtag. Its incorrect, just as incorrect as getting the 'may be a joke twibbon'. Its a disclaimer and that's wrong. Twitter shouldn't need such things, the context is inherent to the medium.

Its like if in the original Spartacus scene, the folk joining in stood up and said "I'm Spartacus! Just kidding, I'm not really, you were right the first time". It agrees with the original charge.

If the sentiment you want to express is solidarity then don't undermine it by joking.

The show of solidarity would have been more profound without the #iamspartacus hashtag, and with a wider range of targets being menaced. "I've left a suitcase of explosives in Victoria Station, you have 28 minutes to find it", "A plane will crash in the next seven hours", "I just pushed a man under a train", etc, purposefully tying up so much of the security services' time in investigating 'menacing' messages on twitter, that the authorities would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, that the twitter medium is not to be taken seriously.

I had this similar idea a few months back, the NATO phonetic alphabet thing, Foxtrot, Bravo, November, etc, to do a similar alphabet using terrorist keywords. So, if any authorities are monitoring voice phonecalls, they'd be snowed under with assassinations, bombs, capture, hijackings and so on.

Photographer locations at The Battle of Bolton

Fond as I am of Bolton, I was somewhat saddened to here of the trouble there over the weekend. Two baying mobs decided to congregate in the town square and have a ruckus cos that's what they're into.

Flickr has a handful of photographers on location and I can't stop myself from putting together a google map of their locations across the day.

If you click through to the larger version, the photies are listed in time order, so you can follow the progress of each photographer. To be honest the most exciting point is around 1:00pm where a smoke bomb goes off and some UAF bigwig is arrested, dragged off and has his toothbrush confiscated.

View The Battle of Bolton in a larger map
Its a bit of a work in progress, but I'm finding it immensely satisfying.

Any suggestions about improvements I could make, warmly appreciated.

Inevitably scannerporn.com

When the airport body scanners were first announced they said it wasn't porn, I said Rule 34. It was only a matter of time, and now by way of an anonymous comment on my blog:-

www.scannerporn.com

We saw it coming a mile away.

So, kids can't go through the body scanners cos its violates child porn laws, but adults have no choice in the matter. The government have forced us to become nude models.

Sure they can say its not porn if they want, but that's not quite the way porn works, hence the appearance of www.scannerporn.com Now the airport body scanners very definitely are pornographic.

Sure, that website wasn't quite there first, what with lingerie advertising aping the images, but still, its a neat development in the war against porn terror.

Body Scanner Porn the legend continues

I read on The Register:-

The proliferation of airport body scanners will spark a flurry of low-grade porn, internet conspiracy theorists claimed last week.

But officials at Manchester Airport, where full body scanning is already due to be tested, have been quick to dismiss this as urban myth. Who to ignore?

A number of websites have suggested it is a simple enough matter to transform the slightly abstract, solarised images currently taken by airport scanners and turn them into slightly fuzzed smut.

"internet conspiracy theorists claimed last week"? I was going on about it last October

...asserting that the images are not erotic or pornographic. Clearly she is unaware of Rule 34,

Rule 34 - If it exists, there is porn of it.

We're just hours away from something appearing on ffffound

Besides, Boing Boing reckons that the Technical Specs do allow for storing and sending the images.

North vs Pachauri

Now, if I was recruiting someone to be the head of my UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, I'd want someone who really knew their stuff, someone who was signed up to all the mailing lists, Facebook groups, international institutes, organisations and companies. Dr Richard North of EUReferendum would have you think that these are vested interests and that Dr Pachauri is lining his pockets on the back of all this climate change stuff.

The good Dr North makes a compelling case, listing thirty or forty organisations that Dr Pachauri holds positions in that funnel money into his various TERA-branded business/charities. Including but not limited to:-

• Director and Head of Tata Energy Research Institute
• Director General TERI
• Strategic Advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors LP
• Member Senior Advisory Board of Siderian Ventures
• Board member of the Nordic bank Glitnir
• Chairman of Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund
• Board member of the Credit Suisse Research Institute
• Member of the Advisory Group for the Rockefeller Foundatio, USA
• Member of the board International Risk Governance Council, Geneva
• Chairman of Advisory Group at the Asian Development Bank
• Member of the Policy Advisory Panel for SNCF
• President of the Asian Energy Institute
• Director to GloriOil Limited
• Scientific Advisor
• Chairman of IPCC
• Far East Oil Price Advisory Board
• Member of International Advisory Board of Toyota Motors
• Member of the Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG
• Chairman International Association for Energy Economics
• Independent Director of National Thermal Power Corp
• Part-time Directory of National Thermal Power Corp
• Director of Indian Oil Corporation
• Director of Gail India Ltd
• Member of National Environmental Council, Government of India
• Member of International Solar Energy Society
• Member of World Resources Institute
• Member of the World Energy Council
• Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India
• Member of the Oil Industry Restructuring Group, for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India
• Director of Consulting and Applied Research Division at the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad
• Visiting Professor, Resource Economics at the College of Mineral and Energy Resources, West Virginia University
• Visiting Research Fellow at The World Bank, Washington, DC
• McCluskey Fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University
• Board chairman Climate-Risk centre, The Earth Institute at Columbia University

So, SPECTRE TERI-Europe has 27 Albert Grove, in Merton, South London listed as its UK office. Dr North sites this as being jointly owned by Dr Pachauri and Dr Rita Kumar and also the home of Dr Kumar and a gentleman known as Nicholas Robins.

I happened to be just passing the suburb of Merton in South London earlier today and thought it would be a bit crazy and stalkerish if I went to have a look at this 27 Albert Grove address that Dr Pachauri and Dr Kumar have as their UK offices, and I've got to say, it looked a bit pokey. Maybe there's some kind of secret underground villainous headquarters and the address above is just a cover.

No idea about pornography

The BBC reports on a new body scanner being used at Manchester Airport

A scanner which produces "naked" images of passengers has started a trial at Manchester Airport.

The authorities say it will speed up security checks by quickly revealing any concealed weapons or explosives.

But the full body scans will also show up breast enlargements, body piercings and a clear black-and-white outline of passengers' genitals.

Its a neat picture they've included with it, the way the flesh bulges over the belt. I haven't given much thought to how clothing distorts the body, except in the case of corsets and the like.

Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at the airport, said most passengers did not like the traditional "pat down" search.

...

Ms Barrett said the black-and-white image would only be seen by one officer in a remote location before it was deleted."The images are not erotic or pornographic and they cannot be stored or captured in any way," she said.

Now this last sentence is clearly untrue, as the picture that accompanies the story has been captured and stored, and now reposted. Unless of course that's just a stock image, mybad.

I want to know more about this one officer who gets to look at nuddy pics all day. You're going to need more than one officer, possibly three, working in shifts, maybe six to give a week's coverage, and their manager who gets called over if the officer sees anything interesting.

Actually, there must be a way to capture and store an image in the system. What if the chap does see somene is carrying a gun or bomb? There needs to be some kind of proof, some record, even if its just a Prt Scrn button. I guess the officer could take a camera phone snapshot of his screen, and just send it to all the necessary personnel.

Also of concern is Sarah Barrett asserting that the images are not erotic or pornographic. Clearly she is unaware of Rule 34,

Rule 34 - If it exists, there is porn of it.

We're just hours away from something appearing on ffffound

Schneier was talking about this sort of thing years ago.

The evil that men do

There's a subtle difference in the role played by Killer Bob in the first and second series of Twin Peaks. In the first season in 1990, Killer Bob represented 'the evil that men do', whilst Agent Cooper found that Leland Palmer, a seemingly loving and caring father, killed his own daughter who he'd been sexual abusing for years.

Leland Palmer was an evil man, and this evil manifested itself as Killer Bob. Killer Bob was Leland when Leland abused his daughter.

In the second season, in late 1990 and 1991, due to the first series's success 22 episodes were made, rather than 8, other writers were used in addition to Frost and Lynch who were involved in other projects. These other writers turned Killer Bob from from an absract 'the evil that men do' into an actual malevolent entity that 'makes men do evil things'. Bob was a demon who possessed other innocent people and made them do evil things, and absolved them of personal responsibility.

'It's not my fault gov, Killer Bob took over my body and made me do it'.

In a similar way, yesterday's riot in Harrow. I feel that SIOF and EDL are clearly being portrayed as a season two Killer Bob. The streets were filled with angry youths pelting the police with bricks, bottles and firecrackers, breaking through lines of riot police in the hope of finding someone to fight.

They're absolved of all responsibility because the SIOF and EDL provoked them. These organisations provoked the local youths and UAF into becoming a thousand-strong violent mob.

Right-wing groups who claim to oppose Islamic extremism are trying to provoke violence on Britain's streets, the communities minister has said.

The thousand-strong violent mob is 'the evil that men do', and they did it themselves, they breached the peace. Each one of them has personal responsibility for their actions, and fighting.

One of the most important lessons Marty McFly learnt in Back To The Future III was not to give in to provocation.

At the end of the movie when he's just managed to get back to 1985 from 1885, he refuses to take part in a drag race with Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers who calls him 'chicken', and as a result, doesn't get hurt in a car crash which would have ruined his future.

Youths of Harrow, you can be Marty McFly, don't be Leyland Palmer.

Fucking hate GAME shops so much it hurts

How can I express my anger and frustration with GAME in a constructive manner? They're a bunch of shitting cock nipples, the lot of them, and I strongly feel they ought to go out of business as soon as possible.

In bullet-pointed form here are my main issues

• No cheap X-Box360's in stock despite boxes on shelves
• Tried to sell us one that was £60 more expensive
• Sold us a Wii with party games and only one controller

We are people of limited funds, so price is an incredibly important issue when it comes to purchase decisions, so the cheapest XBox360 was £119.99 compared to £149.99 for the cheapest Wii.

Also the XBox games were better, they had Beautiful Katamari, and Portal and Project Gotham Racing all going cheap. Extra controllers were only £8. It too ages but eventually we decided on our purchases and approached the pay counter.

The woman scanned barcodes and scurried off to an unseen storeroom and we waited. About ten minutes later the other sales chap took a phonecall from to back and told us that they didn't have any cheap preowned XBox 360s left in stock, but they could sell us one of the more expensive ones.

Sixty quid more expensive. 50% more than the one we'd chosen.

At this point I started seeing red and in my imaginary dreamworld went batshit crazy and razed the entire shop to the ground.

On a similar note, elsewhere on the internet we find out that the newly elected mayor of Doncaster will be unable to cut funding for the town's Gay Pride parade and unable to axe the council propaganda rag, and unable to cut translation services. The chap may be a fuckwit, but he did win the election the constituents presumable chose him because they agree with his manifesto. The electorate looked at the very specific items on his manifesto and the vague platitudes on his rivals and decided that he was the candidate for him. Regardless of the inner workings of the council and the services currenly offered, the people spoke, and they chose him. But alas, their vote is in vain.

So instead we emerged from the GAME shop twenty minutes later, having been sold a cheap Wii.

They'd sold us the basic package, which was another mistake on their part becuase there's only one controller, only one person playing at a time. Which might be okay for some games, and some games consoles, but for the Wii, with Rayman Raving Rabbids and Sonic/Mario Olympics, its a fucking disaster.

They're party games, specifically designed to be played with your friends, with more than one person playing at a time. Games which you are racing and competing against the other players. Except if there's no one else playing because you've only been sold one controller, you find yourself stood in the middle of the room on your own, trying to get the character on screen to win a sack-race on his own, throwing your arms in the air trying to get the character to jump at the right time.

Those fucking cunts at GAME must have been laughing their asses off when we left. Those absolute bastards. Vermin of the video game selling community. If there was some kind of fascist organisation dedicated to exterminating people who work in video game shops who sell shit games and console bundles to the unsuspecting public, I would wear the uniform and jackboots and join that organsation and vote for them in the European Election.

Its like stadium navel-gazing

Rather neat utility for doing your own spoof Police anti-terrorism posters here.

Thanks to mostly Quagm and Flashboy on twitter for pointing me there.

There's rather neat pool of loads of user-generated pics like these on flickr. So here's the slideshow:-

Origami Water Bomb - A step by step animated guide

Here's a wee video I drew of how to fold an origami water bomb, also known as an origami cube or play-cube.

CCTV cameras - don't even look at them

Its been weeks now that the thing about the Met Polis insisting that CCTV cameras are installing in pubs before approving licences, I was just reading about the Guardian's poll on the subject on Charlie Kiss's blog.

So the Information Commissioner says it raises serious privacy concerns.

What's perhaps more alarming is the new counter-terrorism posters from the Met which suggest people should be reported for looking at the CCTV cameras.


Its almost like the terrorists have won. Can't the Met Polis just fuck off and stop taking 1984 to be an operations manual.

Yes, I am suggesting that the Met have used "I bomb won't go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras" purely to stiffle debate on the subject of CCTV privacy intrusions.

Don't suppose whoever gets to control these things could cut the Met Polis's budget by exactly the same amount of money they've spent on this publicity campaign?

This campaign utilises London specific media: radio and press, posters at tube and rail stations. As part of the national campaign there will also be national press and national commercial radio advertising, large outdoor posters and advertising on the rears of buses. To ensure the campaign reaches minority communities, there will also be advertising in minority media press titles.

Press advertising will appear in national newspapers and on main commercial radio stations. In London, this includes the Evening Standard, Magic, Heart, Total LBC, Smooth and Capital FM.

And perhaps that cost-saving can be passed on to the taxpayers?

Here's SpyBlog taking apart the link between studying CCTV cameras and terrorism

There is no evidence that any Islamic extremist or Irish terrorists or Animal Rights extremists or neo-Nazi extremists, who have exploded, or tried to explode bombs, or set off incendiary devices, have been deterred from doing so by the presence of CCTV cameras. Some may have been tracked down partially through the help of CCTV footage, after their attacks or attempted attacks, but that is not what this poster is implying.

There is no evidence that any of them who have actually had access to any explosives, have ever been caught in the act of "terrorist reconnaissance" of CCTV cameras, neither by members of the public (which is what this poster misleadingly claims), nor by regular Police street patrols, nor even by any covert surveillance of known suspects.

In other news, here's a view of a post box on Corporation Street in Manchester from Google Maps Street view.

Plane crash causes

That plane crash thing yesterday where it landed in the Hudson River and there were no fatalities. Whilst all the articles I've seen are quite clear and certain

Government officials do not believe the crash is related to terrorism.

The FBI said there was no suggestion of terrorist involvement

Which can only mean one thing...

The crash was caused by aliens.

If it wasn't, they would have said so, wouldn't they?

Actually, more intrigue, The Mirror has removed the reference to the FBI statement, so it only remains in the google search.

Maybe it wasn't aliens, but it was terrorists after all.

Or maybe it was the bogeyman, wooooh.

Sacking so called experts

This story in the Telegraph.

Uncle Tim flagged it up cos of the thing about laundering cash. If the experts are so clearly mistaken, then why are they even experts? You know like when Stalin was developing his nuclear bombs, and if the scientists were too slow or made mistakes, he'd sack them or sling them into a gulag and promote the next person who came along calling themselves a nuclear scientists, and in the end he was left with just a bunch of bullshitters who knew nothing about nuclear physics.

Is this what we've done with counter-terrorism and security in the UK, we have to rely on idiots now?

Anyhoo, after reading the original article, I'm somewhat puzzled...

Computer experts in al-Qaeda have created an "online University of Jihad" that is recruiting and training potential terrorists in Britain without them having to risk travelling to camps in Pakistan.

...

Terry Prattar, a specialist in counter-terrorism with Jane's Strategic Advisory Services, said: "Al-Qaeda want to create a University of Jihad on line, both in a spiritual and financial sense.

Do Al-Qaeda have this online university or not? Do they just want to have it, or do they actually have it?

And furthermore, imagine in your head an 'online university'. Its not so easy cos most folk are familiar with real life universities, drunken students and folk with books and laptops hurrying into lectures, end of term exams and fancying the girl who sits a few rows in front.

This idea of an online university, it could be anything. A page with a list of links to video sharing sites. Or even an email with the links. Or maybe zip file with txt files and video clips. Surely that can't count as being an 'online university' there has to be end of year exams or some kind of certification system.

I reckon its bullshit.

Remember the Jolly Roger's cookbook. The floppy disc of anarchist txt files, how to make bombs, mantraps and phone phreaking, that got passed around school in 1993, until some kid in the year below printed out a copy and his mum found it. This Al-Qaeda 'online university' is the same thing. If whitey does it you're an anarchist or a schoolkid, if a muslim does it they're a terrorist.

Its up there with the 'Lyrical Terrorist' who would have just been a Manic Street Preachers fan if she was ten years younger and didn't wear a burqa.

Hmm, also, I'm somewhat sceptical of this Terry Prattar chap, the counter-terrorism specialist, does he even exist?

Terror and guns

Here's a thing, I'm a big fan of Bruce Schneier's Security blog, he's a bit of an expert in the security and security technology field, and every so often current affairs overlap his expertise.

So he posts about the Mumbai terrorist / nutjob attacks last week, about how security precautions against movie plot threats are pretty useless against low-tech attacks and how the terrorists / nutjobs had a lower than expected kill ratio, on average 18 kills each.

But one of the things he asks is that how come this sort of terrorist attack does happen more often in America where guns are more freely available?

There's a response in the comments here

"Why not in the U.S., where it's easy to get hold of weapons?"
Another answer is contained in the question : because law abidding citizen can get hold of a gun and protect themselves.

Its a warm and reassuring line of reasoning, but its not so true. Cos in the UK we have very few nutjob / terrorists with guns attacks, in about the same levels as America, but guns aren't so freely available.

In the UK we had Dunblane and Hungerford and in the US there's Columbine Virginia Tech and many more.

Hmm, actually, maybe Uncle Bruce is wrong, there are many more of these attacks in the US, its just they're not classed as terrorism. Like the Mumbai attack, just happened once. But things like Columbine and Virginia Tech happen all the time.

Soul

Have signed up to SoulMates on the Guardian websitey thing. Kind of like bowing to pressure, I have my doubts.

My profile is here

My cow orker suggested that getting to the top of the most popular profiles list is something to aim for, so feel free to have a look, call your collegues over and get them to have a look too.

I had to resist the urge to just write about killing people, killing lots of people, in the 'why shoul people get to know me' and 'perfect match' descriptions. I fear being arrested as a murder suspect.

Turning for the worse

Coming down with a cold, could be a bad one.

Not hot water at the flat, run out of toilet paper too.

Had dinner with da last night at the Chinese place, and found a computer monitor in the street.

Thinking of renaming the gig review website "The Terrorist Threat Report" just to be controversial. Ooh saw Steve Lemaqc at the Bearsuit gig last night, but I think he was only there to see Ida Maria