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Perhaps the greatest irony about about Mr Blunkett’s ID card scheme is that it may actually make identity theft worse, not eradicate it as he would have us believe.

Establishing a huge database of everyone’s personal details, conveniently concentrated in one place, creates an ID theft bonanza for any criminals who can penetrate its security. If national identity cards become widely trusted, thieves stealing names and ID numbers from the database could create fake cards in other people’s names, then use them to empty bank accounts and apply for fraudulent credit cards.

Far-fetched? Perhaps not. There’s currently a minor crime wave at Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs) in the USA, where photo driving licences already serve as de-facto national ID cards, and Social Security Numbers are the equivalent of the National Identity Register Numbers the Home Office wants to create here. According to EPIC:

In recent months three state DMVs have been penetrated by identity thieves. In March, burglars rammed a vehicle through a back wall at a DMV near Las Vegas and drove off with files, including Social Security numbers, on about 9,000 people. Last week Florida police arrested 52 people, including 3 DMV examiners, in a scheme that sold more than 2,000 fake driver’s licenses. Two weeks ago Maryland police arrested three people, including a DMV worker, in a plot to sell about 150 fake licenses.

The Las Vegas Review Journal has more on the Las Vegas break-in, where thieves also stole blank licences, seals, cameras and other equipment to make real licences in anyone’s name they choose.

Last November David Blunket said:

A national ID cards scheme will provide a ‘gold standard’ for [proving one’s identity reliably], protecting individuals from the modern-day crime of identity theft …

In reality his proposal would put all our identity eggs in one precarious basket.

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A restaurant in southwestern China had been fined for offering to serve sushi on the bodies of near-naked women, a newspaper reported Monday, after advertisements for the meal sparked a rush of both indignation and curiosity. ….

…. Authorities said the restaurant’s action violated the law protecting women’s rights, the law on advertising as well as the law on food sanitation. They also said the dinner was against Chinese moral standards and was humiliating for women.

The health authorities banned the dinner before it was held early this month, saying that the women lacked required health certificates for restaurant employees and were improperly dressed.

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A high school junior has been suspended for the rest of the school year for refusing to end a cell phone call to his mother who is a solider in Iraq. Kevin Francois, a 17-year-old at Spencer High School in Columbus, was suspended for disorderly conduct Wednesday after a confrontation that began when he was told to give up his cell phone at lunch during the call, he said. His mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates, left in January for a one-year tour and serves with the 203rd Forward Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. “This is our first time separated like this,” said Francois. Since her deployment overseas, Francois has been living with a guardian in Columbus. Francois got the call from his mother at 12:30 p.m., which he said was his lunch break. He said he went outside the school building to get a better reception. A teacher who saw Francois on his phone told him to hang up. He refused.

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“Many more women and children would have been saved if they knew how to swim,” says Girlie Ganage, aged 44, as she practises her breast stroke in a private 12 metre pool.

The school teacher from Mirissa, in the south-west of Sri Lanka, is among 25 women here who have decided that it is time to learn to swim following the horrors of December’s Indian Ocean tsunami.

But that involves breaking some unwritten rules.

“Before the tsunami, it would have been unthinkable. Men still don’t believe me when I tell them,” Mrs Ganage says.

The culture in Sri Lanka prevents mixed bathing in the few public swimming pools which do exist – most of which are in the capital Colombo – so opportunities for women have been almost non-existent.

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Google’s web accelerator seems like a good thing for the public web, but it can wreak havok on web-apps and other things with admin-links built into the UI. How’s that?

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page � including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.

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QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to talk to you. You’re going to Europe, commemorating 60 years of liberation in Europe. You could have gone to many countries, why did you choose to go to Holland?

THE PRESIDENT: First of all, Holland was a stalwart, and the people of Holland were brave and courageous when it came to resisting tyranny. And a lot of people paid a heavy price for standing for freedom in the face of fascism. As well, many Americans lost their lives on Dutch soil. And it’s an opportunity to praise those who fought, honor those who died, and remind people that there’s more work to be done to make the world more free.

Q: About that, more work to be done, do you see any similarities about what happened 60 years ago, the Americans, among others, liberating Europe, and what you are doing now, in the Middle East, for example?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s a different situation, but there is evil in the world. There’s always been evil. I believe that those who kill in the name of a great religion are evil people; people who are willing to destroy innocent life or bury people in mass graves, or starve people to death are evil. And I think the free world must confront evil. The last choice is to use the military. On the other hand, sometimes you have to.

And as you know, I made a difficult decision. Some in Europe didn’t agree, some in Holland didn’t agree, and I can understand that. But now we have an obligation, and a duty, it seems like to me, to work together to help others become free. Freedom is universal — freedom shouldn’t be just — people shouldn’t view freedom as only the purview of Americans or the Dutch or Europeans. Everybody deserves to be free.

Two point for Mr. Bush: First, this is what broke the German Army. Second, read this Statement by Justice Jackson on War Trials Agreement; August 12, 1945, and apply it to some recent military conflicts.

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There are some things I would like to say, particularly to the American people, about the agreement we have just signed.

For the first time, four of the most powerful nations have agreed not only upon the principles of liability for war crimes of persecution, but also upon the principle of individual responsibility for the crime of attacking the international peace.

Repeatedly, nations have united in abstract declarations that the launching of aggressive war is illegal. They have condemned it by treaty. But now we have the concrete application of these abstractions in a way which ought to make clear to the world that those who lead their nations into aggressive war face individual accountability for such acts. The definitions under which we will try the Germans are general definitions. They impose liability upon war-making statesmen of all countries alike. If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner’s dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.

[..]

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

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“We may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net,” media baron Rupert Murdoch said in a recent speech to newspaper editors. Chief among the risks, he said, is “maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin’s theory be challenged in the classroom.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.’s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science’s explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life’s complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.

Darwin’s defenders are refusing to testify at the hearings, which were called by the State Board of Education’s conservative majority.

How about a great new bumper sticker:

“When Evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve!”

Iraqi police secure home made bombs, filled with TNT, after discovering a suicide car and a remote control device in the center of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, May 6, 2005. The explosive was hidden in the trunk of the car, parked in the center of the city. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

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Een meerderheid van de Nederlanders is ronduit negatief over het Amerika van president Bush. Dat blijkt uit een enquete van TNS NIPO in opdracht van RTL Nieuws.

64% van de ondervraagden vindt de houding van de VS ten opzichte van andere landen ‘beangstigend’. 71% zegt dat de VS de terreurdreiging uit eigenbelang overdrijft.

68% van de Nederlanders onderschrijft de stelling dat de regering van premier Balkenende zich als het schoothondje van de VS gedraagt.

Wat verder opvalt is dat over het geheel genomen ouderen iets milder zijn in hun oordeel dan jongeren en mannen meer Amerika-minded blijken te zijn dan vrouwen.

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Okay, the world title for fastest text messaging is still raging in the streets. The victor in the most recent contest was a bit of a dark horse – 93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin’ to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code. Of course, Mr. Hill does have nigh on 80 years of practice under his belt, which was enough to help him triumph even despite Brittany’s liberal use of texting slang (Mr. Hill transmitted the chosen phrase verbatim). The showdown was sponsored by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, and the rivals had to transmit the following message: “Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing.”