jonathan.rawle.org

Today it was announced that the US is going to start charging £9 for an ESTA travel form. So what’s the difference between a visa and a visa waiver?

When tourists from western countries visit even a country such as China, the visa application process is fairly simple and can be completed by post. The questions are much the same as is required by ESTA, and no interview is required. A decision is made and the documents returned by post. The main distinction between a visa and ESTA has been that the latter is free.

So it seems that in the future, ESTA will in effect be a visa that’s cheaper, quicker to receive, and doesn’t require sending off your passport. But it no longer gives the impression of being a waiver, or a special privilege for America’s allies. You still have to apply in advance, and have a decision made in your favour in order to avoid a trip to the US Embassy.

I think that if the US is going to require everyone to pay for this new type of visa, then we in other visa waiver countries should reciprocate and introduce a similar charge and process for American visitors. This isn’t the first instance where arrangements are one-sided in America’s favour. Just look at the extradition agreement that has famously left a British hacker facing a ludicrously long jail sentence if he’s tried in America. Then there’s also the fingerprinting of people on arrival in the States. Let’s have a little more parity and bring in similar measures for American citizens visiting Europe.

Question: which composer is the most popular when it comes to mobile phone ringtones?

Just the other day when I was on the train, I heard someone’s phone ring with the familiar Nokia ringtone. My first thought was to wonder why so many people leave what is in effect a free advertisement for their handset manufacturer as the ring signal on their phones. My mind then went on to consider the tune itself: 13 notes, I counted. How does anyone go about writing that sort of short jingle, so that it’s unique, catchy and easily identifiable? Whoever they hired to write it must feel rather pleased with himself.

This evening I was listening to David Mellor’s show on Classic FM in which he explored Spanish music, and coincidentally he mentioned the Nokia ringtone. It turns out that it’s actually a phrase from Gran Vals, a guitar solo by Francisco Tárrega, written in 1902. Of course, Wikipedia already knew this, and unsurprisingly, there are lots of videos of people playing the piece on Youtube. Early Nokia phones even apparently referred to this tune as Grande Valse

Perhaps in future I won’t look down on the Nokia tune as purely the product of corporate vanity. The sad thing is, as he died in 1909, Tárrega won’t have made a penny out of having his music played billions of times per day. However, he does have the distinction of being the most played composer in the world, even if most people have never heard of him.

Last week it was reported that a review of drink-driving laws in the UK has recommended a reduction in the allowed blood alcohol level for drivers. The government must now decide whether to act on the report. Over at Lords of the Blog, Baroness Deech asks for comments, suggesting that a balance has to be struck, in the same way that we allow under-25-year-old men to drive even though they cause a lot of accidents. I thought I’d reproduce an edited version of my response here.

A balance has to be struck when it comes to preventing under-25s from driving, that’s true. Denying someone the ability to drive would cause them severe difficulties due to the terrible state of public transport in many parts of the country, and due to many employers still establishing themselves in locations inaccessible without a car (even public sector employers – but that’s going too far off topic).

However, drinking is not essential, it’s as simple as that. It’s not at all necessary or important. So why should some “right” to drink be put before the safety of other people? Try telling the bereaved relatives of innocent people killed by drink drivers that you’d put the driver’s right to have a drink before the dead relative’s life.

One respondent to a BBC “Have your say” on the same issue claimed that drink drivers only ever kill or injure themselves. In about half a minute, I found a number of articles from the last few years on the BBC website alone about innocent people who had been killed, and the torment their loved ones were going through, while in many cases the drink driver had escaped serious injury. I don’t feel the need to reproduce those links here, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the 168 lives saved would not be drink drivers themselves.

Despite supporting a reduction in the limit, I do have one reservation about the proposed 50mg/100ml level. Unfortunately, I feel it’s a view also being pushed by people who simply want the limit to stay as it is so that people can drink as at present, but putting that aside for the moment, it might have some merit. It is that reducing the limit will reduce people’s respect for the law, making it more widely ignored than at present. People will be confused about whether it’s OK to have a drink or not. Given that, perhaps an effectively zero limit is more appropriate (surely not actually zero due to alcohol content of medicines, and those naturally occurring in the body). That way it would send out an unambiguous and clear message, which is what the police still recommend, and was subject to an advertising campaign a few years ago: “None for the road”.

Alternatively, if the limit stays where it is, there should be much stricter penalties and enforcement. Police should have the power to randomly breath-test drivers, and anyone convicted of drink-driving should face a short prison sentence (a shock for otherwise law-abiding citizens, without being too much of a burden on the prisons) and lose their licence for a long time (5 years+) if not indefinitely, and should also face an automatic extended driving test if they are allowed to drive again.

There is often a view expressed in the media that drink driving is now socially unacceptable, yet I’m not sure it is to the extent claimed. While most people if asked would say drink driving in wrong, when it comes to the evening, and they are the ones enjoying a few drinks, I have found on a number of occasions otherwise perfectly decent, professional, middle-class people suggesting it is OK “just this once” because it’s a “special occasion” and they aren’t driving far. They still seem to consider drink-driving something a small number of alcoholics do, not something they could ever do. The change in attitudes still has some way to go, and a change in the law of one sort or another could be just what is needed.

It didn’t take long for our new government to face its first scandal and resignation of a minister. What’s more, after all the promise of a clean break with a new parliament, the MPs’ expenses saga has reared its ugly head again.

David Laws, a treasury minister, claimed £40,000 in rent for a second home which he was actually paying to his partner. What I find slightly bizarre is that he claims, “My motivation throughout has not been to maximise profit but to simply protect our privacy and my wish not to reveal my sexuality.” Why, in that case, did he use taxpayers’ money to rent a room from his secret lover, an expenses claim that would then be on record and subject to scrutiny? Had wealthy former-banker Mr Laws not used public money, he would have had every right to keep his private life secret, and it would be no-one’s business how much rent if any he was paying to the man whose home he shared.

We can’t have a situation where politicians can use the excuse of keeping their private life private in order to avoid scrutiny of their expenses claims. If we did, they could make all sorts of unacceptable claims for their partners of either gender. Entitled to keep their private lives private, yes. Entitled to keep details of what our money is being used for secret, no.

Laws also states (contradicting his other statement that he wanted to keep his relationship private) that he never considered he and Mr Lundie to be partners as they don’t have shared bank accounts and have separate social lives. I’m sure that’s no different from many married couples in the 21st century. If he’d been living with a woman for five years when the new rules came into effect in 2006, I doubt there would have been much question about whether they were “partners”, so what happened to equality irrespective of sexuality?

Finally, I have to pick up on Lembit Opik’s comment:

I think this is a national tragedy, not least because it suggests that – on matters which are nothing to do with a person’s personal competence to do a job – they can still be pushed out of Parliament.

Who is he referring to? Himself? David Laws has been pushed out of Government, not Parliament: he’s still an MP. Opik himself was pushed out of Parliament in an exceptionally large swing from the Lib Dems, presumably because of his antics, for example appearing on TV quiz shows and dating a Romanian singer 17 years his junior. So that sounds like sour grapes to me. I wouldn’t say the scandal has nothing to do with Laws’s competence to do the job. Ministers require a high standard of integrity, and £40,000 is up there with duck house MP Sir Peter Viggers’s dodgy claims. I’m afraid I don’t really think sending David Laws to the Back Benches is much of a tragedy.

I don’t use Facebook, largely because I don’t like giving up control of who sees various pieces of personal data. Traditionally, an address book was a very private thing, kept securely at home. But now, with social networking sites such as Facebook, people seem happy to publish a list of their contacts on the internet. It has become some sort of vulgar popularity contest. One thing I certainly don’t want is anyone to have a list of my contacts. Just because I know person A and person B doesn’t mean that they should know each other, and whether or not it would be advantageous to them, it certainly wouldn’t be to me!

Facebook fans will be quick to point out that the site allows users a lot of control over who sees what on their profile. Well, I’m not certain it’s possible to hide your list of “friends” from other “friends”, which would be a requirement. But even if you could do that today, there’s no guarantee that Facebook wouldn’t change something tomorrow that suddenly revealed the full list of “friends”, and all sorts of other private details too. They have a track record of doing so, for example last December and in September 2007, just two instances of when changes to the site meant that people were suddenly revealing more than they bargained for. And the trouble with having such complex privacy settings is that it’s very difficult to figure out exactly who can see what – often, the only way to do this thoroughly would be to create several test accounts and try out various combinations of privacy settings and mutual “friendship”.

It isn’t just a list of contacts that’s at risk either. Dates of birth and family names can give fraudsters enough information to access a bank account. Status updates saying when you are on holiday can be useful to burglars. People may also upload content such as photos to their Facebook page in the belief that only their “friends” can view them. However, in many cases, if one of their “friends” comments on the photo, the comment appears on the “friend’s” “wall”, and if their wall is publicly visible, anyone can click on the link that says, “John has commented on James’s photo” and view the photo, and from there can view the entire album to which the photo belongs! In this way, many of a person’s “private” photos are actually publicly visible, and they have little control over it, as it depends on their “friend’s” privacy settings.

The social networking privacy site Social Hacking has an article containing a Javascript bookmarklet that allows people to see all of a Facebook user’s albums that are visible in this way, so there’s no need to search through the wall history of all their “friends”. As the author says, this in no way circumvents the privacy settings, it simply makes it more convenient to see photos that are already available. There may well be a method to protect albums from this, but a quick look at a some random profiles shows that few people use it. And even if everyone tightened up their privacy settings to prevent their photos being leaked, the next time Facebook decides to change the way privacy settings work, who knows which photos will be visible again?

Ultimately, Facebook is a proprietary site controlled by one company. It goes against the whole open principle of the world wide web. Why must people put something “on Facebook” rather than “on the web”? As it is a social network, Facebook coerces people into using the site because it’s the only way to see their friends’ updates if that happens to be what their friends are using (no quotes around “friends” this time as, in this instance, it refers to real friends!). If people hosted their own blogs, and kept their photos on their own website, they could be sure of controlling who was seeing what – and who would be able to see it in a month’s time. And if people published RSS feeds, rather than Facebook updates, their friends could use any reader to view them, not be tied to one website. Facebook could easily become the next Microsoft, but worse, as it is people’s privacy at stake instead of their pockets.

If you value your privacy – or your freedom to use an open internet as we currently know it – don’t use Facebook. Direct your contacts to your website where you can show them exactly the information you want to.