Recent political developments in the UK seem to be directed towards a loss of individual privacy and liberty, bandied about as politicians seek to be viewed as having the "hardest policies on terror".  Currently newsworthy topics are the drive of the Government to have a 42 day detention period without charge for terrorism suspects (fortunately thrown out by the House of Lords) and the move to greater communications surveillance, the latest plans for which appear to be a fit of pique from the Home Secretary in response to her detention plans being thwarted.  Jacqui Smith's opinions on personal freedom and liberty seem so far removed from common decency and the democratic ideal that one wonders why she is thought fit to hold public office, let alone one of the highest ministerial positions in the country.

The human rights organisation Liberty says:

A pair of recent issues of Science plonked into my mail box this week.  Among the items that caught my eyes was an exciting brief communication in Science shows a rare example of what appears to be fossil evidence of behaviour. These are Waptia-like arthropods from the Lower Cambrian, which appear to have been preserved while engaged in some form of processionary behaviour. Unlike known present day processionary arthropods, these chains of individuals appear to be physically linked - you can see in the figure that there is overlap between an individual's carapace and the preceding individual's telson. The authors propose the chains reflect migratory behaviour rather than feeding or reproduction.

Blood dope cheat Ivan Basso's back in action after serving his 16 months ban handed down for depositing blood in the Fuentes blood bank clinic.  He's riding for Liquigas, though it's not clear how this squares with the rule that riders busted for doping violations are not to ride for Pro-Tour teams for two years after they return from their ban.

Bernhard Kohl, the second CERA cheat (after Stefan Schumacher) on the soon-to-be-defunct Gerolsteiner team has confessed to doping, and has not requested the B sampled be tested.  Sadly the two Gerolsteiner positives continue to have a negative effect on German cycle sport:  Cyclingnews.com reports the Tour of Deutschlandand the Stuttgart Six have been cancelled as sponsors pull out of the sport.  Two German TV channels have announced they won't broadcast the Tour de France.  Well done Kohl and Schumacher, and other pro cyclists who decide to cheat - see what the consequences are?

As a direct result of BT's infuriating dalliance with the despicable Phorm system, I chose to leave BT, and joined Zen Broadband, with the switchover on 8th October. 

I selected Zen from the myriad of other ISPs out there for several reasons - good reviews (in both press and in the internet); reasonable pricing; clear upfront description of service; rapid response to my equiry about Phorm; no lock-in to lengthy contract.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is planning to implement even more draconian snooping powers that previously reported, according to a report in the Telegraph. 

In an astonishing non sequitur, Smith is quoted as saying that communications data of the sort which helped convict Soham killer Ian Huntley and the 21/7 bombers was not at present being routinely stored, and needed to be if terrorists and serious criminals were to be prevented from striking.   So what Smith appears to be saying is that phone call evidence of the type that was used to convict people after committing a crime could be used to collar them before committing a crime.  Now here we have a distinct sense of thoughtcrime. 

Some excellent news - another astonishing attempt to encroach on our civil liberties has been defeated in the House of Lords - by a majority of 191 votes. This debate has been somewhat overshadowed by the global financial turmoil.

This video puts me in mind of A Zed and Two Noughts, the1985 Peter Greenaway film.  I found this video via ScienceBlogs.

[video:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Mt2E1M6dU 425x344] 

Cyclingnews.com reports that another of the Tour de France follow up tests for CERA has turned up positive.  (Or in the rather amusing terminology of professional cycling, "non-negative").  This time it's Bernhard Kohl, a team mate of fellow drugs cheat Stefan Schumacher (Gerolsteiner).  Of course, the B sample still has to be analysed - presumably if it is in agreement with the A sample, he'll no longer be "non-negative" but will be positive.  Kohl finished in third place overall, and also won the King of the Mountains jersey (after Riccardo Ricco was disgraced by failing a CERA test during the event).

What remains to be seen is whether German cycle sport (Kohl is I think Austrian, but the team is German) can survive this blow, after a series of high profile doping positives over the last couple of years.

The Open Rights Group have compiled a collection of CCTV surveillance cameras and assembled a huge mosaic in a protest held yesterday (11th October) in Parliament Square. The collection of images can be found here.

Apparently the organisers of the Giro d'Italia do not plan to re-test samples from their 2008 event for CERA.  Recent analysis of samples taken at the 2008 Tour de France have revealed further use of CERA (the EPO derivative naively thought by athletes to be undetectable), and the IOC have announce that they we re-test 5000 samples taken at Beijing this summer.

So why the dfferent strategy to doping checks?  Recall that the second placed Ricco won two stages in the Giro, and then tested positive at the Tour de France, after very strong performances in the mountains (Ricco's hero is apparently Marco Pantani, which is a little alarming given Pantani's sad demise following his positive dope tests). The claim is that tests were already doneduring the event.  But given that the Tour de France organisers have uncovered further evidence of CERA abuse, wouldn't it be wise to re-examine the Giro samples?  Or is this an indication of the "two-speed cycling" often complained about by the French?

El Reg has a report that EU commissioners believe that HMG's response to their request for information as to why no action was taken over BT's covert spying on customers' web browisng was inadquate and want a better one.  The original response was not only inadequate, but submitted late.

Martin Selmayr, spokesman for commissioner Viviane Reding's Information Society and Media directorate-general told The Register the UK had more questions to answer. "We wrote to them again on the 6th [of October]", he said. "For us the matter is not finished. Quite the contrary." quoted from the Register 

The big day dawned for my change from BT to my new ISP, Zen Internet. A bit like a small child on Christmas morning, I dashed downstairs as soon as I woke up, and changed the router settings. Lo and behold, there, I was on the internet via Zen!

I did a quick speed test of the connection via speedtest.net, just to see what I was getting.  I've never seen any download speeds in excess of 2Mbps with BT, usually it was in the 1.7-1.9 range, yesterday it was a measly 700kbps or so.  Here I am with a considerable speed improvement, which exceeds the expected 5.5Mbps.

Well, here's a turn up for the books - a doping blog entry not specifically about cycling.  I've blogged a couple of times about several pro cyclists who've tested positive for a new derivative of EPO, CERA.  One of the complaints about the bad press that cycle sport gets for doping is that perhaps it just reflects a higher test rate in cycling than in many other sports.  I find it incredible that other endurance sports have not embraced the benefits of EPO as cycling undoubtedly have.

Of course those dimwit athletes are probably mainlining CERA just as much as their equally dimwitted colleagues in the pro peleton, under the misapprehension that it is undetectable.  Well, I guess they are now thinking again.  A report at the BBC Sports website says that the IOC are gearing up (pardon the pun) to have 5000 samples retested (presumably blood samples, though this isn't stated in the article).

Now, I have to admit that I don't frequent knitting blogs as a rule, but this is a cracker - spotted via Pharyngula, for more info, see the originating website.

One of the great things about the UK is that we don't have people of the calibre of Sarah Palin running for high office.  As light relief from the latest banking news, here is a flow chart which illustrates Sarah Palin's undoubted debating skills (original source blog).  For further entertainment, generate your own Sarah Palin interview.

This week's edition of Nature has a brief paper (doi:10.1038/nature07390) reporting on the identification of an HIV positive tissue sample collected in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in what was then the Belgian Congo, and now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Sequence data derived from the tissue was used to investigate the chronology of the appearance of HIV from its likely simian origin.

This is a piece of research which hit the news services (see for example this page at the BBC news website).  The research has a number of features which earmark it for media interest: an important virus, a serious disease with a global spread, and a simple take-home message as to the origin of the virus.  This raised my interest and I looked at the paper.  Incidentally, the paper raises issues to do with complexity of statistical analysis: I imagine many readers such as I, and the journos who wrote articles in the press, have little or no chance of understanding what an "unconstrained Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo method" is, and are similarly limited in one's real critical analysis of conclusions reached by that means!  I am forced to assume that all is above board in the statistical and computational aspects of this paper, and that the referees have done their job!  In addition, it's always interesting in studies of ancient DNA (and cases where sample preservation was not originally intended to preserve nucleic acids) to know what measures were taken to ensure that contamination with modern DNA did not happen.

We've known for some weeks now that the Tour de France organisers have been re-examining a bunch of samples from the 2008 race, and recent indications were that 14 of these were sent for detailed analysis to look for traces of the EPO variant of choice in the prop peleton, CERA.  Athletes had believed that various characteristics of CERA, and its dosage regime would render it undetectable.

That this was wildly optimistic was revealed by a series of positive tests, as reported by cyclingnews.com.

Cyclingnews.com reports that Alexander Vinokourov, dumped in spectacular style during the 2007 Tour de France for blood doping (which fuelled a spectacular return to form after an injury-plagued race) is planning a come-back.  He says he's likely to return to the Astana team (the same team now run by Lance Armstrong's mate Johan Bruyneel and which Armstrong will ride for in his comeback season).

Has the world gone mad, or just Vinokourov?  It was Vino and his fellow team mates that earned Astana such a reputation for doping that they were excluded from the 2008 Tour de France.  Vino's ban for doping was astonishingly light, at a mere 12 months, and was the subject of a CAS appeal by the UCI, who suspended it following Vinokourov's retirement.  What responsible cycling team would touch him, even with a ten foot bargepole?

The Times online reports that UK Government ministers have agreed in principle to spend £12 billion to enable GCHQ to monitor every phone call , every email and all our browsing habits.

If true, this must be unprecedented in peace-time, and exceeds even the East German Stasi in its level of monitoring the population.  It's an extremely worrying development, particularly given the draconian powers HMG have pushed through in recent years.  We are presently living in a State where merely reading material deemed inappropriate can result in prosecution.

4 good reasons not to take part in the BT Webwise Trial An excellent summary from the Open Rights Group explaining many of the issues at stake.  Includes many useful links.