As usual on our annual trips over to ride the Port Talbot Wheelers two-up '25', we take the opportunity to visit antiquities.  This time we visited two castles in the Towy valley near Carmarthen.

Dinefwr Castle is located in the grounds of a National Trust property (so car parking is £2 - admission to the house is more still, though it wasn't open when we visited).  There's a nice tearoom in the House.  The castle itself is perched on a  craggy rock overlooking the valley, and is in quite good shape considering what it's been through, including being remodelled into a "romantic ruin" in the 17th century and having (bizarrely) a summerhouse added to the top of the round tower.  The picture below shows the view up to the castle, plus a couple of tetchy sheep.

Adzilla, another vile company aiming to use deep packet inspection to monitor internet users' browsing behaviour to deliver targetted adverts has bitten the dust, according to to a report at Wired.com (Another ISP Ad Snooper Hit With Lawsuit).  This follows the demise of Nebuad's plans to carry out similar nefarious activity.  Adzilla may be no longer with us, but a class action lawsuit has been launched against it and its ISP partners.

In early June of 2007, Susan Simon noticed odd things happening to her internet connection and traced the troubles to an outfit called Adzilla that turned out to be spying on everything she did online. 

I have a (probably half-baked) plan to carry on blogging while on cycle tour this summer.  Well, for as long as I can keep a Vodafone signal going.  One of the aims is to report on the cycling before I forget everything we see during the day.  To keep tabs on the routes we've cycled, I bought a Globalsat DG-100 GPS logger.

This little device is a basic GPS datalogger, which comes with some pretty basic software which, though a little on the clunky side, does seem to work pretty well.  I plan to use this with a small OQO pocket computer running Windows XP while travelling.  The unit is 3.15"x2.75"x0.7", so is pretty compact.  The silver coloured plate is the battery cover - it's powered by two NiMH cells (supplied), which are recharged via the USB connector.  Other than that, there are only two controls - the big silver cover power switch and a mode selector on the side.  The device comes with three preset modes, for pedestrian, bike and car travel (they differ in the data sampling rate), but these can be adjusted using the supplied software. 

In addition to the two software packages for downloading data, the unit comes with an application for adding location data to digital photograph files (so no more wondering where the heck we took those snaps of different Highland views!).

This event has become Team Grumpy's annual season-starter.  It's a well run two up team time trial event run on the R25/24 course.  This course uses a dual carriageway section for the first half, before switching to the old road running roughly parallel to the dual carriageway, but which is quite a bit hillier, with several short but quite steep climbs.

Over at the Team Grumpy blog, we'd been doing a count down to this event, ruminating on training and preparation.  In the event, we finished our "rigorous" training programme off with quite a lot of Belgian beer, takeaway curries and (on the evening before the event, pasta).  Two evenings-worth of system abuse was not, perhaps, the ideal fine-tuning of our finely-tuned physiques (in particular, I've had trouble keeping and/or getting the weight off), so we were feeling a little apprehensive and 'inwardly disturbed' on the way over to the course.

The Register reports (Phorm unleashes legal attack on critics) that much-criticised former spyware company Phorm has unleased legal missives in the direction of Which?, who conducted a user survery which supposedly found that internet users were deeply unhappy about the intrusive and possibly illegal Phorm system, which scans all internet activity in order to extract keywords for targetted advertising.  According to The Regiser,

News articles based on a survey indicating public opposition to Phorm's web snooping and advertising system have been withdrawn after the firm made legal threats to their publishers.

The BBC reports (Protest officers seized balloons) that some unusual items were confiscated from a power station protest group.  Supposedly items are meant to be confiscated to prevent offences being committed, but a FOI request reveals that along with the aforementioned balloons,

items taken included blankets, a walking stick, a clown outfit and soap.  [...]  A mountain bike, cycle helmets, bin bags and party poppers were also taken from protesters entering the camp site.

I'm visiting friends in South Wales, and I'm using their BT internet connection.  This gives me the first check that the BT-Phorm warning system is still working (it is - if you're on BT, you'll see the grey box with warning script on the right.

If you see this warning, click on the  InPhormation Desk link for more information about what Phorm, BT Webwise and deep packet inspection are, and why yo should be worried.

This morning, Ben Goldacre, the Guardian columnist and Bad Science blogger) has written on the difficulties and dangers of datamining to identify criminals and terrorists (Datamining would be lovely if it worked).

He's written this on the back of an IPPR report (The National Security Strategy: Implications for the UK intelligence community), and he's raising issues of accuracy and false positive rates - clearly analogous to evidence-based medical trials, which are closer to his usual blog fare.  Goldacre quotes the author of the report:

The Cramps' Lux Interior died earlier this month.  There's a story at the Mojo website (Lux Interior: October 21, 1946 - February 4, 2009)

I've inserted a video of my favourite Cramps track below the fold

Two reports in the press highlight the database dangers the UK is sleepwalking into.

The Guardian reports (DNA details of 1.1m children on database) that the details of over a million children remain in the national DNA database,  despite over half of these individuals having no criminal convictions.

 This cute little fish is Macropinna microstoma. The green objects under the transparent carapace are its eyes: the dark blobs above its mouth are olfactory organs.

 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM9o4VnfHJU 480x295]

Here's a clip from Newsnight, in which Jeremy Paxman chairs a debate about the dangers of social networking.  Baroness Greenfield doesn't come out of it too well.

 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8LlUME-IM 480x295]

Cyclingnews.com has a newsflash story concerning a new professional road cycling team to begin racing in 2010 (Britons announce professional road squad), Team Sky.  Clearly building on evidence of success on the track over the last few years, British Cycling have moved to set up a British-based road squad.  Sponsorship for four years is from Sky, who already play significant role in the development of UK cycling.

Dave Brailsford clearly has a number of riders targeted for the 25 man squad:

A coalition of child protection charities have proposed that the implementation of the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist should be made compulsory (Ars Technica - UK charities: make IWF Web blacklist 100% compulsory for ISPs).  Interestingly, this comes a few days after an objection to the IWF's charitable status has been made.

"Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites," said advisor Zoe Hilton in a statement yesterday. "Allowing this loophole helps to feed the appalling trade in images which feature real children being seriously sexually assaulted. We now need decisive action from the government to ensure the Internet Service Providers that are still refusing to block this foul material are forced to fall into line. Self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing-and in a seriously damaging way for children."  

Ars Technica reports (Record industry talks Irish ISP into blocking P2P sites) that the largest Irish ISP, Eircom, has agreed to start blocking access to filesharing sites, beginning (of course) with PirateBay.

Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, has entered into an agreement with IRMA, saying that it will begin blocking access to sites that allow users to swap files and that it will not oppose any court action mandating that such action must be taken.

About a year ago, I wrote a blog article reviewing the OQO 01+ UMPC.   I rather liked this PC, and indeed still do, though one does need to take into account its limitations.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the power supply, which after a few months stopped working. 

To clarify, the power supply brick has one output (with a peculiar 5 socket plug, of which more later), and two inputs - one is for mains, the other is for 12V car adapter input.  It is the former input that has blown, and this seems to be far from unusual.  It occurred to me that I could update my blog while on summer cycling holiday, with the OQO plus the Vodafone 3G stick (well, at least while I was within transmitter range!).  However, my workaround power supply required the use of a UK mains > 12V power supply to power the OQO power brick.  Tis is far from being portable.

Poor old Jacqui Smith!  The Home Secretary is currently embroiled in controversy concerning her expenses claim for here "second home" (which turns out to be the home she lives in.  Turns out of course that her "main home" is a room in her sister's house (BBC News "Smith asked to explain expenses".

I've got no opinion as to her guilt or innocence here, but the amusing thing in this report is that it suggests she was turned in by her neighbours:

This more than slightly barmy web page (The Faith of Britain) suggests a band of psychics and "healers", with a bit of help from the British public, will, for a two minute period, focus "positive energy towards achieving our hopes and aspirations".

The date and time chosen for this happening is 6th March, because:

Followers of the huge Operacion Puerto blood doping scandal will remember the affair - Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes offered a blood doping service to professional sportsmen (and presumably sportswomen).  His services are most talked about in the context of professional cycling, but in fact his clients are reported to have included professional sportsmen from other sports.

The saga began with police raids in 2006, when Spain's Guardia Civil collected coded blood bags during its raid on the offices of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes.  (There is excellent coverage over at cyclingnews.com going back several years.) Fuentes' scheme was to withdraw blood from the cyclists, and store it for retransfusion, a process known as blood doping. This is a formerly legal technique (I believe it was used in the past by the US Olympic track cycling team( but it has been prohibited for many years now.  It's still clearly in use - witness the sorry tales of (for example) Vinokourov and Hamilton in recent years.

Over at his blog Heresy Corner, the Heresiarch has an excellent overview of the continual erosion of our civil liberties (Remember what he said about "British liberty"?).

The article is framed over a series of points made by Gordon Brown in a speech delivered shortly after he took office as Prime Minister.