Richard's Kingdom

There are many questions to be answered when considering a new ISP: cost, connection speed, download speed at peak times, data transfer limits (and what happens if these are exceeded), contract length, reliability and quality of customer service all spring to mind. It’s usually simple to answer such questions by consulting an ISP’s website, looking [...]

The war on terror is over. We lost. The tell-tale signs are everywhere. You can see them in our buildings and our transport networks. You can read them in your morning paper. You can hear them echoing down the corridors of Whitehall. Galvanised by fear whipped up by the media, to which our politicians pander [...]

Europe wants to monitor what you search for on the Internet. Under the misleading guise of protecting children against sexual abuse (sigh) Written Declaration 29 calls for the Data Retention Directive to be extended to cover search engines. This would force national Governments to record everything you type into Google, Bing, Yahoo! et al and [...]

Yesterday the Government announced a “Freedom or Great Repeal Bill” to undo the worst excesses of Labour authoritarianism. If many of the policies therein seem familiar it’s because they seem to have been cherry-picked from the Freedom Bill that the Liberal Democrats put together for the Convention on Modern Liberty last year. After the publication [...]

The new Conservative-Liberal coalition Government today announced it intends to pass a “Freedom” or “Great Repeal” Act. This will: Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database. Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission. Extend the scope of the Freedom of [...]