Robin Wilton's esoterica

Paul has already blogged about the stylish privacy-breaching arrangement in the basement of Belgo Belge...

Further to that, I offer the following (skip this if you are particularly fastidious or suffer from vertigo):

On the train from the Gare du Nord to the Airport I had occasion to use the equivalent facilities. Like most UK trains, the 'flush' is operated by a large rubber button on the floor. Unlike most UK trains, though - when I pressed said button, a small trapdoor hinged open and I was treated to a top-down view straight down the pipe and onto the rapidly-passing clinker beneath. It was a novel perspective.

Leaving these visceral matters and returning to the more familiar topic of airport security:

There are signs of the times even in the humble carrier bag. What with all the new restrictions on taking fluids onto aircraft, Brussels airport has subtly upgraded the carrier bags at the duty-free shop. The bags now have a peel-off strip which allows them to be sealed shut in a tamper-evident way with your booze and chocolates inside. One side of the bag is now clear, so that the contents (and the carefully-inserted receipt) can be inspected.

It's sad, but neat.

The number one travel accessory for the busy traveller is once again... the humble ear-plug.

All hotels must, by some undisclosed international law, have at least one room located directly over a point where a truck-full of shouting men have a bottle-flinging contest some time between 2am and 4am. The bottles may be packed into crates, but may also be in a giant recycling bin, or (optionally) a few dozen individual bottles for an extended period of 'freestyle' flinging.

Interestingly, at least one such fixture must take place on the first night of your stay... though similar contests can also occupy subsequent early-morning sessions.

I have not yet established whether the traveller, too, can participate by flinging empties of his own out of the window... but if I ever forget my earplugs, I'm going to find it extremely hard to resist.

Dave's comment on my original post on this topic

Am I the only person aghast (and hence, passing the Voight-Kampff test) about the fact that information about would-be doctors' religious and sexual persuasions is even gathered, let alone recorded?

raises some points which I think deserve their own entry, so here it is.

Dave, I'm glad (and hence either pass the Voight-Kampff test myself or am from the new, improved Nexus 8 range...) to say your empathy does not make you unique... though us being aghast about it will be of little comfort to those concerned. Two things spring to mind:

1 - best practice is for sensitive personal data such as religious/sexual/ethnic specifics to be captured on a separate form from the basic profile data, and for the disclosure by the subject to be voluntary.

The separate form ought then to be linked to the main document only by a non-personally identifiable index number, and the sensitive personal data ought only to be used statistically, in support of assessments of whether the organisation in question is meeting statutory obligations in areas such as sexual/racial equality.

2 - The UK Information Commissioner's Office has indicated that it intends to focus more, in future, on "actual detriment" suffered by data subjects as a consequence of breaches of privacy. This sad episode raises some very pertinent practical questions about such a policy.

How does one assess the 'actual detriment' which has resulted, as of today, from this data breach?

When does the current data breach cease to be the cause of future 'actual detriment'? Now that a given junior doctor's personal details have been disclosed, how soon will anyone be able to say that a given instance of 'actual detriment' - such as a homophobic brick through the windscreen -  did not result from this data breach?

David Maclean's Private Member's Bill (as blogged about previously) - the one which would exempt the houses of Parliament from the Freedom of Information legislation they enacted to cover all other public services - continues to twitch like a B-movie zombie.

As this BBC article indicates,  some procedural quirk means that the Bill will be debated again on May 18th., despite having been 'talked out of time'  last week by opposing MPs. The article also nicely illustrates some of the pernicious effects this bill would have if it got into force:

"The bill also protects all MPs' correspondence from release and stops authorities ... confirming or denying whether they have received a letter from an MP."

As you can see, the Bill's tentacles reach out into other bodies which would still have their Freedom of Information duties in other respects.

It is still a bad law, and it still deserves to die.

By yesterday evening, the news bulletins on the way back from the airport were noting that the Dept of Health job applications website I mentioned yesterday had been withdrawn from service in the face of a further breach of privacy.

The reports didn't give any details about the technology, or who is responsible for the architecture or implementation of the system, but did suggest that the department had been aware of the issues already for some eight weeks. 

I posted a few days ago about operating system choice in the retail PC market. Here's a little footnote to that observation: since the chimney collapse event,  we've been dealing with insurers, loss adjusters, surveyors, and now the suppliers who replace damaged items.

In discussion about replacing a damaged laptop, I had the following exchange:

Supplier: "And what version of Windows was the laptop running, sir?"

RW: [momentary hesitation]

Supplier [prompting helpfully]: "Windows XP, Windows 98...?"

RW: "No, no... I understand the question. It wasn't running Windows; it was running Linux."

Supplier: "How do you spell that, sir?" 

quod erat demonstrandum