This tweet from @Case4theCrown just shows the exasperation the judiciary – a body not normally known for making its feelings known – feels with regard to the continuing farce that is Capita’s courts and tribunals interpreting “service” for the Ministry of Justice.
It’s February 14th, St Valentine’s Day, a busy day for florists, restaurateurs and people selling greetings cards.
I’m declaring my love here online: I love free software.
If you are unaware what free software is – and it has far more to do than merely being gratis (think free as in speech, rather than free as in beer. Ed.) – look at the Free Software Foundation’s free software definition.
From the Debian GNU/Linux operating system to the Gimp graphics package and the LibreOffice productivity suite, I couldn’t do without it.
If you love free software too, show your passion too in one of the following ways:
At the start of the week, China suffered a major internet outage for several hours, Le Monde Informatique reported yesterday. Experts are wondering about the cause; was it hacking (to use the verb ‘to hack’ in its Daily Mail sense. Ed.) or a technical problem with the country’s censorship mechanisms?
Last Tuesday more than two-thirds of Chinese websites were inaccessible and millions of users were deprived of internet access for some 8 hours, according to Qihoo 360, a Chinese security software supplier best known for supplying anti-virus products. Security experts are wondering about the origin of this outage. Some believe it was hacking whilst others think there was a fault with the country’s so-called ‘Great Firewall’ censorship system.
After the outage, Chinese authorities conducted a preliminary inquiry which focussed on hacking. The Chinese CERT team is continuing its inquiry. giving priority to the hacking theory, Chinese specialists believe that they hijacked a root DNS server in China to reroute all the traffic. The Greatfire.org website, which analyses Chinese online censorship, disputes this diversion, stating that Google’s DNS servers were affected.
However, Greatfire.org also showed that some of the user traffic had been redirected to an IP address in the United States and more specifically to the Dynamic Internet Technology site which has links to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is heavily repressed in China. Greatfire.org believes the origin of the breakdown was due to a technical problem with the ‘Great Firewall’.
China regularly blocks sites whose content is critical of its government, including Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times. By wanting to block the Dynamic Internet Technology site, the Chinese authorities would have inadvertently rerouted the whole nation’s traffic, according to Greatfire.org.
This blog has drawn attention before to the lamentable lack of knowledge of certain bodies, e.g. the BBC and various newspapers, to the difference between translating and interpreting.
As the screenshot below shows, these bodies have now been joined by Capita Translation & Interpreting, that arm of the Crapita empire which is busy wasting public money by failing to provide interpreters – or those of good enough quality – for courts and tribunals under a contract with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).
This exchange came into my Twitter timeline on the same day as the Law Gazette reports that Capita T&I has never managed to reach its 98% performance target under its Framework Agreement with the Ministry of Justice in the 2 years it has held the contract and just a few days before Ursula Brennan, Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, is due to appear before the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee as they examine the interpreting contract for a second time (posts passim).
As the Crapitards in charge of the Capita T&I are clearly confused by the difference between translators and interpreters, I can only recommend they too read my illustrated guide post.
Friday’s Le Monde reports that Russian State security agency the FSO is going to step up its surveillance of bloggers and others who are critical of the Russian government.
While Russian state security agencies already have surveillance systems in use, the administration has decided “to entrust this part of the work to professional computer specialists“.
Quoting Izvestia, Le Monde states that an invitation to tender with a maximum budget of 31.8 mn. roubles (€700,000) has been issued for the procurement of a centralised data collection system for data published on the internet.
The subject of the invitation to tender is the creation of a system comprising a database of citizens who have a “negative” opinion of the government and the provision of a daily summary of publications concerning the president, his administration, the prime minister or even the opposition. The procurement of this system is reportedly not a case of “turning up the heat” by the authorities, but more enabling them to anticipate some events by the early detection of protests being organised (a likely story. Ed.)
I’ve been aware of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton et al. and their expeditions to Antarctica since my childhood and on Christmas Eve this year was made aware through social media of the exploits of the 1902-1904 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition.
Although its work was overshadowed by more prestigious expeditions, the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition nevertheless completed a full programme of exploration and scientific work, including the establishment of the first manned meteorological station in Antarctic territory, as well as the discovery of new land to the east of the Weddell Sea.
Below is a photograph taken on that expedition; a suitably light-hearted one of piper Gilbert Kerr serenading a penguin.
However, penguins did more for the expedition than provide an audience for pipers. They were a regular item on the menu too!
A typical day’s diet there might have been: breakfast of porridge and penguin eggs, with bacon on Wednesdays and Thursdays and coffee or cocoa week about. Lunch of eggs with bully beef or bread and cheese and tea. Dinner of penguin “hare soup”, then stewed penguin, with some farinaceous pudding or preserved fruit to follow.
The above comes from the text accompanying a splendid photo of Bill Smith, the expedition’s cook from Glasgow Digital Library, which has a fine collection of photographs from the expedition. I also love the final sentence on the page too for its description of Smith:
Smith’s substantial physique is a good advertisement for the value of his own work.
Season’s greetings all.
A message to all businesses: if you sack a member of staff, you should consider changing your Twitter password, particularly if that person had access to the account.
The Plough, a pub in Great Haseley, Oxfordshire, didn’t… and at the time of posting it has nearly 1,700 followers.
You can enjoy the results in the screenshot below.
Update 12 noon, 16/12/13: According to Buzzfeed, Jim Knight, the chef in question, created the Twitter account with the permission of his now former employers. Furthermore, he has also now been offered a new job, in which I wish him well. 🙂
Hat tip: Eugene Byrne
I live not very far away from Felix Road Adventure Playground, which for four decades has provided opportunities for play for inner city children in Easton.
As regular readers will be aware, the playground has been under threat of closure ever since Bristol City Council made a mess of outsourcing play facilities around the city.
In response to this calamitous cock-up, local Easton residents organised a petition to save Felix Road (posts passim).
According to the Save Felix Road Twitter account, a debate on the playground will be held at a full meeting of Bristol City Council on 17th December as the petition has gained more than the required number of signatures to trigger a discussion in the council chamber.
I’ll await developments with interest as it’s not right that children in one of the most deprived parts of the city suffer when Bristol City Council cocks things up.
My attention was drawn today to a curious article on the Local Government Association website from Bristol City Council.
To me it’s reminiscent of a livestock dealer crowing about the fine qualities of the beast he’s trying to sell or perhaps even a prostitute buttering up a prospective client.
There are some fine examples of jargon too.
However, this article gives me cause for concern on three counts.
Firstly, I’m paying the wages of the council’s planning wonks directly through my council tax (and indirectly through your national taxes, a portion of which gets returned to local authorities by way of government grant. Ed.), but it seems like they’re not working for the benefit of the city’s residents, but the planners seem rather concerned with working for the benefit of property developers.
This leads on to my second concern: those chummy quarterly chats with the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA), a cosy club whose membership is drawn from primarily from local residential and commercial property agents, as well as commercial property lawyers, developers, architects, planners, building and quantity surveyors.
Finally, there’s the offer to renegotiate Section 106 agreements. These are planning obligations under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (as amended) and are a mechanism which make a development proposal acceptable in planning terms, that would not otherwise be acceptable. They are focused on site specific mitigation of the impact of development. S.106 agreements are often referred to as ‘developer contributions’ along with highway contributions and the Community Infrastructure Levy.
For a cash-strapped council, I would have thought that its priority should be squeezing as much from developers under S.106 as it can.
Evidently not.
The example of Finzels [sic] Reach given in the article is interesting. After being granted planning permission, the developers renegotiated their S.106 obligations and still went into administration last year. Perhaps their scheme was so poorly planned and financed, it should not have been given planning permission in the first place.
The article – dated 8th October 2013 – is reproduced in full below.
Bristol City Council: open for business on Section 106 agreements
Bristol City Council has an ‘open for business’ policy in relation to bringing forward development and investment in the city. Last year the Council received just over 3,000 planning applications, saying ‘yes’ to over 80 per cent of these (89 per cent of major schemes).
The council meets representatives of the Bristol Property Agents Association (BPAA) on a quarterly basis in order to discuss live issues, including delivery of development. The West of England Planning Toolkit and the Bristol Planning Protocol were jointly produced with representatives from the development sector.
Bristol has a good record of housing delivery. Its adopted Core Strategy target is for a minimum of 26,400 dwellings to be delivered between 2006 and 2026, and in the six years since 2006 over 12,700 (approximately 48 per cent) of these dwellings have been constructed. In addition, there are around 7,000 residential units currently with planning consent in the city – a significant proportion of which are yet to be commenced. In order to ensure this much needed development is brought forward, Bristol proactively seeks requests from developers to renegotiate Section 106 agreements on schemes that have become unviable since planning consent was granted. Requests are considered by the planning committee in a process that includes an open book appraisal of viability by the developer.
Outcome and impact
This approach is proving successful. Examples include Finzels Reach (a £200 million mixed-use development site in central Bristol), which is a high quality regeneration scheme on a strategically important site.
Within this context, Bristol negotiated a revised Section 106 package that met some, although not all, of the demands put forward by the developer. The revised position incentivised the developer to deliver the development to their timescale by reducing the Section 106 package by around a third (£4.5 million) if various triggers were reached.
Contact
Kate Hartas
Media and PR officer
Telephone: 0117 922 2649
Since I drew attention to the article, I’ve received the tweet shown below from Bristol City Council.
On the basis of that tweet, I have a couple of questions for Bristol City Council’s press office.
1. If Bristol City Council describes a press release bearing this month’s date as ‘ancient’, what counts as modern?
2. If that press release was released in error as you seem to be implying, is any quality control exercised by your officers before material is released for publication?
Answers will be accepted in the comments below.
Update 23/10/13: The following message has been received this morning from Bristol City Council.
Hi Steve
I’ve tried to leave a comment on your blog but get a message saying we’re blocked, probably because our work computers are behind a proxy.
In answer to your questions though, the press release you’re referring to was sent out in Sept 2012, hence our description of it as ‘pretty ancient’. The website it was published on is not in our control but that of the LGA, which recently did technical amendments to the page (not the release) which updated the automatic date shown on their site. After your tweet we drew this to their attention and asked them to remove it as it was old news and could be confusing given the apparent date. The original press release was not an error, it was sent deliberately in Sept 2012. What we can’t control is who posts it where and for how long after.
I hope this clears it up for you.
Kind regards
TimTim Borrett
Service Manager, Media
Bristol City Council
Thanks Tim. That helps explain the ancient nature of the press release (which you might like to know the LGA’s webmaster still hasn’t taken down. Ed.), but not the matter of why the council’s planning department seems to be working more in the interests of property developers and not for the people of Bristol who pay their wages.
