Given the pervasiveness of placebo success in medical trials, it always surprises me that the use of placebos by medical professionals is explicitly banned (even taking into account the fact that a person in a position of trust would be deceiving you). However, the above article links to an interesting paper written by Adam Kolber – a Bioethics and Law professor, and author of the Neuroethics and Law blog – on the possible ethical use of placebos by medical professionals. Here is its abstract:

Placebo treatments, like sugar pills and saline injections, are effective in treating pain and perhaps a host of other conditions. To use placebos most effectively, however, doctors must mislead patients into believing that they are receiving active medications. While placebo deception is surprisingly common, its legality has rarely been tested. In November 2006, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a new ethics provision categorically prohibiting doctors from using placebos deceptively. In so doing, the AMA shifted the legal landscape, making it almost certain that courts will decide that placebo deception violates informed consent requirements.

I argue that the AMA’s new policy is overbroad, insensitive to patient preferences, and likely to have unforeseen consequences. While deception is often exploitative, placebo deception can genuinely benefit patients. Absent stronger evidence to justify a ban than we currently have, deceptive placebos should be treated as scarce medical resources–used sparingly but not categorically prohibited.

One glaring problem with this – no matter how valid the conclusions – is that to use placebos safely and correctly we would need physicians who have the time (and inclination) to thoroughly peruse patient histories – something the overstretched NHS is severely lacking.

On a lighter note, it always amazes me that I learn something new and fascinating every time I read more about the use of placebos. This time my education came from the following paragraphs:

Furthermore, studies done in the 1970s showed that when heroin users inject water (sometimes done deliberately to alleviate cravings when drugs are in short supply), they can experience drug-like euphoria and have been observed to show opiate-like physiological signs such as pupil constriction.

This last point also demonstrates that placebo is not solely about expectancy, belief or ‘being fooled’, as the heroin users knew they were injecting themselves with water. Conditioned responses play a role.

Of course, as with most cases of classical conditioning, this response eventually becomes extinct as the initial stimulus (real heroin) is repeatedly withheld. Still fascinating, though!

(Bonus points if you know why I gave this post its title.)

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing… (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase and entire life.) – Luis Buñuel

The above quote is from The Lost Mariner, a chapter discussing one of Sacks’ patients, Jimmy G, who – due to Korsakoff’s syndrome – lost both his memories from the previous 35 years, and the ability to create new ones. It’s a touching and sad story where you feel that the only redeeming quality is the fact that this man cannot create new memories; at least then he doesn’t know that he has this problem.
________________________________

Six months ago my family-life was ticking along as normal; everything was fine. Then, during a routine operation, my grandmother passed away, leaving my grandfather – a very self-sufficient man approaching 90 – alone in their home of 30 years. While interim accommodation arrangements were being made, my grandfather was found unconscious after suffering a stroke and was admitted to hospital – not even two weeks after his wife’s funeral.

Three months in hospital saw him recover well, and he was eventually placed in a geriatric recovery ward in preparation for release. Whenever I visited him he would get angry at the sports results and moan about the “boring sods” with whom he was sharing a ward with and who refused to go outside for a walk around the hospital’s rather beautiful grounds. This was perfectly normal behaviour.

However I was fearing the worst, and it appears that these fears were well-founded. A month ago he started to develop severe dementia, leading me to make the obvious comparisons between him and Sacks’ patient, Jimmie G, whom I was reading about at the time.

The retrograde loss of memory – and losing the ability to create new memories – is a horrible thing to witness; nothing can really prepare you for it. At the same time it’s difficult to become truly sad at this fact: how can we, when the ‘patient’ themselves is oblivious to the fact – and is seemingly content – due to the fact that the condition itself causes them to lack the ability to comprehend what’s going on?

But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being – matter of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him… Neuropsychologicaly, there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do. – Alexander Luria in a letter to Sacks regarding Jimmie G.

These sort of medical conditions always raise interesting issues, but when combined with the general (and severe) decline of physical health in an older patient, some more interesting – and controversial – philosophical, moral, and political subjects are brought up. An important one of which is the topic of non-eugenics euthanasia.

Highly regulated, I believe that euthanasia would be a crucial addition to our public health system for a few exceptional and well-defined situations and circumstances. However, as this is unlikely to happen, I believe strongly that the topic of euthanasia is so important that it is at least worth serious consideration and debate – not just by medical professionals, but by both politicians and the public.

Of course, views on this vary wildly by culture, religion, and even within each individual (agreeing in some cases and not in others, even when the actual medical circumstances are the same), and for one moment please don’t think my family and I are planning any mercy killings – it just raised a debate between us and I wanted to spread the love and ignite your internal debating chamber.

In my family, many of us have made it clear that if we were in such an awful physical and psychological state that life were no longer enjoyable and was a chore, that we wouldn’t want to be kept alive. One member has even gone so far as to say (in all seriousness), that if this were the case they would be eternally grateful if we were to assist them in dying. Of course, current legislation makes entertaining this thought pointless.

“Don’t think because I’m not saying much that I wouldn’t like to say a lot.”

Of course, Lawrence isn’t anyone I know; he’s a character played by Bill Nighy in Richard Curtis’ The Girl in the Café and – unlike the films Curtis usually pens – it isn’t so much a rom com as a rom pol – a word I would like to take credit for, meaning romantic-political-drama.

How I came to watch The Girl is almost as interesting as the film itself: randomly traversing the Interwebs one day I passed through LifeHack and onto Ingrid’s wonderful online home. Captivated by her quirky, funky e-cards and her beautiful photographs, I read on and duly added the site as one of my regular reads, soon succumbing and joining The Girl on Tour. I’ll let Ingrid explain:

I think this is a wonderful and important film that needs to be seen by as many people as possible. That’s why I decided to send my The Girl In The Cafe DVD on a tour. The Girl has been on tour for more than a year now, she has visited more than 60 people already, and is planning to visit people in 20 (and counting) different countries. If you want to participate all you have to do is send an email to be put on the list. And when the film gets to you, you watch it, write a review on your blog and send it to the next person on the list.

The mighty Bill Nighy has called this project “very cool” and “very admirable”.

So, what’s it about, and is it any good?

In short, the film charts the unlikely and troublesome relationship between Lawrence (a high-profile civil servant, played by Nighy) and Gina (the delectable Kelly Macdonald – Trainspotting and No Country for Old Men). In truth, however, it’s a story about standing up for your beliefs no matter what the consequences, governmental bureaucracy as an inherent problem within the G8, and the ongoing struggle of trying to solve one of the most important global problems of our time: extreme poverty.

Lawrence works for the Chancellor of the Exchequer as part of the British contingent working on solving the first of the eight Millennium Development Goals. As the film progresses we see Gina confront a number of high profile politicians over what she sees as their lack of action, and it is here where the film turns into not-so-much a political drama, as an advert for the admirable MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign (or the ONE campaign, as it is better known in the U.S.).

I’m unsure about the numerous confrontation scenes and the over-simplification of such an important issue, but I suppose it is a film and as such it has to make economics and politics enjoyable! The message, of course, is much more important than any film can be: if you read at an average pace, 40 people have died of causes directly linked to extreme poverty since you started reading my post. That is what the film is about.

“Look, you wouldn’t care, perhaps, to meet again?”

After doing some research and compiling a list of possible subscriptions, I’m presenting them here as a way to keep track of them and also in hope that you may chip in with your thoughts and recommendations to liven up my daily commute.

BBC Worldwide

• Anything from the BBC Radio 4 archives. Highlights include:
  • In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg – “The History of Ideas”
  • Analysis – “Making sense of the ideas that change the world”
  • All in the Mind – “Exploring the limits and potential of the mind”
  • The Reith Lectures – “Annual radio lectures, given by leading figures of the day”
  • From Our Own Correspondent – “Personal reflections by BBC correspondents around the world”
    
  • The Material World – “Reports on developments across the sciences”
    

• The Naked Scientists – “Stripping science down to its bare essentials” (in association with Cambridge University)

• BBC Newsnight - Not strictly a podcast, but you can’t miss Newsnight!
  

National Public Radio (US) a.k.a. NPR

• Intelligence Squared – also known as IQ2 U.S. While you’re at it, check out the live London Debates.
• RadioLab – “Science meets culture, and information sounds like music”
• Science Friday – “Making science user-friendly”
  
• Fresh Air – “Probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights”
• On the Media – “Explores how the media ‘sausage’ is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression”
  

CBC Radio One

• Quirks and Quarks – “Science that defi(n)es gravity”
• (The Best of) Ideas – “…About contemporary thought”

ABC Radio National (Australia)

• All in the Mind – “From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting – exploring the human condition through the mind’s eye”
• Philosopher’s Zone – “Your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics”
• Big Ideas – “thinking on major social, cultural, scientific or political issues”

IdeaCast – “Breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management” from The Harvard Business Review

EconTalk from The Library of Economics and Liberty on “the economics behind current events, markets, free trade, and the curiosities of everyday decision-making”

…Open Source “Inverting the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: not a podcast with a web community; a web community that produces a podcast”

Physics for Future Presidents with Richard Muller – “What every world leader needs to know”

Scientific American’s Science Talk – “Exploring cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists”

Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) – “promoting ‘slower/better’ thinking”. Part of The Long Now Foundation

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe – “Your escape to reality”

Studio 360 and specifically its Design for the Real World segment – “Get inside the creative mind: a smart and surprising guide to what’s happening in pop culture and the arts”

Philosophy Talk with Stanford University’s Professors of Philosophy – “The program that questions everything… except your intelligence”

The CERN Podcast is recorded in situ at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider with special ‘celebrity’ guests – “A cocktail of entertaining chat shows with a bit of particle physics thrown in”

That’s quite a few isn’t it? Of course there are many more great ones I’ve missed that may be of equal or greater interest to me as all of the above, so if you know of any please let me know (yes, I am actually begging).

How about these popular ones that I left out of the above list purposefully – am I being foolish in demoting these to the footer: Slate’s ‘Daily Podcast’ or ‘Explainer’, This Week in Tech, The Glenn and Helen Show, Shire Network News, This American Life, World Beyond the Headlines, Common Sense, BrainStuff from HowStuffWorks, The Guardian’s Science Weekly, Selected Shorts, The Economist, The Writers’ Block, This Week in Science, Sex is Fun and Open Source Sex with Violet Blue. Regarding those last two: one’s on the physiology of sex and the other is written for women; both are supposed to be interesting; and I imagine they’re both super-NSFW.

Sources or: Where I Found These

• Digg’s Best Podcasts
• Open Culture’s Podcast Library (Open Culture is a great site I first got directed to back in May 2007 with their great collection of Foreign Language Learning Podcasts)
• Ask MetaFilter’s What are the most intellectually stimulating podcasts?

To cut a long story short, I have now pencilled-in a trip to Shrewsbury for the weekend following next year’s anniversary as not only is Shrewsbury Darwin’s birth place, but it’s also the location of an annual, month-long celebration of his life and work, and also where my father currently lives. Two birds, one stone, and all that jazz.

On a slightly different note, all this talk of hard science is making me want to mention the book I’m currently reading: John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. Initially sceptical that it would be written for the maths-newcomer, I became impressed as Paulos describes with gusto the common – and frankly dangerous – pitfalls that everyone faces when living in an innumerate country. Encouraging his readers to view the world in a more quantitative way, I found myself grasping for paper and pencil a few times as he succinctly describes potential consequences of innumeracy:

• Inaccurate reporting of news stories and insufficient scepticism in assessing these stories
• Financial mismanagement and accumulation of consumer debt, specifically related to misunderstanding of compound interest
• Loss of money on gambling, in particular caused by belief in the gambler’s fallacy
• Belief in pseudoscience: “Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.“
• Poor assessment of risk, for example, refusing to fly by aeroplane (a relatively safe form of transport) while taking unnecessary risks in a car (where an accident is more likely)

It’s a book I definitely recommend for both the innumerate and the mathematically proficient. The former will learn a lot and hopefully gain a renewed sense of wanting to brush up on those GCSE maths skills, while the latter will get introduced to some interesting topics – a couple of which I covered in my previous post on mathematical ‘paradoxes’.

Off on another slightly related tangent, I recently came across an interesting article Prof. Paulos wrote for ABC News: 12 Irreligious Questions to the Candidates (via kottke):

Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?

Ah to hell with it, have another tenuously-linked topic… The above book (Innumeracy) has renewed my interest in performing mental math and better thinking – a personal development subject I first started working on about 12 months ago with the help of the Mentat Wiki – an interesting website from the author of Mind Performance Hacks. Providing you with new memory ‘systems’, you can use these to perform some useful (and not-so-useful) memory feats and improve your maths, all without the use of a calculator or other aid.

Yeah, that’s right baby: squaring and cubing large numbers… in my head! Hell yeah, that’s how I roll!

And seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, have some VD cards you can send to your ‘loved’ one. Perfect. (Bitter? Me?  No.)

Regardless, below are my top 10 lists of 2007. You know the ones – they proclaim to contain the best 10-or-so of something from the 12 months that have just passed? Come, soak up the nostalgia:

• The Best 19 Movies You Didn’t See in 2007 – Looking for the best independent films of 2007 that didn’t make it big? Well then, this is the list for you. A great list to accompany this is /film‘s ingeniously compiled 25 Definitive Movies of 2007. A ‘glass-is-half-empty’ kinda person? Well how about the 9 Worst Movies of 2007?
• Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks – I love this stuff. While it’s got nothing to do with 2007, it’s got everything to do with making your life just that little bit easier. This is the reason why I once read Lifehacker religiously: reading this list makes me want to resubscribe to their RSS feed. In fact, I will.
  
• Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007 – Watching these videos you may laugh (Don’t Tase Me vs. MC Hammer), stare in amazement/puzzlement (Daft Hands/Prison Inmates Performing ‘Thriller’), or simply cringe and wonder how it all went so wrong (Miss South Carolina Teen USA). The list could be refined though: where’s Chocolate Rain, Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and the Finger Painting Turtle-Kid?
• 10 of the Most Interesting and Entertaining Images of 2007 – The top 10 viral images of 2007. That means, that if you have an email address, you’ve undoubtedly seen these 10 times already.
  
• 7 Things We Should Pretend Never Happened – I knew I was going to agree with most of this list as soon as I read the headline for item number one: Huddled Masses Lining Up for Bullsh!t.
  
• D!ckheads of the Year – Like Ronseal, this list does exactly what it says on the tin. Erik Prince of Blackwater, College Republicans, Congressional Democrats and – of course – George Bush… all nominated by Rolling Stone for the honour of being ‘D!ckhead of the Year’.
• Top 10 Astronomy Pictures – I’ve never been a huge astronomy fan. Yeah, the Universe is fascinating and full of mystery; but there’s something inherently unknowable about it that – for some reason – distracts me from its splendour. Nonetheless, these images are truly captivating.
• Top 10 Most Pirated Movies and TV Shows of 2007 – Bored and trying to think of something to download and watch? I’m not as that’s illegal, but if I were (hypothetically speaking, of course) I would go here to see what films and TV shows were downloaded the most last year.
• Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 – From the Ashera GD hypo-allergenic cat to super CO2-absorbing trees, it’s been an interesting year in genetic engineering and Wired does the this round-up for us. If genetic engineering isn’t your scientific tipple, why not have a look at their Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007 instead?
  
• Best ‘Professional’ Photographs of 2007 – There’s UNICEF’s Photo of the Year, National Geographic News’ Top Ten Photos, and The Press Photographer’s Year Awards (my personal favourite, yet also the one with the worst website). Of course, it’s not just professionals who take captivating photographs, and so PhotoCompetitions.com has the definitive list of amateur and professional photography competition for your perusal.

As a bonus, have the following too:

• My favourite round-up of interesting links from the past year: Jason Kottke’s Best Links of 2007
• The best ‘personal’ round-up of the past year: The Girl in the Cafe’s The Year That Passed
• The best post detailing the biggest news stories of 2007: (cough-plug-cough) My Top 10 News Stories of 2007.
• Update (16th Jan) – The best single post of the entire year? It has to be Carl’s Why I moved from Boston to Nashville or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Everything in Snowclones – you had me at ‘sliced lolcats’.
  

As 2007 comes to a close, I decided that it was time to have a round-up of the big stories of the year. I like to do this every year as I find that you’ll undoubtedly be surprised: either by a ‘big’ story that somehow managed to pass you by, or just by realising how fast the year has gone. So, how to do this summary of events? After all, a year is a long time in news and news is different everywhere you look!

One of the best barometers of stories that made it big on the Internet is, of course, Digg – the news aggregation service that I do not visit often enough. So, what were the big online stories of 2007? Here they are – in reverse order – according to Digg:

• Stand up for your rights, get arrested – 2007 saw a lot of people arrested for doing, well, nothing in particular. One story that made it big on Digg was a man who was arrested for using $2 bills in BestBuy.
• Net Neutrality – I’m not getting into this now, but here’s a Digg’d picture showing why it’s an important issue.
• The Nintendo Wii – ‘Nuff said.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force ‘terrorists’ and other Bostonian mishaps – In 2007, Boston definitely put the ‘error’ in ‘terror’: overreacting to so-called ‘hoax’ devices, blowing shit up, and prosecuting innocent people is the name of the game here. Refuse to be terrorised, people!
• PirateBay – 2007 was the year where piracy went mainstream. Too many stories to mention.
• Microsoft Surface – Pretty nifty look at the future of personal computing: the end of point-and-click. I first saw this technology being (better) demonstrated in Jeff Han’s 2006 TED talk.
• Paris Hilton – You can’t avoid this woman if you tried… 2007 saw her do ‘time’ in jail and the loss of her inheritance. Oh, and she’s still the most annoying person on the plant.
• Execution of Saddam Hussein – Executed 40 hours before 2007 began, the leaked video of the hanging was undoubtedly the first big online story of 2007.
• iPhone – Love it or loathe it, the iPhone arrived in 2007 to much fanfare. Well, at least it’s getting people thinking about design, right?
• 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 – A vivid depiction of the Streisand effect. This is one story that showed – in no uncertain terms – the power of the Internet as a consumer tool: we don’t want restrictions on our music, our books, our television and (as this story makes abundantly clear) our HD-DVDs. This was the 21st Centuries ‘Digital Revolt’.

We can’t spend all our time online and ‘real world’ news is important too, right? So, here’s another list of the top 10 news stories from around the world, according to Time and The Times Online:

• Pakistan’s Political Crisis – From the pressuring of Musharraf to give up command of the Army to the assassination of Bhutto; Pakistan’s politics hasn’t been out of the news all year.
• US Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis – When the US housing bubble eventually popped it wasn’t just the US that suffered – markets around the world felt the impact as banks reeled in their debts.
• Burma Protests – A bad year for democracy in Burma. As tens of thousands of monks took to the streets to protest against a rise in petrol prices (and thus the price of other staples), the military junta cracked down by raiding monasteries and tackling the peaceful protests head on.
• Goodbye, Harry Potter – At last, it’s over!
  
• Iraq War - The Iraq war was for oil you say? The only surprising part of this ‘revelation’ is that it came from the man who was head of the US Federal Reserve for 18 years – Alan Greenspan.
• Chinese Toy Recall – Made in China took on a new meaning this year as millions of toys made there and exported to the US were recalled for using lead paint, having loose parts, and burning children. Of course “buying local” is still an alien concept to half the western world and a little mishap over some paint isn’t going to make a difference, is it?
  
• Virginia Tech Massacre – There was more to this story than just another school shooting. Not only did the gunman mail manifesto-style tapes to the media halfway through his rampage; he was also pronounced by a judge to be mentally ill and in need of hospitalisation – yet still managed to legally buy his arsenal of weapons.
• iPhone – Enough already!

Yes, I know that’s only 8 stories, but it was hard picking another two that had world-wide status: was the Madeleine McCann story known throughout the world? Was the saga of Alan Johnston’s capture and eventual release as big in the US as it was here in the UK? Can the rise and rise of Facebook be classed as ‘real-world news’ (it only went fully public in late 2006)? How about 2007′s ‘Data Chernobyl‘? It’s a tough choice.

The Sir Ian episode is a magnificent return to form for Gervais and it repeatedly hits my satire G-spot dead centre with it’s mix of sheer comedy genius and social commentary – but it’s the Christmas episode which really had me appreciate the series.

In it, Gervais’ character (Andy Millman) makes a final speech admonishing reality TV; the producers and networks that produce the shows; and more poignantly the viewers and the ‘celebrities’ involved in them who “hand in their dignity at the door” when they partake in this so-called entertainment.

It’s a great commentary on the current television landscape we often find ourselves watching and the public’s obsession with fame and celebrity. Searching for the quote to share with you, I came across the following which describes the moment perfectly – The New York Times: Going Out, Gervais Picks Bang Over Whimper:

“The Victorian freak show never went away,” Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the “Extras” final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. “Now it’s called ‘Big Brother’ or ‘American Idol,’ where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires.”

To the networks, he says: “You can’t wash your hands of this. You can’t keep going, ‘Oh, it’s exploitation, but it’s what the public wants.’ No.”

To the audience watching at home, he says: “Shame on you. And shame on me. I’m the worst of all. Cause I’m one of these people that goes, ‘I’m an entertainer, it’s in my blood.’ Yeah, it’s in my blood because a real job’s too hard.”

These details include the names, addresses, bank details and national insurance numbers for all members of the 7.25 million households that have a child under the age of 16. That’s just under half of the population – pretty impressive really.

Moral of the story? Don’t trust a man with eyebrows like this (Alistair Darling, right). No, seriously – don’t.

So without further ado I present you with my latest compilation: ten more UK data loss incidents from recent history, courtesy of The Register:

• 400 passport details and addresses lost by HMRC (2007)
• All 11 Million customers of the Nationwide Building Society had their “confidential customer data” lost (2007)
• 15,000 names, addresses, DoBs, national insurance numbers and pension details of policy holders from Standard Life lost by HMRC (2007)
• 26,000 Marks and Spencer staff members’ salary details, addresses, dates of birth, national insurance and phone numbers lost (2007)
• 500 Eden Project staff had their (undisclosed) data lost by Moorepay (2007)
• An undisclosed number of confidential medical records were discovered on hard drives sold on eBay (patients from Dudley NHS Trust) (2007)
• 11,000 children treated or born in a Nottingham Hospital had their records lost (2007)
• 15,000 Met Police Officers had their payroll and pension data lost by LogicaCMG (2006)
• “70 Top Secret Files” from the Ministry of Defence were found on a laptop at a landfill site. These included terrorism contingency plans for MoD bases (2005)
• 1,354 government computers (594 by MoD) “stolen or mislaid”. Unknown/undisclosed data (1997 – 2002)

Many of the above have one thing in common: when many of them were first announced, the question of whether or not the data was appropriately encrypted was usually avoided – typically cited as being a security risk if the issue were even discussed.

I have two problems with this: one, whoever has the data already knows if it is encrypted or not; two, if it is encrypted, telling us that it’s encrypted doesn’t suddenly make it easy for the criminals to break into the data. If it’s encrypted, it’s encrypted. That’s all there is to it and therefore your data is safe. This leads me to one conclusion: it’s not encrypted. (See also: “UK’s Privacy Chernobyl” – Bruce Schneier’s recent post.)

As a side note, has anyone else noticed how the comic Steve Martin (above, left) looks strangely similar to Alistair Darling? Are they related? If so, all is forgiven: give us a joke.

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant [...] to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof [...]

In all honestly I expected nothing less, but actually reading it and taking the time to understand the implications of uploading your material makes me want to never upload a photo again, lest a Virgin Mobile incident (or worse) happens to me or someone I know. Especially when they class ‘User Content’ as:

Photos, profiles, messages, notes, text, information, music, video, advertisements, listings, and other content that you upload, publish or display [...]

And even more so when you read this:

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service.

How depressing? But in all honestly I’m not going to change my ways – if you upload anything anywhere, expect it to be seen by anyone and be used for any purpose. To finish, have some choice quotes from Digg when the aforementioned video was posted there:

• I like looking at drunken half naked girls on a daily basis. Long live Facebook.
• What is this, six degrees from Kevin Bacon?
• Big Brother is watching you poke.
• If you look at all those dotted lines and trace that pattern on to a piece of Reynold’s Wrap it is the secret directions to make a tin foil cap, which will protect you from imaginary things that do not exist!
• If you don’t want someone to know something about you…. don’t post it on THE INTERNET.
• HOLY CRAP CONSPIRACY.
• OH MY GOD THE GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO KILL US ALL
• OH NO THEY KNOW I LIKE A MOVIE!!!!