Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 7 February 2003, 6:02 PM
Tuesday
Tuesday 4/2/2003
A bad day to be called Seymore Butts from Arsenal, especially if you have a problem requiring your MP. New spam filters on the Parliamentary inboxes have been doing what spam filters always do -- letting through the penis extensions while blocking the real meat. In particular, discussion of the forthcoming Sexual Offences Bill is being shown the door, while anything in Welsh is similarly deemed inappropriate and liable to harm the eyes of those reading it. And, sweetest of all, the Lib Dem's consultation paper on censorship has fallen foul of the silicon Mary Whitehouse. It's nice to see our beloved leaders finding out how the real world works, albeit five years after everyone else.
But it all sometimes works. I fired off a whinge to my MP, the very personable Chris Smith, via www.faxyourmp.com concerning all that nonsense over the ID cards. Not only did I get a prompt reply, but it was a model of clarity -- yes, he shared my misgivings, no, he didn't think that any of the arguments for ID cards stood up and yes, he was continuing to say so to the appropriate people. I'm unlikely to vote for him -- or indeed any party that supports teaching fundamentalist religion to children in the guise of general education, as Labour does with Emmanuel College at Gateshead -- but it's nice to know that with appropriate technology even the daftest of spam filters can be bypassed. They've yet to teach a fax machine to spot a rude word.
A bad day to be called Seymore Butts from Arsenal, especially if you have a problem requiring your MP. New spam filters on the Parliamentary inboxes have been doing what spam filters always do -- letting through the penis extensions while blocking the real meat. In particular, discussion of the forthcoming Sexual Offences Bill is being shown the door, while anything in Welsh is similarly deemed inappropriate and liable to harm the eyes of those reading it. And, sweetest of all, the Lib Dem's consultation paper on censorship has fallen foul of the silicon Mary Whitehouse. It's nice to see our beloved leaders finding out how the real world works, albeit five years after everyone else.
But it all sometimes works. I fired off a whinge to my MP, the very personable Chris Smith, via www.faxyourmp.com concerning all that nonsense over the ID cards. Not only did I get a prompt reply, but it was a model of clarity -- yes, he shared my misgivings, no, he didn't think that any of the arguments for ID cards stood up and yes, he was continuing to say so to the appropriate people. I'm unlikely to vote for him -- or indeed any party that supports teaching fundamentalist religion to children in the guise of general education, as Labour does with Emmanuel College at Gateshead -- but it's nice to know that with appropriate technology even the daftest of spam filters can be bypassed. They've yet to teach a fax machine to spot a rude word.
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