Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of Londoners and the spaces they live in is for sale to anyone with the money to buy it. “A private place operating as a public space” is not what I want to have on London's limited real estate.
I admit it's reasonable to debate the pros and cons of private ownership of public spaces in city centres, but my point is that in this case The City of London is both historically unique and important, and by many measures been a huge success for the host nation.
Informative/fun video on the subject:
Though yes, all the fuss is slightly ironic in the city where most central greenspaces are property of Royal Parks.
I think that's also misleading; it's not a 'corporation'=='limited liability company with shares'. It's not a "capitalist" institution, it's a pre-capitalist feudal institution that predates the LLC by centuries. It's an elected local body with an unusual electorate.
It's a good idea to turn Wi-Fi off when you leave home/work. This also avoids the issue of captive portals with gated internet access capturing your phone and disabling your data connection. I'm looking at you TfL.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/12/city-london-cor...
However, the Church of Scotland - at least how I remember it from my youth, now there was an organisation dedicated to the eradication of passion and joy from the world.
I wasn't a member (my girlfriend was) and I haven't attended a meeting in the last 20 years. But I was still shocked when they (grudgingly) allowed hymn singing in 2010.
Having said that, the garden bridge sounds more like a CofE-esque police state that a Free Church police state. I mean, it'll probably allow flowers and papists and all sorts.
> https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html
"Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices."
This morning, I went in with my old Thinkpad on which I have replaced Xubuntu with Slackware/MLED including a complete reformat and encryption of the SSD. The wifi recognised the machine and greeted me by name. I can only assume that the server is recording the MAC addresses of devices that use the system. That is just about the only thing left that it could be reading.
I believe WiFi routers have options for white-listing devices by MAC address. Probably being done automatically in your building.
I encountered this problem in Dublin airport a few years ago, before they switched to a different wifi provider.
The authentication code to join the wifi network would be sent by SMS. Which seems clever, until you realise that many people transiting Dublin won't have international roaming ( I didn't ) so can't receive the SMS.
When toll-free phone number services started providing number identification to the service in the 1980s, American Express had their system look up the customer's record from the phone number, and their operators started greeting customers by name. Some customers saw this as "creepy", and American Express stopped such greetings, although the customer's record was still looked up.
Today, everybody has caller ID and name lookup.
Nice to see tens of millions of public money going on vanity projects like this with ridiculous baggage attached to it.
The £20mm public loan over a 50 year period sounds interesting. I wonder what interest rate they are getting on that. I would LOVE to see it. Maybe I'll do a FOI request. If I could bet on it, I'd bet they have a pretty swell deal.
I was able to add it to the slide deck just in time and people were genuinely surprised by it. It's a good thing that the company were transparent about it and shared the image but for many non-technical attendees it was a bit of a wake-up call.
"Do you use the free WiFi at the local supermarkets?" "Did you buy a bunch of liquor and condoms, and then come back a few weeks later and buy pregnancy tests?" "Did you think you were pretty slick because you paid cash?" The audience's eyes getting bigger and bigger...
The company I used to work for did something similar[2] at a conference over the course of three days. (You can drag on the map to highlight individual devices.) It's really cool and really quite creepy.
The service was provided by JT Global (website here: http://www.jtglobal.com/jersey/) and Purple WiFi (http://www.purplewifi.net/) so you might try following up with them? I don't know any of the people involved, I just showed up for my talk and left soon after.
> The Garden Bridge Trust said the planning documents detailed theoretical maximum powers that were extremely unlikely to be used
It might be intended that way, but realistially, it seems that the exercise of power is invariably pushed to the theoretical maximum (and often beyond).
What is more worrying to me is when the police have more powers than the citizenry.
Recognising the right of free citizens to enforce the law is a-okay in my book, although of course that's not quite what England's doing.
> Recognising the right of free citizens to enforce the law is a-okay in my book, although of course that's not quite what England's doing.
You make a good point. I'm generally in favor of the idea of "citizens arrest" and the like. But in this particular instance, the asymmetry is concerning.
> people’s progress across the structure would be tracked by monitors detecting the Wi-Fi signals from their phones, which show up the device’s Mac address
...I think if you said "mobile phone signal" to someone round here they'd assume you were talking about the GSM radio. If you think shopping malls / cities aren't already using MAC addresses sniffed during WiFi discovery to track location you're sadly mistaken (which is why iOS started randomizing them from iOS 8 onwards).
It seems this is the point people pick up on it and start pushing back a bit. The real point is halfway down: "The planning document stresses that the security measures are aimed primarily at crime and antisocial behaviour, and notes that staff would be expected to make full use of their CSAS powers to respond to protests or demonstrations, which are banned on the bridge."
A protest-free 'public' space. All part of the Singapore-isation of London. The garden bridge is a massive waste of partly-public money anyway; a conspicuous consumption vanity project like the (private) dangleway.
Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.
This isn't public land, even though it's built with public funds.
The bridge trust said the proposed planning conditions would not amount to the structure becoming an overly controlled and regulated place, insisting the visitor hosts are “not police officers”. It said that while the visitor hosts would theoretically have the power to seize any banned items, in practice this would only happen with things such as alcohol.
Since when have any powers been granted on a theoretical basis?
The issue is that millions of dollars of taxpayers' money is being used to pay for things on private land as if it were public.
I'm less bothered about using wifi MACs to measure traffic, so long as no data is retained – it can provide useful insight into the number of visitors. Randomisation is obviously in modern devices, but I'd be concerned that older devices won't have the data regarding them deleted.
In 2012 I started turning WiFi and location off on my phone as I left home. I remember the date because it's when London got 4G, and as of that date I no longer really needed WiFi, but I did need my battery to last the day.
It's become habit.
Properly phrased title: "London Garden Bridge Trust will track mobile phone signals of bridge users"
