Shush, don't tell the government

For various reasons I found myself in the market for a 3G broadband dongle last week to replace the ancient Vodafone PCMCIA card version I have been using for years* and a look at the coverage maps showed my best bet was Three and a pay as you go would work out fine instead of a contract.

So off I flapped down to the Three shop and just out of curiosity I wondered if in out surveillance society you could still buy communications equipment anonymously. And it turns out that, yes, you can. Picked up a dongle pre-loaded with a 1Gb allowance for 20 or so quid cash, no names, no registration, nothing. You can buy top-up allowances at a tenner a time again for cash in plenty of places so I have an anonymous internet connection, and it's pretty fast too.

This got me thinking what would you have to do to be virtually undetectable using this, and its not that hard. There are location services, you might have seen these advertised as "find where your kids are" services that use data from mobile phone masts and triangulation to identify the location of a mobile device and the networks will of course give this information to the police but a bit of research indicates that they are not that accurate. Plod would have you believe that they could go "Yep, Dragon's on his 3G searching for ocelot porn again, he's at his house behind the water pipes, in the back bedroom" but they can't. Even in a city with a dense collection of masts it's only accurate to 100 meters at best, in rural areas that drops to kilometers.

Traffic analysis would be a way to work out its you of course. If anyone really was interested in finding me they would be able to work out the dongle gets used most mornings on a particular train into London just by watching what masts it connects to so you would probably need to use it in one space or adapt a usage pattern that makes no sense and can't be attributed to you.  Dumping the dongle every 3 or 4 months as well and getting a new one, ideally on a different network, would probably be prudent as well.

Combine this with strong encryption and the use of proxies like TOR and darknets and you're as undetectable as an undetectable thing.

I'm amazed we can still get away with this, really amazed. I would have thought that our lords and masters would have pointed at those modern horsemen of the apocalypse, Terrorist and Peedofils, and gone "waaaah! all communication equipment must be registered for your own protection citizens".

Of course all the information presented above is just a thought experiment, if you choose to act on any of this I take no responsibility. But here's a link so you can find your nearest Three store...



* "Tiamat" - my lovely old T60 is laid up awaiting repairs and the Compaq 6720 (named Voliatus as it's not the smartest lappy in the world) I've borrowed doesn't like the old card it seems.

Dragon's Magic Pianos - The Korg 707 - an occasional series

I know a lot of my visitors come here from Old Holborn's Blog and expect a bit of right of centre libertarian politics (or just a dragon stomping around and swearing at stuff) but just for a change here's a little piece on what might become an occasional series on old synthesizers which, since Mrs Dracunculus bought me a Yamaha DX7 for my birthday last year I have become an occasional collector of.

The first one I'd like to tell you about is a real little gem of a keyboard, the Korg 707. Made in the late 80's it was very much aimed at the budget synth market with a 49 key keyboard and a rather cheapy looking plastic case. Its an FM synth with 4 operators and 8 voice polyphony and like all FM and digital synths of that era its a git to program (although lots easier than the DX7) although Korg, with an eye to live performance, put three sliders on the front so you can tweak the two envelope generators and the "Timbre" (basically the resonance Q) in real time. Play this little puppy and you start to use these controls a lot and very nice they are too.  If you really want to go for that 80's synthpop band look you can run it on batteries and it comes with studs on the side so you can sling a guitar strap on it and wear it over you shoulder for that "I am an utter cockwallet" look.

This is my beast, its a bit tatty and the bottom C doesn't sound but as I picked it up for 35 quid on eBay I really can't complain.

Like any FM synth its very good at metallic and bell tones and I have to say although most of the presets suck donkey balls there are some real gems in there, especially the "Tine Piano" which you can hear in this little bit of music I composed.

November 707 - Dracunculus


All that is recorded directly from the 707 on the presets (no sequencing) and fiddling with the performance sliders (and a bit of reverb and compression in Reason) - yeah I know I'm about a good a musician as I am a blogger.

One of the nicest things about it is that the keyboard has full size velocity sensitive keys and, amazingly for something in this price range, full aftertouch, so it works surprisingly well as a MIDI controller and given that these go for 50 to 70 quid on eBay if you're in the market for a 4-octave  controller you could do a lot worse than get one of these.

I like mine so much I'm thinking of getting a tidier one.

Happy birthday to Grumpy Dragon

Happy birthday to my blog, which turned 5 yesterday, which means it should be forming sentences of a few simple words and can ask to go to the toilet.

According to Google the stats are 13205 pageviews - 479 posts and 1,247,419 gratuitous uses of the word "fuck".

Thanks for reading my drivel over all these years and here's to another 5 years.  It may have learned to spell and use punctuation correctly by then.

My liver, not yours.

Here we go again. Having demonised the smokers out of existence The Righteous are, as we have come to expect, training their guns on anything else that, heaven forfend, might give us some kind of pleasure and of course the next demon to be slain is the drink.

Latest on the block are pseudo-charity the British Liver Trust. Pseudo charity? Well when did you last see these people rattling a tin on the street or were accosted by a cheery Aussie chugger demanding you sign over your children yea unto the seventh generation to them? You didn't because they are funded largely by the Government, this from their most recent filing at the Charities Commission:

Key fundraising successes of the year include a three year grant amounting to a total of £489,506 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities Programme to expand our support group network ...

OK so not funded out of taxes but its a reasonable supposition that they're not going to be wanting to piss off Whitehall any time soon or no Lottery cash for you Mr Hepatitis.

But look, you could say, they are having a go at the government, it's all over the BBC...

Government-led policies on alcohol throughout the UK have been branded a joke by the chief executive of the charity the British Liver Trust.

"We need to see direct action to prevent the daily death rate from liver cancer increasing," said Mr Langford. "At the moment all we are seeing are weak policies or no action at all. However, there are so many solutions to the problem."

And rather conveniently, up pops a government spokesman to say...

"We will shortly be setting out how we will tackle all the health and social impacts of alcohol in our alcohol strategy," he said.

 Well wasn't that convenient?

And you know, you just know, that "our alcohol strategy' will be "tax the fuck out of the dragon because he's got the money and he likes glass or two of wine when he gets home". But all for my own good of course, see the Liver Trust says we have to do these things to help you; you're only a dragon, you can't possibly be trusted to make your own descisions about your health. Trust us, we are The Worthy, we are The Righteous.

Well you can all go and fuck yourself with the biggest dildo Bad Dragon make*  Look it's not as if I don't know what alcohol does, you tell me often enough. Do I drink more than your reccomended 21 units a week? You bet on Fafnir's scaly tail I do, but that's my call, not yours. I will take that risk.

And it's not that much of a risk when you look at it...

In 2010, an estimated 3,788 people died from liver cancer across the UK, equating to an average of 10 people each day

... to put that into perspective that's 0.006% of the population.

"But the problem is growing!' screams Dr Liver...

Mr Langford said the condition seemed to be the poor relation to the other big killers, but was the only health problem out of the big five - cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and general cancers are the other four - showing an increasing trend.

Well how about the reason for that is that people are surviving some cancers and dying from others, that and we are all living longer so we're more likely to get rarer cancers, plus the rise, since 1977 which is their baseline in the report, of HIV/AIDS and associated conditions such as Hepatitis? You can't just point at the booze and say "that's your cause, right there, outlaw that and you'll see liver cancer rates drop" - that's just bad science.

Look I'm sure the British Liver Foundation do good work supporting people with liver disease and the like but will you please stop using dodgy statistics and cozying up to government giving the po faced arseholes an excuse to demonise and tax the fuck out of one of the few affordable pleasures we have left.

Or I could come round to your place, douse you in a fine XO Armagnac and sneeze in your direction; up to you.



* it's the Sea Dragon in aquamarine with the integral spooge-tube in case you're interested

"Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary" they whisper

I see over at Max Farquar's blog everyone's favourite uppity mussie Anjem Choudary has been frothing at the mouth again, this time inciting his fellow rugbutters to kick off at armistice day parades and bad-mouthing the military as muslim baby killers, etc, etc.

Well quite frankly that's his right and good luck to him. In a working democracy all the voices of the demos should be heard, even if, particularly if perhaps, what they have to say is unpopular.

Where of course the likes of Chowdray and his ilk cross the line is of course they don't just talk and seek to persuade. There is always the implicit, and more often explicit, threat of violence pointed at anyone who "upsets muslim sensibilities"*... "Remember Theo van Gogh" they whisper, "Look what happened to Charlie Hebdo's offices" they write.

Well Anjem and your pals, maybe you should remember that with your right to free speech comes your responsibility to bear the consequences of that speech and I would point out that you are upsetting an awful lot of people and in particular a lot of people who are trained at great expense to fuck you up in 197 ways before you even realize its happened. Of course I am not advocating violence against you, that would be stooping to your level, I am merely making an observation. But maybe you and your ilk had better take a good hard look at yourself and have a serious think about what you're before you flap your gob in public again, because if you carry on as you are I fear that what will be being whispered in your "community" is "Remember what happened to Anjem Choudary"



* pointing out that their prophet was a pedophile is always a good way to do this.

Strangled at birth

Rather unwittingly the last spendthrift Labour government thew the middle classes a nice little bone in their bid to be all green and cuddly. This was something called the Feed In Tarrif (FIT) which basically meant that if you generated your own electricity from a solar photovoltaic array on your roof you would get paid to do so and at a very generous rate of 43p per kWh as well. That's guaranteed for 25 years and index linked.

Oh and as there's no way to actually measure how much you generate gets back into the grid, you get 3p per 0.5kWh on top of that.

And you get to use all the electricity you generate too, so a household bill like mine of around £800 a year would come down to around £200 a year.

So with a 4kW array costing around £14k to install it works out that over the 25 years you'll make around 10 to 12% return and break even around the 8 year mark. And with my current investments making 2 or 3% at best its an absolute no-brainer. So last month some men crawled over my roof and I now have my own little power station that's  generated over 100kWh of nice clean energy and enriched me to the best part of fifty quid in the couple of weeks its been running.

What's that Mr Government? Middle class people with disposable income making a profit? Oh no, that will never do, never never never! You're there Mr Middleclass to pay your taxes that we will spend on services you'll never use and give your money away to those poor developing nations with space programmes and nuclear weapons like India and China. We can't have you doing that, you're supposed to be installing solar because you can afford it and to make us in government look all green and answer the problem of Warble Gloaming! You're not actually supposed to treat this as an investment!

So in six weeks time the coalition are going to cut the FIT to 22p, and that's only if you've got a "C" energy rated house already (which is nigh on impossible to get if your house is more than 20 years old) . I did a quick back on an Excel spreadsheet calculation and the ROI on a 4kW rig like mine drops to around 2% and the payoff period almost triples to 21 years.

Now a small but significant industry has grown up in this country over the last 2 years to service the demand for Solar PV; it's estimated that it employs around 25,000 people. This is not to mention the ancillary services it supports like the team of scaffolders who shoved a load of metal poles round my house (and then took 2 weeks to come and take them down again!) - I was chatting to Mr Scaffolder and he said solar PV was around half their work these days.

Well Mr Scaffold is probably going to have to lay off some of his staff and there's going to be 25000 people heading for the dole office come December because nobody is going to want Solar PV now. A new industry, supporting thousands of people has been strangled at birth because oh my god we can't have people making money out of Eco-Wibble can we. Those people on the social are going to cost way fecking more than the feed in tarrif money ever would.

Sure, the high rate was to kick start the solar business in the UK and it was unsustainable at 43p but why the hell didn't you cut it back slowly and on the dates you promised? All the hoons in Whitehall have done by cutting the FIT in half is to strangle one of the very private enterprises that was supposed to hoover up all these public sector jobs at birth.

Fucking idiots.