London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
And in any case there is simply no real value for gays to become 'married' other than getting a sticker.
The "sticker" was a visa in my husband's case. Although the UK does not require you to be married to your partner in order for them to get a visa, you have to provide all kinds of ridiculous documentation in the absence of a marriage certificate. In other countries (e.g. the US), being married is an absolute requirement.
Gay marriage is now legal in the UK. Are you suggesting that it would make "more sense" now to abolish gay marriage and try to adjust 100s of other laws and regulations to prevent any disadvantage to gay people? Surely this must be a disingenuous suggestion.
Changing all the specific legal benefits, privileges, and obligations of marriage to be "marriage or partnership" makes less sense than changing the admission criteria for marriage.
I mean, this is a tech forum, right, think about it from DRY perspective.
Legally, there is obvious value. Stating such an opinion leads me to believe you are being willfully dishonest in your argument.
In every country in the world? There are a large number of countries that allow marriages that does not meet your definition. Both polygamy and gay marriages.
Reminder that this poll exists[0].
[0] http://qz.com/262645/people-without-kids-live-better-than-pa...
It'd be inaccurate to call those gay marriages as some of the cultures they are practised in at the same time have been very oppressive when it comes to homosexuality (though presumably such marriages have been used as a means to hide lesbian relationships), but the fact remains women have been able to marry women with the explicit intent of having shared children for hundreds of years... [1]. And they're not few:
" Kevane (2004) estimates that approximately 5–10 percent of the women in Africa are involved in woman-to-woman marriages. "
[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...
The UK does better than most countries for supporting LGBT rights, but it took a long time. The UK discriminated against homosexuals for many years, and we still have some way to go to fully recognising rights of LGBT people.
This is true, of course, but potentially a little misleading for people not familiar with the UK, since civil partnerships have been available since 2004.
The function and intention of marriage has changed through time and locality.
To pick a singular aspect of a complex social construct and use that to base its purpose and definition on is myopic.
Who is making it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith here? You've consistently harped on a reductionist definition of marriage in this thread.
>If I get together with an AI in the future you'll call it marriage too?
Personally, I truly do not care what you call it. If they're able to give consent and you can find a place to have wedding, good for you. If the law wants to respect it, congratulations.
And in fact some cultures has "weird" forms of marriage that deviates from the man + woman norm explicitly over things like fertility.
E.g. in some parts of Africa, two women marrying (but not, at least in principle, lesbian marriages, though I'm sure this institution have been conveniently used to obscure lesbian relationships) have centuries of history as a means for infertile women to gain heirs by taking a fertile wife who will find a man to get her pregnant, who will have no rights to any children. In these cultures, one of the women will generally be considered a husband, and take on many traditionally male roles (to the extent that in some places such a "female husband" gain access to e.g. take political offices not available to women etc.) [1]
African cultures are full of still extant examples where marriage is treated as a pragmatic means to secure economy, social stability and inheritance to the point where bending gender norms too is seen as a perfectly sensible hack if it furthers those goals.
Given the long history of such varied forms of marriage (including e.g. polygamy too), it would be much more reasonable to claim that marriage historically is about securing a family units financial situation and inheritance, and furthering social stability than having anything to do with "a man and a woman procreating"...
[1] http://www.osisa.org/buwa/regional/female-husbands-without-m...
You need to review your history on marriage including, but by no means limited to, what the bible has to say on such matters.
The biblical view of marriage is vastly different to simply "a man and a woman wanting to procreate", itself took on and in places redefined millennia of tradition that pre-dated it, and given how much of that definition the church now ignores (allowing divorce, no longer requiring the stoning non-virgins, to cite two of many examples) I don't think ignoring something that isn't actually stated in the text anyway should be a significant problem.
E.g. many African tribes have traditions for polygamy that are either explicitly intended to deal with men being likely to die earlier (as fighters or hunters) to safeguard the viability of the house-hold and/or to deal with inheritance in societies where women were often not allowed to inherit (a typical case being a social obligation in some tribes for a man to marry his deceased brothers wives in order to ensure she still has somewhere to live).
For property purpose more generally: controlling inheritance was part of that, but a related part (and perhaps a more significant part in early societies where inheritances were small) was economic support the other direction, up the family tree rather than down. Where children (and grandchildren, and lateral relatives) care for their parents (and grandparents, etc.) in their old age instead of their existing nonfamily social support networks, establishing broader family bonds through formal unions is important to that.
This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a property arrangement between the parties; in the West its been separated from an essential intent for procreation for quite some time, though there are religious subcultures within Western societies for whom that may remain more important than it is in the broader society.
But adoptions to secure an inheritance chain is historically certainly not that unusual either.
So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?
Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations.
The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs.
The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law, religion, and society do not a marriage make.
It is the combination or mixture of elements that gives rise to something new, something neither of the elements alone is capable of, that is a 'marriage'.
And it is good that way.
Married and marriage have plenty of meanings in English...
I do know that [family member], who is gay and married, has said that she feels welcomed in our church and that she wishes she'd had one like it to support her when she came out.
It's one of the only institutions I can think of that seems to be allowed to openly discriminate against homosexuals and until more recently women in some regards as well.
I hope you didn't take my comment as me jumping on you, I'm just curious because I don't think I could call any church in the CoE liberal when the leadership are so conservative.
The beautiful thing about the Church of England is that it includes a wide spectrum of opinion and tradition, from high church (smells'n'bells) to scruffy low church, from liberal to conservative, left and right).
I don't agree with everything, but it's a great space for people with different backgrounds and opinion to mix and learn from each other. It can be very radical in a quiet, British, socks-and-sandals sort of way.
Ha! Didn't think I'd be writing about the CofE on HN!
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.
Edit: I'm pretty sure we had Wee Frees and Wee Wee Frees.
Edit2: I'm pretty sure "church" isn't the right word...
> 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.
It would appear to be: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2738
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 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 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.
Is disabling wifi when you are not connected sufficient to stop this sort of tracking?
> 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.
The FAQ says:
Over 65% of the capital costs to build the bridge will be fundraised from the private sector. More than £145 million has been pledged already and there is a business plan to cover the £2 million annual maintenance and operations costs. Transport for London and the Government have together contributed £60 million in total.
https://www.gardenbridge.london/questions-answers/fact-ficti...
The arguments for the public funding contribution are that commuters will be able to walk across it, and it will help regenerate the areas at both ends.
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"