Author Archives: Richard - Page 2

The Things We Miss

Posted by on March 25, 2012 No comments
Canal Locks

Canal Locks

The weather has perked up recently and I took the opportunity to get my trusty mountain bike back into operation.  This morning I went out for a couple of hours and broke it back in properly, while I was out I noticed the number of other people doing the same thing has increased recently.  I snapped this photograph of the canal locks along my route and was pleased with the resulting photograph, you can see the full size by clicking it.  You can also find a couple more that I took on my Flickr account.

While out and about I exchanged greeting with other tow path users and noticed the waterfowl were pairing off ready to nest.  Ducks watched me warily as I cycled past them and I watched male Geese chase off competitors on more than one occasion.  Once the Geese nest, this will make the tow paths a slightly more hazardous place as they will be on their guard against tow path users.  Watching other cyclists led me down a few new stretches of tow path and made me aware of new ways around the old routes I was using.  All of this is nothing spectacular, but what struck me again was how much of this world we miss when cocooned inside a car.

I’ve nailed my colours to the Peak Oil mast already, but to reiterate things, I’m of the opinion that the age of the motor car is entering its twilight.  The cost of Oil extraction is rising, the Oil we are getting is more expensive to refine and more expensive to transport.  The era of cheap energy is over and it will mean the slow end of our car-centric society.  I am seeing much commentary on this, but a lot of it seems to be along the lines of “somebody should change the world so that I don’t have to change my lifestyle”.  When you think about that, it doesn’t make much sense as the world isn’t going to change for us and there is little we can do regarding the underlying reality of this situation.  The only question is how we manage the decline of cheap energy.

Faith Schools

Posted by on March 24, 2012 No comments

A new report from the Church of England caught my eye today, courtesy of the British Humanist Association.  It seems to be pushing for a stronger evangelising of state funded Church schools, while complaining of the attack of secularism.

How are these publicly funded schools supposed to be inclusive when they make children of other faiths or no faith whatsoever feel like outsiders?  Let’s be clear, the landscape in the United Kingdom is changing and has been for years.  Secularism in this country has now strengthened to the point that it is challenging the established Church, which poses some very difficult questions for the powers that be.  The British Social Attitudes Survey shows that  50% of the population are secular and this is even higher in the under 24s.  These schools are state funded, which means they are paid for from the taxes levied on non-Christians and Christians alike.  With this thought in place, you have to ask how you can justify using public money to promote one faith over all the other alternatives?

A Meditation More Challenging

Posted by on March 23, 2012 1 comment

After a long time of being a solo practitioner and participating in in virtual Sanghas, I restarted my investigation into local Buddhist centres recently.  I’ve tried a couple previously, the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara and the Jangchub Ling centre in Cradley Heath.  Both brought interesting conversations, very friendly faces and a welcome affirmation that I was not alone.

My most recent trip was to the Dr BR Ambedkar Memorial Centre Buddha Vihara in Wolverhampton, literally a stones throw from the Mercedes dealer on the ring road.  This brought more smiling faces, a warm welcome and a much needed reminder about the physical difficulties of meditation.  If you meditate in a chair, as I tend to, you never realise just how challenging meditating on a cushion can be.  The aches in the leg muscles, the aches in the back and the constant distraction from this can make you quite glad that your sitting is over!

This took me back to something I learned many years ago from a wonderful book that started me on my somewhat intermittent journey as a meditator.  The book is called “Moon Over Water“, by a lady called Jessica MacBeth and it really is like having a patient friend walking beside you on the path.  Jessica recommended that we shouldn’t rely on always meditating on one place, or having certain incenses or clothes or an altar to hand.  The idea was that we would be able to meditate wherever we needed to (e.g. a hotel room).  The sitting I did on Sunday proved the value of her advice and I would like to add that we should also not get overly used to sitting in one position.  If used to a chair, if you can do so, try the stool or the cushion and vice versa.

The lesson I learned here is that we do need to challenge ourselves as meditators from time to time.

A Few Thoughts On Privacy

Posted by on March 22, 2012 No comments

After my last couple of posts, I thought it’d be a good idea to think about privacy in a bit more detail.  It’s a fairly hot issue, with every organisation having a privacy policy and various laws being in place to protect it.

Privacy is a right that’s under fire in this day and age, with social networks and other websites demanding more or our personal information and tracking more of our behaviour.  If you have a mobile phone, you can be tracked and if your phone has GPS then that goes double.  This grab for our private information is usually justified by the need to provide free or location based services, but it’s worth remember something I always tell people, if you’re not paying for a service then you’re the product not the customer.  In the event of refusal it’s possible that suspicion is cast onto the privacy advocate with the tired maxim “Only the guilty have something to hide”.

That’s an old one and it’s also utter rubbish, let’s dispose of it now.  “Only the guilt have something to hide” is a false dilemma, which can be rephrased as “Give me the information I want, or you’re guilty”.  It’s also based on a false premise with a conclusion that doesn’t follow from it.  Let’s think.

  1. A person is only going to withhold information if they’re guilty.
  2. The person I’m questioning is withholding information
  3. The person I’m questioning is guilty

Step 1 isn’t correct, a person may withhold information for any number of reasons.  For example, contractual obligations to an employer (be it general business confidentiality or IT security policy).  If you’re a doctor or lawyer, then there are reasons of patient or client confidentiality to consider.  In general, there are always matters of personal security and identity to consider.  You wouldn’t give out your date of birth or passport number freely would you?  No.  The alarm code to your house?  No.  What about the login details to your Internet banking?  No, I thought not.  With step 1 cast into doubt, step 3 no longer follows.

This maxim tries to put the burden onto their victim, but why does the questioner want to know and with what authority?.  It also assumes that the people doing the checking are incorruptible and that their motives are entirely above board and honest.  This asks the question of whether the questioner can be trusted with the information, often they can’t be.

I’ll end here, for now, but will write more on this as the ideas occur.

A Bit Of Internet Privacy – The Browser

Posted by on March 21, 2012 No comments

In my previous post on this subject, I talked a little about the search engines we use and how we can start our drive to recover control of our online lives with them.  This time, I’d like to look into web browsers.  I’m going to focus in on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome here as these are the two I know.

Your web browser is most likely to be the primary tool you use when dealing with the Internet, in fact I’d take a wager that when most people think of the Internet they think of their web browser.  This means that in our push for control, this is our next step.

The first place to look is the method we use to get information across the Internet and onto the screen.  Generally, your browser will use a method called HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.  This is a transfer protocol, one of many, and this one deals specifically with web pages.  The problem is that it transmits in the clear, but we can fix that by using the HTTPS (HTTP Secure) protocol which is encrypted.  This sounds complicated, but really it isn’t and there are already extensions for Firefox and Chrome, which are called HTTPS Everywhere and HTTPS Enforcer respectively.

Now we’ve got some protection on that aspect of things, we need to look inside the pages.  Ad networks are quite capable of tracking your behaviour as you browse the Internet, which makes sense as they want to serve you the most relevant ads.  For our part, we can do something about this with three extensions.  The first prevents adverts from being displayed and is called Adblock (Firefox) (Chrome); the second blocks all manner of tracking and ad networks and is called Ghostery.  The third sets permanent opt out cookies for 90 major ad networks and is called Beef TACO, as far as I know this one is Firefox only.

OK, that’s data transfer and tracking networks, now we need to think about information that’s been saved on the computer.  This is in two parts, the Cookies and the Cache.  Cookies are small files that are saved on your computer, websites can store a number of things in them, from the useful (site preferences) to the sinister (behaviour tracking data).  Generally cookies can be cleared from within the browser, and we have most of the sinister stuff covered with the above extensions, but if you’re using Adobe Flash Player then we have a problem.  Flash Player sets a type of cookie called LSO Cookies, which can’t be deleted by the browser as they’re managed by Flash Player, luckily there is a Firefox extension for this called BetterPrivacy.  If you’d like to see exactly what Flash Player has stored, click here.  Our next target is the cache itself, this is where your browser stores data that it’s downloaded during the browsing process.  It then uses this local store to save it having to fetch things over the network.  This speeds things up nicely, but does mean that if you’re concerned about somebody accessing this data (e.g. you’re using a computer for sensitive communications in a repressive regime), you have a problem.  The cache itself can be wiped by your browser, that’s fine.  But data can be undeleted, which is where these next two extensions come in.  The first secure wipes the Firefox Cache, the second restores the close down settings clear dialog to Firefox 3.5+, respectively, they are Secure Sanitizer and Ask For Sanitize.

Finally we come to an extension that allows you to control the operation of scripts that run in webpages, it’s called NoScript or NotScripts and is available for Firefox and Chrome respectively.  This is useful as these scripts can still betray a lot of information about your actions, but do be careful around public access WiFi (e.g. theCloud.net) as I’ve had this extension render that service unusable.

I think that covers the browser pretty well, but if anyone knows of anything else that can be added, please leave me a comment!

A Bit Of Internet Privacy – Search

Posted by on March 20, 2012 No comments

I’ll switch focus towards the technology side of things starting with this post.  We’ve been regularly seeing stories in the online media about the internet and privacy.  It does seem to me that there is a slow erosion of the basic expectations we all have of privacy, this is magnified by the ease with which information held in networked systems can be cross-referenced.  An example I remember is a time that a neighbour was incensed that he’d had a letter from the government regarding his car tax, he’d not paid it and was convinced that somebody had “grassed him up”.  It never occurred to him that the various government agencies had all of his information held electronically and that a simple SQL query would turn up his details in seconds.

Regarding our Internet privacy, things are equally worrisome given the amount of data that we carrying with us in our browsers and that flows between our computers and the networked systems we access regularly.  What can we do to help us reclaim a little bit of control?  Well there is the option of Tor and also darknets,  but I’m going to look at a few simpler options over the next few posts, all of which are free or Free Software.

For this post, I’ll cover search engines.  Google keeps quite a bit of information on your activities, it’s not the only one that does this and our choice of search service is the first place we can go to start to reclaim some control over our online lives.

The first one I’d like to mention is reasonably well known, it’s called DuckDuckGo.  It’s a search engine that doesn’t track you and doesn’t keep records of what you do.  If you want a privacy minded chat system, they also rung an XMPP server which can be accessed by any Google Talk compatible client and there is a community forum for help.  I recommend that you hit the options on DuckDuckGo and turn the “” to off, otherwise anyone with access to your proxy server logs or who is sniffing network traffic will be able to tell what you’re searching for.

The next service is a European site called Startpage.  Startpage seems to be a service that takes results from Google, but protects your privacy while doing so, they are the first search engine to have EU approval from EuroPrise.  Although they don’t seem to have a community forum, they do offer a useful proxy service for each search result they return and they use HTTP POST for searches by default which keeps the search terms out of the URL.

Both of the above search engines support the use of https connections for improved privacy and I encourage you to give them a test drive.

Why is Secular Buddhism Important? – Part 2

Posted by on March 19, 2012 No comments

In my previous post, I talked about why I think that drawing ethics from a dogmatic supernaturally inspired source isn’t really a very good idea.  In this post, I’d like to talk a little about why I think that ethics drawn from a secular source are more meaningful.  I also think that as Buddhism has a long history of doing just that, it has an awful lot to bring to the table in this process.

Why do I think this?  When we hand the responsibility over to a third party to decide our morals, or forgive us, this takes quite a lot away from us as Human Beings.  We can no longer claim to be masters of our own destinies, we cannot evolve our morality in any meaningful way and we still have responsibility for our actions.  This is because we are the ones who chose to let someone else drive and then willingly went along for the ride.

Speaking from the viewpoint of this Secular Buddhist, it’s much more meaningful to take this power back for ourselves.  Buddhist ethics are based in a clear minded view of the world in this moment, as it is.  Not coloured by dogma or beliefs, by superstitions or agendas.  We have to actually think about the issues as they are in this moment, justify what we think and why we think that way rationally and without recourse to dogma.  We have to consider the feelings of others, we must practise empathy and consider the Karma that our actions produce for ourselves and others.  This leads to a greater consideration for the humanity of others and underlines our deep and powerful connection to those around us.

It also brings me back to something I’ve covered in a previous posts, the idea of forgiveness and compassion starting with ourselves.  When forgiveness is doled out by another, we’re not required to understand or forgive and we’re not really able to, not even for ourselves.  When we are the ones doing the forgiving, we are required to understand that we’re imperfect, limited and fallible.  Coming from that position, accepting that we are flawed and imperfect, we can learn to forgive ourselves.  Once we can do that, we’re in a much better position to use that same understanding to begin to forgive others.