Crimebusting with CCTV

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Image © naughton321. Used with permission. Well, well. The Register reports that

Liverpool-based operator TJ Morris Ltd, better known on the High St as Home Bargains, is fed up with shoplifters. So it has set up an innovative new scheme which involves publishing on the net CCTV pictures of individuals suspected of shoplifting.

As the company explains on its site: “Below are a series of images of suspected shoplifters in Home Bargains stores.

“We are keen to identify them and pass their details onto the police. We are offering a reward of up to £500 per instance, for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution for shoplifting.”

Hmmm… I’ve just looked at the said web site and it does indeed have pictures of various unsavoury-looking types. But then, I reflected, most of us look pretty unsavoury when snapped by a CCTV camera. I’ve seen myself on CCTV, for example, and I wouldn’t want to meet me on a dark night. While Home Bargains’ approach may seem aggressive, it reflects a broader trend where businesses and homeowners are turning to high-quality surveillance systems to safeguard their properties.

Smart cameras today go beyond grainy footage—they offer high-resolution video, motion detection, and even facial recognition capabilities. For instance, smart home cameras can alert you in real-time to suspicious activity, allowing you to respond quickly and provide valuable evidence to law enforcement if necessary. To make sure you’re choosing the right camera for your home’s specific needs, you can find more info here on what features to consider and how to maximize your home security setup.

Of course, while technology might catch the culprit in the act, knowing what to do with that footage is a whole different game. Just because you’ve got them on tape doesn’t mean justice is automatic. That’s where having sound legal guidance can turn that grainy clip into a real case. Whether it’s theft, trespassing, or just something that made your dog bark at 2 a.m., understanding your rights—and limits—as a property owner is crucial.

That’s why I’d tip my hat to a team like Knutson + Casey. They don’t just know the law—they help you use it, the right way. Whether you’re dealing with a neighborly dispute turned legal or something a bit more criminal in nature, they’ve got the experience to take your side of the story and make sure it’s not just heard but backed up with solid legal muscle. Because in a world where everyone’s watching, it still pays to have someone who knows how to handle what happens after the footage rolls.So it’s interesting to read the next part of the Register’s piece:

A cautionary note is supplied by David Hooper, a Partner at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain and a Specialist in Libel Law. He said: “If police put up a wanted poster, they have what is known as ‘qualified privilege’ and are protected in law. “That is not the case with private individuals or businesses, who would have to be very sure they could justify their actions. If challenged, they would have to prove reasonable and objective grounds to suspect somebody of having shoplifted. “If they got it wrong, they could open themselves to a libel action.” Quite so, m’lud. I can picture the scene now. My QC is addressing the Jury in his summing up: “The plaintiff, a perfectly respectable university professor of modest means but somewhat crumpled appearance, has had his reputation destroyed by the false implication, conveyed through the publication of these CCTV images, that he is a common thief, whereas in fact he has for many years selflessly donated a substantial portion of his income to the support of worthy organisations such as Apple Computer Inc, Amazon.co.uk, Heffers Booksellers, The Economist, the New Yorker and other causes too numerous to mention. The pain and anguish caused to him and his family by such cavalier and defamatory publication can barely be imagined. I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that he is entitled not only to a full and prominent apology from the organisation that has so cruelly traduced him, but also to substantial damages.” Quite so. £500,000 plus costs would do nicely. A picture is worth not just a thousand words, but five hundred grand in old money.

Submariners of mainstream media

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Quentin pointed me at this terrific essay about the PR industry by Paul Graham. Sample:

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren’t dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won’t bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they’ve worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don’t want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it’s the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won’t lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true. But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants were our target market, and we were paying the piper.

It’s a terrific article, full of uncomfortable insights (and often bringing up echoes of what Nick Davies found when researching his book, Flat Earth News). The peg for the piece was a spate of stories on the theme “The suits are back”. The general tenor of the meme was that it was no longer tech-chic to wear jeans and tee-shirts. (which of course is baloney.) Paul Graham did some detective work based on spotting common phrases in the various ‘suit’ stories and found that they all led back to the original client — an outfitter chain called The Men’s Wearhouse.

Stephen Fry on the “pointless babble” report

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Lovely blog post.

The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds. Apparently, according to Pears (the soapmakers presumably – certainly their “study” is froth and bubble) 40% of Twitter is “pointless babble”, (http://is.gd/2mKSg) which means of course that a full 60% of Twitter discourse is NOT pointless babble, which is disappointing. Very disappointing. I would have hoped 100% of Twitter was fully free of earnestness, usefulness and commercial intent. Why do these asinine reports jump onto a bandwagon they don’t understand and why do those reporting on them relate with such glee that a service that was never supposed in the first place to be more than gossipy tittle-tattle and proudly banal verbal doodling is “failing to deliver meaningful commercial or political content”. Bollocky bollocks to the lot of them. They can found their own “enterprise oriented” earnest microblogging service. Remind me to avoid it.

Precisely!

White-Fi

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Interesting post in Tech Review.

Long-range, low-cost wireless Internet could soon be delivered using radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. The blueprints for a computer network that uses ‘white spaces’, which are empty fragments of the spectrum scattered between used frequencies, will be presented today at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain.

TV stations have traditionally broadcast over lower frequencies that carry information longer distances. However, with the ongoing transition from analog to digital broadcasts, more unused frequencies are opening up than ever.

By tapping into these lower frequencies, it should be easier to provide broadband Internet access in rural areas and fill in gaps in city Wi-Fi networks. For example, the spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz, which was originally allotted to analog TV channels from 21 to 51, offers a longer range than conventional Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 gigahertz. “Imagine the potential if you could connect to your home [Internet] router from up to a mile,” says Ranveer Chandra, a member of the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research behind the project.

The FCC ruled last November that companies could build devices that transmit over white spaces but also gave strict requirements that this should not interfere with existing broadcasts, both from TV stations and from other wireless devices that operate within the same spectrum. Chandra and his colleagues designed a set of protocols, which they call ‘White Fi’, to successfully navigate the tricky regulatory and technical obstacles involved with using white spaces.

Wonder what OFCOM’s attitude to this would be?

Ignorance on stilts

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A long piece in The New York Review of Books about the emerging news ecology begins with this idiotic assertion:

The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium’s pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are, remarkably, still at it. Kaus, who started the blog kausfiles in 1999, is now at Slate, and Sullivan, who began The Daily Dish in 2000, now posts at The Atlantic. Both still use the style they helped popularize—short, sharp, conversational bursts of commentary and opinion built around links to articles, columns, documents, and other blogs.

Doesn’t exactly improve one’s confidence in the quality of the subsequent analysis, does it? Kaus and Sullivan are indeed entertaining and prominent bloggers, but they are not recognised as ‘pioneers’ by anybody outside of clueless mainstream media. The truth is that it was only when Sullivan — a prominent old-media commentator — morphed into a blogger that the world noticed the existence of the new medium.

Growl.

Thanks to Magnus Ramage for the link.

Pointless babble or something more important

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Doug Clow has a thoughtful blog post sparked by a cod ‘research’ report that 40% of the stuff on Twitter is “pointless babble”.

Fundamentally, though, this study (almost) entirely misses the point of what people on Twitter experience. It sampled the Twitter public stream, which is the total assemblage of what everyone using the service is producing.

But what looks like ‘pointless babble’ isn’t pointless, if it’s from people you know or care about. It’s social grooming, it’s keeping in touch. It’s what most human conversation is about. If you think this stuff is pointless babble, you’re really not going to enjoy parties. Or indeed be likely to maintain fulfilling personal relationships. On Twitter, you get to choose whose ‘pointless babble’ you want to follow. Almost nobody who actually uses Twitter uses it by reading the public stream.

If you learn about Twitter by reading these sorts of reports, you’ll get a bizarre view that really tells you very little about what it’s like to use as a service…

I’m consistently amazed by the way people in the mainstream media and elsewhere project their fantasies onto Twitter — much as they used to do with blogs until their employers told them that they had to blog. Twitter is one of the most useful web services that I use, but that’s because it provides me with a low-intensity way of plugging into the collective IQ of colleagues, friends, acquaintances and peers. For me it’s at least as important as RSS, and that’s saying something.

Can the US fix itself?

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I’m working on a theory of incompetent systems — i.e systems which are in danger of catastrophic failure but which, for various reasons (absence of effective feedback loops, undue power of vested interests, etc.) will not be able to fix themselves in time to avoid catastrophic failure. Climate change looks to me like an incompetent system problem. Intellectual property law is another. And the American healthcare system is yet another. Watching the way the public debate about health reform in the US has been maliciously hijacked by powerful vested interests was reminiscent of the way debates about IP are skewed. But healthcare is far more important, and yet it’s being allowed to happen. It’s unbelievable.

Not surprisingly, therefore, I was struck by this blast from Mark Anderson. Excerpt:

If it were not such a tragic struggle, watching the entrenched interests fighting any change in the U.S. healthcare system would be vaguely amusing, like watching elephant races.

Unfortunately, these aren’t cute elephants, but a cancer on our society: the growth in their wastefulness, and in the value they subtract from the healthcare process every year, is bankrupting good companies, destroying the business foundations of the country, and enriching a few at overwhelming cost to the many.

While the American healthcare system has many problems and parts, it does not defy analysis. And while it will take many different reforms to perfect it, just a single change would bring it back from the dead. The problem is simple: private insurance companies. These groups do not have patient care in mind; they are only focused on extracting money from the system. They do not even operate as part of a healthcare system: with the same basic structure, they could extract money from any supply chain.

The worst part of this scheme is that the real customer, the patient, is essentially prevented from being the customer. She does not know the cost of her care, she has little or no control over those costs, and the result is the vendor is free to drive them to the sky, with everyone getting a cut – except the patient. Why not charge $100 for aspirin? Who cares? Why not charge 2x for a broken leg? Why not run 4x too many MRIs? Who cares? The MRI vendor is happy, the hospital with the new machine needing to be paid off is happy, the doctor getting paid per use, and reviewed for quotas, is happy, and the patient – Who cares?

Most insurance companies learned long ago that their real business is in investment: life insurance companies are the obvious early case. Collecting and paying out premiums and claims is just a sideline, a way to get the cash needed for the investment business. You knew this, right?

So it is with American healthcare. These companies are not in the business of healthcare: they are in the business of extracting as much cash as possible from the system, on a compound annual growth basis which is 3-4x the cost of living. How much would they spend to keep this bloodletting from being interrupted? Well, the bank lobby spent $1B to remove the Glass Steagall protections, just before the banks helped blow up the US economy. I would guess that what we are seeing right now, in Washington, DC, is the largest amount of money ever spent on lobbying a single cause – all in the name of retaining a broken system, one which costs more than twice the next one down, one often classified as something like 37th in the world, just behind Slovenia…

When the US — after eight years of moronic, destructive, wasteful government — succeeded in electing Obama I remember being struck by the country’s extraordinary ability to reinvent itself. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe Obama was just a blip?

On the other hand, if he can succeed in getting meaningful healthcare refore passed, then he will go down as the greatest president since FDR.

Labour’s “Twitter tsar”

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From today’s Guardian.

The Labour party has appointed a ‘Twitter tsar’ with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.

Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has been made the party’s new media campaigns spokeswoman ahead of an election next year that she says will be the first ‘new media election’. A recent study for a newspaper voted McCarthy the most “influential MP” on Twitter – with more than 1,600 followers.

Labour’s advisers are buoyant this week because the party thinks it stole a march on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, by using Twitter to get out a defence of the NHS in the aftermath of an attack by Conservative MEP Dan Hannan on the health system.

Though all involved insist the “we love the NHS” Twitter topic grew organically and was not composed of purely Labour activists, the prime minister and his wife Sarah Brown used Twitter to get their defences in first. The “we love the NHS” trending topic was so popular that the site crashed on Wednesday night.

I’m assuming that the soubriquet ‘tsar’ is the Guardian‘s, not Labour’s. If so it’s just the latest example of a lazy, historically-illiterate habit. It first surfaced in journalism, I think, many years ago in the US media with stuff about a President (Nixon?) appointing a “Drugs Czar”. This was not, as you might pedantically have supposed, the capo di tutti capi of the illegal drugs racket, but a government official charged with running the so-called “war on drugs”, which was at least as misguided as the later “war on terror”.

Er, harrumph!

Thanks for Pete for the original link.