Seen it...

As an IT guy I've seen one of their so-called 'secure' systems.

All users Domain Admins (because it wouldn't work otherwise) and the Administrative Shares still active on the server. So, if you're a user of said system, you have unrestriced access to everything, even the server's operating system.

Led to believe this system is installed in numerous places round the country, too.

This is a gift!

This is a gift to those who believe in the noble and entirely innocent matter of keeping your private details literally private.

A gift and yes, also a sacrifice, and a very unpleasant one for those that have not chosen to be 'given' to this sacrifice but have become part of it. This isn't 'possible terrorists' or 'possible criminals' it's just a 'legal'/'legitimate' sample of the population.

There will yet and inevitably be some much more monstrous outrage committed against common privacy in the not so far future, and this business with the missing discs will be the case where people will look back and say "well it happened there, and nobody did anything. No one took it seriously, they were all trying to play it down.".

Well of course something should be done now, and of course it wont happen because they want to be seen to be right, right now. In fact it's just a new problem which the politicians should have the wisdom to take less than personally, which they don't.

... and digital civil liberties will default to zero.

But I'd like to remind all dear readers of this darling disrespectful Reg.ime that civil liberties have always defaulted to zero, just as soon as defined.

And all the civil liberties we have, we have because people have realised the rottenness of the default, and acted to get it changed.

The point is to recognise when a definition has taken place. Were you asked about that, or was it just a consequence, a side-effect?

Technological development may be somehow inevitable, but social - political development is a matter of action and choice.

If you can't choose to be ready to act on this now, prepare your information and understanding now from this case to use in the next, more serious privacy battle...

0845, 0870 numbers

Back in the days, local calls used to be cheaper than national calls (there was even a regional rate for calls up to 56km away). This hasn't been the case (for most people) since the world and his cat became telecommunications resellers, all of whom claim to offer cheaper calls than everyone else. Suddenly we were promised "national calls at local rates"; and then when that wasn't enough to tempt us, tethered lines eventually started offering inclusive minutes like old-skool mobiles. But the inclusive minutes come with restrictions: they cannot be used for mobiles, nor "non-geographic" numbers (i.e. 0845, 0870).

When they were first introduced, 0845 numbers (used to be 0345) were charged at the same rate as local calls and 0870 numbers (used to be 0990) were charged at the same rate as national calls. But now, on most price plans, local and national calls are charged at the same rate -- and that rate is lower than 0845 calls, let alone 0870 calls.

There is still a price plan with very low line rental and no inclusive calls at all, aimed at people who only ever use the phone occasionally ("two calls a year: christmas and my eldest son's birthday"), and which does distinguish between local and national calls. This is how companies can get away with talking about "local rate" calls. It's still dodgy, though, because most people are on other price plans.

Another thing that has changed for the worse is that businesses nowadays tend to answer as soon as you call, then tell you you're in a queue -- if I'm going to spend the best part of an hour waiting to speak to a human being, I'd rather not be paying for the privilege.