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The only GOOD DRONE is a DEAD DRONE. Y'hear me, scumbags?!

Get offa ma property, boy!

Something for the Weekend, Sir? There’s nothing worse in journalism than a big-mouthed writer who can’t take what he gives. So I would like to thank all those readers who emailed me personally to offer their opinions on last week’s column in which I cast doubt on Hollywood’s portrayal of computer hackers as sharp-witted and articulate with washboard abs rather than fat, spotty and smelling of Lynx and tramp sick.

A special note of appreciation goes to those who expressed shock at my apparent lack of respect for the mighty Iron Maiden before going on to tell me which popular music combos they thought were rubbish.

It was a eye-opener. I had hoped The Reg’s readership might be getting younger but I never imagined it included quite so many children.

This being the case, allow me to enhance the SEO standing of this week’s column by making an unnecessary reference to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Thank you for your indulgence.

Speaking of youngsters, I was browsing in a charity bookshop yesterday in which I noticed an old book called How to Photograph Children. One imagines it will remain gathering dust on that shelf for quite a while. It’s not exactly the kind of tome you’d wish to be seen with tucked under your arm as you bicycle back to the vicarage, is it?

There is an innate creepiness about the act of watching children. This possibly explains the decision by Judge Rebecca Ward this week in the US to clear the charges made against a bloke who shot down a drone hovering over his back garden. William Merideth said he believed the drone was spying on his two girls and, being an ordinary protective father whose primary concern is for the safety of his kids, reached for the nearest shotgun lying about the house and blasted the motherfucker out of the sky.

Hailing from northern Yurp, I am a stranger to back-garden gun culture. Guns themselves I have no trouble with, except when used outside club competition and forestry hunting. Perhaps for this reason, European gun owners are treated as charming throwbacks to a more innocent era rather than as survivalist psychos and ego-supremacists in constant terror of something made up in their own heads.

In France, for example, hunters are treated as figures of some amusement. Although there are cases of hunters catching careless ramblers with stray buckshot while trying to track down wild boar, they are much more likely to end up accidentally shooting their own dogs and even each other in their hapless adventures.

I have heard that in many locations around the US, you can shoot whomever you like just as long as they’re on your property. This must be handy when you’ve run out of bottles and tin cans but it must make visits from family over Christmas a tense affair, what with all those simmering life-long disagreements ready to explode into an almighty bloodbath simply by leaving the cap off the toothpaste.

So I am transfixed by the court’s finding that Mr Merideth is within his rights to shoot down a drone invading his personal space – not because I am appalled but because I think it’s absolutely fantastic. To me, he sounds like Fuzzy Lumpkins from the Power Puff Girls for digital generation.

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Just think of all those intrusive CCTV cameras staring at you as you leave the front door, tracking you down the street, watching as you wait for a bus, record your every sniff and cough while on the bus itself, following you into work and sniggering at you all day to make sure you’re at your desk. Bugger the drones, let’s poke all those fixed-camera bastards in the eye!

Then there are the unwelcome intrusions into my personal cyberspace to deal with. Perhaps I could persuade a judge to justify my violent retaliative action against every Nigerian scammer and American spammer attempting to fill my inbox.

As for Google’s laughably targeted ads or those irrelevant crap promotions you keep seeing on Twitter, how would you like a slug of digital lead between your virtual eyes, pal? Oh and what about GCHQ prying through my children’s web history? Bloody paedos, the lot of them.

There are plenty of other instances when instant retribution would do me nicely.

I recently had to deliver a presentation of a bespoke development project to a customer, directed onto a company laptop that had been set up with the software. Just as we began, she began plugging in an unfamiliar computer. When challenged, she said she felt more comfortable using her own laptop from home than the one I’d spent a week configuring. She refused to be talked out of it.

Rather than desperately trying to install Oracle runtime and shitloads of support files before delivering what turned out to be the most incompetent tech demo since the dawn of the industrial age, what I should have done was reach into my shoulder bag for a shotgun and blasted her laptop into aluminium filings. And I’d have had the might of the courts behind me.

Don’t stop there. Does the postman keep invading your private space with bills? Blamm!!! Is that nice old lady from the other end of the street about to ask you to mind her cats while she goes on another cruise to the West Indies? Kapow!!! The next time your neighbour climbs a 20ft ladder to “trim the hedge” just outside your living room window and remains there all afternoon watching your TV, take the fucker out with a Glock model 40.

Skateboarder almost caught your heels? Cyclist overshooting the white line by a metre? Someone looking too intently at their smartphone to walk in a straight line? Take that! And that! Don’t mess with me, I’ll blow you away!

Come the great legal revolution, my firing range will also be lined up with auto checkouts from supermarkets, cash machines that keep showing me ads, gas engineers who hand me leaflets about Hive, and everyone everywhere even remotely involved with the Internet of Things. Intrusive, every single one.

Click click boom. It’s the only language these drones understand.

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Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. When GCHQ get around to reading this column (no doubt half an hour before he even submits it to The Reg’s backroom vultures), he would like it to be understood that he does not own any guns nor intend acquiring any. He does not want to shoot anyone. Those supermarket auto checkouts, on the other hand, better watch their backs...

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