This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don't express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all.
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.
I find your comment somewhat alarmist, and lacking historical context. The City of London (from which the Temple end of the Garden Bridge starts) is many many hundreds of years older than the UK itself, and has always been privately owned and governed by shadowy, corporate and arcane processes. Traditionally even the Queen is not allowed to enter the City of London without the say-so of the Lord Mayor. This "private place operating as a public space" has been operating for centuries and stewarded the emergence of London as a leading global financial centre and until recently capital of the largest Empire the world has ever seen.
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.
The bridge is a particularly contentious subject since it's funded by tens of millions of pounds of public money. If The City wants an independent bridge, surely it shouldn't be a problem to stump 40 million rather than asking TfL as if this was a major transport project.
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.
I would have thought that the City of London Corporation would be opposed to Wi-Fi tracking. Given their negative reaction when they discovered that the street bins were tracking people [0]. The technology in question was Presence Orb [1].
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.
I think you're being a bit harsh about the C of E - as a Scot they seemed to be a rather friendly organisation untroubled with strong beliefs, particularly about the "God" thing.
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 see your Church of Scotland and raise you a Free Church of Scotland.
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.
I grew up in a wee Scottish village that had a population of barely a thousand and had (when I was a kid) six heavily attended churches of various denominations of which, I have to admit, the Church of Scotland was the most light hearted in its own miserable and dour way.
Edit: I'm pretty sure we had Wee Frees and Wee Wee Frees.
Edit2: I'm pretty sure "church" isn't the right word...
I don't get your Church of England reference. I'm a communicant member of a liberal CofE church and these restrictions would be anathema to me and to most of our church's congregation. Indeed, I "play a [rather loud] musical instrument" for the church every week...
Liberal generally means in support of gay marriage. I'm a member of a liberal church and we're very much in support of it.
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 don't know: I'm not aware we've ever been asked. My guess is that our church would if we were allowed to, but that the diocese and Lambeth Palace would overrule it.
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.
One of my good friends is a CoE Vicar, but I do really struggle with the fact the organisation in some aspects is really backwards.
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.
It doesn't make sense to call gay partnership a marriage. Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.
> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.
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.
They did. Ancient Rome and contemporary Japan are two examples relying heavily on adoption to pass on property to the next generation. The biological reality of genitors is only partly relevant to determine family ties.
In its historical roots, though often (but far from always) without the "orphan" part, that's exactly what marriage is: the process by which a family chooses some non-family person to share with some member of the family in the inheritance of the family. (Sometimes in a reciprocal, but even when so often not symmetrical, relationship with another family.)
> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon
> ...
> with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.
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.
So you talking about gay rights but at the same time you refuse billions of people who lived and live outside of Biblical views to have their own views on the subject?
You mean including the many millions who live in cultures where polygamy is normal? And where "female husbands" are well established (there are millions of women living as "female husbands" with wives - sometimes more than one - in Africa).
The best thing about this comment is: This opinion doesn't matter any more.
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'.
Marriage is simply a human need as long as it still takes 20-30 years to raise children. If you do not at least promise your partner to be there until the end of life, there can be no (perceived?) certainity that you are not shooting yourself in the foot by getting children.
And because raising kids takes so long, and needs full energy by a couple, society (religion, state, etc) supports being loyal to each other in many ways.
And in fact female-female marriages (though at least in theory not sexual) have a long history in some cultures as a means for infertile women to gain heirs...
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. "
> Marriage is a strictly defined cultural phenomenon meaning a relationship between a man and a woman with the original intention to continue the family by having kids.
So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?
You can call computer a calculator since it does indeed 'calculate' stuff, but you'll be in a minority. Computer's got so much more than a simple calculator, same with marriages - it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.
> it is much more for a man and woman in every country in the world.
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.
>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.
Does it make more sense to change Visa laws to allow more flexible relationships? Would you then not need to be 'married' and just use your partnership status?
No, it doesn't. (Even if we were looking at it from the perspective of the country before same sex marriage was made legal.)
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.
Amusingly (or not), the UK went to all the effort of introducing "civil partnerships" which involved exactly all that upheaval, about a decade before just introducing equal marriage, which then led to a load more effort to allow porting a partnership into a marriage, as well as leaving partnerships in place for those who do want one or already have one.
I can see how someone might have asked that question in 1995.
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.
I don't know what culture you're from, but culture is people, and support for gay marriage has increased massively in countries around the world, and is probably the majority in western Europe and North and South America. If by culture you mean "how things have always been done" then that's saying that public opinion never changes, and that slavery should never have been abolished, women never given the vote etc. Times change, and happily my culture at least is far less homophobic, racist and sexist than it used to be even 30 years ago. There are sadly still areas that are still very homophobic (parts of eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, for example), but overall the momentum is in the right direction.
I already gave you an example in another thread of how it serves a purpose for gay people. There are many legal advantages to having your relationship legally recognized. E.g., immigration, hospital visitation rights, ...
> So who is picking up one aspect of the complex relationship here?
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.
Of course the man/woman/kids abstraction leaks - many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people, and people who just plain don't want to have kids.
> many cultures use marriage to describe the legal union of old people, infertile people
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"...
No it isn't. Marriage was adopted by the Church and redefined along the lines you describe - it existed long before that as a legal process to control inheritance. You're welcome to do whatever you think is best within the confines of your own marriage but to say that marriage intrinsically has your preferred attributes is incorrect.
> Marriage was adopted by the Church and redefined along the lines you describe - it existed long before that as a legal process to control inheritance.
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.
So are you saying that millions (and now billions) of Chinese and Indians who never had Bible and were absolutely poor used marriage to pass inheritance along? Also there were thousands of tribes who never had to worry about inheritance but who have traditions for marriages, no?
Actually, if you bother to look you'll find that tribal societies often have very rich culture and rules around marriage exactly because "worrying about inheritance" is a critical for their very survival. And "worrying about inheritance" is also a substantial part of the reason there is a rich history of marriage that goes beyond one man marrying one woman in these societies.
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).
Same sex marriage is still not legal in NI, so you're not quite right for "UK". And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014.
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.
>And gay people were only allowed to marry in 2014.
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.
"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."
The small educational centre where I teach has recently provided free wifi to users of the building. It is a good connection. You have to give a mobile phone number once to use the system.
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.
> You have to give a mobile phone number once to use the system.
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.
MAC addresses are part of the link layer of an Ethernet network. The same link layer segment of a network must have unique MAC addresses so that packets can be unambiguously routed to the correct destination. MAC addresses actually consist of two parts, one part is assigned to the manufacturer, the other part is basically a serial number that the manufacturer generates. So from looking at a MAC address, you can look up who manufactured the device. The MAC addresses are not broadcast beyond the layer 2 network segment that you're connected to. However, that does mean that anyone in range can read the MAC address of your wifi card as it is sent 'in the clear' (not encrypted). Generally MAC addresses are also used for access control (though this is not particularly effective as MAC addresses can be spoofed) and for long-term IP address assignments (same IP can be assigned on subsequent connections).
Yes, computers broadcast their MAC address when they first connect to a network so that they can, for example, obtain an IP address via DHCP. However the MAC address isn't forwarded beyond the LAN to which the computer is connected.
No flying kites? Isn't that what we were saying you couldn't do under Taliban control about 5 years ago and laughing at how ludicrous it was?
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.
Strictly speaking, flying kites is not allowed in other London streets as well ("any street, to the obstruction, annoyance, or danger of the residents or passengers", from a 19th century law http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/10-11/89/section/28). Flying a kite from the pavement of Waterloo Bridge seems intuitively a bad idea so that's not very controversial. It does undermine their "park" claims though...
I'd be tempted fly a bag of cheap phones under a kite.. "The tracking system says there's a gang of people gathering... What?!? Now they're hovering over the water?!?"
I've sent one off, let's see what happens. I've done quite a few before. If they don't reply, it's often worth trying again but rephrasing or targeting a specific detail.
I did a talk on privacy topics from a user's perspective at a small 'tech fair' this weekend and I was delighted to see this tweet showing a map of the venue showing everyone's precise location: https://twitter.com/johnebridge/status/662984007370612736
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...
With face-recognition software using CCTV cameras pointed at your face while in the checkout lane they will recognize and profile you, credit card or cash, WiFi or no WiFi. At least, the technology is there.
Not the original poster, but when you sign into a Wi-Fi network, the router needs to know where to send the packets, so it needs to have a way to identify your device. That's why all devices that can connect to a network have what's called a MAC address[1] – a very long number that is unique to your device. Your device also broadcasts that address when it scans for networks, so just about all the time. When you control several access points and a few of them see the same device at the same time, you can triangulate the location of that device down to a few metres.
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.
I'm not an expert, but yes, when you disable Wi-Fi, your device will stop scanning for networks and broadcasting your MAC address, so you can no longer be tracked that way. More recently, phones have also started randomising MAC addresses while scanning (starting in iOS 8, I don't know about others), so you can only be tracked for a short time as long as your Wi-Fi is on but not connected.
I have no idea, sorry. I just happened to see it when someone else re-tweeted it and it looked perfect.
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.
This does seem worrying, particularly the private citizens being given some limited subset of police power, to issue fines and confiscate items.
> 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.
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.
I would understand that in a private place such as Disneyland or in an ultra-orderly city such as Singapore. But for a so-called public park, this is an insult to democracy. Part of what makes public parks interesting is how impromptu activities take place.
Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.
It's a £75 million project being set up and run by a charity, the Garden Bridge Trust, so it won't be publicly owned. It will be closed to the public when it's rented out for commercial purposes.
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.
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.
I guess this is another symptom of the UK's rapid slide to totalitarianism. Recreational areas probably shouldn't be strictly surveilled and regulated by quasi-cops at all times.
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?
There is an obvious creeping issue regarding the privatisation of public space, which is the interesting part here and what we should be pushing back against.
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.
The article is bitter sweet to me. Bitter because it's yet another little step in a huge march intended to erode freedom. Sweet, because they track WiFi signals.
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.
I always do it both to preserve battery and for privacy (and I never turned on location services) but a customer of mine, in the business of counting people entering and leaving stores, told me that about 60 to 80% of people has WiFi turned on all the time. That was a surprise. I would have taken a zero off those figures if I were to guess.
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.