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Some of you may have seen reports in the media recently about the government’s NHS Care Records System – a huge national database of patient medical records and personal information sometimes referred to as the NHS ‘Spine’ that everyone’s details are due to be uploaded to sometime in the next year.

There are 1.3 million people working in the NHS as well as a huge number of temporary agency staff—not just doctors and nurses, but managers, administrative staff, IT staff and contractors. Potentially thousands of NHS employees and central government bureaucrats will have access to not only your medical records but also your demographic details, name, address, NHS Number, GP details, phone number (even if it’s ex-directory) and mobile number. Anything you disclose to any doctor, nurse, midwife, health visitor, health professional, NHS employee, pharmacist, at any hospital, surgery or clinic will be stored on this massive central government database. This could include sensitive issues such as sexuality, ethnicity, genetics, mental health issues, illicit drug use, abortion, contraception, impotence, paternity, infertility, HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, infidelity, personal relationships, emotional problems, test results, domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse.

Then there is the risk of computer errors that could have you wrongly labelled an alcoholic for example, as in the case of one woman who only discovered the mistake after it had been on her records for 15 years. She is now one of the most vociferous campaigners against the Spine.

After much opposition from the public and a large proportion of GPs and negative coverage in the press, the Dept of Health have backed down somewhat and it’s now (allegedly) possible to opt out of having some of your details on this database.

One of the main ways is to write to your GP requesting that they don’t upload the data they hold about you onto the Spine.

For more information about opting out (including a standard letter you can print out and send to your GP) go to http://www.nhsconfidentiality.org/?page_id=9

Even if you feel there isn’t anything in your records you wouldn’t mind sharing with god knows who, you should think about opting out on principle as an objection to the increasing attacks on our privacy. What with ID cards and the National Identity Register, the database state and complete surveillance society is almost upon us…

Very hi-res images.

http://www.xrez.com/

Courtesy of Barney.

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

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Hāfez was a Persian mystic and poet. He was born sometime between the years 1310 and 1337 in Shiraz, Medieval Persia. John Payne, who has translated the Diwan Hafez, regards Hafez as one of the three greatest poets of the world.

His lyrical poems, known as ghazals, are noted for their beauty and bring to fruition the love, mysticism, and early Sufi themes that had long pervaded Persian poetry. Moreover, his poetry possessed elements of modern surrealism.

This picture was sent by a friend of mine in Iran – quite unusual to see one of Hafez’s poems on a wall somewhere in the west.

Over the course of 20 days in May and June, the community of Webware.com users voted for its favorite Web applications. These are the results: the top 100 Web apps, 10 in each of 10 categories, determined by Webware readers and the fans of the sites that made the final cut.

See the list

From Guardian’s website (Comment is free..) by Nasrin Alavi

Washington is using the sort of rhetoric it used in the build-up to the war in Iraq. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, looms forever large in the western media. So you may care to see a few Iranian faces other than Ahmadinejad’s for a change.

The video above, for a song by the underground Iranian band Kiosk, titled Love for Speed, was filmed entirely in Tehran. It’ll give you a flavour of the sort of music that booms out of rickety taxis and flash cars alike in city’s maddening traffic. Kiosk are very popular in Iran.

The video was shot in a two-and-a-half days by Ahmad Kiarostami (son of the legendary Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami). Ahmad just walked up to passers-by in Tehran asking them to mime the lyrics.

I have to warn you that Kiosk sound far too much like Dire Straits. I also have to share a dark Iranian secret with you here. There are many Iranians who love Dire Straits, Pink Floyd and Manchester United Football Club with a passion. Although the track is subtitled the translation in the video isn’t that great. But you’ll get the gist, the opening lyrics are:

The power of love or love of power
Modernism versus tradition forever

Living in the axis of evil
Drive a Citroen 2CV and a have a love for speed

Why feel any pain and suffer
With pills and powders at hand

Nothing to eat for lunch or dinner
Then let them eat yellowcake

http://www.flight404.com/blog/index.php?paged=2

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deal/57872/hp-dx2250-athlon-64-x2-5000-2-6ghz-/

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

See the talk

I found this video while looking at the following sites:

prothink.org

wakeupfromyourslumber.com

I also stumbled on this article which is extremely controversial:

Holocaust is Nothing But A HoloHoax.

A word of caution: some of the material in the above sites are obviously anti-zionist and in some cases may seem anti-Semite – the authors of these articles deny that they racist or anti-semitic and that they are simply telling us facts that you do not normally hear about in the main stream media. I’ve read quite a few of their articles as a reference point on what ‘the other side’ is talking about – they do not in any way reflect own opinions.