Tom Lachecki

I went out for the evening and came back to find BBC News reporting that Canning Circus police station — which is 30m across the road from my flat — had been "firebombed".

As the assorted peoples of the internet gather around Facebook, Twitter and the rest of them watching violence unfold in several major English cities, a couple of things cross my mind.

It's referendum day in the UK: the day when all vote-registered citizens announce whether they are happy with the existing First-Past-The-Post electoral system, or whether they would prefer the Alternative Vote system.

Two short stories on copyright.

A 69-year old Viennese tourist named Matkza was forced by police officers to delete photos he'd taken of the Vauxhall bus station in London, saying it was "strictly forbidden" and recording the passport numbers and hotel addresses of him and his companions, presumably because the Security Services at headquartered nearby.

As our beloved Western civilisation finds itself teetering on the brink of a stage in the inevitable social cycle that involves a government committed to maintaining order at all costs, it is more important than ever that we do not let Britain descend into a terrified nation.

The European directive that requires Internet Service Providers to log their customers' communications came into force in the UK today, and means that details of user emails and internet phone calls will be stored by ISPs for twelve months. On paper, Directive 2006/24/EC is not such a bad thing. In real life, though, the fact of the matter is that the European Directive on Data Retention is highly controversial.

Since I have utterly failed at maintaining Tomalak's Tuesday Tip — though I do intend to pick that up in 2009 — I have reformatted some conversation logs into interview style, as I found them quite interesting on the re-read. Hopefully someone out there might get something out of the ideas of myself and of people I know.

Gordon Brown has finally spoken up loudly and jumped on the anti-Russia bandwagon with chafing hypocrisy.

Reasonably predictably, Vladimir Putin is suggesting that the United States government played a significant role during the recent conflict in Georgia, a former Soviet state. But I am starting to think that there is a little more to this than the usual slant.