I’ve been doing some research over the past couple of days for the Pirate Party UK into CCTV cameras and how effective they are in both catching and the prevention of crime. Here are the results of my findings.
Number of CCTV cameras in the UK
A figure of 4.2 million CCTV cameras has been floating round for some time now, which came from a paper written in 2002 by Michael McCahill & Clive Norris. Out of a sample of 211 business on Putney high street and Richmond Road they found that 41% had CCTV cameras installed with an average of 4.1 cameras per system. From here it was just a case of scaling these figures up, they took 41% (102,910) of all registered businesses in London and multiplied that figure by 4.1 to estimate the amount of private CCTV cameras (421,9310). Which they then rounded to 500,000 as a guestimate of how many public CCTV cameras there are. Dividing the population of London (7.2 million) by this number found that there were approximately 1 camera for every 14 people. Presuming that this figure would be representative of the UK they then divided the population (60 million) by 14 to get the 4.2 million figure.
Even at the time of the 4.2 million figure would have been questionable as the report made huge assumptions, but now 7 years later it is doubtful that it’s in anyway accurate of the number of CCTV cameras today.
If we used the same methodology and updated figures such as the ‘guestimate’ by recent headlines that there are now over 1 million CCTV cameras in London and using updated population data we get an updated figure of just over 8.1 million cameras in the UK today. However this data will be again very inaccurate.
Number of crimes are solved by CCTV cameras
In an internal police report in 2006 looked at 269 street crimes across London and found that only 7 had been solved by CCTV evidence alone. The media of course picked up on this and reported that “only 3% of crime is solved by CCTV” failing to take into account that this study was performed in London where there is a higher density of cameras and discounting the amount of crimes solved only partly by CCTV.
Recently headlines have been floating round saying that it takes 1000 cameras to solve one crime. This number came from another internal police report claiming that only 1000 crimes had been solved in the whole of London by CCTV cameras. Guessing that there are over 1 million CCTV cameras in London they divided the two numbers to come up with their 1 crime for every 1000 cameras figure.
So assuming there are in fact 4.2 million cameras in the UK we could calculate that 4200 crimes are solved using CCTV cameras, or using my crudely updated figure of 8.1 million 8100 crimes. Even if these figures were correct it is questionable whether the government should be spending over £500 million a year on CCTV to solve 8100 crimes considering the vast majority of these cameras will be privately owned.
In October of last year a national CCTV strategy was published outlining that they wanted to compare CCTV evidence to DNA and fingerprint evidence to see if it is effective. Unfortunately there isn’t any data of how many cases are brought to court with CCTV evidence as even now there is no one is currently compiling the data. So we dont know if Police should be spending more or less time trying to collect CCTV evidence or if the governments £500 million a year is worth the investment.
CCTV in crime prevention
These figures don’t take into account what CCTV was first designed for, a preventative method to deter would be criminals. So to get a clear indication on the success of CCTV we should look at the effect on crime levels in total. A meta study in 2002 for the home office entitled “Crime prevention effects of closed circuit television: a systematic review” looked at 18 CCTV evaluations from the UK and America comparing areas before and after CCTV cameras were installed and comparing them to similar control areas. This study found that CCTV did in fact reduce total crime rates but only by 4%. The study concluded that CCTV seems to work in some areas but not others and noted that many of the evaluations did not control for regression towards the mean.
Another report in 2005 by the University of Leicester looked at 14 CCTV systems which found that only one provided a statistically significant reduction in crime that could be accredited to the CCTV system, and that was focused on the protection of car parks. The study also found that fear of crime wasn’t reduced as a result of the CCTV being installed and that there was little planning or organisation in camera placement and management, instead local governments were applying for grant money just because it was available.
Personally…
Personally I don’t have a problem with the idea of CCTV in general, I just don’t think it should be used on a massive scale trying to cover the vast majority of our urban areas. Instead I’d rather see a reduction in public money spent on CCTV cameras which should be placed in more strategic and well thought out places. I’d also like to see a limit on the amount of time CCTV footage can be held and laws put in place to prevent future and current technology profiling people.
Popularity: 81% [?]
It’s one of the biggest rumours amongst geeks, who have all thought at some point in their time online that Google should bring out their own operating system. Why? Because they seem to get things right. And it has finally been confirmed on the google blog, Google are turning Chrome into an operating system.
But why are they doing this?
Google isn’t stupid, and have been expanding more and more into the top down approach to keep you coming back to Google making it harder to use competing products. Android is a prime example of this, when you turn on an Android phone for the first time you need to make a Google account. Which means that anything you do on that phone they can link to your account and in turn learn more about you to “deliver more targeted adverts”.
But learning about you isn’t Google’s only concern. Google are obsessed with speed, simply because the less time it takes to get to a Google results page the quicker you can click an advert. Google have made server side loading times as quick as possible by having vast server farms in countries all over the world and now they are coming after client side loading times.
What will it look like?
This is what Google have said people want from an operating system:
People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates
The first two points I’ve already covered, they are all about speed, it is however the 3rd point that strikes me. It looks like Google is going to backup users data to the cloud, whether all applications are cloud applications to begin with or that Google will backup data from the hard drive is unclear but it will be interesting to see what the privacy brigade have to say about it.
Even more interestingly the 4th and 5th points are about software & hardware updates and that users wont have to worry about them anymore. Google might do what it does with the chrome browser and update software behind the scenes without disturbing the end user, but I’m not sure how they could do this with every application. Alternatively I am beginning to think that the Chrome browser will be the operating system sitting over the top of a simple stripped down linux distro making it as fast as possible. This way all applications could run on the web with HTML and javascript making client side software updates obsolete because they would just need to update the server.
As we spend more time online Google are capturing more and more of our lives and learning more about us. I don’t know about you… but I, for one, welcome our Google overlords.
Popularity: 52% [?]
Note: I’ve basically written this as a dummies guide to The Pirate Bay and its effect on the community. For anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, I doubt it will be useful.
Since its creation over 5 years ago The Pirate Bay has risen to the status of largest bit torrent tracker and as of today is the 112th most visited site in the world. This popularity isn’t solely the result of the sites service, which has been sketchy at times, but rather the celebrity like status that the sites founders have gained. Achieving this with their cocky attitude and their dismissive nature of copyright holders by publicly ridiculing any take down notices they received. To many pirates the site seemed like the rock of the file sharing world that couldn’t be shifted by anyone, and as long as they were around BitTorrent would be safe.
In February the founders were put on trial for “promoting copyright infringement” this was a test of faith for many, for some the legality of BitTorrent its self was under question. The Pirate community stuck behind The Pirate Bay, with mass protests being held outside of the courtroom and people frantically translating the trial into English. Twitter came alive with the hashtag #spectrail and were speculating and analysing everything said in court.
However all this support was in vain as they were found guilty ordered to pay a total of 30 million SEK and spend a year each in jail. However there was hope for the Pirate community yet, Peter Sunde the sites founder claimed in his usual cocky fashion that the prosecutors wouldn’t receive a penny from him and that The Pirate Bay would remain unchanged since it wasn’t the site that was on trial.
On the 30th of June everything changed and the foundations of the Pirate community were shaken when it’s once rock was rumoured to have been sold. From nowhere “Global Gaming Factory X AB” announced that it was buying The Pirate Bay for 60 million SEK. This outraged a lot of the community who now saw the founders as sell-outs after being heroes just a few days before.
There have been mixed messages about the future of The Pirate Bay from both sides of the sale. The Pirate Bay’s founders say that the site will remain pretty much the same, but with a new skin and extra features. While Global Gaming Factory X AB claim that they will make the site a legal haven offering copyright holders and downloader’s money, the copyright holders getting money for allowing their content to be shared and the downloader’s get money as a reward for sharing their bandwidth.
Personally I think The Pirate Bay is dead, any legal content coming to the site will inevitably push away the illegal and they will defiantly respond to take down notices. This in turn will drive away visitors who come to the site looking for content that isn’t available through traditional means, essentially illegal content. The question still remains whether The Pirate Bay 2.0 will be able to attract any content partners with the word “Pirate” in the name which they won’t want to be associated with.
Popularity: 54% [?]
My understanding of cloud computing is that software, data and resources are taken away from the desktop and hosted by a third party provider. The resources are then provided as a service to the end user, and can be accessed by any device with an internet connection. We don’t have to worry about it working or being compatible, because it just works. It’s called the cloud computing because we are obscured from what actually happens on the third party’s side by a “cloud” or the internet.
Software as a Service
There are services already out there based on the cloud architecture, Google for example provides Goggle Docs that you can access and edit on any device with an internet connection. This is known as Software as a Service (SaaS), saas is basically a web based application that you don’t need to install to be able to run. The benefit of this is that you don’t need to worry about having the correct version installed or correct patches running on all of your machines. It also means that cost is spread throughout the lifetime of you using the product, instead of having to purchase the software upfront you are charged based on how much you use it.
Hardware as a Service
There is also Hardware as a Service or (Haas), haas again charges you only for when you use the hardware resources. This saves businesses and users having huge capital costs for hardware they are going to be using some of the time. Amazon already provides this service calling it Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), charging users by how much they use per hour.
But why would someone use this service?
My answer is why not, cloud computing is also commonly known as utility computing which helps us understand it more. The best analogy I can think of is back when electricity was first becoming available you needed to invest in a generator to be able to have electricity, then an infrastructure was built to allow us to build power stations so electricity was available to anyone without huge capital costs to get it.
The same is for computers, we have been investing lots of money for better and faster hardware but now that we have an infrastructure, the internet, we can utilise it so we don’t have to purchase lots of hardware and let the cloud do all of the processing for us.
Cloud computing although already around us is in its early phase and won’t go mainstream for some time yet there are lots of things to be learnt and compatibility issues sorted. But I wouldn’t dismiss it as a service just yet especially for file sharing side of things.
More Info
Want more information about cloud computing? Check out the links below
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I think this post is therapy for me than anything else, but I thought I’d make this clear before I go on. I’m a facebook user who has never had an active myspace profile for the many reasons I list below.
Uniform Design
For starters every single myspace profile looks like it’s from the 90’s with terrible design and layout, it’s like all of the users are shouting out “look at me I’m on the internet”. The glittery text and thousands of images bloating the page not only makes it longer to load but also is a strain on my poor eyes.
Facebook on the other hand has gone in a completely different direction and made all profiles uniform, with it being designed by a professional designer it actually looks good. With the new layout Facebook have gone even further in this direction by removing all the cluttering apps from the users profile page and put them on a separate tab, meaning everything is easy to find. If I want to find out some information about a contact on Facebook I just have to click the “Info” tab and everything is there where as on Myspace I’ve got to go on a hunt.
Auto Playing Music
Music is one of the things I’ve always hated about Myspace, auto playing music is very 90’s. When I want to listen to music I make a conscious decision to do so, instead I have to quickly find the media player that is responsible and pause it or simply turn down my speakers, both being highly inconvenient.
Friends Feeds
Facebook lets you keep up to date with your friends very easily, the feed system is my favourite feature putting all of my friends activities on one page so I don’t have to visit everyone’s profile to find out what’s going on with them. Not only that but I can choose to find out more about certain people, ie my friends and less about others ie my contacts. Not only is this information displayed on one page it is also syndicated via RSS so I can have all my friends’ status’s update right on my desktop.
Gripes with Facebook
As you might be able to tell I do quite like facebook as a tool for keeping up to date on what my friends are doing, but I do have a few gripes with it namely the requests feature. I hate being mass spammed with messages to join a group that I have no interest in what so ever. I use the feed for finding interesting groups that my friends have recently joined.
There also seems to be a lot of complaint about the new Facebook layout, I’m glad Facebook is holding their ground on this and are not going to be switching back. My message to any facebook user who is complaining is that I would like you to read the facebook 10 commandments and take note of number 10.
Popularity: 52% [?]
