A lot of the infrastructure of pirates in the UK is intimately linked to the urban environment of high-rise residential tower blocks, which housed the studios (often in abandoned flats), with the height of the building providing excellent coverage for transmitter aerials which would be mounted on the roof.
The pirates got very advanced over the years, and one of the most important tactics was to separate the studio and the transmitter, using separate tower blocks for each connected via microwave linkup. It got to the point where they would have multiple transmitters available so that if the DTI (UK government body responsible for finding and prosectuing illegal radio transmissions) found the transmitter currently in use, they could then switch quickly to a different one and carry on broadcasting. There would be people monitoring the frequency to check that it hadn't been taken down, and once mobile phones were more common it made it quite easy to quickly abandon a transmitter or studio if necessary. The tactics of the DTI are actually quite fascinating in themselves, involving triangulation and all sorts of interesting gizmos.
If you're interested in learning more, the YouTube channel Ringway Manchester[1] has been documenting the techniques used over the years, and is an excellent channel for info on radio in general, especially with regards to the UK, including some brilliant interviews with the people involved in running the pirates, with stories of the crazy things they got up to in those days. There are also a couple of excellent documentaries from the 90s on the topic, one of which, specifically about Kool FM, is featured on this channel about Jungle & Drum n Bass Documentaries[2] (First Sight Pirate Radio).
Phil Rees products were an absolute godsend in the 90s when most hobby and budget studios were still mainly all hardware being recorded to tape of some description. You would often find multiple little red and black boxes doing various conversion and routing jobs. And they all powered straight off the mains without a big heavy internal linear supply, or external wall wart, which was a great help during late nights where the right PSU may have gone walkies.
Were you using a MIDI to SMPTE converter of some kind? The MPC 1000 only has MIDI I/O, no SMPTE tape sync. And the stock firmware only offered regular MIDI clock, not even MTC[1], though it is possible to get MTC in and out of an MPC 1000 using the unofficial JJOS OS[2].
You're holding it wrong. You can just record a real one and play it back. I use the same cursed approach with my 2500XL to intake/chop/modify/output cv/note signals to a modular setup (which has a handful of outs that don't need to be modified to do this)
Gmail filters are very good. But if someone with the same name as you starts using your e-mail address for everything because they don't understand or care about needing to see the e-mails they receive then there's very little you can do to stop it other than unsubbing from lists they sign up for (where possible).
I've been getting someone else's e-mail traffic for about 5 years now, on two separate Gmail accounts, and while occasionally hilarious, it is somewhat scary to see how much I can know about their lives from the type of e-mails they get. I have replied to inform some of the senders about the situation with the suggestion that they could tell the other person involved to use a new e-mail address, but it is still happening. You'd think that they would need to see some of the important work-related mail they receive yet they are apparently utterly oblivious.
I occasionally also get similar mail to my own domain through a catch-all filter.
It's quite funny how little some people understand about what an e-mail address is, or how it's supposed to be used, even today.
> very little you can do to stop it other than unsubbing from lists they sign up for (where possible)
It certainly felt that way when someone was giving my GMail out to the cashier at the hardware store where I got no end of digital receipts which I couldn't unsubscribe from because they're providing the email address to the cashier each time. As they were receipts from a large verified brand Google treated them with the highest priority.
I've been in a similar situation for almost a decade now. There's an elderly woman who's email address is one character away on the keyboard from my own, and I often get emails meant for her. I tried for years to respond to inform them that they are using the incorrect email address, to no avail. At this point I've started to go in and disable/cancel anything that is signed up for with my email address and have to aggressively filter spam.
Got it years ago when Gmail was still in beta. My friend sent me an invite and yes I was actually excited to get invited to use the new 'Google Mail'. 1GB mailbox? Wow cool! How times change. The address is mostly dormant but still required for certain services/accounts so I can't just delete it. Probably better to squat it anyway, all things considered.
I often forget how browsing the web looks for most people. Can't understand why they put up with it, or do they just think that it's part and parcel of the internet to have every page look like a slot machine from hell?
I currently don’t use ad blockers. The only time I used ad blockers was when a previous employer specifically asked me to, when using a company machine.
> Can't understand why they put up with it
To see which (rare) sites don’t put up a million ads and actually care about the reading experience.
A lot of the top-listed sites on HN are small blogs without ads (or in the case of danluu.com or lwn.net - without almost any formatting).
daringfireball.net is notable for actually having small, non-intrusive ads that I wouldn’t ever feel the need to block (unless you consider the entire site an ad for Apple but that’s a seperate concern).
> do they just think that it's part and parcel of the internet to have every page look like a slot machine from hell?
It is integral to the business models of the sites putting up those ads. And if those sites don’t make money then they’ll also be unable to pay writers. Much like herd immunity or financial speculation there will always be “somebody else” to watch the ads and essentially subsidize the ad-blocking audience, but I’d rather not be one of those people, I want my usage to be worth the while for the writers.
I am sometimes (rarely) willing to pay for an ad-free experience if I’m a repeat visitor. But more often I’d rather not visit at all if a site is too annoying. Another unfortunate situation is that even if you pay for a subscription, some sites have no ad-free option, such as the New York Times.
The big exception is YouTube, where I visit often, am bombarded with ads but also don’t want to pay Google.
In an ideal world, I would do exactly what you do. I don't WANT to block ads everywhere. I would love to support my favorite websites, and if watching a couple of ads is what it takes for them to stay online, then I don't really mind.
Problem is, the ads I see when I disable my ad-blocker are uniformly terrible. Maybe this is because I'm in India, but I've never once seen an ad that wasn't outright disgusting, let alone useful.
I regularly see ads for: escort services, shady hair loss prevention pills, shady weight loss pills, astrology, TV shows and movies in languages I don't understand, gacha games, gambling apps, educational programs I can't sign up for, apps that are clearly malware. Once Instagram inexplicably showed me ads for expensive lab equipment only available in Germany for a whole week.
I would like to see ads for: local businesses around me, concerts and gigs in my city, new restaurants around me, indie fashion brands, TV shows and movies in languages I can understand. Basically, ads based on my interests and recent search terms.
The ad networks insist on delivering the worst kinds of ads to me, sometimes accompanied by imagery I would prefer not to see (e.g hair loss and dermatology ads). The websites I frequent and want to support don't get to choose what ads I'll see. All they can do is insert the ad-network's JavaScript into their pages and hope for the best.
Unless the networks can guarantee that I won't see something illegal, harmful, or plain disgusting when I enable their ads, I'll keep my ad-blocker on. I'm not going hurt myself for somebody else's business model.
While I think I agree with you in principle, it's worth pointing out that at least some of these targeted/relevant ads you want come with privacy concerns which, at least in my opinion, are just as important if not more so than the content/experience of the ads themselves.
Either way though, GP putting the responsibility on the viewer, at this point - given what we know about how the ad companies operate and use our data - is just absurd. We're not the ones who burned up any good will in this particular social contract.
In theory site owners could be more selective about the ad networks they partner with. They bear a responsibility for a poor user experience, but many don’t care.
I remember hearing about a lawsuit several years ago from several news organizations against an ad blocking company in which they described themselves as “ad companies that serve content” as opposed to “content companies that serve ads”.
To be fair to the news organizations, ads are very probably their primary source of revenue.
The "get a bunch of people looking at something interesting and then show them ads" business model has under-pinned newspapers, television, and now websites like Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.
The content was always kind of a side show, an excuse to serve you ads.
An example of an actual content company would be something like a movie studio, where the product is the actual movie, or a publishing house, where the product is an actual book.
Newspapers, television channels and YouTube, however, are making their money selling your attention to advertisers. So I think calling them "ad companies that serve content" is actually correct.
The situation has been manufactured by the advertising industry such that the individual's rational response, blocking ads for multiple reasons, hurts the web in the long run. At the end, it will be said, "it was the ad blockers' faults", not "there were too many ads + tracking systems and ads could contain malware"
I turned off my adblocker on 404 Media since I wanted to support them, I loaded one new tab in an article and it maxed my CPU at 100% for so long that I paused and had to figure out what was spiking my computer.
Open your browser’s dev tools while loading a website and there’s usually a continuous stream of HTTP and JS errors and warnings. That websites actually work surprises me sometimes, but that’s the pragmatic beauty of the web.
I just live in the world where most things are crap.
People put up pages because they want to express themselves and/or receive views or engagement.
AI kills the first half, and trying to sell my attention kills the second half.
I don't stick around for it. I click into "the secret romantic lives of elephants", hit popup hell, then realise I really didn't care. I often can't even remember what I clicked on as soon as I hit back.
That's a bit hyperbolic. The areas of the internet I frequent do not have egregious ads (for example, this page). Areas where I really would like good ad-blocking (youtube) are often not covered by these ad blockers. Thankfully Youtube Premium isn't too expensive and solves that issue.
Maybe it's better these days but I always found browser extensions (including uBlock) had a pretty big performance hit, so I've always shied away from them (with the exception of a password manager).
> Thankfully Youtube Premium isn't too expensive and solves that issue.
True, but some of us refuse to give that company money on principle. The minute I can't watch YouTube without ads is the minute I stop watching YouTube. (The creators I follow make way more money off me on Patreon than Google would ever pay them, anyway.)
> I always found browser extensions (including uBlock) had a pretty big performance hit
I always found that not using uBO was a pretty big performance hit. :)
Why would they need to do anything so explicit and crude? Everyone carries a smartphone on them at every waking moment and they chose to do it willingly (though unwitting of the implications for personal privacy). They are also ready to use them for surveillance almost on a hair-trigger impulse these days. Thankfully this works against state services almost as much as it works against the public, as channels like Crimebodge are able to show us. But the point is that the state already knows what these devices represent to them in terms of data collection, and are subtle enough to avoid making this a mandatory situation... For now.
Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.
THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.
I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.
You describe mobile handheld scanners that are a form of self-checkout in some stores, but not the norm. Most of the commenters here probably associate self-checkout with a station with touchscreen, scanner and bagging area.
I only use the mobile handheld scanner version. If someone has to go through all my items and scan them at the terminal, it's not going to be me; store clerks can do that much faster than I can.
Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.
It was implied. Why else would you use that argument in responding to ridgeguy's comment about using human-run checkout lines? What machines would you point to as making the world worse?
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
You both miss the crux of the argument, i think. It would be more precise to say that physical machines raise the standard of living that we measure, but abstract machines reduce that which we don't measure. (Viz, finance.)
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).
Not only there are cameras, but the machines typically accept only cards and not cash (except for one supermarket chain in my city) so I never use self-checkout.
The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?
They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
Some of it is just the camera, some of it is the camera + scale. The bagging area is a big scale to make sure stuff going in the bagging area was scanned. If the weight goes up without anything being scanned, or with the wrong weight, it will raise the alarm.
I’ve run into a couple situations where I was buying something light, like a greeting card, and the scale didn’t pick it up and was preventing me from moving on… waiting for me to bag the item. I threw my keys on the platform and that signaled I bagged the item and let me move on.
Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.
I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
No, it's metric. Our schools are flooded with 30cm rulers. You'll see kids as young as 8 with 330ml drinks. Some even count in decimal - there is no end in sight
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
IIRC the big push to contactless and Oyster before it is just reducing the cost of handling money. Transit agencies do not really want to be in the business of banking, and physically printing paper tickets and maintaining the machines to accept them properly is a lot more expensive than an RFID reader.
In particular for paper and magnetic strip, you have to keep the reader clean enough to accept reads properly, and the machine also needs to not damage the ticket. This is a non issue with tapping.
I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.
Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.
About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.
Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.
Which is again, a fair question with a reasonable answer:
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.
Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.
In Spanish supermarkets, it's tins of shellfish in the anti-theft boxes. In English ones, it's razor blades and menstrual pads. Spirits are often tagged in both countries, but not as consistently as the mejillones and the tampons.
Police have been using it in London for several years, mostly at protests, but also in other 'test' deployments. They are currently required (it seems) to place signage around the catchment area to notify the public that facial recognition is in progress. Private companies may well have been using it for longer in their shops without having to notify anyone. Sainsbury's, for instance, quickly attracted suspicion that they were doing trials of it at certain locations.
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