Friday Ramble, starting with the Councillors Moores Scobie web hack, going on to Manston Airport and stuff.

I am feeling distinctly frail today, a victim of yesterday afternoon and evenings activities brought on by the very hot and humid weather and combined with the aging process.

Anyway before my day off there was a lot of excitement on Thanet Life, see http://birchington.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/facebook-fuddles.html the most controversial aspect of which Simon Moores has now changed with an image editing program.

It is this change that has caused me to mention the post here more than anything else. When Simon first put up the post it had only one image showing a screenshot from Will Scobie’s personal FaceBook wall, promoting his partner as an election candidate.

As Simon was saying that she was also being promoted by Will on the Mayor Margate FaceBook wall I commented:

Michael Child said...

Simon if it was part of a screenshot of http://www.facebook.com/mayor.margate it would say Mayor Margate next to the picture, this is the name of that facebook account.

Part of a screenshot of http://www.facebook.com/willscobie13 which is what you appear to be showing in the picture of will show William Scobie next to the photo.

Of course a full screenshot would show the url anyway.

It would be helpful all round if you could publish a full screenshot to clarify the issue.

2:20 PM   

After this Simon then published part of another screenshot from the Mayor Margate FaceBook wall, what was really unusual about this was it showed the page signed on by the FaceBook account holder.

Now I guess most of us have various internet accounts and know when we are signed on to them we see things that no one else is supposed to be able to see, this could be our bank balance, or it could be pictures of an erotic nature where the participants have moved from using the feather to using the whole chicken, well it could be any number of things, but the point here is that when you sign on to a website to view your private account, you should be the only person who can view the secure pages.

If you came across a screenshot of one of your signed on pages being publicly displayed on someone else’s website I guess you would call this cause for concern.

Accessing the private parts of other people’s websites, is generally called hacking and can occur in a number of different ways including totally by accident.

There are two sides to this coin, one where the hacker deliberately or accidentally hacks someone else’s secure page, whether they recognise that they have hacked the secure pages or not and what they do with the results.

The other side of the coin is the person being hacked, whether by accident or design they caused their private pages to be hacked and what they do with the results.

The simplest way that computers get hacked is that someone leaves a computer that is accessed by more than one person without signing out of their account. Following this, another person may come along and use this computer sometimes not even realising they are signed on to a different account than the one they are usually signed on to.

Another way this can happen is if, as sometimes happens the account holder sets the password and username the same, with something like FaceBook combined with a mobile device and a bit of sunlight it would be quite easy to sign onto someone’s account without even realising that you had. 

Continuing down this particular line of thought, having become signed on to FaceBook you see completely different things depending on who you are signed on as.

It is very difficult to explain this sort of complicated thing to people who either don’t understand sites like FaceBook or worse of all think they do but don’t.

I will try here by going back to my activities yesterday afternoon and evening, the youf of today decided that it would be interesting to take up dingy sailing and as I can sail a dingy, or at least could when I was a youf I tried to explain aspects of sailing an inexpensive dingy (old) in the sea without joining a club (expensive).

For those of you who haven’t taken this particular route in the game of life, the most prevalent disease in Graduate Lane is acute skintitus.

Anyway I managed to borrow a sailing dingy of 1970s vintage and took the youf out for a little sail off Ramsgate yesterday, until weary with the experience, hence my frailty today.

The difficulty with dingy sailing off Ramsgate is basically the current, you need to be certain that you have enough wind so you can sail fast enough to avoid going to Holland, Broadstairs or some other foreign place and the only other dingy I have sailed off of Ramsgate was a different design so with the wind increasing yesterday seemed like a good day.

As a rule of thumb here with the wind blowing sufficiently to cause waves about as high as the sides of the dingy it sails very well indeed.

Having taken all sorts of advice I decided that I did after all warrant the banana and donned my Velvet Underground T-shirt, sorry about the photo.

Anyway back to the hacking business, I think it fair to say that at some point around Wednesday Simon acquired a screenshot of Will’s signed on FaceBook page and published it on his blog.

Thinking of the last post where at least one anonymous commentator seems to be so virulently against Manston airport that he or she is generating more support for the airport than any of the normal pro airport commentators, I did wonder a bit about this hacked screenshot.

Obviously publishing it and the information suggesting that Will has broken rules that he doesn’t appear to have broken, isn’t doing Simon’s credibility much good. So I did wonder if the picture and the information had been sent to Simon with malicious intent towards Simon.   


More likely I think this is likely to have originated from someone ill intent towards Will, who rather like my anti airport anonymous commentator became a bit blinded towards reality by a fanatical approach that they went ott.   


Onto some airport reality, as an interested party in the purchase of the airport myself, I gather that there is now yet another interested purchaser, this time it’s London Oxford Airport Owners, The Reuben Brothers. 


With Balfour Beatty this makes two experienced UK airport operators in the frame.


Of course you will understand that these are just the wild rumours of an ageing shop assistant so you will presumably give them little credence.   

For me the main worry about the airport just now is that the airport operator has applied to The Environment Agency to reduce the environmental controls that were set out and the subject of a major consultation exercise.

These environmental controls were mainly designed to protect Thanet’s drinking water supply and Pegwell Bay with its international wildlife accreditation.

Any airport operator that wishes to make cuts to the safety issues relating to both these issues in order to make the airport more attractive to a potential purchaser, is to my mind hoping to attract the sort of potential purchaser that may be undesirable, so I am glad that these two operators that are already familiar with the stringent UK environmental controls are in the frame.  

I will ramble on here later if I get time and when I have solved certain technical problems that seem to preventing me from publishing pictures from this computer.        

Thanet Life, Simon Moores Moves the Goalposts, is it a new Thanet Blog Wars?

I have been commenting on Thanet Life blog since sometime in 2006, sending Simon information and pictures that he has published there since that time too, so I was pretty much gob smacked when I got an email from him today saying that he was refusing to publish a comment I had made there. This hasn’t happened before and I am not certain if I will ever be able to comment there again, or for that matter if I will even bother to try.

This relates to a key Thanet issue that Simon raised on his blog about consultation over the disposal Thanet’s council owned leases.

Here is what the said:

“DrM. said...
Andrew, the most fundamental change is the treatment of long leases of 25 years or more as part of the overall asset disposal process.

The emphasis is now very much on consultation as part of such a process to avoid circumstances where the council is seen to be over-riding the wishes of local people without proper consideration of their arguments. 1.37 pm.”

Now an important point here is when this change came into effect, because of some of the disposal issues that have come up recently in Thanet. There have been many contentious asset issues in Thanet, part of Hartsdown Park in Margate being the most recent.

Here in Ramsgate there are several large council owned assets in prominent positions and some of them have been effected by this rule, Pleasurama where the council granted a 200 year lease to the developer without any consultation, The Maritime Museum where the council invoked this rule in a way that caused the closure of the museum, the slipways where the council used this rule to prevent a developer obtaining a long lease to build a bar complex there.

This is essentially an issue about money, as developers need leases longer than 25 years to finance developments on council owned land, hence the council are able to effectively halt the Margate Football Club development, that has planning permission, by not offering the club a long lease. This can also effect grant funding for charitable organisations wishing to run council assets. There is also the common sense side of this, it you are going to run a museum or theatre, you are in for the long hall and can’t invest heavily when the building’s security is a matter of the council’s whim, even if you could I doubt the charity commissioner would let you.

Anyway here is the link to Simon’s blog post http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/lost-in-translation.html and here is my comment that he refused to publish.

Michael Child has left a new comment on your post "Lost in Translation":

Thank you Simon for the information, did you mean 26th July 2010 or 2009?

This is a quote from an email I received from the council in February 2010.

“The position regarding the Clock-Tower Building, occupied by the Steam Trust is as follows. The subject was discussed by the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny (Asset Management Working Party) in view of the length of lease sought by the Trust.”

With relation to your pervious replies the difficulty here is that you are different from the other bloggers, in as much as you are privy to council information that we are not.

In an ideal world the council’s information department would have a forum where major local issues could be discussed openly on the internet, it is the perception from outside the council, is that the councils information department exists exclusively to control the information that is available to the public.

I suppose in a way even that would be mostly unnecessary if the council published all of the information it held, apart from the information that would be refused in a foi request, as the council receives it, onto its website.

This could be achieved with considerable savings in costs to the council, by the council insisting that all information sent to the council, was supplied in preferred file formats, with the council levying a charge to commercial organisations either sending information on paper – so it has top be scanned in – or in a file format that has to manual converted for web publication.

In this instance I would say that you are as much a victim as the rest of us, in as much as the changes to such a fundamental rule about the way the council conducts its business, should have been publicised and the rules governing the way the council rents out its properties should be clearly and openly available on the council’s website.

The discussion I had with the leader of the council isn’t pertinent to this issue as it relates to a lease of less than 25 years and not the older lease that council didn’t issue due to the new rules. However it demonstrates very clearly what I am saying about information that you are privy to and we are not, put the shoe on the other foot for a moment and consider the situation if I was privy to your conversations with the leader of the council and said to you. “Simon. I understand the Leader of the Council called you to personally explain the issues surrounding such and such an issue, and hopefully that should have answered most if not all of your questions.” By way of an answer to a question you had asked me on a blog

Comment posted 11.18 am 2nd March 2011-03-02

Don’t misunderstand me here I delete comments that are potentially libellous, offensive or containing personal abuse, I suppose all bloggers do, but to delete a comment because it disagrees with your point of view, well that is another matter altogether.

When a local councillor who claims to support transparency and impartiality does this, then one can only form ones own conclusions.