According to BBC News, (Although they’re not alone in using this quote) yesterday’s decision to block a Christian couple from fostering because of their views on homosexuality is because “laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation ‘should take precedence’ over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds.” Although I agree with the end decision in this case, the quotation given is somewhat concerning.

I’m worried about this idea that there is some sort of pecking order of oppression, that the gay community is somehow more oppressed than the religious community. That way lies Oppression Olympics which is, to my mind, unhelpful. Is it really relevant if I, as a white lesbian trans woman am more or less marginalised than a black lesbian cis woman or a Muslim straight trans woman? What’s needed is appropriate help and support for each group according to it’s needs and specific situations. This sort of muddled thinking could lead to more plaintive cries from the religious right that they’re being repressed because gay trumps religion in the courts. (In reality, the Equality Act 2010 states the opposite: there are many exemptions for religion)

Upon reading the actual judgement, the court actually makes it’s view very clear: “…between the protected rights concerning religion and sexual orientation there is no hierarchy of rights…“. (Emphasis mine) It goes on to say “there may, as this case shows, be a tension between equality provisions concerning religious discrimination and those concerning sexual orientation” which really is the nub of the problem: What to do in cases where two strands of diversity clash in this way.

The resolution is in the National Minimum Standards for Fostering Services. I have not been able to get a copy of the document they refer to as the later, online, version has “Standard 7” about leisure activity. I do hope the courts are not equating homosexuality with a leisure activity! Luckily, they quote the relevant section earlier on in the judgement: “The fostering service ensures that children and young people, and their families, are provided with foster care services which value diversity and promote equality.” The same restriction presumably applies if a potential foster couple stated they could not tolerate a child being religious.

So, despite what the BBC quote suggests, the courts have not decided that one strand of takes precedence over another. It’s just in this particular case, the freedom of the children wins out over the desire of a couple to foster, as it should be.

Vodafone has taken huge numbers of people offline, but this time, it wasn’t deliberate. According to a post on their forums, (Intermittently available, I guess due to load) they experienced a break in at a data centre which caused some damage and has knocked out large numbers of users – twitter and blogs are suggesting it’s mostly west of London.

I had always assumed with the Egypt troubles that you’d need to shut down a few locations to cause real damage as everything would be run at least in pairs hosted in diverse locations. No matter how careful you are with technical measures, there’s a limit to how much you can protect in a single location against fire, flood or someone doing something nasty with a truck full of fertiliser.

It’s perhaps ironic that at the LINX meeting last week, there was a discussion on how well an “internet kill switch” would work in the UK. It was noted the Egyptian one wasn’t 100% effective as people still managed to get out and even if you take whole exchange points in the UK offline, we’ve shown we can route round the problems quite effectively. We may be reasonably confident that it’s hard to take the Internet down, but perhaps it’s rather easier to shut down the mobile and fixed-line communication networks than I’d realised.

Situations like this can be nasty – one hopes that Vodafone has enough space capacity in their network to simply reroute traffic elsewhere, depending on what was stolen/damaged. Some of it may be quite specialist/expensive kit and replacements could take days or weeks to source from abroad. At the very least, if the data centres have redundancy within them, they can “borrow” half the equipment from another location and relocate it to the affected data centre! (Prior to 2001, we used to talk about how to ensure redundancy in the event of hypothetical aircraft hitting data centres as a “worst case” scenario. We don’t use that example any more)

Of course, as well as embarrassing technical questions there are a few embarrassing questions for security staff too. How did intruders get that far into such a critical data centre and manage to do damage before they were stopped? Were they even stopped or did they get away with their booty?

The hunters lay in wait for their prey.

The more experienced pick their spot carefully. They know where the beasts will appear – and at the same time, most days. Mercifully, today will be no exception, for the hunters disappointment can quickly turn to anger.

Crowded together they are silent, necks craning to catch a glimse of any signs that will reveal the location of their target. The occasional head turns to look around to check for any other indication that might give them that slight edge over their competition.

Suddenly, a sign. Even before there is any noise, they know where their prey is.

A hundred bodies turn and move as one, but quickly the slower members are left behind.

It takes just seconds for them to reach the first of the dozen members of their target herd. But the rewards are the same for all: Their preferred choice of seating on the 1714 departure from Kings Cross to Cambridge.

(I don’t know why, but the train arrives very shortly before it’s due to depart. It’s not announced on the boards until after it’s ready and even though it’s almost always platform 8, the above appears to be a daily occurance)

Am I getting a reputation for being someone who blogs about MPs doing silly things? I suspect I may be, as I had a couple of people point me at this piece from “This is Gloucestershire”.

That a Tory MP thinks storing everyone’s DNA is a good thing probably comes as no surprise, but it’s baffling that Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood also apparently came out in support of this idea. Being a Liberal Democrat, it’s no surprise that TheyWorkForYou.com lists him as voting very strongly against introducing ID cards.

But if you collect the DNA of everyone in the country, are you not just creating an ID database? Wasn’t the database the major problem with the ID card system in the first place? And if you don’t have an ID database, how do you know you have everyone’s DNA anyway?

Even without the usual ID card arguments, collecting everyone’s DNA is problematic, as Arizona found out with a database of less than 70,000. Getting a duplicate obviously flags up that there is a problem, but a bit of research shows we’re not really sure of the statistics behind DNA. What happens if we collect everyone’s DNA and throw up a single match, because the offender wasn’t on the database or there was a false negative?

Someone completely innocent gets thrown in jail and has their life picked over by the police. They may even be convicted by the courts that don’t fully understand how this works, because they don’t do statistics.

Lets say that the DNA testing system is more than 99.999999% accurate. (That’s a made up number by the way) To be precise, let’s say the chances of a false positive are maybe somewhere in the region of one in two hundred and fifty million. But if for every sample you test 61 million people, (The population of the UK) you’ll get a false positive one time in 4, assuming I’m remembering my A-Level statistics correctly!

At the moment, neither the police nor the courts (And certainly not juries) are trained to understand statistics in this way. Science says that the DNA testing is accurate to one in two hundred and fifty millinon, that’s beyond any reasonable doubt, yes?

This story in the Independent Life/Style Fashion section, titled “Gender-blending: Sexual ambiguity in fashion” could so nearly have been a nice “Hey, look, transgender gender-f**kery is cool” story. But, instead, they’ve managed to completely confuse transgender and transsexual in a way that ends up being downright offensive.

It’s not just the usual confusion of nouns and adjectives that one expects, with references to “a pre-operative transsexual in little beyond a smattering of magenta body-glitter“. I could live with that, largely because if one gets annoyed with every grammatical error in the papers, one would spend life in a constant rage.

No, it’s far worse than that:

Of course, the Blitz Kid cult of the early Eighties had its roots in the peacock glamour of Seventies rock, and performers such as Roxy Music and, of course, David Bowie. Knight cites those as his own personal reference points but states: “Now, it’s much more upfront. It’s now 2011 – it’s not 1970. And, with the advances in cosmetic surgery, there’s the ability, medically, to go further.”

Uh, what? Cosmetic surgery isn’t some sort of glamour thing for Transsexual folk. It can quite literally be the difference between being beaten in the streets and not, between life and death. Or by “go further” do they mean genital surgery? That’s certainly been around since the 70s. OK, so perhaps we can skip this one, after all it’s a quote rather than the journalist themselves.

But then we get this gem: (My emphasis)

The appeal of Candy’s first issue, featuring Kelly Osbourne’s then-boyfriend, Luke Worrall, in a powder-pink negligee, was such that cult Swedish clothing label Acne approached Venegas to create a selection of transsexual-friendly pieces. That’s transsexual rather than unisex. “I wanted to make the opposite of unisex. Unisex clothes are usually very neutral – in this case, I wanted people not to say, ‘Oh, these are clothes for men and women’, but to ask, ‘Oh, are these clothes for men or women?’ The same feeling you get in front of a transgender person, that’s what I wanted to create with the clothing.” Acne has previously collaborated with Fantastic Man and Lanvin. “The last thing you can call that is underground,” Venegas says.

A true head-in-hands, oh-my-gods moment. It seems we’re being told transsexual means people saying “Is that a man or a woman”? If this sort of offensive confusion is the result of the “designers’ fixation with sexual ambiguity reaching new extremes“, then I’d quite like it if those designers – and the journalists that follow them – took their fixation and got the hell off our turf before they do some real damage.

Want to outgeek friends who have IPv4 T-Shirts from inferior, foreign geeky web sites?

Want to annoy your local Virgin Media engineer?

Look no further! “There’s no place like ::1/128” T-Shirts are now available. For the ladies, size-wise an “L” fits me and I’m a 14. Text reads: “There’s no place like ::1/128” and “This T-Shirt is IPv6 ready. Are you?”

(For those requiring explanation of ::1/128, see here. Yes, it’s geeky. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)