jordswart.org

It is assumed that cameras will not prevent any crime, but will help solve it. In London, at least, this assumption doesn’t seem to be true anymore. London has spent about £200 (close to 300 million Euros) installing 10.000 CCTV cameras. The overall result of this investment is a decreased proportion of crime solved, not increased. There hardly seems to be a relation between the number of cameras and the proportion of crime solved.

• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.
• Hackney has the most cameras – 1,484 – and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.
• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.
• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.
• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.
• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras. cameras.

Link via boingboing.

Cory Doctorow (of boingboing fame) wrote a nice column where he explains why DRM (Digital Rights Management) will never work. The article is intended to explain to non-technical people why DRM is impossible. It also explains why DRM only hurts people who actually go out and buy the content and NOT the pirates.

The thing is that when they say that you can’t travel than fast than the speed of light, they’re talking about the fundamental principles of physics: it’s impossible to get beyond lightspeed, even if science fiction movies help us conceptualise it.

In the same way, we can imagine building progressively better software locks for movies, music, ebooks, and software until we hit on one that even the wiliest hacker can’t defeat. But, just like the physicists, the geeks who say that DRM can never reach this point are speaking about fundamental principles of information science. It’s impossible to get that far.

Link.