Steve Hemingway

I thought it was just me, but actually almost everyone who watches these HB YouTube videos hates the woman. Click on the video to get to Youtube and follow the links to related videos. I think it's because she treats viewers and interviewers with such contempt, in the classic Gordon Brown style of being interviewed. She decides what she is going to say, and keeps saying it, whatever questions are asked of her, knowing that the time slot is short and at the end of the day the interviewer cannot force her to answer a question.

Slightly amazingly, 10 Downing St. decided to approve my proposed petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Allow comments to be made on all YouTube videos uploaded by 10 Downing Street.". You can see it on the Downing St. website.

Basically I decided to see what all the fuss was about when Gordon put his famous Youtube video up explaining what he was going to do about expenses. It's actually quite hard to find this video because it has such a low Page Rank compared to the countless video clips edited from this and other GB clips to mock him.

I'm sure if Gordon hadn't suffered a terminal shrivelling of his power the slaves in the back rooms of No. 10 would never have dared to allow my proposal to go through. They probably thought that the PM had more important things on his mind.

I genuinely think that allowing comments on YouTube is a good way of opening up a dialog, and allowing the Common Man to speak unto power. The rhetoric of politicians endlessly talks about the need to do this, but the actions show that they rarely care what ordinary voters think, especially young ones who are very unlikely to vote.

I'm sorry, I can rarely build up enough enthusiasm to write more than 140 chars in a post these days.

I have decided to try again to use encrypted emails using Public Key Encryption. Every couple of years I have a go at this and find (i) that this is very clunky and inconvenient to use and (ii) nobody who ever exchanges emails with me is remotely interested in installing the addin etc.

Well, this time I'm going for this greasemonkey script approach. This means that if you don't use gmail on Firefox then you might have some problems. Even if you do use this combination, but you are on Firefox 3 there may still be problems as the script seems to be unreliable on this version. Oh well....

This is not utterly secure, but it should be good for exchanging passwords, commercially confidential material etc. Please do email me (plaintext or encrytped) to explore the effectiveness of this approach. As Jackie Smith used to say "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", which, translated means "we are determined to read every communication you send and receive".

Update: 25 Jun. I have now discovered that Evolution has built in support for PGP encrypted and signed email. Sea Horse (a bundled application in Ubuntu) will generate and store private and public keys. Here is my public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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=pmXZ
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

You should be able to cut and paste and import this into your key manager. If you manage to import this you will be able to send me a signed and encrypted message.

Update 19 Oct 09

Actually, it's a lot easier just to encrypt within the file system. It's all built into Ubuntu - you can just right click and encrypt with a 'shell extension' a file that you can find within nautilus. This can be attached to an email, which of course may be as brief as you like. The details appear to be explained here, but to be honest I didn't bother reading the details. I just feel a lot more comfortable that Ubuntu will offer decent encryption than Microsoft.