[Ref]
So, yesterday a High Court judge told the world what some of us had known all along, that Charles Clarke's "control orders" are incompatible with human rights.

The orders which basically amount to a form of house arrest, and can actually go as far as full-blown house arrest, are applied to people suspected of having a connection with terrorism.

Suspected. That's a big word folks. These people have never been charged or tried, never mind convicted, of any terrorism offence. If they had, they'd be in jail. If there was a scrap of evidence against them, this government would waste no time in going through the courts so I think it's fair to say that in all likelihood they have not (yet) done anything wrong.

I also have not (yet) committed an act of terrorism^[1] and under the regime introduced by Clarke^[2] I could be placed under house arrest, my passport confiscated and my movements monitored.

The Labour government has shown itself time and time again to have scant regard for legality, human rights, civil liberties and the dignity of the people of this nation. Some people in England and Wales have an opportunity in a couple of weeks to pass judgement on local representatives of the Labour party, and I hope they give this reactionary government a kicking. When the next general election rolls around, it's time for a change, it's time to elect a truly liberal government.

^[1]Nor do I intend to incidentally.
^[2]My views on Clarke are well known, he's a thug and bruiser. He's worse than Blunkett and shouldn't be in government.

Yesterday afternoon I noticed A LOT of traffic going across my DSL router when I wasn't logged in and it wasn't a time when a cron job would be doing anything, a quick bit of investigation revealed that home.rubberturnip.org.uk was the subject of a sustained attack on the SSH daemon. Looked like a brute force job, and it wasn't being successful unless the intention was to piss me off.

It triggered me to finally install logcheck on that box (thanks Justin for the package) and I noticed that there were other machines attempting similar attacks (is there a worm abroad at the moment that I'm not aware of?) although not quite as sustained as that first one, which was doing it for about two hours!

So, firstly, I've started blocking the originating IPs (and I reported the first one to the ISP in question), and secondly I'm going to post offending IPs here. The IPs I am currently blocking then are as follows:

62.80.128.11 203.130.33.203 213.56.25.38 212.227.21.132 202.110.193.231

Other news: CTW203 finished.