Weekly news - The Russians in Ukraine / Yahoo webcam surveillance / New gambling controls

The situation in Ukraine edged further into sinister climes this week as armed Russian forces, shorn of any nationalist insignia as though this might serve as some kind of stateless camouflage, made moves on the Southern Crimea region.

Like a waking octopus, Russia's imperialist tentacles are slowly unfurling with a similar dearth of efficient stealth. Now that the curling brooms and skeleton bobs have been packed back into the closet, Putin's Russia can get back to flaunting their land-grabbing might. His facetious argument is that, since Crimea comprises nearly 60% ethnic Russians, he is merely exercising Russia's right to protect their interests, regardless of the flagrant disregard to the sovereignty of the territory.

To an outsider (who may soon be a temporary insider - watch this space), it very much appears that all the initiative now rests with the Kremlin and just precisely how far they feel capable of pushing the so-far ineffectual international community. Putin knows that the last thing the other G7 countries want is to become entangled in an overseas conflict trying to protect the autonomy of a former Russian state. So far he correctly feels he can call their bluff.

Meanwhile, the danger is that the aggrieved Ukrainians who rose up and ousted Yanukovych so valiently will secede the momentum to the newly-operational Russian forces, or begin turning on each other as happened in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution.

The Ukrainians need to mobilise again sooner rather than later to avoid the possibility of a power vacuum giving the Russians room to capitalise and make gains. They need to stay strong, unite together and be ready to continue the fight as and when it is necessary.

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(Uncomfortably) closer to home, the latest data surveillance revelation blundered into the public eye regarding the GCHQ, together with the gleeful encouragement of the NSA, intercepting and storing the webcam images of millions of internet users, through a program codenamed Optic Nerve.

Apparently in one 6-month period in 2008 alone, more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts utilising webcam technology were collected and stored. Quite predictably, an estimated 3-11% of the harvested imagery contained 'undesirable nudity', being as it were a platform for amateur pornography. Perhaps, steps are being taken to create a genitalia recognition system for optimum foolproof identity security. Who knows?!

Frankly, this latest infringement would be hilarious were it not so utterly condemnable. Rather than feebly trying to justify these measures by pointing out their apparent legality or their necessity in the maintenance of a safe terrorism-free society, I would quite like security chiefs of staff to put a number on the precise amount of real and actual terrorist plots that have been foiled through spying on this Yahoo webcam imagery.

Call me cynical, but I would suspect the figure to be so negligible that it would demand the question to be answered as to whether or not investing vast sums of time, effort and taxpayer's money on the viewing of people in their bedrooms masturbating at each other over webcams is anything other than a deplorable and wasteful invasion of privacy.

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In other news, the Association of British Bookmakers (ABB) launched a new initiative to try and curb problem gambling in England & Wales. These take the form of allowing gamblers to set their own cash and time limits and imposing alerts to bookmaker staff when these limits are reached.

Despite being well-intentioned, if you consider them for a moment, these new steps can be seen to be largely ineffectual; a desperate reactionary stab at a solution to the explosion of problem gambling, predominantly in poorer communities, in the wake of the recession.

Like any addiction, the urge to gamble becomes a compulsion, it being axiomatic that the addict is not using logical reasoning in controlling their own actions. Therefore, these measures to install a modicum of control, which can in any case be circumvented by the gambler if they so choose, is the same as someone with an alcohol problem going out declaring that they will have a certain amount to drink and nothing more.

The problem is, that once the addictive agency has triggered off those neurons there is very little chance that they will be able to compel themselves to respect their own controls. Just one more, just a little longer - this is the mantra of the addict who mistakenly believes themselves able to exercise control and follow the correct course of action.