Greg Pope, MP for Hyndburn, is exchanging the traditional draughty community hall in favour of the comfort of the Commons for his constituency surgery in an online trial. Using the hyndburnlife.co.uk website, constituents can communicate directly with their local MP for one hour on Wednesday 26 January from 6pm. Mr Pope has promised that any questions left unanswered by the end of the surgery will receive answers by 2 February.

Greg Pope said: “As the local representative for Hyndburn I welcome any initiative that encourages the flow of information. I am constantly striving to improve my constituents’ access to information, about their rights and their community, and I welcome any opportunity for them to provide me with feedback.”

Tony Garner, Portal Development Officer for Hyndburn Life and moderator for the online surgery, said: “I am delighted that Greg has agreed to participate in this initiative, it’s a first for Hyndburn Life and I’m confident it will prove to be a useful source of communication all round.”

A Welsh primary school is considering whether to supervise its pupils with electronic tags due to a shortage of teaching assistants.

Under the proposed system, an alarm sounds if any of the 350-pupils leave Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Lonlas Primary School, Swansea, at any point during the day.

The Deputy Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Sara Reid, said: “I understand that schools need to worry about the safety of the children, but we are concerned about the effect this could have on the human rights of children.”

The school’s head teacher, Dyfrig Ellis, has started talks with a Dutch tag manufacturer. He said: “The tagging system does appear extreme, but I believe that it’s an option I have to consider when the safety of pupils is in question.”

The school’s governors are set to discuss the scheme with the local education authority and the wristband manufacturer. The scheme is attractive as it requires a single monitor in a central control room. The school has had trouble finding teaching assistants due to low pay and unfavourable working hours, and is reluctant to increase the teachers’ workload.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said:”It is about local solutions for local problems,” as schools can decide their own policy. The Welsh teaching union Ucac has called for responsibility to be transferred to education authorities.

The tags may cheaply keep the children in the playground, but children suffering bullying or accidents will have less protection than before. Similar concerns could justify the use of tags to limit freedom in other areas of life.

The days of faceless radio will soon be over as Nokia and Virgin have teamed up to produce ‘visual radio’. The technology developed by Nokia and Hewlett Packard will allow Virgin Radio to send images relating to their playlist to mobile phones. The listeners will be able to interact with the station by voting for songs, playing games and buying ringtones and tracks on the “visual interface.”

James Cridland of Virgin Radio told the Financial Times, “Radio is a great medium for emotion and immediacy. But if you can make it more permanent - keeping a telephone number on a mobile screen for example - it can be much more powerful.” The technology is due to be first tested in late March by KISS FM in Finland. The service will be launched by Virgin in the UK in the spring and provide 24/7 interactivity.

Spam is one of the annoying effects of the cyber revolution. Anyone with an email account can recieve hundreds of messages a week marketing anything from a Rolex watch to penis enlargers to hardcore porn. Much of this comes from the US, so to combat the inbox invasion the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG) is flying out to Washington next month to discuss the problem. Their aim is to encourage the US to put national legislation in place.

Some, however, are sceptical about how effective the meeting will be. Steve Linford of Spamhaus, (a pioneering anti-spam project) said: “Not only are we still talking about these issues but we’re now doing so sat in the middle of an epidemic. This trip is a positive move, but I suspect they will go over there, see a couple of Senators and be told ‘yes, we’ll do something’ and it will end there.”

The UK anti-spam laws are less than effective than the Australian laws for example, and with very little power to prosecute criminals. Hopefully this could lead the way to worldwide anti-spam legislation.

For businesses of all sizes, cyber crime has become a major concern. In response, the Metropolitan Police are holding three Incident Response Seminars in London (for the princely sum of £495) to help businesses deal with computer security.

Each of the daylong seminars will be “aimed at specific audiences” including corporate managers and IT security professionals. The seminars will be based on the recent cyber crime experiences of law enforcement and industry, focusing on issues surrounding incident response; designing, managing and implementing effective response protocols.

Though the sentiment of the seminars is to be applauded the price tag seems to be a little high for some. Richard Starnes, UK president of the Information Systems Security Association said: “It’s an interesting concept but I’m absolutely appalled that the Metropolitan Computer Crime Unit is so underfunded that they have to enter the commercial realm conducting seminars to raise funds. What’s next? The Metropolitan Police commissioner standing outside of Scotland Yard with the Big Issue?”

Indeed.

Government Computing have reported that Wolverhampton City Council will encourage text message voting in this April’s City Youth Election.

Mel Potter, promotion and publicity officer at the Wolverhampton City Council’s Youth Division, said: “Huge numbers of young people already have mobile phones, and we hope that by offering the option of voting by text many more of them will take part.”

The council will use the e-txt system from Dynmark, which operates like Microsoft Outlook. The system sorts texts into a folder for each candidate, which eliminates the need for counting and provides an ongoing tally. “Because we can sort the messages by which number they came from, we can easily identify attempts at multiple voting,” added Ms Potter. It is hoped that that the move will also reduce costs.

If successful the council will extend the scheme to the United Kingdom Youth Parliament elections, which are organised by local authorities with no funding from central government.

Online voting for the Wolverhampton City Youth Council elections were introduced in 2003 to supplement voting by ballot box. The council plans to release the election telephone number for texting votes in the next few weeks. Such efforts are commendable, though it will be interesting to dicover whether they actually increases voter turn out.

A man who complained about receiving spam from a US company is now being sued…by his alleged spammers. According to an article on Silicon.com, the New Hampshire firm Atriks has filed a suit against Jay Stuler, claiming that they lost contracts after the complaints were made. They are also claiming for defamation, accusing Stuler of calling the company’s CEO a “criminal” and branding the company a “notorious spam gang.”

Stuler, who claims he received unsolicited emails from the firm for two years before complaing, says on his website: “They apparently are angry that spamming has become difficult for them and blame me.”

The latest weapon in the war on mobile phone crime has been unveiled. The Immobilise Phone Crime database site allows users to register their unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) serial number on to a secure police database.

The National Mobile Phone Crime Unit at Scotland Yard launched the new register, which will make the tracking of lost or stolen phones a lot quicker. Patrol officers and detectives investigating organised mobile theft will both use it to quickly determine if a phone is stolen.

“This means we can return more lost and stolen phones to their rightful owners and thereby charge more people with offences relating to mobile phones and put more offenders before the courts. I would encourage every mobile phone owner to join the register,” Says Tim Godwin, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

This is a great step forward, but rather than relying on individuals to register their phones it would be much better if phones were placed on the database at point of purchase.

The NHS is set to miss the deadline for implementing its flagship Choose and Book electronic hospital appointment selection system, according to a National Audit Office report expected tomorrow.

The watchdog is anticipated to report that some NHS trusts will not be able to offer patients and GPs a choice of date and hospital by December 2005. It will also criticise the speed with which the network of support systems is being implemented. A leaked letter from Margaret Edwards, director of access at the Department of Health, to health authority chiefs also predicts that some areas will not have fully integrated systems.

The system is a core part of the multibillion-pound national programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT). Last week the minister responsible for the NPfIT, John Hutton, and the director general of NHS IT, Richard Granger, spoke publicly about the system’s benefits. Meanwhile, NHS IT directors complained to Computer Weekly that they were expected to implement expensive and unwieldy interim software to meet John Reid’s commitment. The health secretary is expected to robustly defend the policy of providing choice when the NAO report is published.

Modern medicine with all its foibles is under the microscope with the government’s Yellow Card Scheme. For the first time patients, parents and carers are being encouraged to directly report ‘suspected adverse effects’ from drugs to the MHRA The results will be compiled on their website for patients, researchers and medical practitioners.

Health Minister Lord Warner said: “The Yellow Card System is recognised to be one of the best spontaneous reporting schemes for adverse drug reactions in the world.

“The data generated through the scheme can be used to further research and improve drug safety in the UK - patients can see the information used to make decisions about medicines safety and researchers can use this important resource to aid research.”

Patients can report side effects via the Yellow Card Scheme website or paper-based Patient Yellow Card report forms. Patient Yellow Card forms have been made available in 4,000 GP surgeries in the UK. If you would like a Patient Yellow Card form, please contact the MHRA on 020 7084 2000.