Skip to main content

Home/ Internetni praktikum/ Group items tagged request

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Urška Cerar

What Does Google Do If the Government Comes Looking for Your Emails? - Rebecca J. Rosen... - 0 views

  • Every single day, dozens of requests from law-enforcement officials, courts, and other government agencies pour into Google's offices, requesting that Google hand over different pieces of information its users have amassed
  • many of these requests are legitimate
  • It's important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Google says, "When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google's policies.
  • once a request has been deemed valid, Google will notify users when possible.
  • Google will not provide a user's search-query information or the contents of a user's account (email content, pictures, documents, etc.) without a warrant.
  • Google has advocated for updating ECPA, "so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents."
  • If Google can establish clear practices now that somehow balance the competing needs of law-enforcement agencies and private users, that effort will pay off
Jernej Prodnik

Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright publishes once-classified FBI documents that show extent of agency's investigation into Swartz
  • Amanda Holpuch guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 February 2013 22.42 GMT
  • A blogger has published once-classified FBI files that show how the agency tracked and collected information on internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz, who killed himself in January aged 26, had previously requested his files and posted them on his blog, but some new documents and redactions are included in the files published by Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright.Wright was given 21 of 23 declassified documents, thanks to a rule that declassifies FBI files on the deceased. Wright said that he was told the other two pages of documents were not provided because of freedom of information subsections concerning privacy, "sources and methods," and that can "put someone's life in danger."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The FBI's files concern Swartz's involvement in accessing the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) documents. In pursuit of their investigation, the FBI had collected his personal information and was surveilling an Illinois address where he had his IP address registered. Aaron H. Swartz FBI File by Daniel Wright
  • One page reads: "Washington Field Office requests that the North RA attempt to locate Aaron Swartz, his vehicles, drivers license information and picture, and others. Since Swartz is the potential subject of an ongoing investigation, it is requested that Swartz not be approached by agents." The FBI also collected information from his social networking profiles, including Facebook and Linkedin. The latter proved to be a catalog of his many notable accomplishments, which include being a co-founder of Reddit, a founder of a website to improve the government, watchdog.net and as metadata adviser at Creative Commons.
  • Information from a New York Times article about his Pacer hack was also included in the files, though strangely, since the article can still be read online, the name of the article's other subject, Carl Malamud, was blocked out.Hacking collective Anonymous released a State Department database Monday in memory of Swartz. The files included employees' personal information such as addresses, phone number and emails.
Jernej Prodnik

Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers | Techno... - 0 views

  • Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers Campaigner says tech giant's policies don't make it clear that Google Play users who buy apps give over information
  • Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 February 2013 14.39 GMT
  • Google Play: the personal details of app buyers are released to developers Google could face a third privacy row in a two years, after a leading campaigner called for the US government to investigate the fact that the names, geographic region and email addresses of people who buy apps from its Play store are passed on to the app developers without users' explicit permission.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, says that analysis of Google's terms and conditions relating to its Google Play store and Google Wallet transaction system (used for buying apps) doesn't show any clauses where users are specifically told that their emails will be sent on to the developer. He also warns that developers could use that information to "track and harass" people who have given apps low ratings or requested refunds. And hackers – or malicious developers – could create personalised emails to send out to people to steal passwords (phishing) or install "updates" that were actually malware.
  • Google says it has to provide some location data about which country apps are bought in so developers can calculate the correct amount of tax to pay. But that does not explain why it passes on buyers' names and email addresses, which together with a postcode could be used to identify a person's location and address."Google's prior privacy blunders have put [it] under higher scrutiny," Edelman says, pointing to the 20-year consent order with the US Federal Trade Commission that Google signed in March 2011 in the wake of its Buzz social network fiasco – followed by a record $22.5m fine in August 2012 for hacking Apple users' browsers to install tracking cookies. It has also been fiercely criticised in Europe for its changes in March 2012 to its privacy policies, which data protection chiefs said could mean "uncontrolled" use of personal data.
  • Eric Butler, a freelance software developer of the Tapchat and Farebot apps, tweeted in July 2012 "I wonder if most Android users realise that when you buy an app in the Play Store the seller [of the app] can see your name, email address and phone."Following the row, he has noted on his blog that "Because the entire experience of purchasing Android apps is so sloppy, it's not unreasonable to assume that this privacy issue was actually an oversight." But, he says, "Google should follow Apple's lead and offer users and developers better privacy protection."
  • Another developer, Jesse Wilson, pointed out the same problem in November on Google+, and was quickly echoed by Chris Lacy, who said that "as a developer I never asked for this information, I have no need for it, and I simply do not want to be a custodian of such information."Lacy added that "As a consumer, this is distressing on many levels: there is no fair warning that this information will be transferred … trusting my personal information to Google is one thing. But with this system, users are unknowingly having to trust their information to a third party. There's no way to know what security measures that third party might have in place." He added that it meant that the app developer "has gained my personal information without requesting the appropriate permissions via the app."
  • Google has said that passing on the details does not breach its privacy conditions. In a quote to Siliconvalley.com, a representative told the site that "Google Wallet shares the information necessary to process a transaction, which is clearly spelled out in the Google Wallet privacy notice."
Janja Petek

Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
  • Towards the end of the summer of 1969
  • a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
  • It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
  • It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
  • On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
  • Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
  • on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites.
  • On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
  • "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
  • The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
  • It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
  • The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
  • Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
  • One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
  • In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
  • And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
  • Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
  • Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
  • n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
  • It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
  • This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
  • Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
  • After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
  • the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
  • A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
  • For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
  • The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
  • The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
  • Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
  • Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
  • It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
  • The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
  • Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
Miha Naprudnik

Controlling the web - Fault Lines - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, were meant to crack down on the illegal sharing of digital media. The bills were drafted on request of the content industry, Hollywood studios and major record labels. 
  • The US government says it must be able to fight against piracy and cyber attacks. And that means imposing more restrictions online. But proposed legislation could seriously curb freedom of speech and privacy, threatening the internet as we know it.
  • Can and should the internet be controlled? Who gets that power? How far will the US government go to gain power over the web? And will this mean the end of a free and global internet?
Jan Majdič

Free speech on the internet | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Freedom of expression has long been regarded as one of the fundamental principles of modern democracies, in which civil liberties are honoured and regarded as a prerequisite for individual development and fulfilment.
  • It is this classic liberal argument that is still used by civil liberties' campaigners on the internet, like Hatewatch, which argues that those "hate speak" groups, such as neo-Nazis, must still speak freely, if only to expose and discredit themselves
  • It is not simply a case of "same old issue, new technology" with free speech and the internet. With its low start-up costs and global reach, the internet enables almost anyone in the West, in theory, to speak and be heard around the world, as well as hear others' speech.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • particularly when they originate from, and are hosted in, foreign countries.
  • China have successfully prevented their citizens from receiving a huge quantity of (pro-democratic) material on the internet.
  • Governments in the USA, Germany and France, have all taken significant steps to curtail free speech on the internet
  • The anti-censorship pressure group, Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain, was created in response Scotland Yard's request to ISPs to censor their news feeds
  • seeking to regulate and control its immense, potential, power.
  • US is several years ahead of Britain
  • industry self-regulation
  • Technology is used to censor and evade censorship, although it seems likely that censorship tools will grow in sophistication and use as legislators struggle to censor the internet.
  • In December 1997, a 200-strong internet industry group agreed to accept a common standard of labelling called PICS - the Platform for Internet Content Selection
  • Millions of internet users in big offices, cybercafés, education institutions and libraries will use machines or ISPs which have filters installed in them.
  • In 1999, the EU launched an action plan, "Promoting Safer Use of the Internet", which provides for a hotline, where people can report sites which have caused offence
inesmag

How to keep your privacy online | Ask Jack | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 2 views

  • I would like my browsing and Google searches to be private. I don't want targeted advertising and I don't want to feel that anonymous companies are harvesting my clicks to learn all about me.
  • When the web was young, and a lot less shiny, web pages were fixed (static) and – barring browser quirks – everybody saw much the same thing. Today, much of the web is dynamic, which means that what you see has been adapted or possibly constructed on the fly just for you.
  • From your point of view, the advantage is that the websites you visit will be personalised to suit your needs and tastes. From the website's point of view, the advantage is that it can also personalise its prices and advertising to try to suit your needs and tastes, and increase your propensity to click and buy.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On the web, the rule is: if you're not paying, then you are what's being sold.
  • Probably the simplest way to reduce personalisation is to use an anonymising service. Instead of accessing the web directly, you access it via a third-party proxy server, so your that requests are mixed in with thousands of others. These services usually allow you to control cookies, turn JavaScript on and off, withhold "referrer details" and so on.
  • Nonetheless, it's often useful to have access to an anonymous proxy service, and everybody should find one they like. Examples include The Cloak, Megaproxy, Proxify and ID Zap. There are also networked open source privacy systems such as Tor and I2P.
  • Google also tracks your progress across hundreds of thousands of websites via Google Analytics. To opt out of this, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (Beta), which Google offers for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, some sites use different analytics software or track visitors in other ways you will be unaware of. Ghostery may help reduce these.
  • Finally, Facebook Connect is a potential privacy problem because it "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site".
  • In general, the more you do online – social networking, cloud computing etc – the more your privacy and security are at risk. Reducing that risk involves effort and inconvenience, so it's up to you to find an acceptable compromise
Jan Sekavčnik

Twitter in Pyongyang: how North Korea got the mobile internet | Technology | guardian.c... - 1 views

  • the secretive country begins allowing tourists to use the mobile internet
  • it was believed to be the first tweet sent from a mobile phone using the country's new 3G mobile data service.
  • photographer David Guttenfelder uploaded an image to Instagram of a tour guide at a mountain temple, geotagged to Pyongyang.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • rists visiting
  • ere strict for to
  • th Kore
  • he past, rule
  • In 2009, I did not offer up my iPhone as we went through customs
  • We'd leave our mobile phones at the airport but use locally purchased phones with SIM cards
  • broadband internet that may be installed on request at our hotel, which is for international visitors.
  • 3G mobile internet would be available within a week only for foreigners.
  • sim cards are €50,
  • calls to Switzerland are an inexplicably cheap €0.38 a minute
  • Our North Korean colleagues watched with surprise as we showed them we could surf the internet from our phones.
  • Not all North Koreans have local mobile phones
  • The world wide web remains strictly off limits for most North Koreans
  • But they cannot surf the "international" internet
  • North Korean universities have their own fairly sophisticated Intranet system
  • Students say they can email one another, but they can't send emails outside the country.
  • Kim Jong Un has pushed science and technology as major policy directives, and we're starting to see more laptops in North Korean offices
  •  
    "Ads by Browse to Save Twitter in Pyongyang: how North Korea got the mobile internet"
Janja Petek

Google, Facebook and Twitter ordered to delete photos of James Bulger killers | Media |... - 0 views

  • Google, Facebook and Twitter have been ordered by the police to remove photographs purporting to show one of James Bulger's killers.
  • Police served the three web giants with the injunction that bans the purported identification of Venables and Robert Thompson
  • A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said police had requested that Twitter, Facebook and Google "assist with the removal of material in breach of the terms of the order" and that the process was ongoing.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The photographs are believed to have begun circulating online
  • Twitter broke its silence about the issue in a Commons home affairs select committee hearing on Tuesday afternoon.
  • what is illegal offline is illegal online."
Veronika Lavrenčič

The Arpanet, Ethernet Explained | Article by Sonet Digital - 0 views

  • Arpanet, Ethernet
  • Part: 2
  • Larry Roberts
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • linking computers via telephone lines
  • university and research sites would be connected
  • to build Interface Message Processors
  • smaller computers
  • File Transfer Protocol
  • to handle the interfacing between their hosts and the Network
  • ARPANET in 1969
  • The '70s saw the emergence of the first networks
  • o facilitate communications
  • Network Control Protocol (NCP)
  • a user-transparent mechanism for sharing files between host computers
  • the first Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) is implemented
  • common language
  • 1972 Vinton Cerf is called to the chairmanship
  • Inter-Networking Group (INWG)
  • to develop standards for the ARPANET
  • NCP communications system
  • TCP (Transmission-Control Protocol)
  • Users at various sites could log on to the Network and request data from a number of host computers
  • They conceived of a protocol that could be adopted by all gateway computers and hosts alike
  • In this way different networks could be linked together to form a network of networks
  • By the late '70s the final protocol was developed - TCP/IP (Internet Protocol) - which would become the standard for internet communications.
  • Bob Metcalfe's: Ethernet
  • packet switching networks
  • a dissertation on the ARPANET
  • marketed his invention as Ethernet
  • the '80s witnessed the explosion of Local Area Networks (LANs)
  •  
    Drugi del serije člankov. 
metapavlin

Kim Dotcom announces Mega, successor to Megaupload | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.
  • The site would not use US-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by US authorities, Dotcom said.
  • Megaupload was shut down in January 2012 when New Zealand police helicopters swooped into Dotcom's mansion outside Auckland to seize computers and other evidence at the request of US authorities.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Users of Mega would be able to upload, store and share photos, text files, music and films, encrypt those files and grant access using unique decryption keys, Dotcom said. "You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us," a statement on the Mega website said.
  • Ensuring that files are not pirated will be the job of content owners, a major change from Megaupload, which the US film industry says ignored illegal content and profited from it.
Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
1 - 12 of 12
Showing 20 items per page