Watching BBC Breakfast this morning, I took a half-hearted interest in the piece on the UK’s Information Commissioner issuing the first Data Protection Act fines. During the explanation that a certain county council had been fined £100,000 for faxing details of a child abuse case to a member of the public, the item of news ran what seemed like a relatively innocuous piece of stock footage showing various file names contained within a temporary directory on some form of server or workstation. See if you can tell which ones originally caught my eye: (Excuse the quality, Mobile phone recordings of a playing television aren’t usually that great!)



Gave up on YouTube so have chucked it on Vimeo instead!

As a long time fan of The Pythons (Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin) I thought it amusing to see a bunch of deleted MP3s which must surely be the Monty Python Sings CD, but it was another file on that page that caught my eye, can you guess which?

A quick search on Google, for those unfamiliar with the reasonably popular Sybian sex aids, shows exactly what that file is referring to: bailey sybian (Google Search Results for a NSFW phrase)

So, Mr Thompson, whose computer was that footage filmed on? I hope it wasn’t a member of your staff, as the downloading of sexually explicit material on a paid-for-by-taxes computer over a paid-for-by-taxes network by a paid-for-by-taxes employee is surely not the best way to be spending any of the UK’s severely stretched budgets.

[Edit: This would have been live at 0900 GMT if it wasn’t for YouTube taking for EVER to process a 20second video!]