Margate were beaten by Gower (south Wales) in the Best Beach Vote Off in the Cadbury Flake 99 Great British Beach Awards.

Rhossili Bay in Gower is a surfer favorite and has visible ship wrecks at low tide. Better luck next time?

There is a Mini Cooper up for grabs for those quick enough to grab the opportunity. It is being offered by a UK competitions site which means that the prize must be real and the entry must be free. These guys have been going for years now giving away prizes in free prize draws.

Obviously, there can only be one car winner... actually there can only be three winners (read on).

Not only can you Win a Mini Cooper but there is also a Ford Focus 1.8 Zetec and a compact Renault Clio Dynamique also up for grabs.

These offers are good for first time users and those that have entered these contests before. Best of luck to each and everyone of you.

Kent Police may soon be forced to shell out a large pile of cash after admitting that they behaved in a systematically unlawful way.

Unlawful actions by Kent police with repect to the way they treated protesters looks set to pave the way for a compensation bill of the order of several million pounds after our somewhat local force admitted operating an unlawful stop and search operation at Kingsnorth power station in the summer of 2008. The problem rests on how far Kent police went beyond the bounds of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which allows police with reasonable grounds to suspect a person of intending to carry out a criminal act to stop and search that person.

The Criminal Evidence Act 1984 does not allow a stop and search in order to find grounds for the search. Despite the fact that such a blanket use of detaining people would be in breach of Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights this is exactly what Kent Police did. In all the police carried out arround 3,500 searches with no reasonable grounds to support such an action.

A Channel 4 article "Kent police admit 'unlawful' protest policy by Simon Israel reports that: Lawyers for the chief constable Mike Fuller admitted to the unlawful policy and told the high court "we entirely surrender" to three tests cases brought [by] two 11 year old children and veteran campaigner Dave Morris.

Tony's calculations that Kent TV's series cost £2 per viewer once more highlight how KCC have failed to comprihend the nature of the Internet. Simply putting up a website full of Authority Controlled content is not going to make KCC suddenly relevent.

We do not live in China (thank goodness) and so KCC have not got the option of blocking, banning or arresting the competition.

They are not innovating with "Holy Would" (only a single letter removed from Kim Basinger's Holli Would in Cool World). Indeed to even measure up to the things that similar budgets are doing they are going to have to work a whole lot harder.

Take for example Riese a web series finally saw it's debuted early November, 2009. Riese is a Sci-Fi crossed with Fantasy themed web series. The series itself is about a traveller named Riese who flees across the lands of Eleysia with her father's wolf. Hunted by a terrifying religious group called "The Sect" Riese must evade the assassins that have been sent to kill her and discover their true objective.

It's an exciting, visually rich and fully realised story shot using note worthy and innovative technology (Red One). It too had a budget but you can clearly see where the money was spent.

Most significantly for this discusion it is a web series and can watched on youtube and other streaming services. Each episode is fairly short and the first chapter was made of six such episodes. As you can see from the trailer while it's not exactly a rival for the likes of Avatar it is good stuff and KCC would be well advised to learn from this far more successful production outfit if they want to be taken seriousely.

Police stupidity and overreaction has receaved a sound kick in the pants scoring a solid victory for common sense over paranoia.

Despite the fact that both the law and Association of Chief Police Officers guidelines make it abundantly clear that police are in no way allowed to even think about restricting or preventing the press from taking photographs it seems you can not go ten minutes without hearing about some similar illegal restriction of the free press by an officer of the law.

This was definitely the case for Andrew Handley of Milton Keynes who had been dispatched to the scene of an accident to take photographs for MKNews.

Despite staying behind the police cordon the photojournalist was approached by a police sergeant who demanded he handed over the pictures and his camera.

Andrew explained he was perfectly within his rights to take photographs and contacted his editor who attempted to speak to the officer.

Instead he was arrested. His hands were cuffed behind his back, he was cautioned, had his finger prints and DNA taken. He was then detained for eight hours at Milton Keynes central police station.

So much for the police enforcing the law, you might think. Fortunately for Andrew Handley this story has something of a happy ending as Andrew not only had his nominal criminal record torn up but has also won over £5,000 in damages for being unlawfully held in a cell.

Read NUJ wins apology and damages for photojournalist for more on this story.

In case you have been living under a rock twitters DNS was comprimised (again) and some angry young hackers. (They should have used a better DNS managment system).

DNS is what changes your nice www.thanetstar.com into an IP address which can be used to get the web page from. Somehow someone managed to currupt this information and send all the traffic to another website.

The result was that for a short while twitter.com resolved to a server that was not owned by twitter.

Twitter itself was not compramised but should you change your password?

The answer is that it depends.

If you were not online during the DNS hijacking then you need to take no action. If you were online but were already logged in to twitter then you probably need to take no action. But if you sent your username and password to twitter but got the hijacked page instead then you must change your password because there is a chance that the hackers have ssaved that data.

There are better methods of authentication over the web than passwords but until such time as they are implimented in any useful way you had better just stick to coming up with realy good passwords ("password" is not a good password BTW).

BNP make a risky financial move.

It was drawn to my attention that the BNP have a Freepost address so I googled it and what should show up but the BNP website itself. At a bnp.org.uk/contacts/ (I'm not making that a live link for what I hope are dead obvious reasons) was the general contact address stating that general enquires could be sent by post to:

British Heritage FREEPOST

I also found a lot of sites advocating the sending of copious amounts of junk mail at the cost of the BNP. I'm not suggesting that this is an activity that as sensible adults we should be engaged in but it does raise the question of if the BNP had really thought through the whole freepost part.

With the Christmas season here there is likely to be a large number of left over envelopes sans address ready to carry less than glad tidings. I wonder if the freepost address will still be in use this time next year.

In August 2007, Sophie Lancaster was kicked to death, simply for dressing differently. Two years on, and in tribute to the outgoing, bubbly girl who was denied the chance to live life her way, cult new British make-up brand Illamasqua has commissioned a short film by award-winning French director, Fursy Teyssier.

Produced by creative agency Propaganda, in association with iconic British band, Portishead, Dark Angel is a beautifully haunting rendition of Sophies story.



The aim of the film is to raise awareness of The Sophie Lancaster Foundation and generate money which will be used to help educate young people about tolerance. There was no sane reason for the murder that night and the impact on people around the world is still being felt.

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» Continue Reading: Remembering the tragic death of Sophie Lancaster