I have spent a couple of weeks cycling around the Netherlands with family this summer and there follows things which I noticed and thought interesting. In the main I was very impressed with the Netherlands, they have great infrastructure and friendly people who are very willing to help lost or confused visitors.

Living closer to the edge

The Dutch know that they live dangerously, on the edge of what is possible with much of the land below sea level. I got the impression that this left them with a closer affinity with their land than we have with ours; they know they need to care for it or they will lose it. Partly this was seen in the way that climate change is so much on their radar.
They know what is coming and are taking steps to try and stop it and to deal with it when it comes. Unfortunately their prospects do not look good. This year as last year my summer holiday took me somewhere which might not be there for my children or grandchildren to see, the Netherlands will be a very different place in 2100 than it was this summer.
You also find that this attitude runs further back; it is not a recent change brought about by a new threat but a strengthening of resolve which has been required throughout the history of the Netherlands.

Six lines of trees on one road

It is seen in the trees. The Netherlands has an artificial landscape but it is full of trees, tiny cycle paths are lined with trees, roads small and large are lined with trees, some roads have as many as six lines of trees running down them separating the houses from the road from the footpath from the garden and back through the footpath and road to the houses again. This is wonderful. You only really notice how integral trees are to the street-scape when you see this done properly.
In Delft for example (a beautiful city), there were blocks of flats such as you might see in sink estates in the UK, yet they were on roads lined with trees and many balconies were filled with flowers by residents who clearly enjoyed living there. Similarly the university (TU Delft) is beautiful, yet clearly built in the 20th century, using styles that elsewhere have produced horrendous eyesores, yet here perhaps with better architects they are beautiful, surrounded by trees.

It was also found in the attitude of the people, towards cycling, renewable energy, recycling and so on. They are on-board with a project to build a better future in a way that they UK clearly is not for they know that if they do not achieve a better future then they will find they have none. We might find ourselves in a similar situation but doom for us seems less certain and so more easily ignored.

Cycling

Cycling in the Netherlands is wonderful. Our infrastructure is nothing in comparison with what they have. Everywhere there were dedicated cycle paths, even minor roads in the middle of nowhere would have cycle lanes marked down both sides and much of the time there would be a segregated cycle lane.
There were also many cycle paths where there are no roads. The Dutch canal system with its dykes gives them an advantage here in that they need access roads along the tops of dykes but cannot have vehicles like cars running along them or the dykes would be damaged. Bicycles however are fine, this makes cycling a much more versatile form of transport as there are many more routes by bike than by car.
Similarly in cities many streets are one way, being too narrow for two way traffic with cycle lanes, but almost every ‘no entry’ or ‘one way’ sign has the Dutch ‘except cycles’ sign underneath. These dedicated cycle lanes are better than ours in that they deal with junctions properly having clear lights for the cycles with two sets, one high up and one low down so that they can still be read by the cyclist who is right next to the post.
They also give cycles priority over traffic joining from minor roads or turning off roundabouts so that the normal difficulty of having to negotiate every junction carefully is alleviated because it becomes mostly the car driver’s problem and they already have to deal with it to avoid other cars.
This combines to develop an attitude in the Dutch people that their cycle is much more useful than their car (if they have one). Talking to one Dutch lady, she said that she could live without her car but not without her bicycle.
The only slightly irritating habit was the way that they like their streets lined with bricks rather than tarmac more than I do which results in a little vibration.

They also define a ‘cycle’ rather more loosely than we do, motorcycles are also ‘cycles’ small four wheeled vehicles which can carry two people seated next to each other and which look like a tiny car with a motorcycle engine are ‘cycles’. Wheelchair bikes either driven by the wheelchair user with their hands or by someone else on a more conventional looking bike frame attached to the back are cycles, as are huge range on innovations with varying numbers of wheels, luggage space and passengers. Some of these designs have already been imported to Cambridge, but the Netherlands still has greater variety.

Having invented the bicycle we picked the side for the chain based on cycling on the left hand side of the road – such that when standing on the pavement the chain is on the other side of the bike.
Unfortunately in the Netherlands they cycle on the wrong side of the road and so they all have chain guards.

In the Netherlands the people do not wear helmets except when on racing bikes and wearing lycra, this distinguished us somewhat from the locals as we were on town bikes and wearing normal clothes and yet had helmets.

A rather good BBC article on cycling in the Netherlands has been published recently.

Open Street Map

I used Open Street Map (OSM) (specifically the OSMAnd app which has paid and free versions) and it was great, with offline route finding and location searching, which were invaluable. Being able to answer questions like ‘where is the nearest post box’ or ‘where can I get food’ and ‘how do I get there’ without having any internet is incredibly useful. I am definitely going to switch to using OSM rather than Google Maps in future and to actively contributing things which are missing from the OSM data. This also has the benefit that Google will not know what I am planning quite all the time.

Tourist destinations

We followed “Cycling in The Netherlands – The very best routes in a cyclist’s paradise” by Eric van der Horst (ISBN: 978-1900623193) which was excellent.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city with lots of beautiful streets like the tree-lined Churchill Laan mentioned earlier and lots of canals. There are also many parks such as the Vondelpark where we cooked dinner two nights. The Rijksmuseum is full of great painting and well worth a visit, I did not find the Van Gough Museum as impressive but still worthwhile.
Utrecht had some interesting buildings and streets. The castle of De Haar (or at least its gardens) were beautiful and the Farm Hazenveld camp site was lovely. Gouda had a large market and lots of cheese with many nice buildings.

The view from the church tower in Delft

Delft as previously mentioned is particularly beautiful – my favourite city in the Netherlands – the view from the church tower is particularly good and the [De Grutto camp site](http://www.degrutto.eu/) particularly excellent (particularly for the ecologically minded being solar powered and situated in an orchard in a nature reserve).
‘t Kraaijenest in De Lier was a particularly excellent B&B though we stayed there through the ‘Friends of the bike’ organisation where members open their homes to cyclists. The organisation is to be recommended we enjoyed both the stays we had with these ‘friends of the bike’.
The Hauge is good, though not as good a place to cycle as Amsterdam (still better than Cambridge or London). The Peace Place visitor centre is well worth a visit (and free) and we enjoyed wandering around the town centre.
Haarlem is beautiful and the guided tour of the Ten Boom museum particularly excellent. There was also an arts quarter with some very interesting shops such as one full of Lego and 3D printers.
IJmuiden’s Havenmuseum was unexpectedly impressive with a huge variety of sea related displays and lots of knowledgeable volunteers explaining about the exhibits. Particularity highlights included a working radar station (clearly not being interfered with by the wind turbines) and an ancient computer doing telegraph Morse to text conversion.

Disturbing things

Cycling down a street/canal and suddenly the horror of brothels down the side. Cycling down the canal to Utrecht suddenly there were brothel boats down the side with insufficiently clothed women in the window. It was disgusting, more so the cars slowly crawling along the road purpose built beside it with turning loops at each end. There is only so fast it is possible to cycle when you need to overtake other cyclists and there are oncoming cyclists but that is how fast I went, it is not fast enough. This was a disturbing experience, it was about midday…
Similarly in Amsterdam despite carefully staying well clear of the Red Light District walking back from dinner it was in places necessary to keep eyes very carefully on the canal.
While the experience of having tea in cafés in the Netherlands was much better than in the UK – nearly always offered a choice of tea and given a biscuit with it and a little plate on top of the cup of boiling water to keep it hot and to provide a place for the tea bag to go – there were several times when we looked at ‘coffee shops’ suspiciously and walked on as it looked like they might be selling more than ‘coffee’. Accidentally walking into a drug dealer’s establishment is not normally something I need to be concerned with ensuring and I prefer it that way.

Conclusion

The Netherlands is a great country to visit and everyone we spoke to had enough English that we could get by. Taking your bike on a ferry and cycling around it is definitely a good way to go.

Summary: The architecture for David Cameron’s filtering plans is wrong and has a negative consequences, however there are alternative architectures which might work.

There has been much news coverage about David Cameron’s plans for opt-out filters for all internet users in the UK. With opt-in systems barely anyone will opt-in and with opt-out systems barely anyone will opt-out and so this is a proposal for almost everyone to have a filter on their internet traffic. Enabling households to easily filter out bad content from their internet traffic is useful in that there are many people who do want to do this (such as myself[1]). However the proposed architecture has a number of significant flaws and (hopefully unintended) harmful side effects.

Here I will briefly recap what those flaws and side-effects are and propose an architecture which I claim lacks these flaws and side-effects while providing the desired benefits.

1. All traffic goes through central servers which have to process it intensively. This makes bad things like analysing this traffic much easier. It also means that traffic cannot be so efficiently routed. It means that there can be no transparency about what is actually going on as no one outside the ISP can see.
2. There is no transparency or accountability. The lists of things being blocked are not available and even if they were it is hard to verify that those are the ones actually being used. If an address gets added which should not be (say that of a political party or an organisation which someone does not like) then there is no way of knowing that it has been or of removing it from the list. Making such lists available even for illegal content (such as the IWF’s lists) does not make that content any more available but it does make it easier to detect and block it (for example TOR exit nodes could block it). In particular it means having found some bad content it is easier to work out if that content needs to be added to the list or if it is already on it.
3. Central records must be kept on who is and who is not using such filters, really such information is none of anyone else’s business. They should not know or be able to tell, and they do not need to.

I am not going to discuss whether porn is bad for you though I have heard convincing arguments that it is. Nor will I expect any system to prevent people who really want to access such content from doing so. I also will not use a magic ‘detect if adult’ device to prevent teenagers from changing the settings to turn filters off.

Most home internet systems consist of a number of devices connected to some sort of ISP provided hub which then connects to the ISP’s systems and then to the internet. This hub is my focus as it is provided by the ISP and so can be provisioned with the software they desire and configured by them but is also under the control of the household and provides an opportunity for some transparency. The same architecture can be used with the device itself performing the filtering, for example when using mobile phones on 3G or inside web browsers when using TLS.

So how would such a system work? Well these hubs are basically just a very small Linux machine, like a Raspberry Pi and it is already handling the networking for the devices in the house, probably running a NAT[0] and doing DHCP, it should probably also be running a DNS server and using DNSSEC. It already has a little web server to display its management pages and so could trivially display web pages saying “this content blocked for you because of $reason, if this is wrong do $thing”. Then when it makes DNS requests for domains to the ISP’s servers then they can reply with additional information about whether this domain is known to have bad content and where to find additional information on that which the hub can then look up and use to as input to apply local policy.
Then the household can configure to hub that applies the policy they want and it can be shipped with a sensible default and no one knows what policy they chose unless they snoop their traffic (which should require a warrant).
Now there might want to be a couple of extra tweaks in here, for example there is some content which people really do not want to see but find very difficult not to seek out, for example I have friends who have struggled for a long time to recover from a pornography addiction. Hence providing the functionality whereby filter settings can be made read only such that a user can choose to make ‘impossible’ to turn off can be useful as in a stronger moment they can make a decision that prevents them being able to do something they do not want to in a weaker moment. Obviously any censorship system can be circumvented by a sufficiently determined person but self blocking things is an effective strategy to help people break addictions, whether to facebook in the run up to exams or to more addictive websites.

So would such a system actually work? I think that it is technically feasible and would achieve the purposes it is intended to and not have the same problems that the current proposed architecture has. However it might not work with currently deployed hardware as that might not have quite enough processing power (though not by much). However an open, well specified system would allow incremental roll out and independent implementation and verification. Additionally it does not provide the services for which David Cameron’s system is actually being built which is to make it easier to snoop on all internet users web traffic. This is just the Digital Economy bill all over again but with ‘think of the children’ rather than ‘think of the terrorists’ as its sales pitch. There is little point blocking access to illegal content as that can always be circumvented, much better to take the content down[2] and lock up the people who produced it, failing that, detect it as the traffic leaves the ISP’s network towards bad places and send round a police van to lock up the people accessing it. Then everything has to go through the proper legal process in plain sight.

[0]: in the case of Virgin Media’s ‘Super Hub’ doing so incredibly badly such that everything needs tunnelling out to a sane network.
[1]: Though currently I do not beyond using Google’s strict safe search because there is no easy mechanism for doing so, the only source of objectionable content that actually ends up on web pages I see is adverts, on which more later.
[2]: If this is difficult then make it easier, it is far too hard to take down criminal website such as phishing scams at the moment and improvements in international cooperation on this would be of great benefit.

Mass surveillance of the citizens of a country allows intelligence services to use ‘big data’ techniques to find suspicious things which they would not otherwise have found. They can analyse the graph structure of communications to look for suspicious patterns or suspicious keywords. However as a long term strategy it is fundamentally flawed. The problem is the effect of surveillance on those being watched. Being watched means not being trusted, being outside and other, separate from those who know best and under suspicion. It makes you foreign, alien and apart, it causes fear and apprehension, it reduces integration. It makes communities which feel that they are being picked on, distressed and splits them apart from those around them. This causes a feeling of oppression and unfairness, of injustice. This results in anger, which grows in the darkness and leads to death.

That is not the way to deal with ‘terrorism’. Come, let us build our lives together as one community, not set apart and divided. Let us come together and talk of how we can build a better world for us and for our children. Inside we are all the same, it does not matter where we came from, only where we are going to and how we get there.
Come, let us put on love rather than fear, let us welcome rather than reject, let us build a country where freedom reigns and peace flows like a river through happy tree lined streets where children play.

I may be an idealist but that does not make this impossible, only really hard, and massively worth it. The place to begin is as always in my own heart for I am not yet ready to live in the country I want us to be. There is a long way to go, and so my friends: let us begin.