London/UK Riots Coverage (Sky News/BBC News Channel)

There are ways right now for ISPs to trace IP numbers when illegal activity is being investigated by the courts. However, your suggestion -- that people should be required to submit credit card info simply to join social networking sites -- doesn't make much sense to me. Who would enforce something like that? Should the State dictate to private companies what conditions they should impose before allowing people to exchange messages (which is what social networking is essentially all about)? And which state should that be, considering that the Internet is a global medium?

OK, so "Department for Culture and Ofcom." say

"Please turn off your transmitters in this area for
Urgent Maintenance /
Operational /
National Security /
Technical reasons beyond our control "Sorry for the break in service" " -

type reasons,

So co-ordination by the (alleged) rioters ends, and brief confusion everywhere else.
"Oh look- I haven't got service- my battery must have gone".

(Still off-topic)-

You seem to have dragged The State into this, I'd not actually mentioned them? My suggestion was that the social networking sites set up traceability schemes themselves, so if the courts do need to pursue evidence they can. The very fact a log in can be traced should in itself serve as a deterrent to abuse it ? For fixed line Internet abuse, your IP address can indeed be logged, and you're traced ultimately via the financial set up by which you pay for the service. It has to be something like that, with a monthly recurring charge, but can simply be pennies per month.
(Of course that opens the door to pay more if you wish, and not have ads thrown at you).

In any case the social networks don't exist as some sort of philanthropy scheme, they are businesses there to make money

If you can think a better method to preventing the abuse of social networking, then please put it forward, but the fact remains, it's becoming a real problem.

I have to say this first clip must surly be taken the pss?

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3aqFQEbfIY

Also here is that nice man Darcus Howe from yesterday morning:

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o

Has anyone seen a clip from the BBC on Tuesday night which show the team speak to bunch of younger kids taking on camera, around midnight

Nice to hear from a fan of ITV regional television at 0:24. Could that guy be a member of TVForum? It wasn't you was it, 623058?

ITV's live Tonight special looks like it may be coming from the This Morning studio or a purpose built set that looks remarkably like their performance area. Julie is doing a great job anchoring the programme as expected, but I do wonder why they didn't just have an ITV News special.

Has anyone got a clip of Lukwesa ringing in and describing the situation in Ealing the other day?

BBC Birmingham are using a view from ITV Central on Gas Street for their DTL CSO.

Really wish BBC and Sky would stop looping footage from previous nights when talking about the riots. We all know what it looks like by now.

If it's new footage than go for it but it can't be helping just repeating the footage.

But equally it's better to show old footage than just presenters reading down a camera reading out press releases. And crossing to live reporters in wherever, just to tell us it's calmer and no sign of violence.

Perhaps though if the footage isn't there it's time to scale back the continuous live coverage and concentrate on reports and indeed other news.

Skycopter currently showing pictures of police dispersing people in Eltham. Looks like lots of police but not a lot of people/rioters.

Edit: Surprisingly they are doing a news round up rather than sticking with the helicopter pictures, odd decision.