The Times: Tech column - Spy-shop gadgets/Drudge Report
By David Rowan
In these anxious times, when if the terrorists do not get you the carjackers apparently will, it is always reassuring to visit my man in the local hi-tech security store. Mark Fearon, who runs the CCS Counter Spy Shop in Mayfair, central London, will happily sell you peace of mind, in the form of a £250,000 customised bulletproof Mercedes or a £50 battery-powered motion sensor that, the box claims, "barks like a vicious attack dog but needs no messy cleaning up!". What, then, is the affluent neurotic buying these days?
One of the more popular gadgets is a £200 light gun that will blind an assailant for 20 minutes with a one-second 110,000 lumen beam. Known as the AL-22 Security Blanket, the light gun resembles a large plastic torch and is supplied with six single-use bulbs in an elegant briefcase. If you are attacked at night, you can warn off your assailant with an alarm or set it straight to flash for less than a second. "It's not an offensive weapon, but a way for you to get away as it disorientates them," Fearon notes. And, he says, its use is completely legal.
Also in demand are parcel detectors that sniff for explosives, £3,500 pinhole camera kits that automatically record any movements, stab-proof vests as used by the police, and £65 gas masks certified against biological and chemical attacks. If the Mercedes stretches your finances, you could limit yourself to bulletproof tyres at £2,000 apiece, or a £2,000 bulletproof leather bomber jacket ("it will stop an AK-47"). Kevlar, the fine-mesh fibre that has been protecting troops from Iraqi bullets, is now widely available in consumer products such as a £500 bulletproof baseball cap. "If you get a bullet in the head, you're going to have a severely cracked head, but the chances are you'll live,". Fearon says. For a further £50, you could instead buy an infrared night-vision sensor that tells you when trouble may be lurking in the garden.
But, as hit strolls between racks of bugging equipment and pinhole video-recording devices, isn't he relying on people's fear to boost his company's profits? "Money can buy an awful lot of protection," he replies. "The only limitation is the law." But there are limits, even to what money can buy. One customer asked for a home-security system that released poisonous gas when an inner door was breached. "We said no thanks," Fearon recalls. "If you accidentally let it off, you wouldn't be around to demand your money back."
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Remember the Drudge Report, the one-man media empire that caused Bill Clinton so much trouble? As content-based websites continue to disappear - UpMyStreet.com, the localised database once valued at £43 million, went into administration last week - Matt Drudge is doing rather well.
Nowadays with a sidekick to help him, Drudge is attracting around 3.2 million page views a day, typically from people returning five or ten times to see if they have missed a scoop. And with advertisers prepared to pay around a dollar (64p) for every 1,000 pages served, the profits soon add up - to more than £500,000 a year, according to the magazine Business 2.0.
It might not be up there with the £5.3 million made by the New York Times websites last year, but then Drudge does not have to pay the salaries of 237 full-time staff (and the newspaper journalists they rely upon).
While the big conglomerates continue to flounder expensively online, a few smart "nanopublishers" are rewriting the rules of media economics. They use word-of-mouth rather than advertising, aggregate stories rather than report them first-hand, and rely on e-mailed tips rather than those troublesome creatures, salaried journalists. And as more and more weblogs are proving, a loyal niche audience can make a viable small business.
(The Times, April 8 2003)
In these anxious times, when if the terrorists do not get you the carjackers apparently will, it is always reassuring to visit my man in the local hi-tech security store. Mark Fearon, who runs the CCS Counter Spy Shop in Mayfair, central London, will happily sell you peace of mind, in the form of a £250,000 customised bulletproof Mercedes or a £50 battery-powered motion sensor that, the box claims, "barks like a vicious attack dog but needs no messy cleaning up!". What, then, is the affluent neurotic buying these days?
One of the more popular gadgets is a £200 light gun that will blind an assailant for 20 minutes with a one-second 110,000 lumen beam. Known as the AL-22 Security Blanket, the light gun resembles a large plastic torch and is supplied with six single-use bulbs in an elegant briefcase. If you are attacked at night, you can warn off your assailant with an alarm or set it straight to flash for less than a second. "It's not an offensive weapon, but a way for you to get away as it disorientates them," Fearon notes. And, he says, its use is completely legal.
Also in demand are parcel detectors that sniff for explosives, £3,500 pinhole camera kits that automatically record any movements, stab-proof vests as used by the police, and £65 gas masks certified against biological and chemical attacks. If the Mercedes stretches your finances, you could limit yourself to bulletproof tyres at £2,000 apiece, or a £2,000 bulletproof leather bomber jacket ("it will stop an AK-47"). Kevlar, the fine-mesh fibre that has been protecting troops from Iraqi bullets, is now widely available in consumer products such as a £500 bulletproof baseball cap. "If you get a bullet in the head, you're going to have a severely cracked head, but the chances are you'll live,". Fearon says. For a further £50, you could instead buy an infrared night-vision sensor that tells you when trouble may be lurking in the garden.
But, as hit strolls between racks of bugging equipment and pinhole video-recording devices, isn't he relying on people's fear to boost his company's profits? "Money can buy an awful lot of protection," he replies. "The only limitation is the law." But there are limits, even to what money can buy. One customer asked for a home-security system that released poisonous gas when an inner door was breached. "We said no thanks," Fearon recalls. "If you accidentally let it off, you wouldn't be around to demand your money back."
++++
Remember the Drudge Report, the one-man media empire that caused Bill Clinton so much trouble? As content-based websites continue to disappear - UpMyStreet.com, the localised database once valued at £43 million, went into administration last week - Matt Drudge is doing rather well.
Nowadays with a sidekick to help him, Drudge is attracting around 3.2 million page views a day, typically from people returning five or ten times to see if they have missed a scoop. And with advertisers prepared to pay around a dollar (64p) for every 1,000 pages served, the profits soon add up - to more than £500,000 a year, according to the magazine Business 2.0.
It might not be up there with the £5.3 million made by the New York Times websites last year, but then Drudge does not have to pay the salaries of 237 full-time staff (and the newspaper journalists they rely upon).
While the big conglomerates continue to flounder expensively online, a few smart "nanopublishers" are rewriting the rules of media economics. They use word-of-mouth rather than advertising, aggregate stories rather than report them first-hand, and rely on e-mailed tips rather than those troublesome creatures, salaried journalists. And as more and more weblogs are proving, a loyal niche audience can make a viable small business.
(The Times, April 8 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, April 08, 2003
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