Striker Kieffer Moore is out of Wales' Nations League games against Turkey and Iceland.

Sheffield United boss Chris Wilder puts his side's early-season success down to the togetherness at the club.

Neil Crossley from Barnsley forgot his daughter Amy when walking down the aisle

Sheffield Council say at one point just two of its 27 chargers were in operation due to the thefts.

A council delays a decision on the Saunton Sands beach proposal for additional survey work.

A review identifies aspects of poor care and issues with the neonatal service.

Salford City Council also says it will name and shame people found to be misusing Blue Badges.

The move by Transport for Greater Manchester follows Saturday's crash, which injured 17 people.

Thousands are expected at the festival, which opens on the eve of the Strictly Come Dancing visit.

Emily Sutcliffe says it is "unfair" she has lost her account documenting life with her two sons.

The presenter is warned to expect 'pain and suffering' on his BBC Children in Need bike challenge.

Comedian Paddy McGuinness is attempting to cycle from Wrexham to Glasgow over five days.

A restriction zone has been extended to cover the island and part of Hampshire.

Will Young is performing at a fundraiser for the charity in November.

MP Chris Bloore wants increased fan representation on club boards to protect the game.

Brummie painter tells Radio WM how Stephen knight came to commission his artwork

Wycombe Wanderers boss Matt Bloomfield says he has not heard anything from Coventry City about their vacant manager's job.

Awareness sessions are being held alongside the installation of 130 bleed control kits.

The Right Reverend Richard Jackson says the Archbishop has 'taken responsibility'.

Westmorland and Furness Council trading standards safe shopping advice.

A £12m cash boost from the council has seen newly refurbished homes make Maryport more desirable.

A team of engineers are checking the engines so the hydroplane can return to the water.

House that has been empty for 12 years will be community-owned and rented out to local family.

North Yorkshire councillors say £1m from the second homes tax premium will fund community-led plans.

Douglas Council's 1930s development on Lord Street remains boarded after tenants were moved in 2022.

Former Premier League sides Blackpool and Birmingham City are drawn together in the second round of the FA Cup.

The cladding is on a building which will house SEND students, Warwickshire County Council says.

People react to proposals to shut an "expensive" visitor centre in a seaside town.

A Norwich disability group thanks a charity for making a city beauty spot more accessible.

Roblox is introducing new safety features for children under the age of 13, following criticism of how it protects younger users. The free online gaming platform, which has around 70 million […]

The post Roblox introduces new safety features, Australia bans Under 16s from social media appeared first on Tech Digest.

  Kia’s compact electric SUV, the Kia EV3, has arrived in Europe with a range of up to 375 miles on a single charge and an interior design that the […]

The post Kia EV3 now available across Europe from £33,000 appeared first on Tech Digest.

Social media platform Bluesky says it has gained 700,000 new users in the week following the US election. Bluesky, which was originally conceived as part of Twitter by its former […]

The post Blue Sky gets post-election boost, Apple Vision Pro headset production scaled back appeared first on Tech Digest.

Yesterday I noticed that the Spotify Windows desktop app had changed and instead of a “follow” button under a playlist there was now a heart icon. If you hover over the heart it says “Save to Your Library” and when you click on it the playlist appears with all of the other playlists that you...

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Twitter is one of the closest things we have today to a de facto "public space" on the internet.

When marking up a web page featuring text that requires superscripts or subscripts, we should use the semantically meaningful <sup> and <sub> elements. Examples include footnote references⁽¹⁾ and simple maths 12₁₀=C₁₂.

When browsers come across <sup> and <sub> elements, their user agent stylesheet usually applies rules like this:

sub { 
  vertical-align: sub;
  font-size: smaller;
  line-height: normal;
}

This makes the text smaller and shifts the baseline up or down. There’s two downsides to this. The first is that the baseline shift usually causes anomalous line spacing, that is to say lines are pushed up or down to make space for the sub- or superscript. Secondly the sub/superscripted characters look slightly off – effectively their font weight has been reduced compared with the surrounding text.

Many OpenType fonts ship with properly designed sub- and superscripts. These are specifically designed for the purpose – the glyphs are already small (no change in font size required), retain a comparable weight and have a different shape compared with regular characters, as befits a thoughtfully shrunk down glyph. Even if these characters are available in the current font, browsers will ignore them and continue to synthesise using CSS properties. There are sensible reasons for this, as we shall see.

It is very easy to get browsers to swap in the OpenType glyphs instead – just use the font-variant-position property. For browsers which support it (all modern ones) you can override the user agent stylesheet and implement font-variant-position as follows:

@supports ( font-variant-position: sub ) {
  sub {
    vertical-align: baseline;
    font-size: 100%;
    line-height: inherit;
    font-variant-position: sub;
  }
}

But there’s a potential problem. What happens if the characters in the text you need to superscript are not all available as OpenType alternates in the current font? According to the CSS Fonts Module Level 4 specification, browsers should synthesise the whole superscript, even if some characters are available as proper superscripts:

Because of the semantic nature of subscripts and superscripts, when the value [of font-variant-position] is either sub or super for a given contiguous run of text, if a variant glyph is not available for all the characters in the run, simulated glyphs should be synthesised for all characters using reduced forms of the glyphs that would be used without this feature applied.

Phew. Job done. You’d have thought. Unfortunately at the time of writing only Firefox supports this behaviour; WebKit and Chromium do not. If the webfont has loaded, the font you are currently reading contains the following superscript alternates: ^0123456789(). That is to say no letters or other characters except the numbers 0–9 and a pair of parentheses. Now let’s consider the following markup:

2a<sup>2</sup> a<sup>2a</sup> a<sup>(2)</sup>
a<sup>(2a)</sup> a<sup>[2]</sup>

The superscripts vary, in that some of them contain characters which are all available, and others contain a mixture. The text should render like this:

This is how it renders in the browser you are currently using:

2a² a^2a a⁽²⁾ a^(2a) a^[2]

The chances are that none of the ‘a’s or square brackets are superscripted at all. I’ve filed this as a bug in Chromium and Webkit. I’ve also asked that font-variant-position be removed from Baseline until these bugs are fixed, as support is evidently incomplete, but also because that lack of support is harmful to the visual semantics, in other words it could change the intention and meaning of the text.

Finally I’ve proposed that full support for font-variant-position is included in Interop 2025. If you want to see this happen give my proposal some love.

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A leaked document outlines potentially radical changes to bin collections in Bristol.

Damn, look who’s back? After what seemed like a 10 year hiatus, ya girl is back! Yep, that’s right. I’m writing a shitty celebrity gossip blog, and Blake Lively is pregnant again! Some things never change. It seems like every time I turn around Ryan Reynolds has knocked Blake Lively up again. I’m pretty sure […]

The post Blake Lively is Pregnant Again appeared first on HecklerSpray.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into. The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more […]

The post Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches, Kia EV3 scoops EV award appeared first on ShinyShiny.

Today in the Guardian, features writer Kira Cochrane has produced a story that is already being widely quoted on the numbers (or lack thereof) of visible women in the media. "In a typical month, 78% of newspaper articles are written by men, 72% of Question Time contributors are men and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4's Today show are men. Where are all the women?"

On the one hand, this story is decently written and based on a sound idea. Not least because rather than write an article on lazy assumptions of representations, it goes to the bother of looking at whether the actual numbers match up with the perceptions of the author. This is a good place to start in any conversation about representation and is often overlooked in media or social commentary.

That said, there is a huge difference between "counting numbers" and "producing statistics". Or, indeed, evidence. My problem is not with the article per se, which after all is simply a feature for the Life & Style section of the Grauniad, but rather with the reception it's had on Twitter and elsewhere as if it is le dernier cri in proof. The article is an improvement on most other articles of its kind. But it is also at best a beginning of something that could, and should, be examined further in a way which is compatible with well-designed research.

But the widespread acclaim indicates there is a danger of not taking the piece any further, and adopting its conclusions wholesale as if it was a well-designed in-depth study. It's not (yet). It could be. For example, the article starts with "In a typical month" - to be unimpeachable, you must establish in what way the months selected were "typical".

Because the numbers match so closely with the author's a priori assumptions, care should be taken to assure the reader that the shows selected do not comprise a skewed sample. (Actually, this should be done anyway.) We need to know what the spread of shows on television and radio are that are considered topical, political, or sufficiently serious. Why was Question Time included, and Loose Women excluded? I don't think one is especially more in-depth or topical than the other. Why is Have I Got News For You considered, which is a comedy show, and Moral Maze not, which is a serious radio programme featuring many regular women panellists and guests? Or the Radio 4 News Quiz, hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring many women as guests? What about Women's Hour?

Size, as ever, matters. What are the audience sizes for the shows, since clearly that is important? So, too, does sampling. Since it's presumably not practical or useful to count all appearances on all media, there needs to be a way of assuring that the ones considered in such a study comprise a representative sample of media, audience types, and audience sizes. This is something almost no examination of media topics outside academia bother to do (and many inside don't do it either). But if the shows can not be shown to be representative, the stud's conclusions could be accused of being skewed, and the results not taken seriously.

The title of the article, with its unexplored "why?" also presents the danger of interpreting an outcome as if it is the same as the opportunity. Why, indeed, should there be more women on Question Time, when the percentage of female MPs is only 22%? This surely this is a problem that needs to be addressed at root level (why are there not more women in government, considered for such positions, or running for them?) and not by whingeing about token women on politics shows.

The reaction to women going on some of these shows can be extremely negative, which makes other women considering whether to appear think twice. Remember when Fern Britton appeared on Question Time, and the furore over her opening her mouth on topics other than what we thought she should talk about? I was asked to go on QT last year and turned it down because I expected much the same reaction. Would a similarly placed man in media have had the same dismissive reception as Britton, particularly from women like Amanda Platell perceiving them as "lightweight"?

Similarly, the format of the Today programme on Radio 4 is extremely off-putting. Would you like to be shouted at for two minutes first thing in the morning on a show that prides itself on manufacturing controversy, or have a reasonable discussion over on Women's Hour? That, incidentally, is the question more-or-less as it has been put to me by the PR folks at Orion in the past. Come on, it's not even a contest which most women (and men) would choose given the option.

Age is also part of the mix. As one twitter correspondent (@petehague) commented, "I think that the entire debate misses the point that experienced commentators represent past gender policies ... i.e. if you want to get a professor of economics on TV, your selection is influenced by undergraduate gender balance decades ago." And not only the undergrad balance, but especially the percentage making it through study to professorships. David Starkey and his ilk are still rocking up peddling their schtick because, well, the women with the best and most cogent arguments to counter him are not at his level of academic or media experience yet. This phenomenon is almost certainly at work outside the academia bubble as well. And given the continuation of the trend in which women for various reasons choose family or life balance over single-minded pursuit of their careers, it may well never happen.

Finally, we must ask why it is women in media, even ones like say, Laurie Penny, who seem committed to an ideal of being a political writer, end up doing pieces about dating and handbags. Is it because when such assignments are offered, writers would rather take the job than turn it down? And does this, over time, contribute to an impression that anyone who has done so is destined to "lack gravitas"? There is a pink ghetto even - no, especially - at the Guardian. Isn't it ironic that Cochrane's piece is in the Life & Style section, rather than, say, Comment Is Free? On the same day when a man's thoughts on his Movember 'tache does get a spot in CiF?

So in short, while I broadly agree with Cochrane's thesis that it would be nice to see more women on shows like Question Time and Have I Got News For You, I'm not sure the critical applause is warranted. Yet. And I don't think it constitutes "proof" much at all apart from being about those shows on those days. Interesting? Yes. Generalisable to all media at all times? No. The difference between anecdotes and sampling is subtle (perhaps too much so for most media) but crucial.

You may be wondering why this matters on an issue in which most people are in agreement. It matters because if an argument is seen to be slapdash or half-baked, it throws the conclusions into doubt regardless of how worthy they are. It matters because for there to be change it's important to know the real and not imagined extent of the problem. And it matters because if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. There's a germ of an interesting idea in there. The real question is what is to be done with it?

Further to yesterday's post, this is a list of thoughts prompted by a request from Linkmachinego on the topic of being an anonymous writer and blogger. Maybe not exactly a how-to (since the outcome is not guaranteed) as a post on things I did, things I should have done, and things I learned.

It's not up to me to decide if you "deserve" to be anonymous. My feeling is, if you're starting out as a writer and do not yet feel comfortable writing under your own name, that is your business and not mine. I also think sex workers should consider starting from a position of anonymity and decide later if they want to be out, please don't be naive. Statistics I made up right now show 99 out of 100 people who claim 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' are talking out of their arses.

The items in the list fall into three general categories: internet-based, legal and real-world tips, and interpersonal. Many straddle more than one of these categories. All three are important.

This is written for a general audience because most people who blog now do not have extensive technical knowledge, they just want to write and be read. That's a good thing by the way. If you already know all of this, then great, but many people won't. Don't be sneery about their lack of prior knowledge. Bringing everyone up to speed on the technology is not the goal: clear steps you can use to help protect your identity from being discovered are.

Disclaimer: I'm no longer anonymous so these steps are clearly not airtight. Also there are other sources of information on the Web, some of which are more comprehensive and more current than my advice. I accept no responsibility for any outcome of following this advice. Please don't use it to do illegal or highly sensitive things. Also please don't use pseudonyms to be a dick.

This is also a work in progress. As I remember things or particular details, I'll amend this post. If you have suggestions of things that should be added, let me know.

1. Don't use Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail et al. for your mail.

You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This email will have to be something entirely separate from your "real" email addresses. There are a lot of free options out there, but be aware that sending an email from many of them also sends information in the headers that could help identify you.

When I started blogging, I set up an email address for the blog with Hotmail. Don't do this. Someone quickly pointed out the headers revealed where I worked (a very large place with lots of people and even more computers, but still more information than I was comfortable with). They suggested I use Hushmail instead, which I still use. Hushmail has a free option (though the inbox allocation is modest), strips out headers, and worked for me.

A caveat with this: if you are, say, a sex worker working in a place where that is not legal and using Hushmail, you could be vulnerable to them handing over your details to a third party investigating crimes. If you're handling information some governments might consider embarrassing or sensitive, same. Google some alternatives: you're looking for something secure and encrypted.

There are a few common-sense tips you can follow to make it even safer. If you have to bring people you know in real life in on the secret, don't use this email address for communicating with them even if only about matters related to your secret (and don't use your existing addresses for that either). Example: I have one address for press and general interactions, one for things related to my accountant and money, and one for communicating with my agent, publisher, and solicitor. I've also closed and opened new accounts over the years when it seems "too many" people are getting hold of a particular address. Use different passwords for each, don't make these passwords related to your personal information, and so on.

I unwisely left the Hotmail address going, and while I did not use it to send mail, I continued to read things that arrived there. That led to this failed attempt by the Sunday Times to out me. It was an easily dodged attempt but something I would have preferred to avoid.

People can and do register internet domains while staying anonymous but I never did. Some people registered domains for me (people I didn't know in person). This led to a couple of instances of them receiving harassment when the press suspected they were me. In particular Ian Shircore got a bit of unwanted attention this way.

Because all I was ever doing was a straight-up blog, not having a registered domain that I had control over was fine. Your needs may be different. I am not a good source for advice on how to do that. But just in case you might be thinking "who would bother looking there?" read about how faux escort Alexa DiCarlo was unmasked. This is what happens when you don't cover your tracks.

2. Don't use a home internet connection, work internet connection, etc.

Email won't be the only way you might want to communicate with people. You may also want to leave comments on other blogs and so forth. Doing this and other ways of using the Web potentially exposes your IP address, which could be unique and be used to locate you.

Even if you don't leave comments just visiting a site can leave traces behind. Tim Ireland recently used a simple method to confirm his suspicion of who the "Tabloid Troll" twitter account belonged to. By comparing the IP address of someone who clicked on to a link going to the Bloggerheads site with the IP address of an email Dennis Rice sent, a link was made. If you go to the trouble of not using your own connection, also make sure you're not using the same connection for different identities just minutes apart. Don't mix the streams.

The timing of everything as it happened was key to why the papers did not immediately find out who I was. The old blog started in 2003, when most press still had to explain to their audience what a blog actually was. It took a while for people to notice the writing, so the mistakes I made early on (blogging from home and work, using Hotmail) had long been corrected by the time the press became interested.

Today, no writer who aims to stay anonymous should ever assume a grace period like that. It also helped that once the press did become interested, they were so convinced not only that Belle was not really a hooker but also that she was one of their own - a previously published author or even journalist - that they never looked in the right place. If they'd just gone to a London blogmeet and asked a few questions about who had pissed off a lot of people and was fairly promiscuous, they'd have had a plausible shortlist in minutes.

After I moved from Kilburn to Putney, I was no longer using a home internet connection - something I should have done right from the beginning. I started to use internet cafes for posting and other activities as Belle. This offers some security... but be wary of using these places too often if there is a reason to think someone is actively looking for you. It's not perfect.

Also be wary if you are using a laptop or other machine provided by your workplace, or use your own laptop to log in to work servers ("work remotely"). I've not been in that situation and am not in any way an expert on VPNs, but you may want to start reading about it here and do some googling for starters. As a general principle, it's probably wise not to do anything on a work laptop that could get you fired, and don't do anything that could get you fired while also connected to work remotely on your own machine.

3. There is software available that can mask your IP address. There are helpful add-ons that can block tracking software.

I didn't use this when I was anonymous, but if I was starting as an anonymous blogger now, I would download Tor and browse the Web and check email through their tools.

If you do use Tor or other software to mask your IP address, don't then go on tweeting about where your IP address is coming from today! I've seen people do this. Discretion fail.

I also use Ghostery now to block certain tracking scripts from web pages. You will want to look into something similar. Also useful are Adblocker, pop-up blockers, things like that. They are simple to download and use and you might like to use them anyway even if you're not an anonymous blogger. A lot of sites track your movements and you clearly don't want that.

4. Take the usual at-home precautions.

Is your computer password-protected with a password only you know? Do you clear your browser history regularly? Use different passwords for different accounts? Threats to anonymity can come from people close to you. Log out of your blog and email accounts when you're finished using them, every time. Have a secure and remote backup of your writing. Buy a shredder and use it. Standard stuff.

Another thing I would do is install a keystroke logger on your own machine. By doing this I found out in 2004 that someone close to me was spying on me when they were left alone with my computer. In retrospect what I did about it was not the right approach. See also item 7.

5. Be careful what you post.

Are you posting photos? Exif data can tell people, among other things, where and when a picture was taken, what it was taken with, and more. I never had call to use it because I never posted photos or sound, but am told there are loads of tools that can wipe this Exif data from your pictures (here's one).

The content of what you post can be a giveaway as well. Are you linking to people you know in real life? Are you making in-jokes or references to things only a small group of people will know about? Don't do that.

If possible, cover your tracks. Do you have a previous blog under a known name? Are you a contributor to forums where your preferred content and writing style are well-known? Can you edit or delete these things? Good, do that.

Personally, I did not delete everything. Partly this was because the world of British weblogging was so small at the time - a few hundred popular users, maybe a couple thousand people blogging tops? - that I thought the sudden disappearance of my old blog coinciding with the appearance of an unrelated new one might be too much of a coincidence. But I did let the old site go quiet for a bit before deleting it, and edited archived entries.

Keep in mind however that The Wayback Machine means everything you have written on the web that has been indexed still exists. And it's searchable. Someone who already has half an idea where to start looking for you won't have too much trouble finding your writing history. (UPDATE: someone alerted me that it's possible to get your own sites off Wayback by altering the robots.txt file - and even prevent them appearing there in the first place - and to make a formal request for removal using reasons listed here. This does not seem to apply to sites you personally have no control over unless copyright issues are involved.) If you can put one more step between them and you... do it.

6. Resist temptation to let too many people in.

If your writing goes well, people may want to meet you. They could want to buy you drinks, give you free tickets to an opening. Don't say yes. While most people are honest in their intentions, some are not. And even the ones who are may not have taken the security you have to keep your details safe. Remember, no one is as interested in protecting your anonymity as you will be.

Friends and family were almost all unaware of my secret - both the sex work and the writing. Even my best friend (A4 from the books) didn't know. 

I met very few people "as" Belle. There were some who had to meet me: agent, accountant, editor. I never went to the Orion offices until after my identity became known. I met Billie Piper, Lucy Prebble, and a couple of writers during the pre-production of Secret Diary at someone's house, but met almost no one else involved with the show. Paul Duane and Avril MacRory met me and were absolutely discreet. I went to the agent's office a few times but never made an appointment as Belle or in my real name. Most of the staff there had no idea who I was. Of these people who did meet me almost none knew my real name, where I lived, where I was from, my occupation. Only one (the accountant) knew all of that - explained below under point 9. And if I could have gotten away with him never seeing a copy of my passport, I damn well would have done.

The idea was that if people don't know anything they can't inadvertently give it away. I know that all of the people listed above were absolutely trustworthy. I still didn't tell them anything a journalist would have considered useful.

When I started blogging someone once commented that my blog was a "missed opportunity" because it didn't link to an agency website or any way of booking my services. Well, duh. I didn't want clients to meet me through the blog! If you are a sex worker who wants to preserve a level of pseudonymity and link your public profile to your work, Amanda Brooks has the advice you need. Not me.

Other sources like JJ Luna write about how to do things like get and use credit cards not tied to your name and address. I've heard Entropay offer 'virtual' credit cards that are not tied to your credit history, although they can't be used with any system that requires address verification. This could be useful even for people who are not involved in sex work.

Resisting temptation sometimes means turning down something you'd really like to do. The short-term gain of giving up details for a writing prize or some immediate work may not be worth the long-term loss of privacy. I heard about one formerly anonymous blogger who was outed after giving their full name and address to a journalist who asked for it when they entered a competition. File under: how not to stay anonymous.

7. Trust your intuition.

I have to be careful what I say here. In short, my identity became known to a tabloid paper and someone whom I had good reason not to trust (see item 4) gave them a lot of information about me.

When your intuition tells you not to trust someone, LISTEN TO IT. The best security in the world fails if someone props open a door, leaves a letter on the table, or mentally overrides the concern that someone who betrayed you before could do so again. People you don't trust should be ejected from your life firmly and without compromise. A "let them down easy" approach only prolongs any revenge they might carry out and probably makes it worse. The irony is that as a call girl I relied on intuition and having strong personal boundaries all the time... but failed to carry that ability over into my private life. If there is one thing in my life I regret, the failure to act on my intuition is it.

As an aside if you have not read The Gift of Fear already, get it and read it.

See also point 9: if and when you need people to help you keep the secret don't make it people already involved in your private life. Relationships can cloud good judgement in business decisions.

There is a very droll saying "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead." It's not wrong. I know, I know. Paranoid. Hard not to be when journos a few years later are digging through the rubbish of folks who met you exactly once when you were sixteen. Them's the breaks.

8. Consider the consequences of success.

If you find yourself being offered book deals or similar, think it through. Simply by publishing anonymously you will become a target. Some people assume all anonymous writers "want" to be found, and the media in particular will jump through some very interesting hurdles to "prove" anything they write about you is in the public interest.

In particular, if you are a sex worker, and especially if you are a sex worker who is visible/bookable through your site, please give careful consideration to moving out of that sphere. Even where sex for money is legal it is still a very stigmatised activity. There are a number of people who do not seem to have realised this, and the loss of a career when they left the "sex-pos" bubble was probably something of a shock. I'm not saying don't do it - but please think long and hard about the potential this has to change your life and whether you are fully prepared to be identified this way forever. For every Diablo Cody there are probably dozens of Melissa Petros. For every Melissa Petro there are probably hundreds more people with a sex industry past who get quietly fired and we don't ever hear from them.

If I knew going in to the first book deal what would happen, I probably would have said no. I'm glad I didn't by the way - but realistically, my life was stressful enough at that point and I did not fully understand what publishing would add to that. Not many bloggers had mainstream books at that point (arguably none in the UK) so I didn't have anyone else's experience to rely on. I really had no idea about what was going to happen. The things people wrote about me then were mainly untrue and usually horrendous. Not a lot has changed even now. I'd be lying if I said that didn't have an emotional effect.

Writing anonymously and being outed has happened often enough that people going into it should consider the consequences. I'm not saying don't do it if you risk something, but be honest with yourself about the worst possible outcome and whether you would be okay with that.

9.  Enlist professional help to get paid and sign contracts.

Having decided to write a book, I needed an agent. The irony of being anonymous was that while I let as few people in on it as possible, at some point I was going to have to take a leap of faith and let in more. Mil Millington emailed me to recommend Patrick Walsh, saying he was one of the few people in London who can be trusted. Mil was right.

Patrick put me on to my accountant (who had experience of clients with, shall we say, unusual sources of income). From there we cooked up a plan so that contracts could be signed without my name ever gracing a piece of paper. Asking someone to keep a secret when there's a paper trail sounds like it should be possible but rarely is. Don't kid yourself, there is no such thing as a unbreakable confidentiality agreement. Asking journalists and reviewers to sign one about your book is like waving a red rag to a bull. What we needed was a few buffers between me and the press.

With Patrick and Michael acting as directors, a company was set up - Bizrealm. I was not on the paperwork as a director so my name never went on file with Companies House. Rather, with the others acting as directors, signing necessary paperwork, etc., Patrick held a share in trust for me off of which dividends were drawn and this is how I got paid. I may have got some of these details wrong, by the way - keep in mind, I don't deal with Bizrealm's day-to-day at all.

There are drawbacks to doing things this way: you pay for someone's time, in this case the accountant, to create and administer the company. You can not avoid tax and lots of it. (Granted, drawing dividends is more tax-efficient, but still.) You have to trust a couple of people ABSOLUTELY. I'd underline this a thousand times if I could. Michael for instance is the one person who always knew, and continues to know, everything about my financial and personal affairs. Even Patrick doesn't know everything.

There are benefits though, as well. Because the money stays mainly in the company and is not paid to me, it gets eked out over time, making tax bills manageable, investment more constant, and keeping me from the temptation to go mad and spend it.

I can't stress enough that you might trust your friends and family to the ends of the earth, but they should not be the people who do this for you. Firstly, because they can be traced to you (they know you in a non-professional way). Secondly, because this is a very stressful setup and you need the people handling it to be on the ball. As great as friends and family are that is probably not the kind of stress you want to add to your relationship. I have heard far too many stories of sex workers and others being betrayed by ex-partners who knew the details of their business dealings to ever think that's a good idea.

So how do you know you can trust these people? We've all heard stories of musicians and other artists getting ripped off by management, right? All I can say is instinct. It would not have been in Patrick's interest to grass me, since as my agent he took a portion of my earnings anyway, and therefore had financial as well as personal interest in protecting that. If he betrayed me he would also have suffered a loss of reputation that potentially outweighed any gain. Also, as most people who know him will agree, he's a really nice and sane human being. Same with Michael.

If this setup sounds weirdly paranoid, let me assure you that journalists absolutely did go to Michael's office and ask to see the Bizrealm paperwork, and Patrick absolutely did have people going through his bins, trying to infiltrate his office as interns, and so on. Without the protection of being a silent partner in the company those attempts to uncover me might have worked.

I communicate with some writers and would-be writers who do not seem to have agents. If you are serious about writing, and if you are serious about staying anonymous, get an agent. Shop around, follow your instinct, and make sure it's someone you can trust. Don't be afraid to dump an agent, lawyer, or anyone else if you don't trust them utterly. They're professionals and shouldn't take it personally.

10. Don't break the (tax) law.

Journalists being interested in your identity is one thing. What you really don't want is the police or worse, the tax man, after you. Pay your taxes and try not to break the law if it can be helped. If you're a sex worker blogging about it, get an accountant who has worked with sex workers before - this is applicable even if you live somewhere sex work is not strictly legal. Remember, Al Capone went down for tax evasion. Don't be like Al. If you are a non-sex-work blogger who is earning money from clickthroughs and affiliates on your site, declare this income.

In summer 2010 the HMRC started a serious fraud investigation of me. It has been almost two years and is only just wrapping up, with the Revenue finally satisfied that not only did I declare (and possibly overdeclare) my income as a call girl, but that there were no other sources of income hidden from them. They have turned my life and financial history upside down to discover next to nothing new about me. This has been an expensive and tedious process. I can't even imagine what it would have been like had I not filed the relevant forms, paid the appropriate taxes, and most of all had an accountant to deal with them!

Bottom line, you may be smart - I'm pretty good with numbers myself - but people whose job it is to know about tax law, negotiating contracts, and so on will be better at that than you are. Let them do it. They are worth every penny.

11. Do interviews with care.

Early interviews were all conducted one of two ways: over email (encrypted) or over an IRC chatroom from an anonymising server (I used xs4all). This was not ideal from their point of view, and I had to coach a lot of people in IRC which most of them had never heard of. But again, it's worth it, since no one in the press will be as interested in protecting your identity as you are. I hope it goes without saying, don't give out your phone number.

12. Know when les jeux sont faits.

In November 2009 - 6 years after I first started blogging anonymously - my identity was revealed.

As has been documented elsewhere, I had a few heads-ups that something was coming, that it was not going to be nice, and that it was not going to go away. We did what we could to put off the inevitable but it became clear I only had one of two choices: let the Mail on Sunday have first crack at running their sordid little tales, or pre-empt them.

While going to the Sunday Times - the same paper that had forcibly outed Zoe Margolis a few years earlier, tried to get my details through that old Hotmail address, and incorrectly fingered Sarah Champion as me - was perhaps not the most sensitive choice, it was for me the right move. Patrick recommended that we contact an interviewer who had not been a Belle-believer: if things were going to be hard, best get that out of the way up front.



So that is that. It's a bit odd how quickly things have changed. When I started blogging I little imagined I would be writing books, much less something like this. Being a kind of elder statesman of blogging (or cantankerous old grump if you prefer) is not an entirely comfortable position and one that is still new to me. But it is also interesting to note how little has changed: things that worked in the early 2000s have value today. The field expanded rapidly but the technology has not yet changed all that much.

As before, these ideas do not constitute a foolproof way to protect your identity. All writers - whether writing under their own names or not - should be aware of the risks they may incur by hitting 'publish'. I hope this post at least goes some way to making people think about how they might be identified, and starts them on a path of taking necessary (and in many cases straightforward) precautions, should they choose to be anonymous.

Like most people I saw the Science: It's a Girl Thing! teaser on Friday. My first reaction was "meh". Watch, ignore, move on.

But apparently it has ignited all sorts of controversy. Within hours my twitter feed was filling up with people - mostly not girls, not scientists, or both - who were slamming the advert for being too pink, to feminine... in short, too stereotypically girly.

Disclaimer: my science heroes as a kid were Mr Wizard, Carl Sagan, and Jack Klugman in Quincy M.E. Not overly feminine, I'll admit.

While I found the original advert a bit like Cosmo on acid and really not to my taste, it's fair to say the UK media Twitterati were not its intended consumers.

I wouldn't have been impressed with the trailer even as a teenager, but then, I already knew I wanted to be a scientist and had already stopped caring what the mean girls thought. Not everyone who could be interested in science gets there by age 13.

So, about Science: It's a Girl Thing! does it hit its target, or does it fail?

What a lot of the negative comments focused on was that this was funded by the EU. For those who don't know, the EU funds a lot of projects under its Framework Programmes to not only conduct research, but also to promote science and technology in general.

A few years ago I worked on an EU project, for instance, that was interested not in research per se, but in managing a consultation about existing knowledge in the area (the contribution of particular pesticides to child neurological development). We organised conferences on these themes, and produced guidance documents for the EU on various related subjects.

Being able to present well was a vital part of the job. It wasn't the coal-face of research that most of us came from, but if you think things like that aren't important to science in general, you're much mistaken. As far as EU-funded projects go, making videos to try to get teens to think about science is absolutely within their remit.

The second thing is that the video everyone objected to was a trailer. As we all know, trailers are sometimes misleading. In this case that's definitely true.

If you look at the other videos associated with the project - something very few people seemed to do - it's clear the teaser is not the meat of the campaign and was probably made by a different team. The teaser had been removed presumably because of the negative reaction, but the rest of the videos are still there. Those videos cover things like a day in the life of a virology student, a nanotechnology engineer, and a bioengineer from Helsinki. With nary a pink lab coat to be seen. I dare you to go and tell any of these women their work is "fluffy" or "inconsequential".

Rest assured the project will come with a follow-up assessment of how well it did reaching its target audience... an audience that, by definition, is not you. At least for once we were not treated to the usual monochrome 'woman with hair in a bun looks at petri dish' or 'woman at lab bench peers into microscope' crap. Like it or not this was a campaign that was trying something different and for that alone should be commended.


Someone tweeted at me that there's research that "proves" this sort of encouragement of girls doesn't work. So I went and had a look at it.

To summarise, "Betz and Sekaquaptewa recruited 142 girls aged 11 to 13 and showed them mocked-up magazine articles about three female university students who were either described as doing well in science, engineering, technology or mathematics (STEM), or as rising stars in unspecified fields. The three also either displayed overtly feminine characteristics or gender-neutral traits."

Apparently the subjects reacted negatively to the girly girls. Interesting stuff. But it's not clear that the paper sought to define an approach to addressing attitudes about women in science. Rather its results seem to confirm what surely we already know: that these negative associations exist and that people do not see femininity and science as complimentary. If you're going to write off visible femininity being not-opposed to science ability based on a 'personality science' study that serves to approximately tell people what we already know, then why bother doing anything?

Then there's the tone of the criticism in general which is, frankly, as condescending as it accuses to advert of being.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who is making a career change into science. I found myself getting somewhat irritated that she, unlike me, did not appear to be willing to follow science to the nth degree and put her nose to the unrewarding research grindstone. Rather she wanted a degree in a subject she was interested in that could lead to a solid job in a few years' time.

She basically caught me out making the very assumption critics of the Girl Thing campaign are making: that if you're not on track for a Nobel prize, then you're not good enough for science. I realised how many of my assumptions about what science is "for" were shaped by my education-positive, science-positive upbringing... a background she did not have. In other words, the luxury of wallowing around in academia? Was not of any interest to her. She's the best judge of how to live her life - not me.

It felt pretty shit to realise what I was doing (sorry, S).

This points to what I feel is a greater malaise and one which seriously does hamper achievement. When we already know what class and income barriers there are for young people - not only girls - to get into white collar career paths, why would we want to make that worse?

We have to acknowledge that something that offends your taste may not actually have a negative effect. I hate CSI and Silent Witness. I hate forensic fiction shows with the white hot heat of a thousand suns. As someone with a PhD in forensic science, I feel it cheapens the real science and misrepresents what we do.

However, I can't deny the simultaneous explosion of students into forensic science that accompanied Marg Helgenberger and Emilia Fox swishing their luscious locks over murder victims. An explosion of students, by the way, that is predominantly female.


I would probably raise an eyebrow at any colleague who told me that they got into forensic science because of CSI, but to be honest, is that really any worse than my love of Quincy? And does being dismissive of eye-candy actresses pretending to be like me make me a better scientist than my CSI-loving colleague? No, it doesn't. The difference in our influences is not a matter of ability, it's a matter of personal taste, and that is something which is in no way correlated to being good at the job.

It's an effect that is not uncommon, in fact. Loads of people looked at Indiana Jones and fancied a go at archaeology. I'd wager Ally Beal had some impact on the law profession. Maybe the key to getting more young people interested in science isn't having a snarky blog only people exactly like you read (controversial, I know), but having relatable images in wider media for others to observe. Even if those images happen to be model-pretty and a bit daft.

(Insert your own paragraph about the impact Brian Cox will surely have here.)

Whether the rapid post-CSI expansion will have been a good thing for forensic science is another conversation. But it's interesting to see this happening largely at the former-poly universities. I would hold that these girly girl characters have made the field relevant to young women who had the innate ability to go into any science, but perhaps lacked the self confidence and support to see which field might be most relatable to them. Things which some of us take for granted. Having the confidence to strike out and do something different is not a given for everyone. And yes, this is absolutely a class thing... and a girl thing. It is all kinds of a privilege thing.


If you work in a lab with lots of other women, you'll see girly girls, tomboy girls, and plenty of others in between. It literally takes all kinds. Ability to do well in STEM subjects is not a function of appearance or sexiness.

But at the same time looking good and being sexy aren't barriers to being capable at science, either.
With so many people concerned about the crisis in young women wanting to be Kim Kardasian instead of Madame Curie, maybe it's time to acknowledge that we need to cast the net a little wider. Your experiences as a woman are not limited to these extremes.

While the original splashy video has been removed, I'm not sure this is a victory of any sort. I'm a little disappointed they turned tail at the first sign of criticism. Frankly the tone of the backlash provided a level of coverage the rest of the campaign would not otherwise have had. And if it turns out to have been misguided as so many believe, then what better way to learn how to improve the campaign?

But my guess is that regardless of whether or not you like pink and whether or not the advert offended you personally, the outcome will not have been all negative. The assumption that someone who aspires to look like a Kardashian can't or shouldn't become interested in science is frankly bollocks. And the assumption that young girls should be influenced by whatever the chattering classes deem appropriate is also bollocks. If that offends the po-faced middle class - for whom access to science careers is not in question anyway - then so be it.

I was re-reading Iceberg Slim recently (as you do), and wondering what exactly it is the anti-sex brigade mean when they go around calling people "pimps".

I've been called a pimp before. By Julie Bindel, to my face, and I laughed because it is so ridiculous: I have never profited off of anyone's erotic capital but my own… and arguably Billie Piper's, though that makes me no more and perhaps significantly less pimp-like than (say) her agent and the show's producers.

I don't get particularly offended by such obviously over the top labels. But the word itself has started to crop up more and more in the arguments surrounding sex work and the proposed laws regarding prostitution. Take for example in Ireland, where the widespread assumption is that all sex workers are a) women and b) "pimped". Both of these are demonstrably and flagrantly not true, and yet are found in virtually any media coverage of the topic which is heavily influenced by an unholy coalition of extreme religious groups and extreme radfem ideologues.

The side issue dogging the proposed changes, that is, the discourse about what exactly constitutes trafficking and who exactly is trafficked, is of course pretty openly racist - both the words and the imagery. This has been covered in some detail and extremely well by eg. Laura Agustin, whose work on the topic I highly recommend.
 

Typical "trafficking" propaganda: shades of White Slavery all over the place.
 
Anyway, back to the concept of "pimp". Now we all know, or think we know, what a pimp is, and much of this archetype comes from highly fictionalised misrepresentations of Mr Slim's own work.
Go on, you know exactly what people mean by the word. What "pimp" implies. A man who runs women, lures them with money and romance, then turns them out to whoring, often beaten, always drug-addicted.

And he is black.

Starting to sound like casual use of "pimp" is dog-whistle racism, isn't it?

For the life of me I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I "know" they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. I've met streetwalkers, both drug-addicted and not; escorts and call girls, same; not one ever had what popular imagination would classify as a "pimp," but then I keep getting told I'm not representative, so maybe the literally hundreds of men and women, cis and trans sex workers I've met are just "not representative" too?

Occasionally you also hear talk of the "Eastern European gangmaster", but for some reason the class- and racially-evocative term "pimp" comes up far, far more often. Could that be because plain xenophobia just doesn't inspire the troops in quite the same way bald racism does?

Independent sex workers who organise their own affairs and work solo. Roommates who share a flat and both happen to sell sex. Managers running escorts agencies with a dozen or so girls they mostly interact with by text. Massage parlour owners. Women whose house is used by other sex workers, so technically I guess are madams. People who set up message boards and internet forums where clients and sex workers talk among themselves and with each other. All of these are people who get called "pimps" by the anti-sex lobby.

A guy in a crushed velvet suit on a street corner, keeping his girls high and working the neighbourhood? Not so many of those to the pound.

But, let's say he really is out there, because we all keep getting told he is. This working-class black man in the loud clothes who is sexually and physically aggressive and probably has a criminal record. This "pimp".

Do you think his choice of work isn't somehow constrained by society too? That he wouldn't rather be earning money some other way? Because anyone with any sense can surely suss out that a lot of activities, both legal and illegal, would be far more profit and far less hassle than running girls.


Iceberg Slim: hustling because it's not as if you were going to save him and his mother from poverty, were you?
 
This is the reality of waged work, all waged work, whether sex is involved or not. No one, but no one, has "free choice". If you think otherwise, remind yourself what you wanted to be when you grew up, and reflect on how exactly you ended up where you are now. Did you freely select from all career choices in the world, ever? Or did you choose as best you could from the options offered by your abilities and (more crucially) your circumstances? You know, like Iceberg Slim did?

Some folks seem especially resistant to acknowledging the truth about work, so I'll underline it some more. Entire towns in the North weren't full of miners because everyone there just happened to have the aptitude and preference for that sole job, but because it was the only job going. NE Scotland isn't full of fishermen because they have a particular concentration of people whose life's dream was to catch fish, but because that's what the job market offers. Everyone's outcome is the product of limited choices, from streetwalkers to the Queen. And no one's suggesting she needs to be "rescued" from her lack of career options.

If you want to improve someone's options, you address the things that constrain their choices in the first place. Poverty, addiction, education, to name a few. Not take away the only choices they have.

The pimp as we perceive him is a low-end tough. He's not exactly a criminal mastermind. And unlike a lot of the people who talk about "pimps" and whatnot, I know criminals. I have seen that life up close and fucking personal. I have lived in their neighbourhoods and their houses, and even in their families. I know that anyone who runs a business in the way the supposed pimp supposedly does is making little money, if any. What's 50% of that £10 anal bareback the anti-sex lobby claim is available in red lights everywhere? A fiver? Yeah, that sounds logical. Now pull the other one.

I know that his power - again, if he exists, because even when I was living in Cracktown, Pinellas County I saw shit that would stop your heart but I never once saw a "pimp" - is a power of an extremely limited kind. The power of someone with few and possibly no other options.

The anti-sex lobby's fantasy use of the term "pimp" is bogus and it is racist. Anyone who claims otherwise is being purposely disingenuous for the sake of striking fear into white, English-speaking, middle-class people.

Reflection on current events

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