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THE STATE LABORATORY has issued a tender for the provision of an “analytical cigarette smoking machine”.
Operating under the aegis of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, the State Lab provides services to government agencies for a variety of reasons, including monitoring the quality and safety of Irish food, the sale of counterfeit spirits or the possession of illegal medicines.
In this case, it wants to provide help to the Department of Health to test cigarettes sold in the country.
It’s been designated as the testing laboratory for Ireland to carry out testing on tobacco products as set out in new European legislation on their manufacture, presentation and sale.
“This legislation sets out maximum emission levels and measurements for tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide in cigarettes placed on the market or manufactured in member States,” a spokesperson told TheJournal.ie.
To support the HSE and Department of Health to adhere to these EU laws, the laboratory is currently setting up a tobacco testing facility.
The spokesperson added: “To do this the Laboratory needs to procure a smoking machine and other laboratory instruments required to test cigarette emissions for tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide.”
So what exactly is a cigarette smoking machine?
It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but while simulating the smoking of a cigarette it must collect various samples of discharge and the cigarette’s contents.
International standards for an analytical cigarette smoking machine say that the test cigarettes must be “sampled” and then “conditioned”.
The test cigarettes are then smoked on an automatic machine with “simultaneous collection of total particulate matter in a glass fibre filter trap”. Particulate matter is a term for solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air
The system the State Lab wants must have 20 cigarette holders, and contain devices to “control puff volume, duration and frequency”, and “must be capable of smoking a wide range of cigarettes of different lengths and diameters”.
It must also be flexible enough to analyse a variety of brands.
The machine must then be able to run samples on the tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide from the cigarette so the lab can determine if it’s within EU laws.
The State Laboratory also wants a one year warranty to be included with the quoted price, including all the necessary software, hardware, call-outs and parts for the smoking machine.
If the Irish Govt are giving you advice on anything Internet related then you really do have problems.
Especially seeing as the same government were still using Windows Xp despite it being discontinued, I think that particular failure cost the taxpayer €3.5 million.
“The Government is thinking” – I stopped reading after that silly line.
No doubt they’ll introduce an Internet tax to pay for it.
Just send all your usernames and passwords to the relevant department.
Don’t they have them already.
The government won’t be happy until they have full control of the Internet, way to free for them at the moment.
All those Facebook videos of guards beating people up and people saying they are sh!t on this site must do the powers that be heads in.
It’s driving the powers that be nuts that there is something they can’t control.
The Internet has aided in exposing corruption and tranny. But at the same time has given them a tool for spying and keeping tabs on the public.
A few lads I know have been caught out cross dressing on the internet….
Corruption and transsexuality go hand in hand in many governments
Should read :
“The Government Is Thinking Up New Ways To Hack You”
:)
You are okay there, government – I’ll control my own information, if you don’t mind.
The same government who helped setup Irish Water, a company which they gave carte blanche powers to violate every part of the data protection act to track every citizen and all of their personal information in this country, and even after spending €80 million on consultants still ended up sending bills to dead people now want to give us advice on how not to get our data stolen online? Oh the sweet irony.
Is €80mn the final Bill?
The sub text to this article is control , but let’s start small and the government is doing it to protect you .
“It’s a great place for free speech, and so that must be protected, but in a way that is acceptable in the eyes of reasonable people.”
Now…what other asshat pocket stuffing politician coined the ‘reasonable people’ phrase…….I take it the ‘reasonable people’ are only those who agree with the Government and everyone else are ‘unreasonable people’ even if they are in the majority.
There appears to be 2 terms missing in this article .. “Snowden” and “encryption security” .. Ignoring Snowden for a moment (people usually do btw) , the degrading of encryption protection from the “Five Eyes” network and their political masters/slaves is a major stumbling block to stopping “hackers” and “other agencies” from attacking electronic networks.
Encrypted emails services are now illegal in Spain, The UK, China, North Korea and this is gaining ground in many other countries.
Snowden advised that people have password phrases, otherwise their passwords could be easily hacked in seconds..
Snowden also talked of the security apparatus being designed for attack and not defence (because of backdoors and encryption busting techniques.
Point is that if the governments can do it so can any half trained computer technician..
Using the war on terror to degrade our human rights (ie privacy) is not a good excuse, in fact, it plays into the hands of the terrorists and sends a chilling effect to the rest of the population.
Google Stasi techniques and consequences in east germany. And then put the surveillance apparatus now in place in the mix. I Hope that we dont have the wrong people get into power.. that might be very scary.
And lastly .. In an age of such surveillance techniques, If Ireland was invaded it would take an enemy about 1 hour to have a list of all possible AND FUTUREthreats against them (the wonders of technology) and we have no protections..
Snowden worked for a private company with access to all you phone calls and emails going back years.. And your childrens for that matter..
Too late… lol.
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