News
net.wars: Beyond the soup kitchen
"The whole idea of what a homeless service is, is a soup kitchen," one of the representatives for The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields said yesterday.[more...]
net.wars: Principle failure
The right to access, correct, and delete personal information held about you and the right to bar data collected for one purpose from being reused for another are basic principles of the data protection laws that have been the norm in Europe since the EU adopted the Privacy Directive in 1995. This is the Privacy Directive that is currently being updated; the European Commission's proposals seem, inevitably, to please no one. Businesses are already complaining compliance will be unworkable or too expensive (hey, fines of up to 2 percent of global income!). I'm not sure consumers should be all that happy either; I'd rather have the right to be anonymous than to be forgotten (which I believe will prove technically unworkable), and the jurisdiction for legal disputes with a company to be set to my country rather than theirs. Much debate lies ahead.[more...]
net.wars: Camping out
"Why hasn't the marvelous happened yet?" The speaker – at one of today's "unconference" sessions at this year's UK Govcamp – was complaining that with 13,000-odd data sets up on his organization's site there ought to be, you know, results.[more...]
net.wars: Pot pourri
You have to think that 2012 so far has been orchestrated by someone with a truly strange sense of humor. To wit:[more...]
net.wars: Only the paranoid
Yesterday's news that the Ramnit worm has harvested the login credentials of 45,000 British and French Facebook users seems to me a watershed moment for Facebook. If I were an investor, I'd wish I had already cashed out. Indications are, however, that founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in it for the long haul, in which case he's going to have to find a solution to a particularly intractable problem: how to protect a very large mass of users from identity fraud when his entire business is based on getting them to disclose as much information about themselves as possible.[more...]
net.wars: Ignorance is no excuse
My father was not a patient man. He could summon up some compassion for those unfortunates who were stupider than himself. What he couldn't stand was ignorance, particularly willful ignorance. The kind of thing where someone boasts about how little they know.[more...]
