April 2014 – davelevy.info

International pursuit of corruption

Here is a presentation, dated 2011, called Changes in Spanish Anti-bribery Legislation by Rafael Jiménez-Gusi, a Partner of Baker & McKenzie, a Law Firm. It has what is now familiar, the concept of corporate bribery and private bribery. The mitigation acts are interesting, but more so is the unexplored extra-territoriality of Spanish Law and prosecutors. Do you think that Spanish prosecutors can pursue corruption throughout Europe? I also note that bribes are anything of value, that are not socially acceptable. So what’s a big dinner count as? What does a secret job offer count as? …

Policy for Labour on the Digital Economy

The Labour Party’s proposed policy programme only mentions the digital economy once, and this is to promise more speed, everywhere it can go. There are two internal pressure group style swarms/groups/initiatives looking to do better. The first is launched by the front bench incubated if not commissioned by the impressive Chi Onawaruh MP, currently shadow spokesperson for the Cabinet Office. This has it’s home at this site, Chi publicised the initiative at in an article at Labour List called How can we make Digital Government work better for everyone?. A great deal of thought has been undertaken in launching this initiative. The second initiative is @LabourDigital, …

Time to move on from XP

Microsoft have just ended support for XP; there are to be no more updates which means it’s a growing security threat! Not all organisations have moved forward yet, and probably even less home user including me. Microsoft’s behaviour over the last two years has not been helpful to consumers. Firstly, the ‘upgrade’ to the new look and feel of Windows 8 trashes consumer’s self administration skills. Making new systems do what they want and knew how to do on XP is hard. Secondly, moving forward using virtualisation technology as advised by this article at hongkiat remains difficult, partly because of Microsoft’s aggressive digital rights enforcement . Microsoft’s behaviour is not unusual, nor illegal, but there’s a lot of people who aren’t happy and Microsoft’s historic success is based on consumer adoption. They’re changing up, we probably need to also. …

Remediating the Internet’s outstanding SPOFs

Mike Masnick writes a little article forecasting the engineers re-writing the single points of failure out of the internet. He entitles his article, Building A More Decentralized Internet: It’s Happening Faster Than People Realize. He cross references to two articles written by himself back in 2010, Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed and The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes What’s Going On in which he, more accurately, recognises the current and future power of distributed and private networks. It should be remembered that these predictions all occurred before the Arab spring and the recent protests in Turkey and the state responses to the use of networks. One of the key initiatives proposed in my mind, is to develop a P2P name service resolver, while others propose a P2P file system.

I wrote a wiki article, called “Ruggedising the Internet” which points at several further resources and projects. I might even join in. … …

Supporting the EDRi Charter

Earlier this month I wrote about the 10 Point Charter for a Digital Society and the voting exchange supporting it. Claude Moraes, Labour’s 1st place candidate on the London List, an incumbent and a leading member of the EU Parliament’s LIBE (Civil Liberties) Committee has already signed it as has Ivanna Bartolleti, who is also on Labour’s London list. Two days ago, I wrote to the remaining London Labour candidates and asked them to also support it. The rest of this article is a synopsis of the argument I used in favour of all 10 points. I said something like this, …

Mega City

The Convoy’s Wharf planning decision was taken earlier this week. For a balenced informed view, I recommend looking at Crosswatfields blog, Mayor of London gives Convoys Wharf the go ahead, which looks at the growing consensus that schemes such as these are not what London nor its local communities need. I shared my submission on this blog last week, and found Crosswatfields earlier blog article, Only 6 days left to object to the plans for Convoys Wharf an excellent pointer and reminder. If you want some more, I created a story at Storify to capture the twittersphere during the public hearing and this now includes a link to a press release from the Mayor of London which documents the approval of the planning application; it also instructs the developer to review the plans for Sayes Court Gardens and the Build the Lenox project. …

Mega City

On Boris Johnson and Convoy’s Wharf planning permission.

This is published as at the date created. …