Yesterday, I have mainly been playing with my new Lumia 2520 tablet. …
Britain’s over reaching content filters
The UK’s Web site blocking rears its ugly head again. I was pointed at Der Spiegel who reports that Three and Vodafone are blocking the Chaos Computing Club‘s domain. The Chaos Computer Club is a grass roots technology association most well known outside Germany were it is based for its annual Congress held in Hamburg. Equally well known for not being a porn site. The Spiegel article is in German and I translated it using Google translate. I have hosted a copy here, and you can see google’s rendering here. The remainder of the article looks at over-blocking, including IT security resources as obscene, and the market share of the various UK carriers. …
Coming Privacy Law
Yesterday, attended a session convened by the BCS North London branch, called “Data Privacy – How Private is IT?” The presentation was given by two PWC staff members in two parts, the first was a forward looking review at the proposed EU Data Protection Regulation by Kyrisia Sturgeon and the second part a scenario based exploration of good data protection practice led by Pragasen Morgan. To me the coming key changes in the law are that all companies will need to have a qualified data protection officer, and it implements a right to be forgotten, or more accurately a right to be unindexed. …
Professionally published again
I have finally been published on my employer’s web site blog. The article, Conflicting Data Requirements: Privacy versus Transparency looks at the countervailing tendencies by governments legislating for citizen privacy and tax transparency. The article concludes with a series of technical challenges to meet the needs of both political initiatives. The article was syndicated on the Tabb Forum, and you can read that here. The article was originally provoked by a Gartner Press Release which suggests that location and the need for specific jurisdictional compliance will reduce as costs and … …
Some thoughts on E-Commerce for small vendors and big technology
I had to give my credit card over the phone last week to buy a book and was sort of interested in why a site such as this didn’t have it’s own shopping cart. It’s not that it’s too hard!
SaaS is the obvious option, but many organisations prefer and need to own their brand which is not easy with Ebay and Amazon and both these organisations are regulated within the US jurisdiction which may not be appropriate. Amazon is also exceedingly expensive charging a margin rather than a cost+ service fee. Given the publicity around Amazon’s tax affairs, some publishing organisations may feel that Amazon dilutes their brand.
Lifehacker have had a look at the SaaS solution and concluded that building your own is best. (Hmm, it doesn’t sound right but hey!) So they then had another look at the problem, in an article called “How to set up your own online store” which points out that many hosting services will offer shopping cart functionality but they deal with what to use by describing the key functionality as a “free shopping cart script”, and it would be remiss of me not to mention that there are a number of wordpress plugins.
Looking at today’s answers, its sort of interesting how many other solutions have fallen by the wayside, and from my point of view the netscape e-commerce suite which Sun ballsed up but we can see now that it’s life time was always going to be short.
What was once sold as shrink wrapped software has become SaaS, and software is no longer a feature of hardware!
ooOOOoo
For some reason this took years to publish, as ever backdated to when I started it. The wordpress plugin originally linked to has now gone. …
Commoditisation killed Sun Microsystems
Eric Raymond, wrote a short article on his blog, “Commoditization, not open source, killed Sun Microsystems”, which I commented on. This blog article says a little bit more than I felt I had room for on someone else’s blog, and I probably abused his hospitality there. I have thought long and hard about this, because I worked there and thought it i.e. the company was worth saving. Here’s what I said on Eric’s blog, and a bit more. I start by saying that the first thing about Sun’s failure is that it all depends on where you want to start; Sun’s failure was baked in long before the 2000 fall from profit. …
Not so open, a Bioware take on open source
This article represents some thoughts on how copy-left and permissive licences create value. It uses the story of Bioware and it’s use of the D&D™ and Forgotten Realms™ games & mythos as an example. There are two recent news items that make this current: that the community repository for Neverwinter Nights has just shut, and that Wizards of the Coast have just released Dungeons & Dragons V5 rules as a free to use .pdf, a small but significant step to a freemium business model. The story shows how an initially traditional author-publisher business model, leveraged a pre-made community, grew it and latterly enabled it. The point of this story is the way in which community and value grew, becoming significant author contributors and the way in which Bioware responded and learnt although some might say not as quickly or as generously as they might. …
Spying on Web Mail
I and others have written about the spy’s pursuit of meta data. It’s not a problem, it’s not the content you know. This is an image from voice comms; once known as telephone conversations. If you believe this, I suggest you watch “The Wire”. Meta data means “about data”, and consists of the from where, to whom, at what time. With mobile phones, your location can be tracked whether making a call or not. This is meant to be fine, because they don’t review content, i.e. what was said; so that’s OK then. However, the spies think that meta data is the person. An important and wilfully forgotten fact is that with email you can’t separate meta data from content. With web mail, the real meta data is all about the mail provider and maybe the mail client, which is a piece of software; again the meta data they want doesn’t exist as meta data, it is content! …
pictfor: democracy 2.0
Last night I went up to Westminster for a Pictfor meeting; this time, Parliament 2.0: How can the internet revolutionise British Democracy. The panel speakers were, Jaan Priisalu, Director General of the Estonian Information System’s Authority, Katie Ghose, CEO, Electoral Reform Society & Ruth Fox, Director, Hansard Society, while the meeting was chaired by Stephen Mosley MP, it was kicked off by the John Bercow MP, the Speaker. The centre piece of Bercow’s speech was an introduction, for me at least, to the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy which is reviewing Representation, Scrutiny and the legislative process. Jaan Priisalu talked about Estonia’s e-voting paltform, while Ghose and Fox spoke about democratic engagement. …
Was NO2ID wrong!
Was NO2ID a cul-de-sac? Who should be the identity assurers in the internet age? Today it’s code, that code is owned by someone and run by someone. Once we thought banks might run it, they don’t seem interested. The NO2ID campaign polarised the debate. We seem to be in a place that either the state does so on behalf of the public or private companies do so on behalf of their shareholders. Do we need a third way? Co-ops or P2P code?
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