My Freedom of Information request for the summary of citizen input on the UK’s Communications Data Bill reveals unanimous opposition, as well as a disturbing trend to lump opponents of the bill together. Read about it on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off on CDB has 0% citizen support
A chance encounter at the OFE Summit in Brussels, coupled with a provocative statement by an Oracle VP, lead me to believe it’s time for Oracle to come out of hiding and start working with the MySQL community – including MariaDB, Percona and other competitors After all, that’s how open source works. Read more at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Tagged: Community, MySQL, Oracle, Security | Comments Off on MySQL FUD Claim Needs Action, Not Words
It seems Apple wasn’t serious when it promised the European commission it would use micro-USB. Read more about it in my article in ComputerWorldUK this week.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Comments Off on Apple and Connector Standards
The black-out of the Hugo Awards by a “robot” that thought the clip of Doctor Who shown just before Neil Gaiman spoke was proof positive of piracy is educational. My article on ComputerWorldUK today explains why.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Copyright, DRM | Comments Off on “Fair Use” Robots Are Science Fiction
I wrote today on ComputerWorldUK about the draft Communications Data Bill. As I explained at OggCamp (my slides are online) last weekend in Liverpool, it is yet another attempt by the Home Office to get the government of the day to legalise sweeping permanent surveillance powers that allow the automated aggregation of all the details of your online life. Well, all but the actual “payload” – the message bodies themselves in e-mail for example. But the other information surrounding your communications provides plenty of data to fill a “big data” tank and analyse heuristically to detect trends in who you communicate with, when, why, where from and how.
The legislation is modelled on (and absorbs) existing postal surveillance laws but to use those the police have to go to the sorting office and look at envelopes. The cost in time and effort to go there creates “friction” that means the power is not used all the time on all your mail. But CDB is “frictionless”, allowing automated gathering of all the meta-data of all your communications (not just e-mail) and making it available over the next 12 months for analysis.
CDB makes us all a suspect, all the time. Instead of being under surveillance when there is evidence of wrongdoing, you will be under surveillance by default, with a wide range of people able to “go fishing” for information to support accusations against you without your knowledge. No amount of “access controls” can make this sort of resource safe; once created, it can only grow in scope and use.
It’s now too late for you to offer the Joint Select Committee your input on the draft, but you can still join the Open Rights Group who are at the forefront of defending your digital rights in the UK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Open Rights Group | Tagged: CDB, OggCamp | 2 Comments »
Can a community-centric approach save Mandriva from bankruptcy? My article today on ComputerWorldUK takes a look.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Linux | Tagged: Mandriva | Comments Off on Saving Mandriva
How do you do open procurement for ICT solutions? The answer, according to the European Commission, is to ensure that all procurement that requires tendering (and not all does) is specified in terms of the functions required rather than expressing a preference for the brands involved in the solution. But despite the clear regulations there seem to be plenty of public authorities across Europe which ignore them. This is bad news for European businesses and very bad news for open source, as I explain in ComputerWorldUK today.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Procurement | Tagged: European Union, Procurement | Comments Off on EU Procurement Failures
Back at Sun, I believe much of the blame for the company’s failure between 2001 and 2004 – from which the later, otherwise successful open source and hardware appliance initiatives under Jonathan Schwartz were unable to rescue it – came from allowing rapid, indiscriminate hiring of new sales and marketing staff in the 1999-2001 window as a result of the wave of success Java mindshare generated for Sun in the Web bubble.
That led to a huge growth in new, largely non-technical hires who didn’t necessarily share Sun’s traditional, open values and who didn’t rely on technology leadership as their prime guide. These new hires came to dominate the company’s software business, allowing marketing-led thinking to take precedence over pragmatic engineering. They went on to create strategies that just couldn’t deliver, including the disastrous “Sun One” middleware strategy. It matters who you hire.
My column for ComputerWorld this week asks if Twitter is falling into the same trap.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Tagged: Sun | 2 Comments »
Have you ever attended an open source conference? In my article for ComputerWorldUK today, I briefly review four good choices that you can attend over the next few months.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Events, Travel | Comments Off on Call For Participation
A press release at the end of last week disclosed the ITU is worried about the epidemic of patent litigation and the abuse of RAND terms on patents by industry vendors. Of course, they think the answer is more discipline and better patents, but eventually they will work out that the software industry is no place for software patents, especially not in interoperability standards. Read more on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Tagged: ITU, RAND | Comments Off on Even The ITU Is Worried
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