In the space of a few weeks, the Open Rights Group (where I’m a volunteer director) has gone through a growth spurt, winning an award for campaigning work, launching an appeal for members to fund a legal advisor so it can engage in EFF-style direct interventions and winning the right to intervene in its first court case. I’ve written more today on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Open Rights Group | Comments Off on Open Rights Group Maturing
Why do people take actions that actually make things worse as they attempt to solve complex problems? I was interviewed Monday for an upcoming documentary called “Orwell Upgraded“. They decided to release one of my answers as a teaser for the documentary – it is the 2 minute summary of my essay Direct & Indirect Causality.
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Filed under: Open Source | 1 Comment »
Not a title that you might expect to see, but Richard Stallman has indeed posted a pragmatic proposal for dealing with software patents – to limit enforceability of patents against software running on a general-purpose computer. Based on my experiences fighting the Software Patent Directive in Europe, I believe his proposal will face stiff opposition from the telecoms and consumer electronics industries, so I’ve a modified proposal – limit enforcement of patents on software only to cases where it’s implementing a standard which includes patents declared during standardisation.
The full discussion is on InfoWorld – take a look and tell me what I’m missing,
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Find out on ComputerWorldUK 🙂
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Here’s my interview with this month’s Oracle Java Magazine about the forces driving open source and the need for open source skills.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlOOEFDnRH8]Filed under: Java, MinkCast, Open Source | Comments Off on Driving Open Source
And nothing more. My experience at Sun showed me that, when you use downloads as a metric for project success, you’re missing the point and perhaps trying to distract people from other truths. I explain in my InfoWorld column today.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Comments Off on Downloads Prove There Are Downloaders
I’m delighted with the definitions the UK Government has chosen for “open source” and “open standards” in their new Open Standards Principles. They are using OSI as their benchmark for open source, and have a clear statement that only standards with all rights to implement freely available are open. I’ve written more on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Comments Off on Open Means No Patents
Why should we care about protecting small items of personal data, such as our date of birth, parents’ names, post code and so on? Why does it matter when we’re asked for them by someone with no need to know them? What does it have to do with delicious butter?
The reason is those small piece of personal information can be used for triangulation. What does that mean? Here’s a (currently completely fictional) example to explain, taken from my presentation about the Communications Data Bill.
At some time in the near future, you are at the checkout in Safeway. They scan the stick of butter you want to buy, and then you hand over your Club Card and payment. The assistant looks at the screen, then reaches for the voucher printer and pulls a form from it. He places it on the counter and gives you a pen. “Here, sign this.” You look at it in surprise. It is a liability waiver, with your name at the top. The text says “as someone potentially at risk from cholesterol issues, I absolve Safeway of all responsibility for my butter purchase”.
How did this happen? Safeway don’t know your health status; they just know it’s in their interested to get that waiver signed. Their insurance company has used your name and address from your Club Card account like a “shared key” to identify your health records, past purchases at other stores and other information about you. As a result of the data it discovered, a heuristic that’s been trained to identify people who might pose a risk of litigation against the company has flagged you to Safeway as waiver candidate. They get a discount on their liability insurance if they get waivers from all flagged customers, hence the waiver form. It’s not to protect me; it’s to protect them.
This is triangulation. No individual data item discloses private information I care about, but gathered together it can be used without my consent and against my interests. This is why the least authority principle should inform us everywhere in our lives, why we should support data protection laws and especially why we should resist the Communications Data Bill.
Filed under: Communications Data Bill | 1 Comment »
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