Summer Time has ended in Europe. That means no more fish jumpin’, daddy is definitely not rich and it would not be politic to comment on mamma. In addition, meeting times with the USA will be disrupted for the next week until the end of easy livin’ over there as we over here will no longer be rising up singing.
Filed under: Zeitgeist | Tagged: Gershwin | Comments Off on Living No Longer Easy
tl;dr: This zombie bill no politician seems able to kill is a pandora’s box that will lead to a public panopticon.
Since it’s still very much in play at the moment I was invited to represent the Open Rights Group (together with Big Brother Watch) at a discussion of the pending Communications Data Bill (CDB) at the South-Central Liberal Democrat Regional Conference today.
My main point was that the Bill creates an unprecedented resource for the security services to “go fishing” in everyone’s private affairs. “Communications Data” means “everything that’s not the message” for every kind of internet use (e-mail, instant messaging, voice communication, streaming and so on), and collecting all of it from everyone in Britain on a rolling 12-month basis (with some information held indefinitely) offers a massive pool in which to use heuristics to pattern match answers to open questions.
Whatever boundaries may be placed on it now, it’s certain that its scope will creep once created, pushed one notch towards the public panopticon every time another panic-keyword-crisis occurs. Allowing CDB to proceed would be an enormous error and the thin end of a wedge that will permanently remove the assumption of privacy from all of us.
Here are the slides I used:
You can also find them at Speakerdeck; sadly, WordPress.Com doesn’t allow me to embed slides from that system, which I prefer. Let’s hope the Lib-Dems take this seriously and don’t treat it as another gaming chip like they did university fees…
Filed under: Communications Data Bill, Open Rights Group | 1 Comment »
Maybe it’s just a lustful fling, but for now, the only laptop in my life is my 3G Chromebook. Read about it on InfoWorld.
Filed under: InfoWorld | 6 Comments »
Love this video. Pass it on.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iIkOi3srLo]Filed under: Issues, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Conservation, Video | 1 Comment »
I was co-host on today’s FLOSS Weekly episode, about the Baserock continuous integration system for Linux (and also the amazing 8 CPU/32 core Baserock Slab server slice that’s come out of the development activity) developed by UK engineering company Codethink.
[youtube http://youtu.be/OeBG59cNRhU]
Filed under: FLOSS Weekly | Comments Off on FLOSS Weekly on Baserock
Hearing that Amazon had remotely wiped someone’s Kindle, I decided to investigate and find out if it had actually happened. It hadn’t, but what had happened instead was perhaps as distressing and educational. I wrote about it on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off on Concentration of Power
I recorded a short interview explaining OSI Membership while I was at Open World Forum.
[youtube http://youtu.be/c0c5IsST_9w]Thanks to openworldforum.tv for the opportunity to tell people how to join!
Filed under: MinkCast, OSI | Tagged: OWF12 | Comments Off on About OSI
Coming up on 16th November: SFSCon in Bolzano, Italy. While we wait for the details, here’s a reminder of what the place is like:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR7zj7MZiz4]Update: The conference programme is now out, and I can confirm I’ll be speaking there. I’ve been several times and it’s always a delight to visit. They have open source deep in their culture – there’s even a local wine called “Perl”…
Filed under: Events | Tagged: Italy | 2 Comments »
Imogen Heap’s new song is probably the best so far on her gradually-emerging new album.
[youtube http://youtu.be/5hdMYt1Np78]Personally I’m ready for some “still” time.
Filed under: Music | Comments Off on Be Still With Me
Academic research about the problem of patent trolls has finally started to flow, and the findings are just as grim as all our instincts suggested. In my article for InfoWorld Open Sources this week, I look at some of the evidence and summarise it to save you the reading.
All the same, the research paper from Lex Machina is worth reading in full. It puts solid numbers on what previously was dismissed as biased surmise, as well as coining an excellent term for the companies causing the problem – “patent monetization entities” – that will allow confrontation of the issues without the dismissal as rabble-rouser that comes from saying “patent troll”. All a fine preparation for the event at Santa Clara University on November 16 on Solutions To The Software Patent Problem.
Filed under: InfoWorld | Comments Off on Patent Troll Research Round-Up
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