Convergence Conversation

We were discussing this at the Intellect Financial Services Group the other day, so I thought I'd put forward a concrete suggestion based on an article I've been writing for a magazine. What the Group was discussing was interim report from the Independent Commission on Banking "Consultation on Reform Options". This report raises the subject of bank account number portability. Section 5.17, to be specific, says that:

Beyond improvements to the existing system, full account number portability would enable customers to change banking service providers without changing their bank account number.

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The government's Digital Inclusion Unit "Manifesto for a Network Nation" has been released and it says that "home access to the Internet can make the difference between a child getting an 'A' and a 'C' at GCSE" which I'm sure will turn out to be true in our household, where no.1 son spent most of his last school year on Facebook instead of studying for his exams.  The manifesto has a simple goal:

Our ambition to make the UK the first nation where everyone can use the web.[From Home | Race Online 2012]

Why we should want everyone to use the web, when a great many people would rather access the information that they need via mobile phones or digital television, isn't really clear to me.  Surely the goal should be something meaningful in a context: More...

We're all in favour of law and order, I imagine, and I'm sure we all want to see new technology deployed in a responsible manner.  But to some people, all new technology is bad and only to the benefit of ne'erdowells, therefore its use should be either constrained or curtailed in order to keep the world as close as possible to the way it used to be.  I'm not talking about record companies here, but the media.  Remember the recent story about the girl who was mudered by a man she met on the interweb?  The newspapers naturally called the fiend "the Facebook killer", although they could just as easly have called him the "Ford Mondeo Killer", since that it was he used to transport the victim to her doom, and started callng for a variety of crackdowns on social networking, e-mail and the internet. More...

 When we implement communications infrastructure, we implement politics.  Even if we don't realise that's what we're doing, we make implementation choices that embed political structures.  I think we should take these choices seriously.  To see what I mean, consider a superficially simple case: Should people be allowed to have "anonymous" prepaid mobile phones (well, SIMs) or not? It's a simple question, but a complicated subject. And it's worth exploring because it helps us to have a real, focused discussion about practical privacy and security issues. More...

I was at the Intellect conference on Identity & Information in London last month, where Edgar Whitely from the LSE gave a super presentation on data minimisation that I have blogged about over on Digital Identity. One of the speakers kicked off by pointing out that the US "information industry" is massively bigger than the EU information industry and they talked about this as if it was something to do with the weather, or an accident of geography. But the European information industry is crippled because we chose to make it that way.

Back in 1996, the EU implemented something called the Database Directive. More...

There was an interesting response to the news of the use of advanced scanning technology at Manchester Airport with a variety of stories in the media about the use of "x ray spex", otherwise known as terahertz radiation: see IEEE Spectrum for the basics:  The key advances are devices and circuitry that emit and sense radiation in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which extends from the upper edge of microwaves to the near infrared. The rays are reflected by metal but go through most other materials. Water soaks up the radiation, so human tissue, which is mostly water, absorbs it. More...

The last time I was invited to a meeting with a government department to talk about future access mechanisms to a public service -- under slightly misleading circumstances, I have to say, since when I got to the meeting the people on the other side of the table weren't from the government department at all but were all management consultants -- I was genuinely surprised that the discussion was all about the web. Hands up who thinks the web is the major, or even the only, future for online access? If you want a revolution, you need to move beyond the web.

Imagine you are a bank with no branches or ATMs, almost three million customers and only 195 employees in total.

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As a showcase for Britain's IT sector, the Olympics are not what I would have wished for and I hope that Intellect is lobbying hard on our industry's behalf to add more high-tech to the games .  With the world's attention focussed on us, we ought be to be demonstrating what UK plc can do, rather than letting the combination of quangos, management consultants and politicians demonstrate that "Digital Britain" is a mere slogan, a pointless affectation in a country that has no technological vision.  Don't believe me?  Then look at what the Olympic CIO said: More...

One of the first things you learn from studying the history of technology is that it takes a long time for new technologies to replace old ones. When something new comes along, it spends some time intermingling with the old, being used in the same processes, fitting the existing ecosystem for sometimes generations before natural selection takes over. So, the arrival of high-speed Internet didn't destroy the postal service, but changed it. More home shopping means more parcels and packages, more e-mail means less letters, and so on. But here's another fascinating example of the interplay between old and new. More...