Convergence Conversation

There was a great story in the paper that I was reading on the train a few days ago. Not the one about the couple arrested for having sex on a train into Euston.  The typically English commuters ignored them and carried on reading their papers or working on their laptops (honestly, in this day and age -- didn't any of them have cameraphones?). The newspaper I saw rather quaintly reported that the woman involved was "from Essex".

No, not that one, the one about the couple getting divorced because a virtual private detective in Second Life caught the husband's avatar fondling a call girl's avatar. More...

Charles Arthur wrote a nice piece in The Guardian about e-mail that, once again, makes the point that there is (and has been for a decade) a rather straightforward way to reduce spam: digitally sign all e-mail.

Email as presently constituted is insecure and so prone to spoofing that a 10-year-old can do it. If - and it's a huge if - we had had S/MIME or PGP implemented everywhere by default from the outset of the net's arrival in the wider world, then we'd be used to the idea of checking an email's encryption certificate against its signature - even getting it done automatically - and rejecting the fakes. More...

That seems to be the government's "plan", as far as I can tell from the story in the newspapers.

Every call you make, every e-mail you send, every website you visit - I’ll be watching you. That is the hope of Sir David Pepper who, as the director of GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency in Cheltenham, is plotting the biggest surveillance system ever created in Britain.
[From There’s no hiding place as spy HQ plans to see all - Times Online]

Remember also that  Andy Burnham has been talking about regulating the Internet, in what seem to informed observers to be bizzare ways. More...

The modern economy depends on the innovative use of new technology. Innovation is a key source of comparative advantage. We cannot compete with the developing economies in manufacturing and even services are being outsourced, so we must innovate. These are the kind of statements you always hear from European politicians and the truth is that they are at least partly right.  The European Commission has just released a paper identifying the following as the key challenges for the next stage of the Internet:

(1) continuing to update broadband infrastructure to improve accessibility and speeds;
(2) keeping the Internet open to new business models and innovation; and
(3) addressing privacy and security concerns. More...

My dongle is telling me that mobile broadband isn't an appealing proposition.  Why?  Well, because I made a big mistake, and used it.  I've been in Asia recently.  When I got to Seoul, where there is no GSM network, I switched by iPhone to use the free wifi in the conference centre, and elsewhere, but didn't use it for calls or for data.  But when I was at the airport, waiting for an hour before meeting someone, I was having a coffee and I noticed that a couple of guys sitting at a nearby table were using Vodafone dongles.  Since I'm a nerd, ultimately, I took out my 3 (Hutchison) USB dongle and plugged it in to my Macbook.  I was astonished that it connected, and worked.  There must a be a 3G data cell just at the airport -- amazing.  Anyway, I picked up my e-mail and sent a few messages, browsed a few pages, had a pleasant cup of coffee and an hour soon passed. More...

One of the useful things that we could do, as a community, is help the government to salvage working parts from the wreckage of its IT systems.  There's another one headed for the scraphead at the moment, and I think it may have a couple of recycleable parts.  I'm talking about ContactPoint or, as it was formely known, the "Children's Index".  It's the National Identity Register for the under 16s who won't be on the National Identity Register that's being built as part of the Identity & Passport Service's ID card project.

When I first heard about the government's "Children's Index" project (at INTELLECT, as far as I can rememeber, when one of the contractors on the project told me about it), I was quite scathing because I felt that the basic concept was so transparently flawed that the management consultants should have been sent away with a flea in their before it More...

Colin Batten's post about household Internet use made me think a little more about our view of the world.  There's the developed world, where people use the Internet to revolutionise individual and organisational communications and social structures. And then there's the third world.... "Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail, according to research firm Parks Associates."

It is interesting how we tend to assume that everyone is connected to the Internet all the time via some form of computer, when we know that they're not, but it's also I think slightly dangerous. More...

[Dave Birch] I'm not the only one who wonders if political meddling in IT isn't a major cause of chaos and delay in the public sector.

Certainly when it comes to IT it's easier to think of the public sector as a series of small businesses - departments, quangos, NGOs, NHS trusts, police forces - that occasionally work together but more often work against each other, cynics would say.

[From Editor's Blog: Time to take the politicians out of technology? - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com]

But there's a fundamental error in that perspective. More...

I'm listening to William Gibson's podcast on The Conversations Network and he just threw away a quote that I thought worth preserving. He was talking about how the notions of "here" and "there" are changing because now everyone is connected. He said "'There is where your iPhone can't get a signal". Wonderful. When your iPhone can get a signal everywhere, though, then where is 'there'? I have a suspicion that 'there' will be something to do not with connection technology but with disconnection technology, changing from a passive concept to an active one. More...

I don't really understand politics and politicians don't really understand technology, so when politicians get involved in technology I have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Over in Brussels, our overlords have voted to end the internet in Europe.  The BBC is reporting the incredible news that the European Parliament have voted for the "Telecoms Packet", which contains an interesting provision...

Another amendment allows governments to decide what software can be used on the web.
[From BBC NEWS | Technology | MEPs back contested telecoms plan]

Anyone else think this is a good idea? One generation from now, the U.S. More...