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Habeas Data, or Why any Silicon Valley ‘bill of rights’ will guarantee you never have any
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Widespread ridicule has greeted the announcement that eight giant technology companies led by Google and including Facebook and LinkedIn were going to save us from the NSA. The ridicule is thoroughly justified, for trusting giant corporations – whose business models rely on selling your identity to advertisers – to safeguard your privacy is like hiring a kleptomaniac…
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“The price of nothing”
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Kim Dotcom has a new service, with features that Forbes calls “See No Evil, Store No Evil”. But perhaps that should be “see no value, store no value”. I have not come to mock the rotund self-promoter, but rather to talk about what might happen if its users were to throw themselves at the service…
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Why do sheep need Twitter?
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Spot the broadband user in this picture A House of Lords committee this week declared that British taxpayers must foot the bill for an internet that nobody wants – unless perhaps they have a second home in the country. Some observations by the committee may be accurate: Britain’s broadband is slower than its rivals. But…
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How to fix the broken internet economy
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How can we begin to unpick the tangled mess that the technology and creative industries have created? There’s certainly no shortage of blame to go around. In the past every new wave of technology has delivered healthy creative markets – but today this is no longer happening. Just 20 years since the birth of the…
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The Open Rights Group gets rights wrong. Again
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When Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock opens his mouth, his foot soon disappears inside. The UK’s leading digital rights advocate has just demonstrated still more difficulty understanding the “rights” the group campaigns about. At a Citizen 2012 data conference in London yesterday, where he was introduced as “the infamous Jim Killock”, Citizen Jim…
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Windows Metro Maoist cadres reach the desktop, and pound it flat
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The revolutionary dogma of Metro is sweeping through the old Windows desktop, too, a new leak of Window 8 confirms. The leaked build, newer than the public release of a fortnight ago, abandons the 3D design elements introduced into Windows in 1990 for a resolutely two-dimensional world. The ‘legacy’ desktop in Windows 8 is denuded…