Feel compelled to comment, albeit briefly and without enormous insight, on the sheer amount of security / trust / other sneaky stuff, that's in the headlines all of a sudden:
- The Labour blogging scandal, good old dirty tricks with a 2.0 spin on it: ugly and stupid ... and got caught - the hat trick;
- Amazon's clumsy handling of the gay authors issue ...
- ... alongside their - I tend to think commendable - Phorm-blocking move;
- The UK Goverment, in January and effective from March, sliding the ISP citizen-consumer spying law into place, with the usual guff about "only in certain circumstances will this be used" ... see David Stoughton's excellent post on this blog for the full smart dirty on that one;
- And just today, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys urges the dropping of hundreds of thousands of DNA records of entirely innocent people that the government and its cronies are saving up ... "just in case" ... Just in case, er, what? We suddenly run out of real villains and have to go after reg'lar folks?
Time - as I've done having discussed the ISP-bollox with m'learned friend Brian Millar - to give the Open Rights Group a bit of support.
PS something else that's been niggling me for many months now ... the stupidity of so-called smart advertising tools. Contextual, behavioural or whatever ...
Why on earth - when I'm reading about Nokia's 90% quarterly decline in profits (in itself an extremely important piece of business news) would I want to see an O2 ad offering me deals on Nokia phones? It makes, for example, blind cold-calling at home seem positively sparkling! This takes me back to my querulous post of a few days ago on how the future is no longer digital.
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