Today the Times has a front page story on the communications bill which contains the seeds of the government's latest big database surveillance plans. This one's been doing the rounds of the cyber rights communities for a while now but it's interesting that the mainstream media does occasionally notice and provide prominence to such matters, however ephemerally.
Declan McCullagh tells us that a couple of congress men have cottoned onto the probable technical illegality of the widespread clandestine commercial monitoring and profiling of online behaviour. They probably wouldn't like shopping centers secretly tracking people's movements via their mobile phones either. Politicians, like their mainstream media cousins can also be a bit slow on the uptake.
William Patry is indignant at the US labeling Canada a pirate nation just because it has not yet implemented a version of the DMCA into domestic law.
The NYT, of all auspicious bodies, is supporting net neutrality.
"Users of the Internet take for granted their ability to access all Web sites on an equal basis. That could change, however, if Internet service providers started discriminating among content, to make more money or to suppress ideas they do not like. A new “net neutrality” bill has been introduced in the House, which would prohibit this sort of content discrimination. Congress has delayed on this important issue too long and should pass net neutrality legislation now...
Cable and telecommunications companies are fighting net neutrality with lobbyists and campaign contributions, but these special interests should not be allowed to set Internet policy. It is the job of Congress to protect the Internet’s democratic form."
Larry Lessig is worried about little orphan works and proposed changes to US copyright law.
The Sunday Telegraph has been speculating that the government's huge and dangerously insecure NHS Care Records System could be scuppered.
The Dutch have banned electronic voting.
"On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected.
The paperless voting computers had been creeping into our election systems since the mid-1980s, creating a deeply rooted everything-is-just-fine-with-them feeling. This made the task we had set ourselves that much more difficult. We examined the Dutch voting computer, the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B previously in use in about 8 out of 9 poling stations, and proved it insecure. For political reasons, with general elections in the near future, the responsible Minister did not want to make the decision at that time. Although frustrating for us, he basically did the next best thing: two commissions were formed the first was to see who, if anyone, was to blame for the current debacle. The other would, effectively, determine if we were right and election systems in the Netherlands as flawed were as we had made them out to be. The first committee determined that, basically, no one in particular was to blame and everything concerning voting computers was wrong. The second, the Election Process Advisory Commission, issued its report which basically states that we were right all along and the system needed to be changed.
We are proud to have made this impact. Democratic Elections are Really Really Really important. Paperless voting computers enable election fraud on a frightening scale, a tiny group of people can throw elections in which ever way they want. Our initiative, which is one of many similar movements around the world, has removed that risk from our country."
Google has done a Yahoo!-China in India by handing over the personal details of a man to the authorities after he posted a comment to the effect that he hated Sonja Ghandi on Google's Orkut social networking site. The man has since been arrested.
The UK Home Office website has been struggling to stay online.
Cory has yet another nice explanation why he releases his books under a creative commons licence in the context of his teen novel, Little Brother.
Lots going on on the ID card and identity front; likewise on the US constitutional scene.
Yet another inadvertent indication from government quarters of how you can't make better kids by measuring them, or pretending to measure them. The chief inspector says standards have "stalled" and it is "unacceptable that 20% of pupils go from primary to secondary not fully functional in literacy and numeracy". For goodness sake the idea that you can measure a child... how insane is that and yet the whole education system is built on the notion... says yours truly, a university teacher in exam season.
Teachers should be storytellers, curiosity stimulators (remember curiosity is the cure for boredom), observers, listeners, challengers (in the sense of posing challenges for their charges), confidence builders, and practitioners prepared to get their hands dirty in any area they or their pupils/students decide to explore. Not bloody administrators with the incentive to fill in forms which say the child was useless when they arrived in this administrative miracle worker's class and have progressed the requisite number of points on the SATS scale by the time they leave the class. And if the form says that's what happened, then the reality of a child struggling to learn, getting bullied and in fact regressing in all areas is completely irrelevant to the system. Scott Adams has it pegged:
Ho hum. Yes blogging is displacement activity. Now I'd better get back to assessing scripts and filling in forms.
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