IT is not magic pixiedust – Page 4

Back to the future…

Published on June 4, 20092 Comments

This year’s European elections in the Netherlands are the first to use a particular futuristic piece of technology: the red pencil. This because the government last year was finally convinced voting computers just weren’t safe, after years of mounting doubts and campaigns against them. Because elections are organised on a municipal level, there has always been a patchwork of voting methods here, some councils like Amsterdam staying loyal to the red pencil long after most had implemented some form of electronic voting machine. Both main types of voting computer in use however at the last elections turned out to be easily hackable, which led to the first emergency return to the pencil.

Two years ago, the studygroup set up to making computer voting more safe recommended a two tier process: have the computer print out the ballot and use that as your physical vote. I’m not sure what happened to this recommendation, but obviously the current elections came to soon for it to be implemented. Personally, I don’t mind. The red pencil and paper ballot is about the safest method to use anyway: the most difficult to commit any subtle fraud with. Sure, ballot stuffing is still a possibility but as long as the system is reasonably honest, this will be much more noticable than altering computer records…

Your text messages: not safe with Vodafone and T-Mobile?

Published on June 3, 20091 Comment

By law Dutch ISPs and phone companies are required to store all phone and internet traffic metadata to hand over to the police or secret service (AIVD) on request. That is, every phonecall you make, SMS you sent or internet connection you established is logged, stored and handed over to the police whenever they ask for it. Which is bad enough, but now it turns out at least two phone companies, Vodafone and T-Mobile went slightly too far in their zeal to assist the police, handing over not just the metadata on certain SMS messages, but the messages themselves. According to them, it was technically impossible to separate the “traffic data” from the message, so they had no choice but to hand over the whole thing. After this came to light Vodafone immediately acknowledged their error while T-Mobile denied it, but the AIVD declared that it could not and would not delete these SMS messages it had recieved.

Now, as The Netherlands’ best known IT lawyer, Arnoud Engelfriet explains (Dutch) what Vodafone and T-Mobile (allegedly) did is actually illegal under Artikel 273d Wetboek van Strafrecht. Which means their customers could file criminal charges against them…

The 60,000 euro question now is how many other phone companies have done this.

Amazonfail

Published on April 14, 2009

Just because it turned out that the delisting of thousands of gay and lesbian and feminist books as icky adult titles was an accident does not make Amazon innocent or what happened less bad. Richard Nash, ex-publisher of Soft Skull Press, explains why:

The onus is on us, as Tim Wise has taught so well on the topic of white privilege. We cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is always us who get the benefit of the doubt in our society, and if we are to take the pink and lavender dollars, and if we are to say, you don’t need A Different Light, or Oscar Wilde Bookstore, we’ll hook you up just fine, then we can never let this happen. I learned this as a straight white male publisher of queer books, it was why I took care to try to find staff who are gay or trans, to catch my complacency, my temptation to think I deserved the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t, nor does Amazon. The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.

See figure one

Published on December 29, 2008

The British culture secretary wants to censor the internet; not just the British portion of it, but the entire English language internet:

The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites — registered with cinema-style age warnings — to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.

He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to provide packages restricting access to websites without an age rating.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That’s my view. Absolutely categorical,” Burnham, the MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester, told the Daily Telegraph. “If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”

Apart from the fact that his proposals are just unworkable, naive and done with no understanding of the internet, why the fuck is the culture minister is proposing these measures? Shouldn’t he defend freedom of speech on internet rather than scare monger? Or is he just another lazy fuck who wants to outsource the raising of his children? It seems to be, since he talks about leaving his children on the internet without supervision. Typical New Labour, never taking responsibility for their own actions.

Mr Burnham, see figure one:

figure one

Apropos of nothing

Published on October 22, 2008

But Alex reminded me of a 2006 Daniel Davies article on the dismal fate of British public sector IT projects. Here’s what I think is the money quote:

This would seem like an unbelievably obvious, basic rule of good practice; that you can have major operational projects or major structural changes, but not both at once. It is, in fact, one of the big principles that they teach you in business school. But in the British public sector, this principle appears to be treated with the most monumental and catastrophic contempt. There was simply no chance that the NHS IT project (or the various Home Office projects, or the various education projects) was going to succeed; failure was written into the specification by the fact that the government chose to ignore the existence of the projects when deciding to have a dozen or more attempts at “radical change”.

No comment, but it’s not just British IT projects which could use this insight. Unfortunately, most big, public sector IT projects tend to take years rather than months and there are few sectors in which you can shut down change that long. So every project that goes on long enough and has to deal with any kind of legislation is always going to have to run a Red Queen’s Race just to keep up with its environment. The same goes for any large IT driven organisation, which these days is every organisation.

What makes things worse is that by and large a lot of the decision makers are IT illiterate and think of computers as just fancy typewriters or databases as just a replacement for their filing cabinets. Not to mention that especially in government, the people who ultimately have to make the decisions are not part of the organisation having to implement them and therefore do not understand the consequences of their decisions for these organisations.