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Useful idiots/so-called hackers

20-Mar-11

Last week two bits of news struck me as misguided. First there was a court in Amsterdam stating that abuse of a WiFi network, does not equal breaking into a computer system, even if such a WiFi network had some form of security measures such as password protection. Lots of geeky types, including those identify […]

Korean Zombie PC Prevention Bill

15-Mar-11

One can hope that legislative stupidity is not contagious, but would be terminally naive to do so. So although the Korean proposals for a bill that makes security software on computers mandatory and grants the authorities the power to check for the existence of mandated security software on computers seems rather far-fetched, it is probably […]

Rant: why digital levies won’t work

28-Nov-10

Last week the Dutch artist’s union and the the Dutch consumer association jointly proposed a levy for digital media and internet connectivity. The flipside of this deal would be that downloading stays legal in the Netherlands (as it currently is). And no three-strikes-and-you’re-out legislation either. Hurray! Obviously, the electronics industry is vehemently against it. And […]

Website Idea: Tree of Technology

26-Jun-10

First of all, there is this brilliant project called the Tree of Life web project. It is a gorgeous catalog of the taxonomy of all species known to man. Which gave me the following idea: like species, most technologies have precursors (the economies of building steam engines aren’t so nice if you don’t have metallurgy, […]

Rant: the elusive open source/free software desktop

05-Apr-10

Every once in a while there is this happy, chirpy announcement of an organisation (usually a public body) that it will start a project to replace its current closed desktop with an open source one.  And while I hate Windows XP (any edition, and let it be known there is nothing ‘professional’ about Windows XP […]

Kick off

04-Apr-10

Let’s kick off with an idea that is definitely not mine, but something profoundly silly and rather well executed.