Mashups - tasty recipé or difficult to swallow?
The proliferation of “mashups” (software services created by combining disparate components into a new configuration) shows that they are becoming increasingly popular and have already entered the Enterprise domains. Some of these are not only useful but also fairly quick to develop and deploy. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. The facility of [...]
Latest Government data fiasco
There has been more broughaha this week about the latest embarrassing loss of highly sensitive UK Government data  (prisoner and convicted persons data), which was blithely downloaded (unencrypted) to a USB memory stick by a PA contractor and then misplaced/ lost.Â
Home Office Minister Tony McNulty was promptly trotted out to expiate departmental responsibility for this [...]
Do you know where your data is tonight?
The UK Civil Service has been responsible for some serious data losses recently, threatening the privacy and security of information about the majority of UK citizens. Each month seems to bring further examples of citizen data loss and I am really concerned by the cavalier attitude of Government to digital information. Â
The recent confirmation that the Minstry of Defence (MOD) has lost [...]
One ping to rule them all?
I sometimes wonder if anyone’s bothered to research Tolkien puns. There may already be learned tomes aplenty on just that topic, or there may be precious few, my precious. I digress. The ping in question is, of course, ping.fm - “a simple service that allows you to post to multiple social networks with a single [...]
Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll - VirginMedia takes the easy option
Broadband provider VirginMedia are sending snotty letters to “illegal” music downloaders and may clap these dastardly “pirates” in irons if they don’t buckle down and pay attention to Cap’n Branson and his crew.
Â
Notwithstanding the legalities, technicalities and niceties of the scenario, I feel that the policy clearly illustrates the strange prioritisation of customer service issues [...]
Social (networking) insecurity - is it a generation thing?
The growing plethora of social networking sites is being fuelled by a powerful combination of free access, functionality, fashion and fickleness.{readmore}
When each new service comes online it doesn’t seem to take too long for last month’s “latest big thing” to look jaded and less exciting to those who eagerly signed up for yet another free social network subscription.Â
I’ll bet [...]
