The UK Information Commissioner is developing a series of Codes of Practice on various areas of data protection that often cause problems. The intention is to provide practical recommendations of good practice, rather than to discuss the minutiae of the law. To achieve this, the Codes are written in plain English, with plenty of illustrations […]
Category: Articles
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer of the Internet Society (ISOC) talked about the Society’s eight “Internet invariants” in the closing plenary session of TERENA’s Networking Conference 2012. The invariants are key features of the Internet that make it such a good platform for innovation and whose loss might harm the network’s ability to support […]
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Are We Too Late for IPv6 Transition?
[This post was originally published on the TERENA conference blog] Tuesday morning at the TERENA Networking Conference 2012 began with an entertaining and important call to action by Geoff Huston, on why we may have left transition to IPv6 too late and the serious consequences for open Internet connectivity that could result. It was recognised […]
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Analytic Cookies: last minute change
With enforcement of the UK’s new law on internet cookies due to begin this week, on Friday the Information Commissioner published a new version of his guidance on compliance. Although the Information Commissioner says the new version is a clarification, others have described it as a “striking shift”. The most significant change appears to be […]
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Analytic Cookies: last minute change
With enforcement of the UK’s new law on internet cookies due to begin this week, on Friday the Information Commissioner published a new version of his guidance on compliance. Although the Information Commissioner says the new version is a clarification, others have described it as a “striking shift”. The most significant change appears to be […]
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New Defamation Bill – first thoughts
The new Defamation Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech has now been published. Although it also contains changes to what statements can give rise to liability for defamation, the most interesting part for network operators is likely to be the new provisions on liability for those who host third party content on web sites and […]
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“Blocking” and Anti-blocking
Given the outcome of previous hearings on copyright infringement, the court’s conclusion this week that the UK’s major ISPs should be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay was no surprise. However the judgment raises an interesting technical issue. In a previous hearing, it had been pointed out that there was a way to […]
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IETF on Botnet Detection
A bot is a program, maliciously installed on a computer, that allows that computer and thousands of others to be controlled by attackers. Bots are one of the major problems on the Internet, involved in many spam campaigns and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as allowing attackers to read private information from the […]
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IWF Annual Report 2011
The annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation was published yesterday. The highlight is news that through closer collaboration with hotlines and Internet industries in other countries, the average time for removal of an illegal indecent image of a child from the Internet has dropped from over a month to twelve days. That is the […]
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US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights
Having been studying Europe’s proposed Data Protection revision for several weeks, it’s interesting to compare it with the proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights recently published by the White House. This, too, recognises that the Internet is different to the paper-based world, but it seems to me to put this in a more positive way […]