Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
The recent TF-CSIRT meeting in Zurich included a talk by the Swiss telecoms regulator (like ours, called Ofcom, though their ‘F’ stands for Federal!) on the law covering websites in the .ch domain that distribute malware, normally as the result of a compromise. Under this law a designated authority can order the temporary or permanent […]
Most portable devices – laptops, smartphones and memory sticks – should be encrypted so that the information they contain is protected if the device is lost or stolen. Many countries (including the UK) give their immigration and other authorities legal powers to demand that you decrypt an encrypted device though given the number of laptops […]
As a privacy-sensitive person, I’m concerned that the trend in European Data Protection law seems to be to place more and more weight on my consent as justification for processing my personal data. In theory that sounds fine – given full information and a free choice, I can decide whether or not I’m willing for […]
The Ministry of Justice have now published detailed instructions for website operators who want to use the new Defamation Act 2013 process to handle allegations that third-party postings are defamatory. The instructions set out clearly what information needs to be in each of the communications sent and received by the website operator, and they seem […]
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 – 09:28 Andrew Cormack Next year Janet will be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. This made me realise that it’ll also be twenty years since I was first involved in incident response, dealing with attacks against “my” web and email servers at Cardiff University. Over that time the purposes of incident response […]
The Government has recently announced that the Defamation Act 2013 will come into force in England and Wales on January 1st 2014. Section 5 of the Act addresses a couple of problems that have particularly affected Janet customers who operate websites. First, the concern that moderating postings from third parties might give rise to liability […]
The House of Commons has published a useful summary of progress on the Defamation Bill, which will return to Parliament next week. Clause 5 of the Bill proposes changes to the current regime for websites hosting allegedly defamatory postings from third parties. When it was last discussed in the House, before the summer, concerns were […]
At the moment both cloud computing providers and their business customers in Europe have to deal with at least twenty-eight different interpretations of Data Protection law. And there are nearly as many different national rules and formalities when using non-European cloud providers (the UK approach is described in the Information Commissioner’s Guide to Cloud Computing). […]
It has long been a source of frustration that if a Janet connected site wanted to provide connectivity to members of the public this required a separate physical network link to connect those users to a partner Internet Access Provider. Members of the public can’t be given access to the Janet IP service as this […]
There are several situations when it would be useful to have a life-long identifier that doesn’t change when we move house, employer or even country. Most of us already have life-long identifiers to link together all our interactions with the health service and the tax office; in research and education linking together our achievements would […]