Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
I had a meeting with Ofcom this morning as part of their review of section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010. That section, if enabled by the Secretary of State, would allow courts to order a service provider “to prevent its service being used to gain access to [an Internet] location”. This power could […]
The Chief Executive of OFCOM, Ed Richards, gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee last week, in which he reported on progress on the copyright enforcement and web blocking parts of the Digital Economy Act 2010. He first confirmed that the Initial Obligations Code was completed and passed to the […]
Nominet’s Issue Group on dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity has published its draft recommendations, which seem reassuringly close to the JANET submission to the original request for comments. Expedited suspension of a domain is regarded as a last resort, to be used only where alternative approaches via the registrar or […]
With various Governments looking at the Domain Name Service (DNS) as a tool to implement national policy (for example the USA’s SOPA and PIPA proposals) Rod Rasmussen’s talk at the FIRST conference was a timely reminder of the possible problems with this approach. DNS is a critical part of the Internet, providing the conversion between […]
The passing of the Defamation Act 2013 this week removes a couple of areas of legal uncertainty if you run a website, blog, etc. and someone else posts an article or comment that may be defamatory. First, provided you aren’t acting maliciously, you don’t risk liability merely by moderating what is posted. Second, the Act […]
The Information Commissioner has published helpful new guidance on how organisations can support the use of personally-owned devices for work, commonly known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). This appears to have been prompted by a survey suggesting that nearly half of employees use their own devices for work, but more than two thirds of […]
Last year the Article 29 Working Party published an Opinion on Cloud Computing expressing concern at the information available to those considering moving services to the cloud about the protection that cloud services offered for their data. The Cloud Security Alliance have now produced a template for service providers to provide the information that the […]
ENISA’s Critical Cloud Computing report examines cloud from a Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) perspective: what is the impact on society of outages or attacks? The increasing adoption of the cloud model has both benefits and risks. A previous ENISA report noted that the massive scale of cloud providers makes state of the art security […]
It’s interesting to read the Information Commissioner’s comments on the draft European Data Protection Regulation, which have just been published. A number of the comments address issues we’ve been struggling with in providing Internet services such as incident response and federated access management. These are widely recognised as benefitting privacy, but they don’t fit easily […]
The European Commission’s Cyber Security Strategy aims to ensure that Europe benefits from a “robust and innovative Internet”. The Strategy has five priorities: Achieving cyber resilience Drastically reducing cybercrime Developing cyberdefence policy and capabilities related to the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) Develop the industrial and technological resources for cybersecurity Establish a coherent international […]