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User Interfaces for Federated Login

It’s often said that technical people are bad at designing user interfaces. Ken Klingenstein’s presentation at the TERENA Networking Conference reported (and demonstrated) the results when user interface experts looked at the problem of explaining federated login to users. A striking early finding was that even the interfaces users regularly use to login to services […]

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Managing Federated Authorisation for Research

Research, and particularly the on-line collaborative research referred to as e-science, creates a new challenge for federated access management systems. In teaching, the authoritative statement whether an individual is entitled to access an on-line resource comes from their home organisation: are they a member of that course? are they covered by that institutional licence? Thus […]

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Cleaning up after Botnets

One of the challenges in finding an appropriate legal framework for incident response is that for many types of incident you don’t know in advance what information you are likely to receive. Rogier Spoor of SURFnet discussed one of the most common situations – cleaning up after a botnet infection – at the TERENA Networking […]

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Making Best Use of Big Data

A thought-provoking talk at the TERENA Networking Conference by Barry Smyth of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics suggested both the possibilities and the problems of big data, and some of the decisions that society needs to make soon about how we do, and do not, use it to maximise benefits and minimise harms. A […]