Articles

I once wrote regular columns for The Morning Star newspaper and href="http://www.netimperative.com">Netimperative.com concerning
technology, society and the law.

The Morning Star
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Articles for The Morning Star

The Fallacy of the False Negative
A number of pattern recognition systems are now being touted for large
scale public use, such as recognising terrorists faces in airports, spotting
duplicate identity card iris scans and identifying suspicious content in
online discussions forums. These systems will never work.

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Untrusted Computing
Intel, Microsoft and others are touting a technology known as Trusted
Computing. While the technology itself provides some useful features, there
are major issues over who controls the technology. With typical chutzpah
these organisations claim the technology is of great benefits to users -
when often it will do them a great disservice.
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European Patent Law Considered Harmful
Software has traditionally been exempt from patents, for a variety of
reasons. The experience of the United States has shown that Patent Offices
are unable to track prior art in software effectively, leading to long and
expensive patent litigation for patents that should never have been
granted. A proposal is before the European Parliament that would allow
patenting of software. This would be a disaster for the European software
industry, and particularly for Free Software.
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Articles for netimperative.com

Site Finder
Verisign recently instituted a new ’service’ called Site Finder.
Instead of their domain name servers returning an error when you look up a
non existent address, now they direct you to an advertising backed service.
It’s a pretty clear abuse of power from Verisign.

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In SSLs We Trust?
It is received wisdom that SSL certificates for websites provide
increased security. Although SSL certificates have a role to play in
improving security, they are not as important as certificate vendors would
have you believe. Also, the SSL certificate market is anything but
open.
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All Hail the IETF
The IETF are a rather unique, highly successful, undemocratic
organisation who control the protocols and standards by which the Internet
is run. It works by consensus, and it actually works.
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Spam
Spam is on the increase, and it is becoming a serious problem for many
people. There are a number of tools for defeating spam, of which blacklists
are one. Blacklists often do more harm than good.
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Cyber Security
Computer security is vital to our individual and collective safety. A
log of software is very poorly designed with respect to security, notably
Microsoft Windows. This is a well known fact, and yet it is ignored by most
large strategic security efforts. This must stop.
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End User License Agreements
Many software products come with so-called EULAs. As more products
become software, the impact of EULAs is becoming more important and less
clear.
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US problems with Intellectual Property
It is an item of mainstream political dogma that “Intellectual Property”
is a good thing. This is leading to some bizarre political and economic
contortions that quite clearly demonstrate the fallacious nature of the
assumptions on which it is based
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