The Internet database WhoIs may be marked for destruction, if some privacy advocates have their way. The database is regularly used by law enforcement officials and contains contact information of website owners.

The story is covered in some detail here.

“What removing the status quo will do is force all of the actors to come together without the benefit of a status quo to fall back on and say, `We are now all screwed. What will we do?’” Rader (Ross Rader, a member of ICANN’s generic name council) said. “It will lead to better good-faith negotiations.”

The issues are quite important–the database has clear value, but the potential for abuse is quite high. Because of ham-handed law enforcement and anti-terrorist measures in the recent past (mostly in the U.S. and U.K.), a significant percentage of stakeholders are willing to give up the database to prevent abuse.

“Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud and hacking. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings for Web site hosting and other services.

Internet users, meanwhile, have come to expect more privacy and even anonymity. The requirements for domain name owners to provide such details also contradict some European privacy laws that are stricter than those in the United States.

There’s agreement that more could be done to improve the accuracy of Whois, as scammers and even legitimate individuals who want to remain anonymous can easily enter fake data.

The disagreements are over “who gets to see it (and) how can we protect people’s privacy while at the same time making accurate information available to those who need it,” said Vint Cerf, ICANN’s chairman.”

The lesson to be learned is to take privacy seriously and don’t sacrifice your long term credibility for short term information gains. But there is no evidence that that lesson will in fact be learned.

While this sounds innovative, it is an interim solution at best: “UK energy provider RWE npower is piloting an SMS smart metering service in a bid to improve services to its pre-pay customers. Rather than top up energy credit at a shop or other outlet and then physically plug their key or card into their meter, customers in the RWE npower trial are using their cell phones for the whole procedure. Following the same model as pay-as-you-go cell phones, customers recharge their account on their phone or over the internet, which prompts an SMS message to be automatically sent to update the meter.”

Someone explain to me why the customer needs to take an action here. The meter should talk directly to the utility and cc the customer–via SMS is fine, as would be email or smoke signal. But the utility and the meter should be in constant communication. The utility should offer a running view of consumption to the customer, so they can monitor levels of energy use. (Or telephone use, or water–there’s no reason why this should be limited to electricity or gas).

This is the flip side of information assurance–assuring that information is available at the appropriate time through the appropriate means of communication, and presented in a way that helps intelligent decision-making.

So, for UK government, the question is how do the people and organisations receive, view and transmit information and how can it be improved? Dashboards, running views, mash-ups, web chat–lots of possibilities here. Is anybody looking at them?

“MPs are set to be allowed to bring BlackBerrys into the House of Commons after rebel members failed in an attempt to prevent their use despite three-and-a-half hours of debate last week.”

I sort of overly-ostentatiously turn off my mobile devices when I walk into a meeting–ostentatiously because I hope the courtesy will be reciprocated. It rarely is. I personally think that they’re making a mistake here, and should check their kit at the door, like Mad Max entering Bartertown. I sort of want my MP paying attention to what’s happening on the floor.

Curious that this debate is occurring at the end of 2007, though.

New tech news:

* “For the second consecutive day, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) took off from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Palmdale, Calif., to map the fires that are burning across Southern California. Equipped with infrared sensors that can pierce smoke and soot, the aircraft will provide thermal imagery that emergency management officials will use to deploy firemen and water bombers battling the fires.”

* “A world without both spam and AIDS would be a much better place, and it turns out that one may lead to the other. How exactly? The ability of a computer to recognize that “Viagra” is the same as “V1agra” or “Vi@gra” requires the same skills needed for a vaccine to recognize the constantly evolving AIDS virus. In other words, spam-fighting pioneer David Heckerman of Microsoft Research says, an immune system is just like a spam filter.”

* “Today’s prosthetics are medical miracles, controlled by impulses from the user’s own muscles. But one myoelectric hand can cost $35,000 and up—a daunting, if attainable, figure for patients with health insurance, but more of a concept than an option for many amputees around the world. So when a team of students at ITESO Graduate School in Guadalajara, Mexico, began working on a new prosthetic hand, their goal was simple: Cut costs. “We wanted to help people, not make some cool-looking toy,” says Gabriel Herrera, the team’s firmware engineer. That meant prowling a scrap yard for metal and spending just $2000 to make two prototypes in four months. This past summer the students won top honors and $10,000 in an international design contest sponsored by Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor, beating out 775 other entries.”

* “WASHINGTON - Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones. Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said the incidents involving several companies, including Comcast Corp., Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., have raised serious concerns over the companies’ “power to discriminate against content.”

* “LOS ANGELES - When the Pentagon’s research arm first called for innovators to design and race a self-driving car to make warfare safer, a ragtag bunch of garage tinkerers, computer geeks and even high school students answered.” …”this year’s is modern: The field is more savvy, the terrain is urban and corporate sponsors and public relations machines have entered the fray. “They’ve become like NASCAR teams with multiple sponsors and stickers on everything,” said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who has followed the DARPA competitions. “It shows that it’s becoming big business.”

* “Sipera Systems, a VoIP security company, said on Tuesday that users of VoIP services and equipment from Vonage, Globe7 and Grandstream were vulnerable to eavesdropping, spam, spoofing, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.”

* “The Lewis Group, at Caltech, has worked out a unique approach to the idea of an electronic nose. They use arrays of simple, readily fabricated, chemically sensitive conducting polymer films.”

* “The Pantech A1407PT cell phone has a unique ability to let you listen. It allows you to listen to your calls with your bones.”

* “TOKYO — In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all — a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video.”

* “Moves are afoot to try and reinstate the now defunct NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), or something like it.”

Danger–overload. Continue tomorrow.

Thirty or forty years ago in America, journalists, interested citizens and yes, criminals, all listened to the police radio broadcasts to find out what was going on. They would often beat the police to the scene of a crime or accident.

Via Kable we learn that “A pilot scheme will test whether mobile technology can make Nottinghamshire police more efficient. Nottinghamshire Police is to pilot mobile technology which aims to provide officers on the beat with up to date information and reduce the time spent on paper work. The solution has been developed by mobile data specialist Beat Systems and will provide officers with real time access to multiple operational systems. ”

“Police officers in Nottinghamshire can currently spend as much as half of their time at the station on paper work, but the new technology aims cut administration. The company said the solution fully integrates with national systems, such as the Police National Computer, as well as Nottinghamshire’s internal intelligence systems and email.”

Not a word about information security. Not a word about information assurance. Hope someone gives Beat Systems a call to check on this: http://www.beatsystems.com/. Telephone: 0141 946 5800 Email: info@beatsystems.com.

Their website says they are compliant with Home Office and CESG standards. They have the British Transport Police as a client already. Maybe there’s nothing to worry about. I hope so. Still…

From Kable we learn that “The City of London Police has added mapping information and voice activated messages to its emergency communication system. It has added to the email, SMS and pager facilities already available to people and businesses registered for Priority Alert.”

What is the very first thing that has happened in each and every large-scale public emergency over the past 5 years? Why, the mobile phone networks have sunk under the weight of traffic. This is what will happen in the next public emergency as well.

In order to maintain stable communications, one would almost have to design a robust network of computers with redundant linking and flexible switching networks to route around damage. You could start by putting a few of them in universities to see how they would work. You could call it… I don’t know… maybe the Intertubes, or something.

If diverse government bodies wanted to communicate with citizens in times of crisis, maybe they could publish regularly updated messages on a pre-established location on this Intertube thingie, and make it so communications could be two-way. You could call them… oh, I don’t know… globs.

Maybe they would look like this. (Total time to build this was two hours.)

Well, not snakes, but mobile phones. They’re here… The European Air Safety Agency has greenlighted their use in flight, and the installation of on-board base stations has resolved navigational worries. Ofcom has published a proposal that would allow usage above 3,000 metres.

Our wiki covered some of the issues involved here.

Given that the most widely publicized incident regarding previous use of mobile telephony in commercial aircraft comes from September 11, when passengers phoned emergency services, said tearful goodbyes to their family, and provided a running commentary on events (all without interfering with the plane’s navigational systems), the technical and information assurance issues, while not trivial, do not seem to be too much of an obstacle to airborne use of commercial mobile services (although I still am concerned about how future location-based services will be managed).

But the issues are more likely to be social. As the reporter for icBirmingham noted in the story linked above, “I personally think allowing the use of mobile phones on aeroplanes is only a good idea if people are encouraged to step outside the aircraft when making and receiving calls.”

* From Kable: The Department of Health has announced the membership of the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care (NIGB). The NIGB, which will report annually to the secretary of state for health, has been set up to provide leadership and promote consistent standards for information governance across health and social care. It will also arbitrate on the interpretation and application of information governance policy and give advice on matters at national level, the DoH said on 22 October 2007.

* From the category of ‘usual suspects:’ “Eight companies have got through the first stage of the Identity Card Scheme procurement process. Accenture, BAE Systems, CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, IBM, Steria and Thales have been given the go ahead to enter a competitive dialogue with the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) for places on the National Identity Scheme Strategic Supplier Framework.” Pity they didn’t appoint a national information governance board for this scheme beforehand.

* An official review says that “most CCTV images cannot be used in criminal investigations. More than 80% of the CCTV footage supplied to the police is of a poor quality and not fit for the purpose of identification, according to a strategy report by the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers.”

* The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)” has urged local authorities in Scotland to take a cautious approach to residents’ personal information. It issued a statement on 17 October 2007 advising council to restrict the amount of personal information, such as phone numbers and signatures, that is published on their websites. ”

Hard to believe we didn’t blog this on October 9th, when ‘Two European scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for what might be called the grandfathering of the iPod—a process that helps hard drives physically shrink, while still increasing storage capacity. In 1988, Frenchman Albert Fert and German Peter Grunberg each arrived at the same conclusion that changes to the magnetic field of a hard disk can be interpreted as the ones and zeros that form the basis for all electronic data.’

I mention it now because ‘Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers (”Hitachi announced 4TB HDDs by 2011. So?” read the headline on Ubergizmo), who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.’

The significance is that Kryder’s Law (which is to memory storage what Moore’s Law is to transistor density) is now enabled to continue at its logarhythmic pace. This in turns allows the next wave of innovation in wearable computing and more conventional gizmos to continue on the assumption that ever smaller devices will have sufficient memory for purpose.

I personally cannot believe the lack of attention that accompanied the commercial availability of 1-terabyte storage last month. it essentially means the table is set for the future.

The global communication satellite network that provides location information and timing signals to governments, businesses and people around the world is controlled, essentially, by the Pentagon. People worry that in time of crisis (or even in a fit of pique) the Pentagon might degrade or turn off the signals. This is one (and perhaps the last remaining) reason to support the construction of alternative satellite networks, such as the EU’s Galileo.

But it’s becoming ever-less likely that the Pentagon will be able to turn it off. They are removing the switch-off capability from their next generation of satellites, and the ubiquity of usage of their signals makes it just a non-starter politically.

Plus there’s this: Israel Military Industries (in conjunction with their U.S. partner Raytheon) has completed development of Pure Heart, a GPS/laser guided morter munition that extends the effective range of a 120mm mortar to an astonishing 13km. There’s a nice picture of one of the shells in Janes Defence Weekly, where I read the story. Essentially, the navigation system depends on the same GPS signal that we’re worried the Pentagon will switch off. As long as Israel is a staunch military ally of the U.S. (and doesn’t start selling this to obvious enemies of the U.S., something they have done in the past), and as long as Raytheon continues to be a major supplier of defence technology to the U.S. and its allies, there is sort of a vested interest in keeping GPS signals up and running.

I doubt if this is the only example of inferred reliability of GPS coming from U.S. government, its allies or its suppliers. Can any of you supply me with more?