Here’s glaring evidence that giant screens aren’t yet ready to replace old-fashioned billboards…

We believe it important that a free and open discussion takes place on the HMRC incident and related issues. For a variety of reasons, we think the best place for this is at Ideal Government. We look forward to engaging with you there.

Couple of things I’ve been meaning to post.

- A paper (launched last July), Privacy in Camera Networks: a Technical Perspective (PDF), which proposes technical means by which camera networks could be built that preserve privacy. The paper also talks about the Constitution Project’s model legislation in this area. In last week’s net.wars (http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3653), I mourn the fact that the kinds of debate the CP thinks should take place about camera networks - stating their purpose, reviewing their effectiveness, accepting citizen input regarding their impact, etc. - do not take place, and also surmise that neither this type of debate nor the technical measures will ever happen because a) it’s harder to implement the technical measures than not to do so; b) governments have no incentive to do these things because c) the public in general has proved too willing to accept the cameras as is.

- I note that the subprime mortgage lending mess continues to spread. Inadequate risk management in the interests of making profits seems an even more likely threat to information assurance than many of the things we have already discussed here. (Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, this means YOU.)

- In an interview this week, the managing director of the private banking branch of one of Europe’s oldest banks noted several very interesting statistics. TMost British (and European) entrepreneurs 50-65 years old (the majority of their businesses, SMEs, are

The world is changing now.

Ramps may replace stairs in homes and businesses to facilitate access to domestic robots. (Pure speculation on my part, this.)

Domestic robots charged with cleaning and other duties will be equipped with CCTV cameras. (Already exist and offered as a commercial service.)

Some bright lass or lad will equip these domestic robots with prosthetic arms for manipulating objects on command–or autonomously (already exist and working in the lab).

In addition to opening doors and pulling levers, etc., those arms will be able to manipulate tasers or pepper-spray projectors. Domestic robots will then have security responsibilities.

However, to prevent misuse and frivolous use, it is quite possible that the use of robots for security purposes must involve an enabling command from a certified security operator or even a law-enforcement agency, looped in on the feed from the robot’s CCTV camera. It might be a dual decision, with the security operator enabling the owner to actuate the device.

Which of course means the integrity and authenticity of all messaging must be iron-clad–encrypted, authenticated and secure.

So when, 10 years down the line, you are choosing which type of wood to use in the ramp that replaces your stairs, remember the information assurance implications.

And just in case you think this is too futuristic and science-fictiony to worry about, have a look at the first private spaceport–due to be finished in 2010–before Crossrail.

Hat tip to Robert Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, 1957.

Its good to see that Peter Hustinx EDPS (here and here) is following in the footsteps of our own Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, (here) by biting at the heels of government, reminding them of their privacy obligations. Balancing the security of the citizen vs the privacy rights of the citizen is not an easy one, but it seems to me that it’s healthy to have advocates in both corners of the debate, particularly when one corner has Uncle Sam as a strong proponent. Mr Hustinx has again reminded the EU not to let political expediency dilute the aims of data protection (here and here). However I do wonder what recourse Mr Hustinx has to ensure the EU institutions do pay due regards to his warnings.

Any views on the security of the citizen vs the privacy rights of the citizen are very welcome.

The “do we need…..” argument has been rehearsed many times. However, delays in the programs, particularly with funding (see latest) are in danger of making the argument redundant. The driver in me doesn’t worry too much about the delays (road use charging being the most obvious source of revenue). However from an IA perspective there’s a lot going for it. Whether it’s ESA or EU that pulls the strings, the independence and redundancy arguments are compelling. I am going to have to put a few hours aside to look into the “integrity signal” claims of “guaranteed”, “certified” and “legal enforceability”!

Here’s the write-up. I think it’s valuable to throw around crazy ideas, because good things can come of it, but I still kind of hope they don’t get to dismantle the solar system…

wg

One of the cases that keeps coming up at State of Play is the Bragg case. Bragg was a Second Life user who, as Linden Labs keeps suggesting people do, invested somewhat substantially in property in Second Life. It seems, though, that Bragg had found a way to get at Linden’s auctions of abandoned land before anyone else and buy it up very cheaply, intending then to flip the land at a profit nearer market rates.

Linden figured out what he was doing and confiscated the properties and banned him from SL. He is a lawyer. He sued in small claims court. The case has since escalated to include all sorts of damages and costs.

Reuters, which has a significant presence in SL, has been following the story. The case has been working up through the Pennsylvania courts (that’;s where Bragg lives and practices law). The Judge ruled Linden’s TOS illegal, and has refused to remove CEO Philip Rosedale personally from the case (a significant thing for company CEOs).

This case is of serious interest to the many lawyers here - it may set a precedent for how the law views virtual property. Professor Yee Fen Lim argues that property isn’t what people think it is: that *legally* property is really the rights of access and control. In that sense, virtual property is certainly property. Linden defines the property it “sells” as rental of the processor to run the sim. “As computer science that’s acceptable,” she said, “but in the legal view that means property is mere illusion.”

For Bragg, of course, the point is that he invested quite a bit of real money which has now been confiscated. In later panels, a number of commentators thought that Linden’s actions were not reasonable. Abrahams said that under Australian law Bragg would win. Today’s law workshop talked about how unfair and one-sided EULAs and TOSs are, and argued that Linden’s more rational response would have been to say, yeah, loophole in our system, we fix, we refund your money, maybe you can keep one property. But at the moment all virtual worlds are owned by companies who create all the laws, some by contract (TOS), some in code, some by emerging community standards.

wg

They opened the State of Play V conference last night (on virtual worlds) with the rough cut of a new documentary about Second Life called Ideal World, produced and directed by Glen Thomas. It was pretty interesting as a primer on virtual worlds and what might be possible with them, told as a story about a couple who were early adopters and now finance their lives on a remote farm in Georgia with their SL earnings.

The one thing the movie really lacks is any skepticism about all this; it’s so relentlessly upbeat it could have been produced by Linden Labs’ PR department. Much of what’s going on in virtual worlds isn’t really *new* - many of the same issues and opportunities were talked about in the early days of the Internet itself, but also in previous virtual worlds (Worlds Away, The Palace, CompuServe…). I don’t find the let’s-trash-anything-popular school of journalism at all interesting, but I do think that presuming that anyone and everyone can benefit from having the fantasy world of their dreams is well…a bit fatuous. Quite apart from whether everyone can afford sufficiently high-powered technology, the big issue is TIME. A single mother with more jobs than children would probably absolutely love to have a fantasy life in which she hung out with adult friends, drove cools cars, wore fashionable clothes, and behaved irresponsibly - but exactly when is she supposed to be able to do this? And will her online friends help with child care?

The one downside issue the movie touches on is network lag, which is, genuinely, the bane of every SLer’s second existence. With businesses interested in SL as a platform, it’s a problem that Linden Labs has a lot of motivation to solve, but I’m not sure it *can* be solved unless someone comes up with a P2P way of spreading the load; AIUI Linden’s design relies on central servers, and I think there’s a built-in limit there in terms of what one company can provide.

If there’s a Blindside issue there, I guess it’s scalability: over and over again on the history of the Net we’ve seen that things that work fabulously well when they’re small and their membership is restricted and/or homogeneous (Usenet, email, blog communities, CompuServe forums) do not scale to large numbers. Usually spam and other forms of network abuse are the problem.

wg

If it weren’t so important I would file this under some category like Toys for Boys, but when Chris (who sits across from me at Kable) tossed me his copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly, it fell open to a page with two stories, headlined ‘US Army Ground Robots See Exponential Growth’ and ‘SWORDS Armed Robots Join Combat Team in Iraq.’ I think this technology has emerged…

Highlights of the articles:

The U.S. Army has more than 5,000 unmanned ground vehicles operating in Iraq and Afghanistan (up from 163 in 2004)

The Special Weapons Observation Remote reconnaisance Direct action System (SWORDS), an armed robotic system, is currently deployed with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq.

Sadly, the operating constraint so familiar to all of us is the low battery life–four hours.

For UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), flight time has gone up from 100 hours per day (for the fleet) in 2005 to 500 hours per day in 2007.

The principle operating constraint for UAVs is their bandwidth requirements. “One Global Hawk UAV consumes about 500 Mbits/s of satellite-provided bandwidth, more than five times the total bandwidth consumed by the entire US military during Operation ‘Desert Storm.’ ” Now you know why the US DoD bankrolled the Internet in the first place…

500 Mbits/s? What information is that? Live video of the cockpit view, thermal imaging, what else? And who’s evaluating this? What decisions do you make from this? Perhaps more importantly, why are deaths by friendly fire still so prevalent?

Jane’s Defence Weekly, 15 August 2007