Features
net.wars: Mistakes were made
This week we got the detail on what went wrong at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs that led to the loss of those two CDs full of the personal details of 25 million British households, last year.[more...]
net.wars: Print rules
Here's the modern, efficient way to kill a club: dump the printed newsletter in favour of an electronic one.[more...]
net.wars: The Digital Revolution turns 15
"CIX will change your life," someone said to me in 1991 when I got a commission to review a bunch of online systems and got my first modem. At the time, I was spending most or all of every day sitting alone in my house putting words in a row for money.[more...]
net.wars: Ten
It's easy to found an organisation; it's hard to keep one alive even for as long as ten years. This week, the Foundation for Information Policy Research celebrated its tenth birthday. Ten years is a long time in Internet terms - and even longer when you're trying to get government to pay attention to expertise in a subject as difficult as technology policy.[more...]
net.wars: Everything new is old again
One of the curiosities about the future as portrayed in too many darned movies is its homogeneity. Everyone wears all white or all black, or they all dress the same and live in houses with a minimum of furniture all designed by someone who is apparently anxious not to waste any of the Earth's resources.[more...]
net.wars: Swings and roundabouts
This image comes from a wonderful cartoon that cycled frequently around computer science departments in the pre-Internet 1970s. I still have my paper copy! – it graphically illustrated the process by which IT systems get specified, designed, and built; and it showed precisely why and how far they fail the user's inner image of what they thought it was going to be.[more...]
