As the NHS Bill moves to the House of Lords, cuts to frontline services are already beginning to bite. New concerns have emerged over how fit for purpose the new arrangements will be.
Over at ORGZine, I talk about potential privacy implications of the NHS restructuring.

(I am starting a new category on this blog under the [Elsewhere] label. This is intended to collect all my writings published elsewhere on the web.)
I recently gave a talk at Skeptics in the Pub on digital rights. While the audience were lively, engaged, well-informed and provided lots of food for thought in the post-talk discussion, it didn’t escape my attention that only about 10% were female. Read more over at ORGZine.

Reading the headlines Wednesday morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that one of the long hard battles the Open Rights Group has been fighting for the last couple of years – the one on the web blocking provisions in Sections 17 and 18 of the of the Digital Economy Act 2010 – had been won. “Government scraps plans to block illegal filesharing websites”, proclaimed the Guardian, with similar headlines on BBC News and other outlets. The reports referred to comments made by Business Secretary Vince Cable in the wider context of his response to the Hargreaves Review.
Read more at ORGZine.

Last Friday I found myself faced with the Google+ sign-up page. I stared at it for a few minutes, feeling ever so slightly violated. Then I hit the sign-up button anyway.
Read more on ORGZine.

So, who hasn’t been hacked[1][2] recently? Every other day I seem to wake up to news of yet another security breach. Most recently, it was the International Monetary Fund, supposedly hacked by a government. Affiliates of the FBI have not been immune either. To turn the tables a little, MI6 has been hacking Al Qaeda, with cupcake recipes. Anonymous has been threatening NATO.
Read more on ORGZine.

You may be familiar with Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book “Freakonomis” – a collection of curious and entertaining case studies from the world of behavioural economics with subjects ranging from sumo wrestlers to drug dealers. In the introduction to the (less entertaining, less well researched) sequel “Superfreakonomics”, Dubner and Levitt reveal the unifying theme of their work: people respond to incentives.
Read more at ORGZine.

You know that the judiciary is terrified of something related to technology when the Lord Chief Justice starts comparing it to the child pornography, as was the case late last week with the spreading of celebrity gossip on Twitter. Lord Judge was so unimpressed with Twitter users breaching a superinjunction that he called for technical measures similar to those designed to curb the distribution of child pornography to be put in place against the social networking site.
Read more at ORGZine.

In an attempt to take education back to the 19th century enhance discipline in schools, Education Secretary Michael Gove is proposing a variety of new measures and powers for teachers, including the power to confiscate pupils’ mobile phones, search for objectionable content on them and erase it. This is the latest in a series of education policies designed to make today’s children as ill-prepared for the future as possible. Other proposals include the move to “fact-based teaching” and the rewriting of history to fit into a particular, ideologically sound world view.
Read more at ORGZine.

How much do you trust the state? In particular, how much do you trust the state to only use powers it has by law for the purpose they were intended for? One of my favourite science fiction stories is by Charles Stross in an anthology edited by Farah Mendlesohn titled “Glorifying Terrorism”.
Read more at ORGZine.

The long legal struggle on the part of the music industry to kill yet another P2P filesharing platform – LimeWire is slowly coming to an end. In May last year, Judge Kimba Wood at the Manhattan Federal District Court ruled that LimeWire and its founder Mark Gorton were liable for copyright infringement and inducement to copyright infringement. In October last year, the court ordered LimeWire to stop distributing its software. Over the next few months, the trial will continue to determine the damages due to the 13 suing record companies.
Read more at ORGZine.