Communication Breakdown

ICANN has said no to the idea of a .xxx domain. As the Reg points out, this is the result of too much political to-ing and fro-ing, and is really not the sort of thing ICANN is supposed to be there for.

And as for the moral objections to .xxx, well, those people are just shooting themselves in the foot, because a .xxx domain would have actually protected their innocent kiddies from webfilth more, not less.

Oh well, there's no accounting for bad judgement.

Well, I've installed Vista now, and the hell of having to reinstall XP and then its successor is fading from memory. But I've had a new rubbish experience now, and I find it rather worrying.

For some reason my laptop froze yesterday. I had been installing a new driver or some such thing (in retrospect I should have taken notes at the time) and something went wrong, and it seized up. OK, that's bad enough, but then I pressed the power button and the thing went into sleep mode. And wouldn't come out.

Dead. An expensive, new, dead laptop. Panicking, I did the only thing I could - something I've never had to do with XP, in no circumstances. I pulled the battery out, clipped it back in, turned the thing on and all was right again.

The first thing I did next, of course, was to change the settings so that "off" means "off" not "sleep", so hopefully I should never have to do that again. But I'm not thrilled. I can handle having to soft-reset my Vario II every now and again, because I'm used to the Windows Mobile experience, but I shouldn't have to wrench the battery out of a notebook to turn it off. Good job I didn't have any unsaved data.

Other than that, Vista's very shiny and nice. But... hmm.

Yesterday I wrote an article on how a laptop was stolen from a Nottinghamshire hospital's offices, containing the details of thousands of kiddies and protected with nothing more than a single password.

Now, anyone who's ever used a computer outside of their home should know that one password doth not comprehensive security make, but that didn't stop a volley of security companies emailing us to point this out. In the article, I detailed the responses from SafeNet, GuardianEdge and PGP, but another one also came in after publication, from DigitalPersona.

Vice-pres George Skaff tells us that "all organisations need to wake up to the importance of protecting sensitive information by realising there is a need to use authentication techniques beyond that of a basic password which is simple to forget, easy to lose, or fall into the hands of the wrong person - knowingly or unknowingly... The cost to organisations of protecting themselves against the basic problems of password vulnerability, in relation to the cost to people involved if there is a security breach, is very small".

Thanks George (and Gary, Lynton and Jamie from the other three companies). Good job no-one ever accused security firms of being opportunistic.

I'm currently wading my way through the Royal Academy of Engineering's report on privacy and technology, and came across this interesting paragraph on the topic of Big Brother. Orwell's vision, the authors claim, is out of date, a relic of an obsolete political fear of malign governments:

"The danger more likely in present times is that if technology continues to evolve along current lines, 'Big Brother' will end up being more powerful than Orwell envisaged (in the sense that we will have far less individual privacy), though it may not be government that will be empowered. In a world of matchbox-sized camcorders and camera-phones, of always-on broadband and RFID, ordinary people (not a government agency, supermarket or the police) will be the nemesis of privacy. The Internet has the potential to democratise and decentralise Big Brother, as it democratises and decentralises many other phenomena; Big Brother may be 'us', not 'them'."

Now that is food for thought.

I just received my upgrade copy of Vista from Dell, several months after ordering my spanking new laptop. Now I'm torn - do I wait until SP1 or do I just go ahead and upgrade from XP.

This, I know, is a dilemma facing a lot of you, especially those with multiple computers to manage. My laptop's new, so I'm not too worried about the hardware keeping up (though I really want to try out ReadyBoost), and my few peripherals are pretty recent too. On the other hand, there's no compelling reason for me to upgrade - XP suits me just fine.

What to do? I reckon I may succumb to the inquisitive geek within and give it a shot, but I will of course keep you updated as to my progress.