A World of Witnesses (redux)

[I orginally published this entry on 15 April 2008. I am re-publishing with the addition of a relevant video published 5 Dec 2008 by the Lou Dobbs Show].

The Economist.com published this on April 10th with an interesting reference to the safety of toys (given the toy product example I am using in my multi-entry Data Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership blog).

[An area] where mobile technology is beginning to have a big impact is health care, especially in poor countries. In South Africa people can text their location to a number and get an instant reply with the nearest clinic testing for HIV. HealthyToys.org, founded by a parental advocacy group and two American organisations, lets concerned parents text in the name of a toy they are considering buying in a shop and instantly reports back with information about lead or other toxins that may have been found in it. Soon mobile technology could play a large role in detecting, mapping and responding to epidemics. A lot of information about a recent polio outbreak in Kenya became available because health workers were using hand-held devices to collect data that used to be recorded on paper forms.

To see the full article, go to A World of Witnesses.

The foregoing was originally published on 15 April 2008.

The following is a video clip entitled Toxic Toys: Dangerous Toys Still On Shelves:

NY Times: Securing Very Important Data: Your Own

Dennis McDonald of Managing Technology commented yesterday on Cloud Computing: Billowing Toward Data Ownership - Part II, and one thing led to another and I ran across this jewel of an article from last October in the New York Times.

"AS long as we are willing to relinquish some personal data, Web applications have long allowed us to create virtual identities that can conduct most of the social and financial transactions that typify life in the real world."

Nick Craine

"But the newest generation of these services is starting to collect and store far more than just the standard suite of identity data — name and address, phone, Social Security or credit-card numbers — that populates the databases of banks and credit-card processors. They increasingly store information, generated by us, that is directly linked to those virtual identities.

And users are loving them."

For the complete article, go to Securing Very Important Data: Your Own.

Bits: Senators Weigh Possible Rules for Advertising and Online Privacy

"The Senate Commerce Committee began Wednesday to look at how online companies collect and use data about Internet users for advertising, and was told by several big Internet companies that it needs to pass a new law to enforce privacy standards for a range of online and offline activites ....

Senator Byron Dorgan, the Democrat of North Dakota who chaired the hearing, said he had invited representatives of Internet providers to discuss the issue and they declined. So he said he would schedule another hearing entirely devoted to hearing from the I.S.P.s about their advertising plans."

For the full article go to Senators Weigh Possible Rules for Advertising and Online Privacy.

Italy Publishes Tax Returns

The following excerpt is from an article published in the print edition of the The Economist on May 8, 2008.

"Item 100237099149 was a bargain. Offered for sale on eBay on May 5th, it was a CD of the “income-tax returns for 2005 of the entire Italian people”. Until it was removed after a few hours, it could have been bought for around $75.

Five days earlier Italians had learnt, to their varying dismay, amusement and fascination, that—without warning or consultation with the data-protection authority—the tax authorities had put all 38.5m tax returns for 2005 up on the internet. The site was promptly jammed by the volume of hits. Before being blacked out at the insistence of data protectors, vast amounts of data were downloaded, posted to other sites or, as eBay found, burned on to disks."

For the complete article, go to Italian Tax Returns - Publish and be Taxed. 

Pain in the SaaS

Here is an excerpt from an article published by the The Economist on April 24th.

"It was bound to happen. One after another, pieces of software have been moving online in a trend towards “software as a service” (SaaS). You can now manage your e-mail, write documents and edit spreadsheets using online services that run inside a web browser .... But now the trend has reached the darker corners of the software universe. Computer-security firms say criminals have adopted the new model too, and are offering “crimeware as a service” (CaaS).

.... 

The new offerings ... take commercialisation to the next level by allowing criminals to use and pay for such nefarious services via a web browser. Just as companies that adopt SaaS no longer need armies of support technicians ... criminals using CaaS no longer need to be hackers. One web-based service he found even allows customers to specify a target group, such as British lawyers or American doctors. Once enough of their machines have been infected, documents and other data are siphoned out of them."

 SaaS provides huge, potential benefits in terms of costs, business efficiencies and customer convenience. It will be the preferred tool of the emerging Semantic Web. The challenge is that it comes with fear factors, too. In Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership I have addressed some of those fear factors.

"The value proposition of data ownership is that it provides the most acceptable technological and socio-political pathway for adoption by ordinary people of the emerging Semantic Web."

For the complete Economist article, go to Pain in the aaS (sic).