Making a point about privacy

Worth $30million and under 'regional arrest'. This article "Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy" is about John Gilmore's attempt to get the US government to come clean about the encroachment on civil liberty that is happening in the name of security in the post 9/11 world. As Bruce Schneier points out, many of the things we are asked to do in the name of 'security' often do nothing to make us more secure, yet do much to compromise our freedoms. I'm impressed by what Gilmore is doing - if he needed it I'd probably even send him money.

Public service announcement

Firefox 1.0.1 has just been released. There are a bunch of security fixes in there, so it would probably be a good idea to install it and maintain your smug position as 'safer than an IE user'. The page describing the security updates has not yet been updated but they should get around to it in the next day or so. Firefox - YKIMS.

More subversion

In Growth of Human Factors in Application Development, Alastair Coburn says:

"Projects succeed because people break out of the prescribed process to make sure the system delivers, or because the process is deliberately vague, allowing people to do whatever is necessary. The best modern processes are of the latter form. This is

(P1) Trust in people to do what is necessary."

I have always instinctively believed that organisations that attempted to use process as a compensation for a lack of ability were unlikely to succeed - software development cannot be reduced to a 'paint by numbers' exercise. I had not realised that so many others shared this belief.

Breaking the Rules

There's a book out, called "Contagious Success" , and as part of the marketing for the book (and her company's consultancy services) the author Susan Lucia Annunzio was a guest blogger on Fast Company Now. The point she chose to emphasise in this post is that the leaders of high performance teams have to break the rules of their organisation to allow their teams to succeed. The interesting thing for me is the way this reinforces the Dilbertian view of the world, where you naturally assume that your employer is part of the problem. Is this inevitable? Is it not possible to build an organisation that actually works? Or is it true that the only way to quality is subversion?

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Giving and taking offence

There's been a media row in the UK over the last week about some insults the London mayor, Ken Livingston, aimed at a journalist. Various people have chimed in saying that Ken should apologise, but now Tory MP Boris Johnson has weighed in with the opposite view. As Boris has pointed out, nothing Ken said was anti-semitic, it was just rude and offensive. And since it was meant to be rude and offensive, and Ken feels that he had reason to behave in this way, he really doesn't want to apologise and I can't see why he should. So called 'political correctness' has us thinking twice before we say anything, but it is worth remembering that being rude is a perfectly natural thing to do - it is part of the way we communicate, and sometimes we need to let the other person know that we are really pissed off. Those who would sanitise our language to the point that rudeness becomes impossible are mealy-mouthed weasels and they should sod off, right now.

Lessons on how to fight terror

I came across this article, written only a couple of days after September 11th 2001, while following a chain of links from the Register. I was struck by how prescient it was, and sadly by how many of lessons listed here that the Americans (and British to some extent) have ignored and must learn again. As the article points out, the British have spent more time fighting terrorists than just about anybody else. You could speculate why that was, and what the two current greatest victims of terrorist tactics, the US and Israel, have in common with the Britain that aroused such hatred. The question you have to ask is not 'how can we stop the terrorists', but 'what is it we are doing that makes these people feel that they would rather die than share this world with us?'. Only when you understand that can you start to stop the killing.

Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle

If there weren't enough warnings for the proponents of ID cards close to home, perhaps they should look at this Expert Project Management - Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle
The article discusses the fiasco of the Canadian gun registration scheme. The paragraph that particularly caught my eye is this one:

Aside from monumental fiscal waste, this is ultra-bad law. "It's designed to operate on the law-abiding, without touching the outlaw. People who register their firearms rarely use them for crimes, and people who use their firearms for crimes rarely register them. The law's net effect is to diminish public safety rather than enhance it, first because it consumes financial resources and manpower that could be more usefully employed in other areas of law enforcement, and second because it reduces people's own ability to fight crime."

Very similar arguments could be applied to ID cards. In fact, if ID cards are accepted, they will become a powerful weapon for the criminal, as he will be able to 'prove' his lawful status by presenting his card (forged, stolen, or illicitly acquired) and thus lull the suspicions of his victims.

Another blog victim - or is there more to it?

Mark Jen lasted 11 days at Google before he was sacked, probably for reasons related to his blog. Mark puts his side of the story in ninetyninezeros: the official story, straight from the source , although it is a bit light on detail.
The comments are interesting - a sort of 'all human life is here' experience. There are the 'hello mother!' types, who just want to get their name in lights, the people trying to hijack an event to generate publicity for whatever they are selling, conspiracy theorists, reactionary 'serves you right' posters and plenty more.
For my part, it has always seemed a bit daft to clearly identify ones employer and then bitch about them without a fairly thick cloak of anonymity. My economic well-being depends on my employer's success, and doing stuff designed to undermine that would be, well, just stupid. If there is stuff you don't like, do your best to make the changes from the inside. If you really don't like it, then leave. Or perhaps I've missed something?

The Cuddly Menace

This is absolutely what the internet is for. Forget all this blogging, e-commerce, education and stuff, this kind of thing is all the justification I need.