[Dave Birch] One of my most frequent criticisms of the UK's national identity card scheme is that it is backward-looking, an electronic simulation of a Victorian ID card rather than an ID card for the 21st century. I gave an example of this in a talk recently by using the case of OpenID, noting that...

2007 Circumvention Landscape Report: Methods, Uses, and Tools Source: Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University As the Internet has exploded over the past fifteen years, recently reaching over a billion users, dozens of national governments from China to Saudi Arabia have tried ...

Filed under: Cell Phones One of the newest weapons in the arsenal of stalkers is text messaging. Texting has two major perks for those hell-bent on harassment: the constant attachment folks have to their cell phones and the tendency of handsets to pester their owners until unopened messages are view...

The big, long and extremely mediatized trial filed on 31 January 2008 by Swedish prosecutors against the four Pirate Bay founders for "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws" started at Stockholm's District Court, on 16 February 2009. The first day of the trial was dedicated to the...

A whopping 40% of the used hard drives on eBay contain easily recoverable personal data. Use the following guide to ensure your personal data never makes it out into the wild. Photo by AMagill. Kessler International, a computer forensics company from New York, conducted a study of used hard drives a...

Strengthening Security and Fundamental Freedoms on the Internet - An EU Policy on the Fight against Cyber Crime Source: European Parliament (via Statewatch) This study examines the human rights aspects of the Internet, and looks in detail at the relevant criminal law rules of the Council of Europe a...

[Dave Birch] A couple of days ago and I again mentioned the government's "break the glass" plan for a national identity scheme. In other words, what is the emergency plan to be followed should the integrity of the system itself fail. The point about the "break the glass" plan is a serious one. While...

We've all heard the stories over the last year about companies and government departments losing sensitive personal data because they didn't secure either it or the device it was stored on. The loss of data has many negative affects with a loss of confidence in the organisation responsible possibly ...

Filed under: Cell Phones, Computers We had a feeling that people are having problems erasing the personal and sensitive data on their gadgets before recycling or reselling them. After the election, McCain campaign staffers had their BlackBerrys resold. This wouldn't have been a problem if the phones...

[Dave Birch] I haven't had time to read the Carter report on Digital Britain yet, but I will try and catch up with it sometime soon. I've had a quick look at a few bullet points and not seen anything particularly interesting. There's been plenty of comment from sources that I pay attention too, thou...