my web 0.2 website

Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all […]

I tried to open some dialogue with colleague members of the ITSPA about Vodafone’s legal challenge to Ofcom’s two-hour number port ruling.  Instead I got a number of offlist replies suggesting Vodafone’s challenge is still news to many in the industry.
Today, if you want to port your number from one service provider to another, it […]

There are not many silver linings on the cloud sitting over Information Security experts who work for the UK Government this Christmas.  Following the loss of personal information on welfare recipients by HMRC (twice), learner driver information by the DVLA, personal information on policemen binned in an unencrypted and intact form by Devon police, and […]

Ever since John Gage of Sun first offered the phrase “The Network Is The Computer” to the world, people have been using it as inspiration. Sun use it to explain that they mean Social Networking without actually using the phrase (they prefer the old fashioned “community”).
I think web 2.0 developers are offering a new […]

“Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It’s a beautiful system, you know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It’s terrible because Ma Bell is such a beautiful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain […]

I cited a DoJ statement in a previous article that was destined to stagnate or kill all innovation on the web, by permitting ISPs to end the end-to-end nature of the internet.
I’ve been trying to draw the attention of some other technical people by talking about NN on mailing lists.  Sadly some people have got […]

For months, ISPs in Europe have been campaigning to preserve their ‘mere conduit’ status, or in English they have been fighting to prove that they should be able to treat all packets, between customers and the resources that they want to access equally.  This means, no content blocking, monitoring, and fundamentally no commercial favouritism - […]

I have twice now had to defend an unpopular premise - that local governments should not provide free wifi to residents and visitors. A recent thread on the Open Rights Group discussion list almost got pretty out of hand between a few people who thought it was dangerous for the government to be providing […]

I ranted on the Ecommerce Experts mailing list earlier in the week after canceling an order on a cabling website, after it prompted me to enroll in Mastercard Securecode, with no way out.
My gripes are that

The general public should NOT be encouraged to enter their secret personal data at a checkout, in random popups.  The […]

If you are a local council, then you should want people to use your website instead of calling offices for info. Its cheaper to distribute info this way, and people can get at it more easily at peak times, often faster. Giving information out via your website is easy, and lots of people […]