Art, media, opinion and ideas
The Irish Times has an leader article today on Data Retention. A small extract:Perhaps because such legislation deals with electronic data, and the surveillance happens unseen in the background, it has not provoked significant public debate.
Some time ago, Karlin Lillington of the Irish Times linked to details of a secret Council of Ministers questionnaire. This was drawn up in advance of any data retention legislation being in place, in November 2002. It is interesting in its entirety, but I'd particularly draw people's attention to question 5 and the Irish Government's answer.
Digital Rights Ireland have sent letters to the Minister for Justice, the Minister for Communications and the Garda Commissioner looking for undertakings in relation to data retention. McGarr Solicitors represent DRI. I won't be commenting on the case beyond this.
MCD, promoters of the Oxygen festival, recently took umbridge at people discussing their perceptions of shortcomings in some aspects of the most recent Oxygen event. (see "How we feared for our lives at Oxegen . .
Colm MacCárthaigh gives an overview of the timeline of events surrounding the evoting fiasco. Here's an interesting snippit. We come in just as the Oireachtas has formed a committee to look into concerns about evoting.
I'm sure that the DRI people will be all over this, but I just thought that people might be interested to know that an objection to the Data Retention Directive was lodged today by the Irish Government with the European Court of Justice. Today was the last possible day to lodge such an objection. The contents of that objection aren't clear yet.
Gareth Stack, author of the wildly popular Why Do We Bebo? article which has skewed tuppenceworth's statistics ever since it was published (top 5 search results- bebo, BEBO, Bebo + ie and Bebo skins) has posted a follow up on his own blog Hummingbird Mentality called The Next Bebo.
I see today that Play. com is now saying"We are sorry, but we can only supply gadgets to UK addresses. You must choose a UK delivery address for this order.
Wood Communications and Alpha Vision Design would like you, the security forces of this or other states, to consider their lovely surveillance cameras. Silicon Republic would like to facilitate them in making this invitation. To recap on previous opinions I've expressed- ANPR coupled with casual storage of all data recorded by the system will not withstand legal challenge.
A new site launched this week, offering out-of-print Irish books as free downloads under a Creative Commons licence. The Irish Literary Revival site has novels and poems, but is interested in hearing from any writer who might have a published out-of-print work that they'd like to see re-enter the world. They even accept non-fiction books.
Recent Comments