A side-effect generated by the Datagate scandal is the privacy hysteria exploitation to sell encryption-based services. Taking apart some obvious exceptions (business transactions, health information, judiciary data) these services are useless, ineffective and dangerous for the citizen an such and for the society. Continue reading “The Datagate and the Risk of Outlawing Encryption”
The freedom of being a stone-age man or I don’t want to live “smart”
One of the most revealing books I’ve read (that I translated into Italian for local publisher) is Alan Cooper‘s The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Is a book about programming and the fact that core decisions come from a bunch of geeks working down below the basement of the company’s building, while marketing and PR guys occupy the fancy upper floors (have you seen the British sit-com “The IT Crowd“?) Continue reading “The freedom of being a stone-age man or I don’t want to live “smart””
The Browsers’ War. Again?
Browser WWII is coming? The struggle between Apple attempt to let IOS a closed ecosystem and the push of its competitor is leading to a new version of the “browser war”. Google, in fact, is pushing to have an Ipad version of Chrome, while Apple is trying to avoid it. Is this the re-issue of the Microsoft vs Mozilla and rest of the world battle? Microsoft lost it, and Explorer is no longer the only Internet navigator available for its operating system. If history means something, I do doubt that Apple succeed in preventing Chrome to be installed on IOS devices.
About Apple vs Samsung tablet legal quarrell
I’m diddling since a couple of weeks with the new Samsung Galaxy Pad 10.1v, equipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
The whole thing is crappy.
There is no support for OS X, no information on how to factory reset the machine when hangs on boot (the only option, as I sadly discovered, is to send the tablet back to Samsung even for a trivial hard-reset), no native file-manager, no native (working) multimedia player, no native task killer. The internal disk is painfully slow and Android crashes more often that it should be supposed to do. Working MP4-econded videos streamed from a DLNA server don’t play when copied locally.
If I were Apple, I wouldn’t care about Samsung Galaxy tablets. They’re far, far, far away from becoming a viable Ipad alternative
Computer search and seizure. An odd law is coming…
The Italian center-left wing has proposed a bill (currently passed in Senate, and now to be examined in the other chamber) that allows the law enforcement to obtain the use of computer seized during computer-crime related investigation, early before the final judgement comes to an end.
The “idea” backing the proposal (that will likely become a full-force law in a few time) is that there is no harm for the defendant if the police uses his computer waiting for the trial. At the end of the day, if the defendant will be acquitted – says the accompaining text to the draft law – he will get his computer back, and will start using it as if nothing happened. The reason for this law – this is clearly stated – is to give the brand new computers used for criminal purposes to the law enforcement agencies that still use old and crappy technology at no cost.
This is the very same approach adopted for houses and vehicles used by drug dealers and mafia mobs so in principle there shouldn’t be a particular concern for this new law.
Personally I disagree from this statement, since a computer is something different than a car or some other premises. It stores information often unrelated to the investigated crime, and/or information related to innocent third parties.
Why should these people be exposed to a mass infringement of their personal life?