Teknovis

I have been very busy recently, so I did not have enough time to blog regularly :( One of the reasons I was busy was that I had to appear in court :o (Luckily I was a witness, and not a defendant! Ultimately, I did not have to testify, because the defendant pleaded guilty :o)

I found the whole experience fascinating on many levels, and not something that I would like to experience regularly!

I was also struck by the complete lack of technology! This manifested itself in two ways:

• Every solicitor carried between 2cm and 20cm of stacked A4 pages!
• The majority of the questions that the judge asked were very simple, and if he had access to electronic versions of the solicitors’ documents he would not have needed to ask! This would have saved everybody a lot of time!

I wonder will this be any different in 100 years!

Tags: Ireland

I read an interesting article about the Irish Government attempting to indirectly tax all computers with Internet access earlier this week. If this is true, I think that it would be a disastrous decision for Ireland!

The full article is New Irish Internet Tax?, and there is more discussion in New Irish Internet Tax?.

Tags: Ireland, Tax

I recently came across a useful Irish income tax calculator called taxcalc.eu.

It has been updated recently to reflect the continuously changing income tax rates. However, I cannot attest to its accuracy :o

Tags: Ireland, Tax

The Irish Government has finally decided to abandon the badly conceived eVoting system that it purchased several years ago!

Ireland uses a proportional representation system, and it is not uncommon for counting to take several days. Therefore, the eVoting system was intended to produce almost instant results. However, it was determined by an independent commission that the system did not provide a sufficiently secure and verifiable audit trial.

For more details about this story see Gormley scraps e-voting system, or the harshly written Ireland scraps evoting in favour of ’stupid old pencils’.

I am delighted with this decision, because I think that the purchased eVoting system would have provided fewer verifiable audit facilities than the current paper based system. This is a pity, especially when you consider that a well specified system could have provided a significantly more verifiable audit trial. For example, every voter could have been supplied with a unique random identifier after he/she voted. The voter could then use this number online later to determine this his/her vote was correctly recorded, and contributed to the overall result.

Perhaps the best feature of the paper based voting system is that it provides very entertaining viewing :D

Tags: eVoting, Ireland

I just read that the Belgian Government has ordered 17 ISPs to block access to four websites. According to the largest ISP, this is the first time that this has occurred. The censored websites in this case contain details of convicted paedophiles. For more details about this see Belgium govt blocks access to website.

In general, I am in favour of making information public. However, I am also a strong supporter of privacy. So I do not know yet if publishing this information is good or bad.

However, I do think that trying to block access to these websites by forcing ISPs to police network traffic is both stupid and ineffective. In my opinion, this type of action only raises the profile of the censored websites! I suppose that it is typical of pushing a political solution into a technical arena.

Tags: Belgium, Censorship, ISP

Yesterday the Irish Minister for Communications announced details of the all Ireland broadband Internet access roll-out scheme. The essence of this is that every part of Ireland will have broadband Internet access by 2010, thanks to an investment of 223€ million by the Irish Government.

At the moment 10% of the population do not have broadband Internet access, and these 10% live in areas that represent 33% of the area of the country.

Three has won the contract to supply this broadband Internet access, and it will do this using 3G technology. I might be incorrect, but I think that BT actually installed, commissioned, and operates the 3G network in Ireland for Three.

More details about this can be read in Plan to bring broadband to entire country by 2010.

The Irish Minister for Communications seemed quite ecstatic when he was announcing this yesterday. He seems to have the opinion that this will enable significant numbers of new companies to develop, and that these companies will employ many people, and this will lift Ireland out of recession. Yes, really!

I have a more sceptical view :o

From the maps that I saw in the television interviews it seems that the areas in Ireland that will benefit from this scheme are all in really rural locations (mostly the West and South-West). The population densities are very low in these areas! Also, the existing levels of business activity in these areas is extremely low! I do not think that broadband Internet access will change any of this!

So ultimately I think that this scheme means that the majority of Irish tax payers will subsidise a very small minority. I also think that people who live in these rural areas must accept that they cannot expect to have the same levels of service as people who live closer to metropolitan areas. (This of course works both ways.)

Damien Mulley also got some air-time to comment on this government initiative on the RTE news yesterday. I am not sure why, but I feel that he gave a more positive response to it in the television interview than he does on his blog article National Broadband Scheme Launch. Maybe I am wrong about this, because I only saw the television interview once.

Tags: BT, Damien Mulley, Ireland, RTE, Three

There is lots of news these days about Barack Obama’s attempts to bring Web 2.0 to the White House. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that the web site got a face-lift, and it now includes an official blog! That is impressive! Is this the first ever official blog of a political leader?

Another change is that Macon Philips has been appointed as the director of New Media at the White House. I understand that this role is another first!

According to White House plans open government, Barack Obama’s main aim is to improve openness and transparency.

In one memo he spelled out his desire for an “an unprecedented level of openness in Government”. The other said government bodies should err on the side of clarity when considering if information should be disclosed. “In the face of doubt, openness prevails,” he wrote.

I really like the contract between the new approach and the old approach!

The moves were welcomed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said the memoranda stood in stark contrast to a memo issued by John Ashcroft soon after 9/11. This called on government bodies to only release information after exhausting all strategies, including legal action, to withhold it.

This article also describes how the robotos.txt file has been modified to allow all of the White House web site to be crawled. However, I have read other articles that suggested the old robots.txt blocked access to some content, such as printable versions of web pages, to prevent their contents from being indexed twice.

However, not everything is going so smoothly within the White House from a technology point of view, according to New job challenges in the White House.

Barack Obama also has plans for the wider Internet in the US, and these are described in Obama unfurls master plan for US cybersecurity. He really is not wasting any time!

Tags: Barack Obama