Category Archives: Events

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So, it would seem that despite firm opposition by the Liberal democrats the utter abortion that is the Digital Economy bill has made it through the house of lords and has been passed back to the commons.

It is the government’s hope that MPs will not exercise their right to debate this bill further, and if the debate doesn’t happen the bill will be made law.

I can not express how bad this authoritarian and protectionist bill is or how much damage it will do to the UK economy.

It will increase the already disastrous brain drain, as well as losing any party which supports this bill the sizeable UK technical vote.

Please write to your MP now and ask that the bill is debated in full!

Image “closed” by Gill Holgate

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I am really pleased to welcome the Oxford code dojo as the latest addition to the Oxford tech scene.

At a Code Dojo, you are presented with an algorithmic problem and are encouraged to solve it in the most efficient way possible – stretching possibly atrophied puzzle solving muscles in the mean time.

It is also a good excuse to do a bit of networking with the other techs in your local area.

Thanks to Matty and Oleg for arranging such a stimulating event, looking forward to the next one!

Image “Dojo” by Fighter-arts

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Unless you have been living under a rock the last few days you will be aware of Google’s new social networking product – Google Buzz.

Unfortunately it would seem that some assumptions made by the designers and the automatic opt-in nature of the service has lead to some serious issues.

For me it underlines some of the problems with entrusting your personal data to the cloud. That is not to say of course that it is a user’s fault that their data gets shared in such a way – everything in the day to day usage of these tools gives the user a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The trouble is, that this expectation is largely an illusion. When using cloud services, you are entrusting them and you hope that they will exercise the same care when dealing with your data as you would – but unfortunately this is rarely the case.

Whether through carelessness or malicious action information has a tendency to leak. Assumptions made by the design team can be proved poor. So in short, never put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t be happy to see on a billboard.

[audio:http://audioboo.fm/boos/97642-the-buzz-around-buzz.mp3]