Offmessage

Officials who attended a world Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week were unknowingly bugged

This is an interesting one… Pepik (my girlfriend’s company) has a product (called 3dCRM) that does exactly the same thing – tracks people around conference spaces. It’s a pretty obvious use for RFID when you think about it. We’ve all been to conferences or shows where you have a barcoded badge that is scanned at every turn, generally by bored students standing at every doorway. Using RFID makes this process less intrusive, lower cost and more efficient. One of the big challenges that faces anyone attempting to implement RFID solutions for people rather than things is going to be the trade off between value to the punter and the benefit to the business… Clearly in the instance above the problem is the undisclosed use and the lack of a stated policy regarding the future use of the information. That’s why we need to think carefully about each and every implementation.

Me? I’m continuing to focus on solutions that track children for their parents. No consent issues there!

Klein Bottle hats. Nice.

Canadians have also discovered that men make shorter term decisions when faced with pretty women. So that’s where all my money goes?

…but uploading isn’t. Thanks for clearing that up guys!

My baby… More pictures will follow, when I’ve stopped driving it long enough to take them!

AdBusters have (like many others) had a long running vendetta against Nike for their use of sweatshops in producing their trainers (sneakers, whatever). After a few years of planning and with a whole lot of chutzpah they’ve decided to launch their own sneakers as a direct response to Nike. As they say, “rethink the cool.”

Problem with this is that you never really can tell who uses a sweatshop and who doesn’t. Almost all ‘brand’ clothing is produced in South East Asian sweatshops nowadays… Even Marks and Spencer have had their problems… If you haven’t already read Naomi Klein’s No Logo to find out more.

They’re axing RI:SE (thank God). But that also means their axing Zora… And apparently she’s not interested in any more TV. As El Reg put it:

Suleman herself has said that she will probably go back to radio (she previously worked for Capital), and reckons her 36D bust would rule her out of any serious TV newsreading post. The fact that she chose to commit journalistic suicide by flaunting herself like a two-bit hussy on Channel 4 apparently has nothing to do with it.

Or, to put it another way (thanks, megastar.co.uk):

For some, the 26-year-old remains – or rather her ginormous bazonkers remain – the sole reason to zap briefly onto the car-crash show.

Either way, she’s leaving us *sniff*

Could be interesting:

• UK NHS trials Sun Linux, threatens 800k user defection from MS
• UK govt pitches Sun as OSS challenger for 500k desktops

These combined with the China deal would be 2 million+ desktop licenses in only three deals. That, and they’ve also made Solaris x86 free again. Life in the old dog yet? Maybe…

Not content to be pissing off almost everybody in the IT industry SCO have taken yet one step further in the case against Big Blue – this time producing the source code in question on paper, rather than electronically… 1,000,000 sheets. Nice.

“Knowing full well that IBM would need its source code in electronic form so that proper analyses � such as those SCO itself claims to have performed � could be conducted, SCO instead produced the source code on one million sheets of paper,” IBM said in the motion.

Mr Brown said spending on the war against terror, including military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, would rise by �800m, taking the total spending to �6.3bn – equivalent to about 2p on income tax.