My dissertation is about internet security and internet privacy issues. The fact that they are both such large parts of everyone’s online experience and yet they seem to constantly battle against each other for supremacy. Can there be harmony or is there an inherent paradox between them meaning they can never function in equilibrium?

As part of the dissertation process interviews were conducted, one of which with the global IT manager of Premier Oil, to establish what issues are involved in business as well as consumer experiences and what guidelines they have to adhere to. More importantly if any of them are working or not.

Read my dissertation here ›

There is simply not enough debate about it. The fact that this has been rushed through the troubles me greatly but is not at all surprising regardless of the ‘wash period’ the current government are in. The faster they can move bills like this along, the less time anyone has to find out what is really going on and hold a balanced debate about it.

My dissertation was written on a similar subject – online privacy, are we forfeiting privacy to pay for security.

The fact that you can have your internet connection cut off is an interesting theory but how would it work in practice

1. What would happen if someone hacks into my wireless and downloads illegally? Would I get cut off or a strike against my name?
2. What if someone at my company downloads illegally, does the company’s internet get cut off?
3. If I’m a freelance web designer and my little sister downloads a film, do I lose my internet connection which I need in order to do my job? What is the justification for strangling my livelihood?
4. What about a public wireless network, will that get disconnected?

What is the differentiation between someone actively distributing content and someone who downloads an episode of Lost that has already aired? Is there even a distinction in the governments eyes?

The scope of this is too large for the government to understand and as a result the only thing the Digital Economy Bill will do is driving people to use encryption and proxys to avoid having their traffic inspected.

There are services like TorrentPrivacy already available for a negligible fee. This whole thing boils down to the music and film industry being money hungry. Show me a ratio of what I pay for a song or film against how much the artist gets and you will see why so many people torrent copyrighted materials. Then half of that goes to the government in tax anyway.

The cynic in me wants to say that the only reason the government cares about copyright infringement is because they make so much money in tax from the sale of content and income of the artists / labels.

How do they monitor this anyway? The last I heard ISPs said it was nearly impossible to do. The only ISP quoted as saying they were for this bill was Sky! And they’re a content distributer first!

The government are fearful of losing control and refuse to accept and embrace new technologies. This whole thing is a step closer to the situation with the Great Firewall of China and it disgusts me.

Declare that you don’t recognise the Digital Economy Bill, and your name will be added, just tweet: (make sure to keep the #whatdebill hashtag to be counted)

The initial  presentation idea was to have a super-real representation in a real-world scenario and show how Webit would be used. Sounds perfect until I tried to show that in an interim presentation with the feedback being “I don’t know what I’m looking at” and “I don’t get it”.

I realised I was trying to hard to show how the thing would actually work rather than what I should have been doing which was trying to present the idea. With realistic graphics and real-world scenarios there is the danger that whoever is looking at the presentation will be focussed more on the aesthetics of the presentation rather than the general idea. The idea is the most important part after all, everything else is just a means to make that idea more accessible and usable.

“Make it more human”

A great example of this is an OpenID video that uses a rough-around-the-edges approach to make you focus on what it is rather than what it looks like and the implementation.

Using this as a base, the character of Webit was created to showcase the idea for my final project. Webit is a small animated frog who helps you find things on the internet. In the scenario there is a stick man, Rob (voiced by Rob Strode), who is browsing the internet. Webit is introduced as a friend and shows Rob what else is on the internet.

The fact the the characters are roughly coloured and animated means there isn’t a glossy finish to them, making them more accessible.

The end result of this is an interview with .Net magazine and a featured podcast available to download from iTunes here or via RSS here.

Partnerships like this will are what makes the internet continue to evolve and change and I look forward to seeing more convergence like this.

Adblock Plus
Removes LOADS of ads from the net by subscribing to a list of known ads. Also has the ‘open blockable items’ feature so you can scroll through every thing that is visible on that page and block it or right click and select ‘block this’. It even has tabs for flash and Java so you can block those ads too.
ADD IT HERE

Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper
Similar to that found in the Web Developer toolbar outline function, this allows you to mouse over a webpage and see the outline of the current element and then block it in Adblock Plus.
ADD IT HERE

Adblock Filterset.G Updater
Updates the filterset every 4-7 days.
ADD IT HERE

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
Allows you to save your Firefox bookmarks to a server and synchronize them up and down. Useful if you have more than one machine or are constantly re-formatting like me.
ADD IT HERE

Web Developer
An invaluable tool for any web developer out there regardless of ability. The tool I use the most is the ‘outline current element’ tool which draws a red line around the element the mouse is over and show the deprecation in the address bar. very helpful for understanding CSS problems.
ADD IT HERE

Google Preview
Shows preiews of pages next to the search result in google. Similar to that already done when YouTube videos appear in the search results. Uses the image taken from google’s webcrawler.
ADD IT HERE

del.icio.us
An integrated system for taging pages in your del.icio.us page. Comes with a menu bar as well as two menu buttons ‘tag this’ and a direct link to your del.icio.us page. Also feature right click integration.
ADD IT HERE

Feel free to list any other plugins that you use and why.

While discussing password security and allowing Firefox to save username and password combinations so you dont have to with a colleague the other day I became aware that if my laptop got stolen… there was a hell of a lot of stuff people could access as Firefox held the login details.

I was about to delete all passwords from the system to ensure security I chanced upon the ‘Master Password’ button in the ‘Security’ tab in the options menu. Once set I assumed it would just protect the passwords stored which, while a step in the right direction, would still allow people to click my bookmarks and bypass the login screens as Firefox retained the login details.

I was wrong, it is in fact very clever. When a master password is set Firefox does indeed protect the saved passwords from being shown in the options menu but it also provides a pop-up box requiring the master password when you click on a site that has saved login details. So for example if I click on Facebook with the master password enabled, Firefox asks me for the master password before loading the page. Once entered Firefox then pre-fills the login details for me to click ‘login’. If I get the master password wrong or click cancel, the page still loads but the login form is empty!

The form only needs to be filled in once per session then all form fields are filled from then on.

On the plus side it looks a lot prettier (if that were possible) and its transitions are sleeker. It has two key features that Lighbox does not… It has the ability to have a slideshow in the same screen with the click of a button and is very smooth. The other is that it scales the image to fit into the browser window. This was a major problem for me with the last project’s slides as they had to be 1024×768 (for some reason).

There is a downside though, depending on how large the image is the scaling process can cause a lot of artefacts and is completely useless with text (like a slideshow for example). As if you’ve zoomed out in photoshop… the image is very pixelly. I recommed re-scaling all images to a max of 800×600 (which I will be doing with my slide show) to make the most of the progam.

Oh and its also in one handy little package that you upload to the plug-ins folder in WordPress

Here it is on the WordPress site if you want to test it out for yourself.

Its called ‘stylish’ and essentially overwrites the existing css of the page by using !important. So to remove ads its as easy as finding out the container’s name and setting it to display:none !important;. Easy right? Well actually it can be quite hard to find the names of what you want to change… thats why there is a dev community that has done it for you at http://userstyles.org/

All you do is install the ‘stylish’ add-on for firefox and then search the site for the pages that people have changed. So I searched for gmail and found hundreds of mods for it from simply removing ads to re-colouring the whole site. There are a few nice little applications that are web-wide (like the google ad blocking) and some that are only site wide (I have changed the colour of the Facebook header).

The great thing is, you can write your own or edit existing ones and preview all of them before saving them. Even then its a simple toggle-on, toggle-off system.

I recommend this for every web developer.

Seriously, is nobody listening? Although it wouldn’t be the first time the creator of something has watched it turn into something terrible. Anyone remember the Atom Bomb?

The article from the BBC cites a company called Phorm to monitors user information etc but their site itself clearly states “Phorm technology dispels the argument that in order to make online advertising relevant for consumers you must use and keep consumer surfing behaviour or their personally identifiable information“

They also state they are “setting a new, higher standard on privacy and anonymity“.

So I fail to see what the company will do, and if it does will it violate it’s own set of guidelines?

I STILL feel this is a breach of our rights to have unmonitored communications. This is exactly what my contextual studies essay was about.

This would make me FURIOUS if this actually comes to fruition!

Its called Dropbox and its a revolutionary system for syncing across multiple platforms and requires no sophisticated setup, in fact very little setup at all.

The way it works is by integrating itself into the system your using. So for example you have a folder called ‘Dropbox’ and everything within there can be synced across the web as long as you install Dropbox on the target computer and sign in. Rather than having to click ‘update’ or ‘sync’ or whatever and have to wait while all the files are uploaded or checked etc. Dropbox simply uploads the changes in the file only, therefore saving on bandwidth and increasing the speed of the service.

Obviously there are limitations with this and only certain applications will supported (I presume) but the implications are wide reaching. A long with this, you don’t have to click ‘update’ or ‘sync’ on the destination computer as it is reflected as soon as it detects changes to the online folder.

There are loads more features and I’ve already signed up for the public beta and I suggest you do the same. This could be THE way of sharing and syncing information.

Check out the video here.