[Gllug] What the government is doing it IT .

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 06:28:06PM +0100, Peter Adamson wrote:
> 1) The manner in which files are saved in a file should be openly 
> documented, allowing anyone to undersand the way in which information 
> has been saved.

If you could word this a little bit better (pun not intended) then
this sounds like a good idea. Enforcing it as a law however ... there
are all sorts of radical implications. eg. If I'm in the middle of a
game, and I save the game, then the state of the game should be in an
easily modifiable format? So I can just change <player level="1"/> ?

I kind of agree with it, but kind of also think it's a matter of
consumer education and free market competition. If consumers were
better educated, AND there wasn't a certain large monopoly, then we'd
have interoperable file formats. The implications of this are great: a
huge secondary market for small and large companies in applications
which modify, transform, verify, share, etc. company documents. Kind
of what Merjis is trying to do (and can't do because we're faced with
numerous binary formats). This secondary market could create large
numbers of jobs ...

> 2) Government officials in charge of purchasing software should sumbit 
> an email at least once a year stating how much software / OSs they have 
> purchased. What the cost was,
[..]

What's your Lib Dem MP/MEP's motivation? What is going to get them
press attention?

Certainly not forcing officials to go through extra red tape every
year.

How about this: by not shipping billions of UKP to the US software
industry every year, we could create local jobs and improve the
balance of payments! (Particularly creating the local jobs bit).
Force government departments to buy British --- and that means British
software companies, but _mainly_ it means open source software.  By
installing open source software, you're generating a whole secondary
industry in support and maintenance, and guess what, that industry is
made up of Britons. Who need jobs.

> 3)All ISPs should have an LDAP server rigged up so that when a customer 
> logs on, their IP address is associated with a unique subscriber number.
> The LDAP server should only accept connections from trusted parties (ie 
> the police).
> When a police "bot" which acts on a node on a Peer-to-Peer network such 
> as gnutella detects certain words like "pre-teen", the police bot can 
> use protocol "x" to look up
> the ISPs LDAP server, perform an enquiry matching the users IP address 
> to their unique subscriber number. The bot then can make a note of the 
> subsciber number & ISP.
> After say 10 hits, the bot could then email the police, who could then 
> use the unique sub number & ISP info to find out which computer had been 
> searching for child porn.

I leave this to the rest of the group to discuss.

Useful for me though. Next time I really need to get rid of a noisy
neighbour, annoying spammer, nosy inlaws, etc. I'll just write a small
virus which invades their Windoze computer and starts making
"pre-teen" requests to Gnutella. I won't be seeing them for 15 years
or so.

Only joking.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - all your business data are belong to you.
 All new technology is irrelevant until it is taken up by the public.

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