A long time ago, testing software was part of my job. To help with that I had an initial checklist of questions to pose to any new program: situations where I should check that it behaved as expected. Once it passed those basic checks I could get on to the more detailed testing specific to that particular program.

With the Government apparently about to "fast-track" another piece of internet law, it seemed worth trying to draw up a similar checklist for legislation. Here’s a second draft:

One aspect of the Google Spain judgment I’ve not seen discussed is the incentives it creates for search engines.

I was invited to give a presentation on legal and ethical issues around information sharing at TERENA’s recent security services workshop. The talk highlighted the paradox that sharing information is essential to protect the privacy of our users when their accounts or computers have been compromised, but that sharing can also harm privacy if it’s not done correctly.

A recent discussion got me thinking about what might be the right number of passwords. There are plenty of references that still say you should have a different password for every service, and breaches such as Adobe’s last year show why. If you use the same password on two different websites and one of those gets compromised, either by phishing or loss and cracking of a password file, then both accounts are put at risk.

The recent invention of the phrase "Bring Your Own Device" seems to have got educational organisations agonising about something we’ve been doing routinely, indeed relying on, for at least 15 years. Whenever you send a member of staff home with some work to do but no laptop to do it on, or provide a webmail service for students, or invite a visiting academic connect their device to your network, you’re inviting BYOD.