Monthly Archives: December 2003

Nokia Sets An Example For RSS

Here’s a sign of what a company can do with RSS, winning fans, distributing information and building bridges. Technical consultant and blogger Russell Beattie points to a wonderful page by Nokia, containing all of Nokia’s documents, announcements and toolkits via a bunch of different RSS feeds. As Russell says, “There’s sooooo much to be gleaned… Read More »

Are Privacy Fears About RFID Tags Just Hype?

Reports that delegates to the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Geneva were unwittingly wearing RFID tags which could have tracked their movements, attendance at meetings or seminars, visits to the john etc etc has raised some debate about RFID (Radio Frequency ID), privacy, security and the rights of the individual to know… Read More »

Zone Labs Snapped Up – Firewalls R Us?

My favourite firewall, Zone Alarm, is being bought by another firewall maker, Check Point Software Technologies [CNet News.com]. It looks to me as if there’s quite significant consolidation within the security software industry, not just from the point of view of big guys buying the smaller guys, but of companies trying to create products that… Read More »

Getting Dumb With PowerPoint?

I’m a fan of Edward Tufte, the guru of charts, but I’m still not sure about his view of PowerPoint. The New York Times Magazine has another article on his recent polemic against Microsoft’s presentation software. Tufte claimed, as the NYT piece says, that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension, infusing… Read More »

RFID Secretly Tags The Internet Summit

The Washington Times has an interesting piece about the the Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week. Delegates, it says, were unknowingly bugged with RFID tags, according to researchers who attended the forum. RFID is Radio Frequency ID, which means the tags could have contained and given off all sorts of information, including the… Read More »