Yorick Wilks

Recent proposals to consider Google or Microsoft as possible holders of citizens’ health records produced a predictable range of comments in the Times blog: from “yes, yes, anything to get away from another centralized state database” to “Ah ha, there are the Tories handing over public money to a company they are connected to, and [...]

The Guardian last leader yesterday told of a woman—-who started as Eileen de Bont (!)—-and who changed her name to Pudsey Bear to raise money for charity. Later the Identity and Passport Agency (did you know it had changed its name—and significantly!?) would not give her a passport on the ground the new name was [...]

From Slashdot today: +——————————————————————–+ | Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats                        | |   from the defending-against-gnats dept.                           | |   posted by kdawson on Friday April 24, @09:33 (Security)          | |   http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216           | +——————————————————————–+ An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the [0]loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that [...]

Those working in the theory and practice of artificial companions (www.companions-project.org) at the OII and elsewhere are, naturally enough, always on the lookout for new social implications of our future friends, the Companions. One future function might be as a backstop guarantor of identity, for the Companion’s user, when all biometrics have failed. It is [...]

We all assume, and have experiences to show, that internet purchasing is transparent and efficient and works to the benefit of everyone, except perhaps small bookshops and their equivalents everywhere: I will never now give up the speed and efficiency of Amazon.com for a bookshop. But a couple of very recent experiences have caused me [...]

Our second puzzle reflects the changing conception of computation which has been developing within Computer Science over the past three decades. The traditional conception of computation is that we compute an output as a function of an input, by an algorithmic process. This is the basic setting for the entire field of algorithms and complexity, [...]

“The Internet changes everything” says William Dutton, OII Director, but surely not death, which, with taxes, tends to be permanent and unchanging? A moment’s reflection shows that is not so, and civilizations differ in nothing more than how they treat death and its subsequent state, if any. Even within a single society, our treatment of [...]

Did you all catch the Times “Thunderer” editorial last week where they told Tim Berners-Lee firmly that they didnt agree with his view of the future of the web and that HE DIDNT OWN IT! This is, of course, a point he ought to accept himself, given his views of the Internet–lets see if he [...]