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Introduction I drove from Edinburgh to Glasgow last and had a merry chat with my car companion. A s I was driving I asked them to "Play Banana Republic by the Boomtown Rats on Spotify", and then asked, "Tell me the latest tech news". But I was alone in the car, and every command began with "Okay Google". I must admit when a great piece of useful technology comes along, I love it. There is no button to press, and there is no looking at the screen, and it works beautifully. All I have to do is match my sentences to the ones that my Google Assistant understands. For just now we are in a learning phase, and she is learning from me, and I'm learning from her. The world, as far as I can see it, is moving towards one which has Alexa, Siri and Now Google embedded into it. I believe this will become one of the greatest steps forward in the true integration of technology and humans. But, on the other side, we now have a little spy in our pocket, and s...

Introduction So did George Orwell actually predict the future of the Cyber Age with his 1984 book? In his book, George projected a state which observed its citizens, and where there was no hiding place. He could see a time of TVs on the wall which could talk to you, and for the citizens to be watched for everything that they did. Perhaps he could see a world where our Cloud Service providers ... Google .. Facebook ... and so on ... continually monitoring our activities? Obviously, in 1948, when he published it, the use of technology was not quite developed as it is now, but  perhaps we need to examine our current move towards the observation of crime through technologies such as face recognition. On the back of Internet records in the UK being monitored without a warrant, we now see that citizens may not be free from observation when they attend even something like a football match. Monitoring faces A number of police forces in the UK have been trying face recognitio...

Introduction As GDPR heads towards an increasing application of encryption, the US may move towards legislating for a backdoor on crypto - named "responsible encryption". The justification revolves around cases such as for Syed Rizwan Farook who open killed 14 people in San Bernardino. Within the investigation, the FBI put considerable pressure on Apple to open the phone, but they refused. After this, the US government pushed through a court order to force Apple to produce a new operating system which could be unlocked, and again Apple refused and said that it was "a threat to individual liberty". Many now see strong encryption as the key weapon in a battle between perfect encryption and a Big Brother society, and where civil liberties are the ultimate target. And so to soften the tone of the debate, the term exceptional access was coined. Clear While President Obama dismissed the application of backdoors into crypto, it is now being pushed forward within the ...

  Introduction The Twitter data breach showcases the possible up-and-coming storm from the media on data breaches, especially that it still struggles to understand some of the technical elements involved in a breach. With the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story making the news headlines, the media now know that they have a technically-related topic that the general public are interested in. And so Twitter is the most recent major Cloud Service Provider who has hit the headlines: So many in the media this was pushed as a major story, but it was just a typical story of someone making a mistake and which was quickly righted. The chances of any related data breach is minimal as it was only an internal processing mistake. For most companies the error would go unreported external, but in the days of the media chasing for cover-ups and evidence of bad practice, Twitter did the right thing and reported it. The media, of course, go for shock headlines, and which can panic users (and...