Stochastic Geometry Random tangents

Last time I checked, on October 2 I get to vote for either “Yes” or “No”.

I’m pretty sure the options will not include “Cori”,  “Libertas”, “Ganley”, “Cowen”, “Kenny”, “McKenna” or anything on those lines.

So it’d be really nice if every flipping story written on the upcoming referendum would focus on the choices available, instead of trying to convince me one way or another on the character of the lobbyists. Because unless I get to vote on them, hearing about how they love their mothers or hate kittens is just a waste of space…

First up: get out your wallet, I want your money!

The Story is a new Irish political blog, one which has set itself up in the Woodward and Bernstein mold, and which has so far trumped the press here on pointing out the true depth of the financial mismanagement in FAS. While the newspapers and RTE concentrated on the €600,000 spent on an advert that was never aired and on the €600,000 or so that was simply unaccounted for, The Story dug into the records and pointed out that in fact tens of millions had been misspent due to mismanagement on a level corresponding to gross incompetence. They’ve also dug into the budgets of the Houses of the Oireachtas and found not only that the budget for the Oireachtas is monumentally huge (€654 million over 5 years) but that they’ve also been growing at an alarming rate (the per-annum cost rose by 125% in that 5-year period).

But the initial story which started the blog is a Freedom Of Information request.

For anyone in the US, a quick explanation – you, in the US, own every document your government produces and are entitled to a copy of it, barring national security classification and nominal reproduction fees. We in Ireland do not enjoy this entitlement. We can request any record produced by various branches of the government since 1998 under the Freedom of Information Act, colloquially known as an FoI request; but that Act excludes certain records and allows for the charging of fees to cover compilation and research costs.

Back to the story. The original FoI request was for all TDs and Senators expenses records since 1998.

I think half the Irish audience just started drooling at the prospect, no? Seeing what certain infamous TDs charged us for the free phones they bullied out of carphone warehouse and the like? Seeing how much we paid for John O’Donoghue’s wife’s hat at a horse race, or his limousine ride from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 in Heathrow Airport (for those not familiar with this, there’s a free shuttle bus provided by the airport, but our TD charged us €472 so he could take a private limousine instead). How about Bertie Ahern’s expenses? Brian Cowen’s? John Gormleys?

The hitch is, the inital estimate of the cost of the FoI request came in today and it’s €2,440.

So far, in the first two hours that that blog post has been up, readers of the blog have used its paypal donations button to donate the first €240 of that.

So, got your wallet out yet? We may get the government we vote for, and we may not get to vote that often, but we can at least know just how bad they are by paying for some transparancy here.

Go on. Go donate a few euro.

One of the blogs I most enjoy reading these days is McGarr Solicitors. They seldom fail to produce posts which are clever, in the best sense of that much-abused word. Whether it’s pointing out that NAMA is illegal under EU legislation or pointing out that what you read in a Dail transcript is not what was actually said in the Dail on the day, they always manage to quietly, without much fuss, drop a mental hand grenade on the conference table.

Today’s post is no exception. Cloud computing has become one of the central buzzwords in the IT industry, or at least the web-based portion of it. However, until now, I only know of one case (which I cannot disclose details of) where the ambigous physical location of the data storage device being used by the cloud was an issue; and I’ve not yet come across a case where the physical location of the processors in use was an issue.

The problem lies in the fact that despite the point that some EU member states have a fetish for CCTV cameras and observing every waking moment of their citizens, there remain EU laws on the security of personal data as held online. And if that data is sent to another jurisdiction, with different laws, it’s possible for that data to be comprimised legally in that jurisdiction but illegally in the jurisdiction of the company who transferred that data to the Cloud and thus into the hands of those who comprimised it. And while legal action against (for example) the US is unlikely, prosecuting the offending company in the EU is quite viable.

Given the presence in Ireland of the three main players in the Cloud game (Google, Amazon and Microsoft), this is an issue that we’re going to run headlong into in the years to come. As I see it, we have two solutions – change the code or change the law.

Frankly, I think we’ll all have moved to something better than the Cloud by the time we’d have the law changed 😀

So are we about to see features like “sticky bits” or analogues of them start appearing for the Cloud? And at that point, is it even the Cloud anymore?

And how much of an issue is this likely to be in practical, day-to-day terms? As McGarr puts it:

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s office is under-resourced, having only a handful of investigations officers for the entire country. It is hardly likely that he will prioritise clamping down on cloud computing providers who are creating high-value employment in Ireland. Nonetheless, for Irish entrepreneurs and IT professionals who are considering taking the cloud computing route , it is important that they do so with an awareness of the difficulties it could throw up later in a due diligence situation.

Buying or selling a company is like a house purchase. Before the buyer closes the deal, they’re going to want to be reassured that the last owner didn’t do anything that might see them inheriting a legal headache. It may only be when the first wave of early-adopter companies start to be acquired that we will get a clear picture of the full cost of moving to cloud computing.

As I said, McGarr blog posts rarely fail to make you think anew on their topic…