Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Telegraph’s revelation that Public Health England had been offering data to a firm which was known to work with big tobacco is, rightly, scandalous. At the very least, it shows a level of incompetence in verifying who around 100,000 cases of lung cancer were handed to. At the worst, it suggests a recognition by special interest groups and lobbies […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesFor the first time in a while, there was a feel-good atmosphere in Hollywood on Sunday evening as Oprah Winfrey delivered a Golden Globes speech that many described as “presidential”. She sounded all the right notes about sexual harassment and rape, managing to present women–especially, black women–as righteous victims and brave fighters simultaneously. She pointed the finger of blame squarely at “brutally powerful men” […]
Reading Time: 7 minutesPeople’s lives are so saturated with it that they sometimes speak of “withdrawal symptoms” on those increasingly rare occasions when they find themselves without internet access. The question then is whether religion dies out and mankind continues without it, or whether one or many new religions are born into the vacuum that will be left {…]
Reading Time: 2 minutesOur Insight piece last month picked up that guides remained the top trending terms with regards to GDPR – so for this blog , we’ve come up with some of the best writing on GDPR – for companies and for customers – showing how businesses can stay within the lines […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes2017 has been a tumultuous year the world over – not least in technology. Between massive hacks of public and private organisations, the death of net neutrality in America, and the massive (and temporary) upsurge in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, 2018 might have a tall bill to live up to. Here are the top five predictions for big tech trends over the coming twelve months [..]
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen it comes to bashing countries for poor internet freedom practices, China usually appears near the top of the list – and with good reason. Perhaps in part that’s because, in contrast with more crude filtering systems adopted in many authoritarian states, the Great Firewall is an almost elegant panopticon […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesOur overall findings are that the discussion about GDPR is driven by fear of failing to become compliant, across all kinds of users. Just a glance at our groupings of top trending terms can give a flavour of keywords, which focus on guides and webinars which provide clear guidance on compliance. Discussions about more the more positive side of GDPR […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesIt always seemed odd that we didn’t do IT at my secondary school after year 7 (the first year). We had a rudimentary play around with PhotoShop, made mindmaps and mock web pages – and then it abruptly ceased. The assumption was that we’d pick up the computer skills which we needed along the way […]
Reading Time: 9 minutesSouth Africa might be seen as a microcosm of the “globalised” world itself. Home to people of African, European, Indian, Asian, and mixed descent, it nevertheless attempts to find some unity of purpose in its diversity. To this end, in 1994 with the end of white minority rule, it styled itself as the “Rainbow Nation”: the idea that the country’s many racial and ethnic parts can make up a beautiful whole. But rainbows are also elusive, as anyone who has ever tried […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesLast week, I decided, on a whim, to listen to the Alex Jones Show (There’s a war on for your mind!). Texan’s favourite son (who, on the scale of desirable export, comes somewhere between Halliburton and Texas Chainsaw Massacres) wasn’t on […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe rule in journalism is that any question you can ask in a headline can invariably answered “No”. Sadly for cryto enthusiasts, that holds true in this case as well. In all fairness, the bubble has not burst yet, in spite of experts and media pundits all clamouring that it’s about to. The breathlessness with which mainstream outlets. which formally left electronic money to nice sites with coin in their name […]
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe tweet was meant in good humour undoubtedly: a little post by Netflix, claiming 53 people watched A Christmas Prince 18 days in a row. A light hearted jibe, in the vein of banter so heavily mined by Nando’s. That figure, as some commentators suggested, may well even have been drawn from thin air […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesThe internet has always been defined by struggles between the titans. Just think of the Browser Wars – first fought between Internet Explorer and Netscape, and later Firefox, Chrome, and Explorer. They were sources of great innovation, certainly – looking back at a browser from even the mid 2000s is like dealing with alien technology […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesIt’s nearly two years since the protests against a then hypothetical Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL for short) began. They made good sense: oil pipelines have a somewhat dubious safety record, and DAPL seemed to go out of its way to heighten an already grim situation for North Dakota. According to The New York Times, the state has seen in the region of 18 million gallons of oils […]
Reading Time: 3 minutesWhilst it’s Europe and America that we tend to think about when it comes to far-right extremists, Britain First has long been the UK’s fastest growing political party, on Facebook. This was not originally a cause for alarm: a large part of that early success was down to an almost genius campaign of using highly emotive, apolitical images (often to do with animal cruelty) to get users to sign up, artificially inflating their numbers […]