Software, People, and Process
I hope you can see from my explanations above that the activity we have witnessed regarding National Party websites and bank account “hacking” are worlds apart. The former in no way proves the latter, as you stated.
Conflating the two does nothing to advance discussion around how we can embrace or enable legitimate online protest while also dealing with illegal activity in an increasingly connected world.
The key issue with Novopay, and the school payroll system, and many other huge black-box IT projects (yeah, I’m looking at you, $1.5bn IRD replacement system), is the approach of replacing the system as a whole. Forget about the elephant, let’s look for a system of interconnected components that – as a whole – gets us to where we need to be.
I’m not sure when it was decided that electronic product launches had to be a) gaudy affairs in major event theatres and b) completely devoid of availability information; but nonetheless this is the currently accepted formula. Samsung’s announcement of the GALAXY S4 yesterday was nothing more than appropriately bizarre.
It’s just some guys testing the range of their FPV hobby plane out to 7.4 km. It only looks sinister because we’ve been trained that the grainy view with an information overlay means we’re about to see an explosion and bodies flying.
We should be celebrating the arrests in the MegaUpload case. They show that large-scale copyright infringement can be investigated and acted upon under existing laws and treaties. They show that even without SOPA and such draconian laws, copyright holders can seek remedy. Note: I say we should celebrate the arrests. I question the seizing of […]
