Stochastic Geometry

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 … Read the rest

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 … Read the rest