Keith @ Granite Shavings » labour

Election Button

keith — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:06:18 +0000

In the tradition of recent online campaigns, here’s a button for the Irish local/European elections this Friday.

Medium size (which seems to work best for Twitter profile images):

Small:

Feel free to use as you wish. This is a copy of something someone else did, remade with the higher res versions of the logo.

Update:

By popular demand, here’s a version that works as a Facebook logo too.

Labour Conference 2008 – Leader’s Speech

keith — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:31:05 +0000

The key element of any Labour Party National Conference is, of course, the Party Leader’s speech. This will be Eamon Gilmore’s first address to a Party Conference that’s being shown live on television, so he’ll be feeling the heat right now. Saw him half an hour ago on his way to dinner, though, and he was in flying form.

Eamon Gilmore TD

With the buzz mounting in the hall, and the temperature rising (literally) in the hall, delegates are cramming in for the last few seats already. Gilmore’s speech doesn’t start for another hour, but with seats at a premium, everyone’s trying to get themselves into the hall before it fills up. For what I think is the first time ever, we’ve had to supply a video relay room due to high demand for places. Those who can’t get in to the hall will be able to watch on a big screen downstairs. Already there are only a few seats left.

In the style of American conventions, signs have been handed out to delegates to hold up during the speech – mainly for TV viewing, of course. While they sometimes seem a bit silly on the ground in the conference hall, where you don’t get a proper view of them, they look brilliant on TV, and are a great way of getting a message out to viewers at home. TV news coverage is more or less obliged to show a crowd shot, so why not use it to convey a message.

I haven’t seen GIlmore’s speech yet, but those who have tell me it’s going to be great. I’ll be twittering and Jaikuing the highlights on Labour’s channels live, and you can also watch the whole thing on RTÉ1 from 20:30 or on our live stream from 19:30 (see below).

Labour Conference – From the Floor

keith — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:03:25 +0000

Blogging live from the floor at the Labour Party Conference. I’ll be keeping twitter and jaiku busy today, and you can watch what’s going on all day below.

Mandatory disclosure on the way?

keith — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:41:32 +0000

Following yesterday’s revelation by Ruairi Quinn TD that the Government has lost even more laptops this year, The Irish Times reports today that Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern is considering introducing a mandatory reporting system when data or data-storage devices go missing.

That’s welcome, and long overdue. Bruce Schneier wrote about it back in 2006. California has for some time had a mandatory disclosure law, and it’s forced companies to take notice of the cost of losing data – especially in terms of their reputation:

Disclosure laws force companies to make these security breaches public. This is a good idea for three reasons. One, it is good security practice to notify potential identity theft victims that their personal information has been lost or stolen. Two, statistics on actual data thefts are valuable for research purposes. And three, the potential cost of the notification and the associated bad publicity naturally leads companies to spend more money on protecting personal information — or to refrain from collecting it in the first place.

Think of it as public shaming. Companies will spend money to avoid the PR costs of this shaming, and security will improve. In economic terms, the law reduces the externalities and forces companies to deal with the true costs of these data breaches.

So, let’s hope Dermot Ahern is serious about this. We’ve got far stronger data protection laws than the US in most areas – they need to be extended to mandatory disclosure. This is exactly what I was trying to get done when I first wrote those Parliamentary Questions in January, so it’s good to see it come to some level of fruition.

Update:

Digital Rights Ireland have more on this.

More missing Government laptops

keith — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:08:54 +0000

Parliamentary Questions from Ruairi Quinn TD have shown that there’s been a significant increase this year in the number of laptops and other data devices stolen or missing from Government hands. Back in January, he put down a series of Dáil questions (PQs) which showed that more than 100 devices had gone missing between 2002 and 2007.

Today, a new series of PQs shows that they’re heading for 45 devices lost this year alone. That’s almost one a week. That’s bad.

What’s worse, though, is that, despite the repeated losses of personal information all year, neither the Department of Communications, Energy & Natural Resources nor the Department of Education & Science have introduced any whole disk encryption solutions.

Ruairi Quinn:

Ruairi Quinn TD (with Pat Rabbitte TD)

It beggars belief that the Department of Communications, tasked with developing our country’s IT infrastructure, has absolutely no policy on securing IT devices.

I wouldn’t even allow my personal laptop go out and about without Truecrypt encryption. Why are two Government departments so closely associated with technology allowing my data to be left on buses and stolen from cars without any protection? Especially when there’s little or no cost (Truecrypt is free).

What are Ministers Eamon Ryan and Batt O’Keeffe up to that they’ve missed the news all year?

By the way, if you think you can spot my fingerprints all over this, yes I did write the original PQs and this week’s followup PQs. I wrote the Januar press release, but not this month’s one.

Update:

Mulley has a list of the actual responses.