Wednesday, 16 March 2016

NextGen@ICANN Application Round Open for ICANN56 - please apply if interested

The next ICANN meeting will be held in Helsinki, 27-30 June.  Which means students are eligible for the program:  open to people living or studying in the region (Europe) where the meeting will take place, and between 18-30.  

The application round for ICANN56 Helsinki is open until 18 April.  Successful candidates to be posted on the ICANN website on 2 May. All information about the program's criteria and application links for NextGen https://www.icann.org/development-and-public-responsibility/nextgen


Any questions, comments, inquiries from yourself or community can be sent to nextgen@icann.org

Monday, 14 March 2016

Final European Union General Data Protection Regulation

The Final European Union General Data Protection Regulation | Bloomberg BNA: "The text of the GDPR may still undergo some last changes as it is now being finalized by the EU's legal services. The importance of these changes is not to be underestimated, as any change to the wording of such a complex instrument as the GDPR can be significant (note that the numbering of the provisions will also change). However, the version of the GDPR agreed on Dec. 15, 2015, can be regarded as very close to the final text, and it is this version that we will analyze in this article." 'via Blog this'

Friday, 4 March 2016

Building blocks: developing systems using distributed ledger technology

Building blocks: developing systems using distributed ledger technology:

"As the Bank of England mentioned in its Quarterly Report in September 2014 (see our previous article on virtual currencies), there seems to be significant 'next mover' advantage with block chain as it moves beyond the world of virtual currencies.

As it asks fundamental questions about the shape of settlement operations, the Bank of England is planning to make use of and gain from its next mover position, as seen in the "New Heart for a Changing Payments System" speech by Minouche Shafik. Quite an endorsement, so we anticipate other regulators, such as the UK's Payments Systems Regulator, will spark debate about the use of block chain technology in their field.

Block chain's method for recording data to form a digital ledger (of transactions, agreements, contracts or anything that needs to be independently recorded and verified as having happened) has a number of useful features:
it is very transparent – as it is in the 'cloud', everyone in the network can have access to an up to date version of the ledger;
it is hard to doctor the information – making it less susceptible to fraud;
the ledger does not need to reveal underlying transaction data – so it is appealing from a data and information security perspective.

When jumping on this trend, as developer, to insource or to form a consortium, there will be slightly dull but important housekeeping issues to take care of – and they are easier dealt with up front than when haunting you at a later date. We'll discuss a just few of these." 'via Blog this'

Tuesday, 1 March 2016

Apple’s “Code = Speech” Mistake

Apple’s “Code = Speech” Mistake: "Some lower courts have even suggested that Code = Speech.

More successfully, critics of campaign finance regulations have argued that “money is speech,” a strategy that resulted in the much-criticized Citizens United ruling in 2010. The Supreme Court’s equation of money with speech has made regulation of money-driven political corruption very difficult.

If courts were to accept the simple proposition that “Code = Speech,” regulation of our digital society would become very difficult as well, because so much of our society depends on computer code to function." 'via Blog this'