The Healthcare Informatics Society of Ireland (HISI) spoke out today, in advance of their 13th Annual Conference, about the need to increase the confidence of political and management decision makers in using and investing in information and communication technology (ICT). HISI also identified the need to raise public awareness of how critical a role ICT plays in the current delivery of services. In today’s economic climate HISI stresses that technology is crucial to the drive for efficiencies and effectiveness within the sector because it underpins and supports the development of services. read full story / add a comment

An angry Chinese lawyer accused Microsoft of perpetrating the biggest ever hacker attack in response to the software giant's controversial move to trigger hourly screen blackouts on computers using pirated copies of Windows XP.
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From the site: "Superstruct is the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you'll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It's about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential." read full story / add a comment

Sometimes coincidences happen in a timely way, while at other times they appear to happen but are actually coordinated events.

On Monday, the Tánaiste Mary Coughlan announced that Facebook, the popular social networking site, was setting up its head office for Europe in Dublin. Since Facebook doesn't actually make anything, it will have a negligible effect on the economy, but it sends the right sort of signal. At the same time (around midday on Monday) the profile page for the Shell to Sea campaign was removed from Facebook.

Some Shell to Sea groups remain, but as anyone who uses Facebook will tell you, having a profile page is where the action is. Shell to Sea had a popular one, with lots of "friends" and activity on the page. It was very useful in spreading information about the campaign, especially outside Ireland.

So Mary Coughlan goes on the radio to talk about Facebook and how its arrival in Ireland sends a strong signal. At the same moment, the Shell to Sea page is removed. Coincidence? read full story / add a comment

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit company http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/sfi coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the http://ubuntu-ie.org/ to impact their own communities. read full story / add a comment

The hacking of the "blood & honour" site and server was reported on the 30th of August, but now a breakdown of visits, posts, IP's, search terms and real world user location is available.

Though this is a crosspost the long list of numbers & search terms might not at first highlight the Irish dimension. Celtic only occurs a dozen times, Dublin likewise and not one mention of Ulster. read full story / add a comment

Google have today released their own internet browser, named Chrome. Potential users who may not bother to read the terms of use before using it may be surprised to find that ANYTHING you post on the internet using Chrome will be owned by Google. read full story / add a comment

Can corporations censor the Internet? read full story / add a comment

Prof Paddy Cunningham exposed as biotech industry lobbyist read full story / add a comment

'Skype or even Firefox might be declared illegal in Europe if they are not certified by an administrative authority', Foundation for a Free Internet Infrastructure (FFII) read full story / add a comment

March 26th sees the first "world document freedom day" celebrated in many states including Ireland to promote & raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards.

Irish support comes from the Dundalk Institute of Technology. DkIT is a proposed site of OOoCon2008 as well. So, if you're into the idea of an open standard which allows you produce, open and alter documents using open source software across platforms then you should go to Dundalk & get a t-shirt. Apparantly they've been sent loads. They may even have umbrellas too. If you're against this, you can always boycott Dundalk and campaign against it hosting the OocCon2008 event. Either way you ought learn a bit more about the campaign. read full story / add a comment

Politics.ie, the popular internet discussion chat board, has been taken offline in what is said to be a serious hacking incident. Users of the site complained that personal information and private messages had been hacked into earlier this week, and some also complained that their avatars (the colourful flag or party emblem they use to indentify each other) had been changed without their permission.

Yesterday at lunchtime the site stopped loading onto users' computers, with all requests timing out. People have speculated that productivity in certain government departments has since shot up. read full story / add a comment

'The problem for the senior vice-president of technology at Phorm, an Aim-listed company which recently tied up a deal with the UK's three biggest internet service providers - BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, who between them have more than 10 million customers - is that it's not the privacy groups who he really needs to convince. It's the millions of people whose services will be affected by Phorm's scheme, because some are up in arms over what they see as an invasion of their privacy through Phorm's intention to categorise all of their web-surfing habits in order to target online ads at them.' read full story / add a comment

Anarchism has traditionally been hostile to all religions because by their very nature they tend to be authoritarian. A supernatural creator who sets the rules is naturally considered to be the ultimate source of authority. And its authority means humanity’s obedience. If there is a god, it would, in the words of Bakunin, be necessary to abolish him. But a creator doesn’t exist, so we are left with the more mundane task of spreading the good news that values aren’t handed down from on high, but emerge from human society.
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President Bush has signed an executive order which will allow the US military to shoot down one that country's satelites before its diminishing orbit means the loss of the Hydragin gas it holds.

They say they're doing this to safeguard lives. Hydragin as we all might guess is a very dangerous substance. They're not saying they're doing this to have a bit of practise at a remarkably difficult exercise they have not officially admitted to having done before. For many good reasons such as incapability, implausibility and the usual reliable Star Wars diplomacy crap.
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School children are participating in Week of Wonder throughout Limerick during half term break to discover the 'benefits' of engineering. This sign with a few added photos was found at Limerick School of Art and Design. read full story / add a comment

The NYPD whom you quite probably have seen on television have lobbied successfully to propose a municipal law "to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to permits for biological, chemical and radiological detectors." The Council Members proposing it are Vallone Jr., Addabbo Jr., Comrie, Fidler, Gentile, Nelson, Recchia Jr., Stewart and White Jr. (by request of the Mayor). You might have seen him on telly too, in fact you might have seen his telly station, his name is Bloomberg.

Their argument is that allowing the general public to use geiger counters & other bio- chem- or general WMD detectors may, will, does or perhaps did cause PANIC. They don't like panic. They like orderly queues & heroic administrations who chose to HQ their emergency services on a 23rd floor of a building leased by a party donor slap bang next to the World Trade Centre despite that bit of Manhatten being considered a "target" & the idiocy of clambering up 23 floors of stairs in a power outage.

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This scandal came to a head after one of the paper's co-authors, Shane Morris (an Irish biotech scientist with a degree from NUI Maynooth who is advising Fine Gael on GM food and farming issues), threatened legal action against the GM-free Ireland Network and GM Watch after we exposed him as a Canadian Government agent and reported that his paper has been described as "misleading" and a "flagrant fraud". For details see http://www.gmfreeireland.org/morris read full story / add a comment

As part of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's annual programme of public meetings on health issues - Promoting a Healthy Nation - the Faculty of Pathology is organising a meeting on cancer biobanking.
Date: Monday 3rd December 2007
Time: 6:00 pm
Venue: RCPI, No. 6 Kildare Street, Dublin 2 read full story / add a comment

Yesterday night the switch was flicked on one of the largest satellite arrays on the planet. Named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen the system brings together his dilletentism or whims as a mega-geek & the anglo-saxon culture industrially vital world of SETI and the very murky US involvement in deep Space radio telescope exploration in one project with one stated aim :-

The search for intelligent Alien life.

I'm going to treat today's "system booting" as a piece of tech-news & come at it from the ever reliable anti-trust angle. Thus I hope to raise awareness of the capitalist & philosophical elements of the project rather than spurn the "tinfoil hat" brigade onto anything sillier than they've achieved mostly not by being too suspicious or paranoid but rather by not putting their theories in social or historical context. To that end I'll mix news with a bit of analysis & bit of opinion. read full story / add a comment