Posts by Ken Rennoldson 25 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2007
That is a fair point and of course the likes of WhatsApp make the point they can't see what is in the traffic. But depending on how the legislation is worded/interpreted, it could be taken to mean all HTTPS traffic has to be provided with a back door for the Gov (& hence the whole damn world).
We know this legislation doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean the consequences can't be even worse than we fear.
From a development point of view cloud is much simpler. Need a new development sandbox - run the Terraform script (other infrastructure scripting languages are available). Need a message queue, or an RDBMS, or an in-memory database. A few clicks and they are there. OK making such things production ready is more work, but it really improves developer productivity.
If you have a stable environment without much in the way of development, then that's a different scenario. But from where I am, cloud is a big enabler because of the services on offer. It's not all about the tin.
The answer is figuring out at the start how you walk away from the contract. And some organisations will be better at that than others. Key is ensuring there is as little data held locally as possible - Dropbox, OneDrive etc will go along way here. So if replacing an individual laptop is as simple as sending out a new one, changing contracts becomes easier.
But then I'm writing from the UK - not NZ and I can appreciate the local market may not work like that.
There is a point about who the data goes to. As one respondent put it: Universities - good, Insurance Companies - DoublePlusUngood (I paraphrase a tad!).
So forced sharing with folk who are interested (and can only be interested) in it as bulk, anonymous data is I think justifiable. But it must be kept out of the hands of anyone with an interest in de-identifying it and would very happy for swingeing fines to fall on organisations that did that - or obtained the results. Such as insurance companies, employers etc. Not sure about which side of the fence I would put big pharma, perhaps I would be cautious and start them off on the wrong side.
I'm not saying there aren't flaws in this argument, but could there be a middle way through here?
I'm not a fan of the overly sweet stuff, but Youngs Double Chocolate Stout hits the spot. A vanila note to the stout without being sweet or overpowering. I've tried a few where the brewer has turned the dial to 11 and the result is only usable in cooking. Or for emptying a pub if that's all you're serving...
Ordinarily I would agree, but even if it was easy to move from, right here and now with Covid I would not take that chance. It's not about changing software. It's about the people who use it and changing the way they work. At some point that will be exactly the right thing to do, but if what is in place is working well right now and the NHS is short staffed - why make life harder than it needs to be?
I'm with you on this. The risk of people doing bad things is part of any decent organisations concerns and steps should be put in place to mitigate it. As always there's a trade off between oppression/bureaucracy/trust etc. But locking down USB ports and monitoring for excessive data transfers seems basic to me.
I bet they protect against staff pinching stock!
I wouldn't dream of giving a developer either of the two examples given to work from. I would expect the use case to evolve from type 1 to type 2 - but for the testers , not the developers. the developers would be working with sequence diagrams, class models and possibly state diagrams specifying with much greater precision the required functionality. The type 1 use case remains though, as a non-technical view of how the system works.
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