As an academic who works on information and media I sometimes have to discuss texts containing words which Microsoft will doubtless ban. Shakespeare, for example is full of such words. I could quote them but don't want my account suspended by El Reg. I think a better headline would have been 'Microsoft bans Shakespeare'. Reminds me of Lord Macaulay in 1830 'We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality'. Just substitute American for British and his lordship had it in a nutshell.
Posts by David Thomas
5 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2013
What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs
Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network
Stop blaming the users
The real issue is that the IT industry should devise some other means of security than forcing us to invent and remember increasingly ridiculous passwords which we have to change, apparently at the whim of power-crazed sysadmins. So why not devise an approach based on biometrics or dna or quantum mechanics. The present system is yet another example of the IT industry's distressing tendency to blame the users for its own failings.
How the UK's national memory lives in a ROBOT in Kew
Thanks for the article and comments. Just a couple of responses to comments. TNA has offsite back up somewhere in England. I'm not sure printing to paper is helpful - TNA has almost as many pages of digital data as it does physical so a huge storage problem. Also many IT formats such as websites are hard to print in a meaningful way. As for metal storage, TNA has some 1940s audio recordings on metal tape. Can we read them? No we can't.
And pubs - try the Express just across Kew Bridge.
David Thomas