Emergent Chaos and Light Blue Touchpaper beat me to it today, but this is good (and I have a better title). The House of Lords in the UK is saying that data breaches should be reported, a la SB1386. We desperately need something like this to bring badly secured sites under control.
However, although the Lords can pat themselves on the back for that one, the rest of our illustrious government cannot be so smug. An independent report has concluded that there is a general lack of security in Government, so much so that they are not yet ready for inter-departmental information sharing using the current infrastructure. Imagine that, a British insitution being described as inadequate... this is bad.
None of this surprises me one bit however, I've been talking about the data breach proposal for months, and am still expecting it to come in around November. As for information sharing in the government, hmm. They can't even keep their trousers on most of the time, I wouldn't trust them with a laptop.
No, what I've spotted as a worrying trend, and one I hope to high heaven will stop as quickly as it seems to have started is the likening of the internet to "The Wild West".
I wasn't there, but I've watched films and read books, so have a reasonable idea that the Wild West was a lawless barren wasteground filled with amoral thugs and outlaws. This is where the allusion to the internet comes from obviously. However, that's really where it should end. Nowhere in the Wild West did we see a long haired weirdo in sandals beat a spotty bespectacled geek at Halo, Billy the Kid did not hang out on Facebook, and Butch and Sundance could have hidden forever in today's wildest corners, Bolivian army or none.
I realise this comes from laziness, as most cliches do, but can we nip it in the bud, before it gets ugly?
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