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The second theme of the conference was rather less satisfactory perhaps because it was dealing with vaguer concepts (or because it was straight after lunch!). Charles Leadbetter introduced "What happened to Digitopia". The core here was comparing the 70s and 80s view of automation leading to a greater quality of life with current reality.
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Simon Davies led this off with an overview of the effects on Privacy and Civil Rights post Sept 11. These events sent a chill through civil rights activists. It's much harder to argue against Government proposals when you are seen as arguing against patriotism. But at the same time we seem to have a unanimous government view that some civil rights need suspending. They are draging out and dusting off every proposal from the last 10 years and trying to rush it through again. But these were all fought off, debated and found wanting in normal times, so why should they now be seen to be essential. Some have been passed with almost no debate such as the use of Carnivore in the USA to monitor emails. We already have the Human Rights act, Data protection act, police powers act, immigration controls and the prevention of terrorism act. And yet the UK has no computerised records of who has entered the country and no records of who has left.
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At the bottom end there are two pressures driving down prices to zero. First whole software markets are being taken over by the majors (MS in particular) giving away or bundling software in that field as a loss leader. Browser, Email reader, Media player, text editor, html editor, image editor etc etc. Second, what is left is being given away by amateurs and open source efforts. Slightly higher up the scale, the market for shareware has disappeared as while the Internet has made distribution easy, it has also made distribution of copies easy.
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CGI-RPC is a proposed standard for calling a remote procedure. It uses the CGI spec for all calls. Consequently the spec is almost completely concerned with the format of the returned data, not with the calling convention. This addresses the one limitation of CGI that it does not structure the returned data in a form that is guranteed to be machine readable.
The intention is that the standard should be inherently resilient and make few, if any, assumptions about the language or the environment of the client and server.
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