elnblog: Electronic Lab Notebooks

Electronic voting

The upcoming US elections are causing a lot of people to focus on the use of electronic voting systems and the inherent issues that result. At one level this doesn’t have a lot to do with using ELNs, but it is essentially the same problem - how do you use a computer system to record a real-world act, in a way that can’t be subsequently altered. As always it comes down to well designed systems (people + technology) run competently which is surprisingly hard.

Hopefully the ensuing conversation will raise the general level of awareness of the issues involved. Ideally we’ll be able to turn the content up and marketing-speak down….

Couple of representative links: Ars Technica’s guide on how to steal an election (scary reading), and Scott Adams’s tongue-in-cheek but thought provoking post on whether it really matters anyway (which I suspect will offend the easily offended).

I don’t think the Enterprise has really woken up to DRM yet

DRM is beginning to make an entrance into the Enterprise, and whilst at one level the technologies sound attractive I’m not sure the longer term, deeper consequences are all that palatable. I do wonder what the lawyers will think (because a Judge is unlikely to be impressed by arbitrary restrictions imposed by some DRM system) and of course from a long term records perspective DRM is completely toxic.

James Governor’s MonkChips: digital lard for the enterprise: DRM meets document formats: “What I am saying is that DRM creates new escrow challenges, and organisations should know exactly what they are using it for, and why, and what risks they are mitigating, before embarking on an enterprise DRM strategy.”

History of US Patents

For patent geeks, an interesting overview of how US Patent Law developed to the present day starting from the beginning:

In 1787, with the passage of the Constitution, Congress was empowered to “promote the process of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors, the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries.” (Article 1 § 8)