Bring your own device

Back in the early days of online computing, the means of your average office worker communicating with his organisation's central database was a "dumb terminal", a device with a keyboard and a smallish TV screen, displaying text in either black-and-white or more likely green-on-black. Security was no great difficulty. No external devices could be plugged in to the terminal and the central computer facility controlled access. The only weak point was the users' password, but these could be centrally allocated and thus not easily deduced by an outsider.

All that changed with the growth of the personal computer. It became cheaper and easier to provide each desk-jockey and even executives with a basic IBM-style desktop computer. However, this necessarily came with connections to the external world - first a cassette-recorder interface (dropped in the 1980s) and 5.25" exchangeable disk drives, followed by 3" and 3.5" disk drives and then the USB interface. Each development enabled successively smaller exchangeable media. Coupled with opening up the World Wide Web as well as organisations' internal network, a headache for data controllers was created.

It has been a short step to providing not just an organisation-owned physical machine on the desktop but also wireless access to corporate facilities via a user's own device - lap-top computer, tablet or smartphone. When the lines between private and corporate facilities become blurred, we reach the situation in which Mrs Clinton has found herself. I believe she is merely the most high-profile example of careless crossing of boundaries which occurs day-by-day in companies, councils and government.



It is clearly essential that organisations holding or with access to third-party data, as well as their own sensitive information, have strict policies on BYOD (or "bring your own technology" as it sometimes described) and it is good to see that government has issued guidelines.

How Vote Leave succeeded

Thanks to Terry Teachout for passing on this quotation:

“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”

Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

St Paul would be affronted

There is an admonition in all the Abrahamic religions for women to dress modestly. Some Spanish authorities have enforced public cover-ups well into this century, and the bathing-machine survived to the age of photography on Britain's beaches. So it is perverse as well as shameful for armed men to insist on women to remove burkinis and it is good to see the French supreme court restoring sanity and liberal values.

Being in the Goldilocks zone is not everything

Proxima Centauri is not as benevolent a star as our own sun, Nadia Drake points out.

Limited scope for Fairwood expansion

On the face of it, the idea of Travel House owner Martin Morgan to expand Swansea Airport to regional status is an attractive one. Swansea hosts an expanding university, top division rugby and football teams and a thriving cultural scene. The airport itself is in Gower, the UK's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and could be an entry point to other west Wales tourist attractions.

However, a glance at the map shows that there is no direct connection to the rail or motorway networks. This would reduce its commercial viability. As a contributor to this Evening Post article points out, expansion of facilities to regain regional status would take "a significant amount of investment" over several years. The main runway would need to be extended by over a third of a mile to be able to the sort of aircraft needed for a regional service. This would require planning consent and possibly a public inquiry. Infrastructure to handle the new level of passenger traffic would have to be created.

Chilcot and the Athens of the North

There is a thought-provoking comment by Maria Pretzler on the public reading of the whole of the Chilcot Report during the Edinburgh Festival. She finds more than one parallel with "the ancient Greek tradition to recite whole epics during festivals".

Ram-packed

In the midst of the war of words over Jeremy Corbyn's travelling sit-in, a writer queried the candidate's use of the term "ram-packed". My guess is that he did what so many of us do when speaking off the cuff: mixed up two phrases. In this case, it was "rammed" (becoming a common synonym for "crowded") and "jam-packed".

I have noticed another confusion of two sayings which has now established itself: "by far and away", combining the traditional "by far" and "far and away".

While I am in pedantic mode, Richard Branson should be described as co-owner of Virgin Trains, not the owner.

Port Talbot integrated transport hub

From a report in the Evening Post, it seems that the proposals launched last year are being taken a stage further. The details as approved by the planning committee last year are here. It is not clear from a swift perusal whether the council has taken into account the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and built accessibility into the design, something which is sadly lacking in the Victoria Gardens bus facility.

On the subject of Neath, when is there to be an integration of bus and train here?