Hon. James Hacker on IT Standards and EU

Mujahedin-e Khalq

CQ Spy Talk

The controversial Iranian exile organization MEK, which the United States calls a terrorist group, could soon see a windfall of tens of millions of dollars as the result of the European Union's decision Monday to take it off its list of terrorist organizations.

What was the basis of that decision?

If you want to know why a PR blogger is writing about this; it is because Presto Vivace is a WASHINGTON, DC, based PR blogger with a national security practice area.

The coming fight over privacy

EU Group Head Says IP is Personal

In a ruling that could have long term repercussions -- especially on the way in which search engines record and store data -- the Head of the European Union's Group of Data Privacy Regulators said IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that identify computers on the Internet should generally be regarded as personal information.

Peter Scharr, who is also the Data Protection Commissioner for Germany, was speaking at a hearing of the European Parliament on the subject of 'online data protection'. He expressly said that when someone is identified by an IP or Internet Protocol address, "then it has to be regarded as personal data".

Privacy is the next killer ap. The market isn't ready yet, but it will be.

Privacy/data protection regulators around the world

Compliance opera

Microsoft Sued Over (Lack of) Standards Compliance

Opera is asking the European Commission for two remedial actions. First, it asks the EC to require Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows, and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop. Secondly, it asks the Commission to make Microsoft agree to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.

Regrettably, Opera isn't specifying which "open Web standards" are not being followed, but one can reasonably suppose that a major point of contention is XHTML 1.1, which IE7 still doesn't support properly.

Opera tells EU that Microsoft's IE hurts the Web

In a complaint, Opera claimed Microsoft continues to abuse its dominant position on the desktop by tying its Internet Explorer (IE) browser to Windows, and hinders interoperability by not following accepted Web standards. It asked the EU's Competition Commission to force Microsoft into separating IE from Windows, and to demand that IE support several standards.

In a statement, the commission said Opera should "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers preinstalled on the desktop.

"Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities," Opera said. "Microsoft's unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain and technologically inferior, and that can even expose users to security risks."

Standards selection can equal vendor selection, that is what this fight is about and why the public should be given sufficient facts to understand the debate.

Microsoft criticized for Open XML petition

An online petition posted by Microsoft to fast-track the standardization of its Office Open XML document format masks the company's concern over the procedure, according to a leading open-source advocate.

The petition, which was uploaded to Microsoft's U.K. site on March 29, asks businesses to show their support for the Open XML format being fast-tracked through the standardization process at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The format is integral to Office 2007, but Microsoft is pushing it as an international open standard for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

"We already have an international standard, the OpenDocument format, and governments are increasingly adopting it," said Taylor on Thursday. "Having a second standard is utterly unnecessary."

Shorter Microsoft - we support open standards; it just has to be our standard. I don't see how they are going to make this stick.

This is another illustration of the importance of standards negotiations.