A Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure for my Personal Data

The UK has seen a couple of odd cases of "data loss" lately. Government organisations have on at least 4 occasions lost data about UK citizens: names, birth dates, addresses, bank account details and even some hospital records. Some data was lost by subcontractors and one of those subcontractors was even in the US!

Things like this have not happened in other countries, yet, or maybe they were not made public. But they make me wonder: can I trust my country or my government know what they do with the data they collect from me?

As Jan Schallaböck of the German ULD suggested in a talk at 23C3: DRM might be the solution.

If whenever I hand personal data over to anybody, I could at the same time specify who should be able to use that data, and for how long, I would not be affected by data losses at all.

Of course, it is not that simple.

For this to work, there has to be some standard for "DRM-protected personal data". The different government branches who need my data would have to use software that can handle this standard format-to-be. And I would need some software on my end that would enable me to apply DRM to my data before I send it off.

Maybe it's another "egg or hen" situation as no government will buy software as long as nobody sends them DRM-protected data. And as long as they cannot read it, I am forced to send my data in plain format.

I would love to have a tool that enables me to send my data off with DRM enabled. I guess I would need to parts: one tool that does the "signing" of my content, and a second one that acts as a server and "watches" how my data is used, or enables some people or organisms to actually use the data. The latter one would also render the data unreadable whenever I want.

Of all the software I won't write, this is by far the most important. If anyone knows of a project - preferrably open source - then let me know! I'd absolutely participate.

A "Social Search Engine"

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.

Foto Timer or Meditation Timer for Windows Mobile

I really should port Foto Timer or Meditation Timer to Windows Mobile (or Pocket PC, or whatever the name is, currently) for two reasons: first of all, Palm OS seems to be "on the way out". Secondly, lot's of smartphones use Windows Mobile.

I simply do not have the time to rewrite Foto Timer and Meditation Timer, currently. And I only have an old Compaq iPac to test it on, not the most sexy device ever...

On the other hand, of all the software I will never write, this is the most probably to materialize some day :-)

A Joomla to Drupal converter

I will absolutely never write a converter that takes content from a Joomla-driven site and tries to recreate the same site in Drupal.

First of all, the concepts of the two are far enough apart to make that very difficult to do automatically. A user would have to define quite a lot of things in the process, such as matches from categories to taxonomy, possibly for each node individually. That GUI would not be very easy to understand.

Also, there is no way I could ever build a tool that converts Joomla themes to Drupal themes. The process would therefore be semi-automatic, at best.

Joomla has modules and components, which extend the functionality. Drupal also has modules, but of course they are different. A converter would only make sense if it could handle at least the most common Joomla modules and components. A shop based on Virtuemart, for example, would have to be converted to a similar Drupal module. That's a bit like "yet another converter".

A Joomla to Drupal converter would be a good thing to have, and I could surely use one right now, but I think re-creating the site manually will be faster and lead to better results.

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.

An "Immersive Development" IDE

I will never write an "Immersive Development" IDE (see http://immersive-development.blogspot.com/) because I do not have the resources to do so.

Cool software I will never write

Hi All!

Welcome to cool software I will never write.

This blog contains a list of software (apps and tools) that I would like to use but will realistically never write. Don't ask me why I would need such a list, I just do.

Have fun,
Jan