I attended an extremely useful and well presented talk by Brendon Lynch who is the Senior Director of Privacy Strategy at Microsoft (sorry, couldn’t find a link to Brendon) on Tuesday at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner here in the Wellington.
The issues Brendon raised are nothing new for those of us that have been working long in the “cloud” and particularly the questions that Microsoft are now starting to hear are those that Google and other early players in this way of computing.
One point I believe he made extremely well was that the “cloud” is internationally delivered whilst “privacy” is local regulated.
This isn’t an easy situation to resolve but one that requires clever brains to sit down and sort out.
He also had a delightful way of explaining what the “cloud” is to those that are new to the term. The cloud is all fluffy and a way of drawing up the “internet”. But really, when you ask about how it’s made in the real world it turns out to be rectangle made up of racks, containers and buildings.
Finally, I loved the new word “markitecture” which describes the use of “technical architecture diagrams” within marketing presentations and are so abstract as to be useless to everyone 
Clicking on an email address on a website that is linked using ‘mailto:’ can often try to kick off any email package you have installed on your PC – annoying if you only use the Gmail web interface.
