Bruce Schneier started the Individual I campaign last year with an interesting idea. All you have to do is adopt the logo to show that you are in favor of:

• Freedom from surveillance
• Personal privacy
• Anonymity
• Equal protection
• Due process
• Freedom to read, write, think, speak, associate, and travel
• The right to make your own choices about sex, reproduction, marriage, and death
• The right to dissent

All noble causes, but I’m not so sure of the logo concept. The current logo looks like something you might find at a construction site. Contractors always seem to have some giant letter and a globe or world image. Or maybe it just too similar to the international symbol for tourist information. Imagine when people who display the logo suddenly find all the tourists asking them for help — “but your button means you are to give me a map of the local area, no? Can you at least point me to the hostel?” Might be a good conversation starter, but it could also start to annoy the legitimate information booths.

And what is the split down the middle of the “I” supposed to represent? Brackets?

Maybe I’m the wrong kind of person to comment on button and sticker design (having little/no experience myself). But it seems to me that a campaign for human rights based on privacy needs something a little more iconic and unique. I propose some variation of the following as an alternative:

Or does that infringe on the “cats” trademark?

More seriously, I’m kind of curious how an “Individual I” concept might merge or overlap with the “Army of One” campaign. Anyone else notice the very similar themes of ontology? For some reason I would have expected Bruce to have more in common with Martin Buber’s I and Thou than a US military advertising campaign.

Speaking of the US military, here’s another idea: the famous logo from the 1st Armored Division could be transformed into an I, in order to achieve a good mix, like saying “an army of I”:

From this: to this:

Although you wouldn’t be allowed to call it the “big red i”, or “red bone”…

Some updates are critical and deserve immediate attention, such as today’s announcement (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-001 and MS06-012) that Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Could Allow Remote Code Execution (905413).

However, other updates provide little more than amusement (in between the remote code execution crises). Take KB912475 for example, which was officially published on 2/28/2006:

Australia has changed the regularly scheduled end of Daylight Saving Time in five Australian states from March 2006 to the first Sunday of April 2006 due to the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Install this update to enable your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

I’m not sure which issue is more strange, that Australia is trying to cheat time for the games or that you may have to restart your OS when you adjust the clock. I guess the bigger issue becomes whether the time changes will cause any kind of application outages among systems that are not patched in time for the games to begin. Imagine a contestant using an unpatched version of the Windows OS while assuming that the time-change will happen automatically and failing to make it to their event on time.

And speaking of changing the system time, when will Microsoft release a patch that pushes back the IRS filing deadline…?

IBM did a survey, and it was just published here on iTWire. Interesting perspective:

According to the IT executives surveyed, 49% of local businesses now perceive cybercrime to be a greater threat than physical crime to their business. At the same time, the perception is that perpetrators of cybercrime are becoming increasingly sophisticated; 80% of Australian CIOs (84% globally) believe that lone hackers are increasingly being replaced by organised and technically proficient criminal groups.

[…]

When it comes to relative costs, Australian CIOs think that cybercrime has a more detrimental financial impact on their business than physical crime. They are most concerned about the loss of current customers as a result of cybercrime (71%), followed by loss of revenue (68%) and loss of prospective customers (67%). Just 38% of their global peers identified loss of prospective customers as a major concern, possibly reflecting the smaller size of the Australian market and relative importance of each customer.