12 November 2015, 11 am
Today I am taking the train to Cardiff for a regional CPD seminar. Oh, no, turns out I am not taking the train after all. Trains from Bristol Parkway to Cardiff have been cancelled. Pretty much all trains from Bristol Parkway have been cancelled, in fact. There is a replacement bus service but not even the station staff seem convinced that this is a viable alternative. I get back in my car and drive to Cardiff. I do not have the satnav with me so I have to rely on instinct and this very nearly takes me to the nearest pub. Eventually I find myself trip-trapping over the Welsh troll bridge again, however, so I know I am on roughly the right track. Unlike the trains. 12 November 2015, 4 pm We are in the middle of the CPD seminar. We have had some fascinating talks. One of the speakers invested in a company which was suing Google® for US patent infringement. It still is, many years on. His talk was entitled “David vs Goliath”. When we asked him why he invested in a company that had taken on Google, he said because the technology was so exciting. Is that not touching? There is hope for the world yet. Now we are having a talk about IP litigation insurance, the products available and the small print that tends to go with them. Some of the small print says that you have to “co-insure”. This means that the insured has to pay x% of the litigation costs that the insurer would otherwise have had to pay. Apparently this is good because it shows that the insured party is serious about the litigation. Perhaps I am being naïve here, but it seems to me that what it actually shows is that you have accidentally obtained (100–x)% of the cover you thought you’d obtained. Why they cannot say that in the first place I have no idea. The scariest talk of the afternoon was about cybercrime and cyber security. Cybercrime is things like ransomware and denial of service and phishing and identity theft, and of course malware and spyware and generallyincrediblyevilware. Cyber security is what you do to stop cybercrime happening. There is actually no such thing as cyber security. Cybercrime is very easy. Apparently you can hire a bot for $50 a day to take out someone else’s website. Apparently you can go to a part of the internet called The Dark Market – which I’ve no doubt is run by Amazon® because what part of the internet retail space isn’t these days – and buy all manner of software with which to commit your cybercrimes. Apparently this software is cheap, and for obvious reasons – because its customers do not mess about with returns policies, they just send in a hit-man – the backup support and customer service levels are better than you’d get with the average Microsoft® product. Not that that is setting the bar particularly high. The Dark Market sounds like an ideal place, in fact, to do your Christmas shopping.
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