An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse.

The event was organised by ImprovEverywhere, according to the Going Underground blog.

• Woke up with terrible headache – suspected wife of hitting him by mistake in the night.
  
• Headache so bad he went to hospital.
  
• Had bullet removed.
  
• Began to suspect that wife tried to shoot him as he slept.
  

A start like that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the day, does it?

1. Whether by design or incompetence, Facebook reveals more information to strangers than you think.

2. Your remotely stored documents may be liable to subpoena without your knowledge.

The moral of the story, folks, is Nicholas’ second law of computing:

The fact that you need to enter a password to access your data tells you nothing about who else can access it.

Corollary: passwords provide only peace of mind.

We have become very used to storing data in what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others refer to as “the cloud“. Data stored ‘somewhere on the internet’ – on servers managed by someone else – is terribly convenient. We can access what we need, from wherever we are, on whatever computer or device is closest to hand. Some people get very excited about this sort thing.

And yet it is (mostly) a very bad idea, from a security point of view. All the data we store online is generally stored unencrypted, meaning that whoever happens to be storing it in the “cloud” or moving it around for you can read it.

With a service like Google, you cannot be certain at any given moment exactly where your data is being physically stored – and so what legal rules cover its handling. It is this that has the French worried.

Why does it make sense for Google to provide email, calendar and other online applications for free? In part, because in so doing it can gather more information about it’s customers – such as their names, for a start. Which is not to say that they have evil or nefarious intentions, but that doesn’t mean that putting information about yourself into the hands of web companies is a great idea either. Between security holes, poor implementations, deals to sell data, company acquisitions and the like, it’s hard to know where that data will end up eventually.

And data stored online may not even have the legal protections that data stored on your disk has. It is only this week that the Federal Government in America was told it might need a warrant for data stored in online email accounts, for example, a debate that I’m sure I’ll comment on as it unfolds.

If only the data was encrypted, sent to the internet, and decrypted when we need it. But for three reasons, protocols like this are rare: they can reduce functionality, can be difficult to present in a user-friendly way and make the make offering to store the data less attractive to service providers.

But while we’re being cynical, let’s also note that a French ban on official use of the Blackberry, even if it makes good technical sense, also opens the door for a more French for the provision of mobile email.