Hi, I’m a retired IT professional. I started in IT in the early '70s (that’s 1970s…) and have watched with endless fascination as Moore’s Law and people’s ingenuity have taken us from punch-cards and paper-tape to where we are today. My professional background is a bit like the industry - varied. It ranges from real-time, experimental, custom hardware, equipment control through modelling, data analysis, to application development, operating systems (V7 on PDP-11, and up from there), experimental distributed systems, telco software, startups, intranets, and testing. I was an early user of Usenet and the early email systems, and was tremendously excited by the introduction of Mosaic and HTML. I’m disturbed at the current abuse of information and identity that’s happening online, as some of the web’s greatest possibilities are abused for commercial gain, and I hope that Maidsafe and other initiatives will keep it safe and useful. As always, technology just is, what people use it for is the challenge.