The OpenSure Free Press 21st November 2011

Posted on by March 20, 2013

Are you reading this as a displacement activity when you should be compiling expenses, or perhaps you’ve scheduled a coffee break? What’s that? Your day is more random than that? Well tchuh, you must read this article as a matter of urgency…

Run your day with Twitter
This article can be introduced only in its own words – I just can’t beat them:

Here’s a very quick guide to how to go about effective daily Twitter management  for general  awareness

Who’s leaving reviews of your company online?
Many useful tools exist on the web for rating companies, services and individuals. It may well be that someone has rated your company or your service or even you personally – would you know? Do you track that sort of thing? It pays to do so. There have been some quite shocking cases of devastating false reviews wreaking havoc. A competitor up to mischief is the least of it – read this article and just be glad it wasn’t you. There is a company that helps to deal with it – it was set up eight months ago:

So far Kwikcheck said it had dealt with 3,000 cases of online defamation. Mr Emmins added that it was possible to sabotage a business within five minutes, and that the problem was widespread.

Bad day at Google Towers
Google has overtaken Microsoft in the security vulnerability hurdles, according to a Trend Micro report (Trend Micro, it must be borne in mind, would like to sell you anti-virus software). The article goes on to say:

Trend Micro explained that the jump in Google security problems was caused mainly by the Chrome browser, but that none of the flaws in Chrome was as severe as those in Microsoft products.

“The increase in the number of attacks targeting Chrome may primarily be due to the browser’s increasing use and popularity,” the report said.

The comment at the end of the article is thought-provoking, if pro-Microsoft. I wonder who left it?

Rural broadband – the European perspective
Yes I know, yawn, rural broadband, but  the EU appears to think things are pretty good, in fact it “estimates that around 95 per cent of European Union citizens now have basic broadband access” according to this article. Once again though rural broadband lets the side down. Frank Mather, EC Director General for the information society, said at a recent conference:

“Around 95 per cent of citizens are now covered by broadband access, although only about 80 per cent of rural areas have access. There is a clear rural dimension to this problem to meet the 2013 target”

It seems we have some way to go to match the broadband infrastructures in Asian countries such as Malaysia.

The dumb machine
This is how the Scandinavian columnist whose name I can’t reproduce with my keyboard describes Google and other search engines, in this article on SEO and keywords. It’s important to bear in mind that he’s talking about huge companies with massive budgets but none the less, it’s a useful explanation of how SEO and keywords work and why they matter. (wtt search engine guide for the pic)

Other odds and ends that have caught our eye recently:

As seen in the gents’ loo in the BBC
Bubble wrap to Tetra-Pak – the Hidden Heroes exhibition
London transport schemes that never were
Sunderland – a city in the cloud

HMRC pays Capgemini £8bn for…?

Posted on by January 13, 2014

Capgemini services cost UKGov £8bn

Our latest newsletter included a piece about Chris Chant’s recent speech in which he revealed quite jaw-dropping levels of wasted money and inefficiencies in government IT. Sadly I doubt that came as any surprise to anyone.

No way to assess value

Now, Tony Collins has revealed that HMRC has paid £8bn to Capgemini for online filing costs and that, according to the National Audit Office:

[HMRC] does not yet have a detailed breakdown of the costs of online filing services, so it cannot benchmark those costs to assess their value for money.

Gawk. Rather staggeringly the article goes on to reveal that:

Unfortunately for taxpayers it is not unusual for a department to pay its main IT supplier without having a full breakdown of the bills.

Justify the expenditure

You might want to read this final quote from the article and then work out quite how much Capgemini has raked in this way since 1994:

It is up to HMRC to insist on a breakdown.  Its IT services have been outsourced since 1994. Shouldn’t it know exactly what it is paying billions for by now?

Damn right it should, and it should be able to explain in full and tedious detail why this money was justified and precisely how the UK infrastructure, personified in the tax payer, has benefitted. And then it needs to explain why this system was better than an open source alternative.

The OpenSure Free Press 7th November 2011

Posted on by March 4, 2014

Welcome to the first proper autumn edition of the Free Press. Join us to kick through the leaves of the last fortnight’s tech news and reviews.

Government IT
This article begins with the quote:

The vast majority of GovIT is “outrageously expensive” says Chris Chant.

Chris Chant is very experienced in government IT and shared experiences both positive and negative at a recent event hosted by the Institute for Government in London. He felt it was time to be honest about the less desirable aspects of government IT, and made many points, just the first three of which were:

–   That “80% of Government IT is controlled by five corporations”.

–  That “some organisations outsource their IT strategy in Government”.

–  That “to change one line of code in one application can cost up to £50,000”.

Shocking, but a very familiar proprietary story. Chris Chant talks a great deal of sense and gives a quite jaw-dropping glimpse into the waste, ignorance and entrapment that goes on. The article is untechnical and easy to read, well worth it if you’d like to see how the government is wasting your tax, especially in these harsh economic times. I leave you with this, which says it all about proprietary vs open source:

“I cannot tell you how many times I have had the discussion that says: we need to get away from that but we cannot because of the complexity of getting out from where we are: all the things hanging on to that particular service that we cannot disentangle ourself from.”

Facebook
“Researchers have demonstrated a new technique capable of stealing personal information from Facebook.”

Comforting. This latest method uses the somewhat cuddly-sounding ‘socialbot’, a program available to buy online for less than 20 quid. Botnets – this is a variant – are nothing new, but what makes this one so scary is “that it is able to pass itself off as a real Facebook user”. Read more about it here.

In the interests of balance, we should bring to your attention this article about Facebook’s Finnish data centre. Finland has been chosen because of its access to renewable energy and the cold climate, so effective in keeping servers cool. Here are a few statistics:

The centre will be the largest of its kind in Europe, and the northernmost of this magnitude on earth. It will handle all data processing from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and serve millions of the site’s 800 million users. It will cover 30,000 square metres – about the size of 11 football pitches – and be fully packed with data servers.

Is the PC dead?
Or as the BBC asks in its article, does the PC have a future? The thrust of the article is that with so many devices at our fingertips, PCs are being forgotten. People are reluctant to replace or upgrade old PCs, preferring instead to buy a different type of gadget, and with ever fewer games being developed exclusively for PCs, they are becoming less and less attractive.

I have to agree. I use a laptop and a phone far more than my desktop PC as I have greater flexibility of when and where I work with portable gadgets. Using my desktop PC means being closeted away in the office, which constitutes the minority of my time. What about you? Leave us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.

The Battle for Wayne Rooney
Or the great .uk saga, as told by the BBC. This is about domain ownership disputes, over 10,000 of which have been handled by Nominet in its decade-long history. Brand name owners tend to be victorious, but both Mastercard and Lockheed Martin have come unstuck. Starbucks though won its case against a family using the name for its newsletter (in itself a heinous crime) and Ryan Air managed to win its case against a detractor. The article makes for an interesting read and I do love the Nominet quote in the Lockheed Martin case:

“The appeal panel said a sense of humour might have been appropriate.”

Green Expo
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to pull out of the Green Expo this Thursday, 10th November. However, Heather will be at the Leominster Women in Business evening tomorrow, November 8th, learning to change a tyre.

In other news…