Category Archives: Technology/Computing

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Three cheers for Harry Smith!

  By surreywebmaster | 18/05/2013 - 10:43 | In The News, Pensions finance etc, Technology/Computing
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Being online aged 90 has made my old age less lonely. Others aren’t so lucky

As grief over my wife and son eased, I wanted to join the land of the living. I wish more seniors could reap the benefits I haveHarry Leslie Smith

Click here for more about – Harry Leslie Smith

There’s no getting around it: I am from the class of 1923, which makes me very old. When I was a boy, people thought our technological limit was reached with the dazzling Flying Scotsman’s train engine. At the time, I probably agreed. I had seen a film of the Flying Scotsman at the pictures, which left me dizzy with envy for the passengers. I marvelled at the people who could afford to ride that locomotive and gallop between London and Edinburgh in less than eight hours. I was born into a Britain where the majority of the population didn’t have a telephone, the wireless or indoor plumbing. Now our island is interconnected with motorways, airports and the internet. The speed with which we can now communicate or impart information, swap jokes, share files and holiday snaps leaves me gobsmacked. In my lifetime, I have gone from learning Morse code to sending messages on Twitter.

Older person using computer

‘It is hard to expect a senior citizen to be on Facebook if they can’t afford to heat their home because of the limits of their state pension.’

The internet has become our agora, the meeting place where diverse opinions can be debated alongside comments on last night’s football match. For those able to participate, it is a wonderful place to learn, speak one’s mind or relax by playing an online game. For me, being able to navigate through the internet has made my old age a less lonely place. The death of my wife and then the loss of one of my sons forced me to confront and become familiar with this new, and at first forbidding computer equipment. Simply put, as my grief over my wife and son eased, I wanted to join the land of the living and all of the diversity it offered.

My early attempts to become computer literate were hard, frustrating and comical. But I knew I would persevere because that is what I have always done when faced with difficult problems. I reasoned that if I could learn to drive an antiquated Leyland lorry during the war, the rudiments of the internet were no match for me. For some time, it was a strained tug of war but eventually I mastered the basic elements, which permitted me to go online and explore this strange and virtual universe.

Being engaged online has given me the chance to interact and share my life stories with people from different lands and cultures. It has let me experience new ideas and kept me in close contact with old friends and family, now scattered across the globe.

Unfortunately, the pleasure I have found in being connected to the internet is not an option for far too many people in the United Kingdom. Recent figures from an ONS report that 7 million people in Britain remain unconnected to the internet and 14% of the adult population have never logged on. More worrying, and what should give pause to many readers, is that although the number of seniors using the internet is increasing, only 27.3% of women over the age of 75 are actively using the internet, compared with 43% of men 75 years of age and older.

The reason why elderly female pensioners aren’t using the internet isn’t because they have a dread of new technology. It all comes down to the insurance man’s actuary table – women generally outlive their spouses. For many widowed women, their golden years are spent in the lonely preoccupation of trying to stretch their pennies into pounds. It is hard to expect a senior citizen to be on Facebook if they can’t afford to heat their home or eat a proper diet because of the limits of their state pension.

Being connected to the internet is supposed to open up new vistas for its users. It can bring the planet and all its wonders to your laptop. It allows you to interact with so many interesting people, but always from a safe distance. As you age, your health and mobility may become impaired, so having the opportunity and the finances to get online makes life less lonesome. It can make you more engaged with your community and your family. It is as important as having a telephone, a stable bank account and a bus pass. All of those elements and access to a computer can make your senior years more pleasant and worthwhile.

Everyone in this country should be part of this ever-evolving information highway, including the elderly and those on fixed incomes. I know if more seniors were able to access the internet they would be better able to voice their concerns about elder-care, the NHS and our current economic crisis.

The internet has given me something that the Flying Scotsman could never do: a chance to keep pace and still be part of the conversation with a much younger generation.

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a second world war RAF veteran and at 90 an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the Great Depression, the second world war and postwar austerity.

It was a life sacrificed through a family’s poverty, a child’s hunger and a nation’s ruin. It was a life redeemed through war. It was 1923….

Photo from Harry’s Twitter profile.

Read also: Is Cameron’s Britain what we fought for in the war?

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Brits’ phone tracking, web history touted to cops: The TRUTH

  By surreywebmaster | 13/05/2013 - 21:01 | Technology/Computing
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What’s inside the info on 27 million punters up for sale

Analysis Pollster Ipsos MORI is under fire for touting data on millions of EE customers – from their whereabouts to their browser history – to anyone with a chequebook, including London’s Metropolitan Police.

The Met shelved the deal when the Sunday Times learned of the mass info flogging. But private companies have been buying the mobile network’s subscriber stats, which include customer locations, calling habits and web-browsing history broken down by demographic.

This is all entirely legal as the data is supplied in anonymous blocks of 50 people grouped by activity and location: for example, 150 peope sent a text message at midnight from the capital’s Shaftesbury Avenue, or 50 people visited Amazon’s website from within a Coventry Tesco.

However, the monetisation of this information has still got privacy campaigners riled.

The Sunday Times is very excited that the customer records have been offered for sale, pointing out that 27 million customers are being tracked by EE every day. But the network operator is adamant that the data being flogged is anonymous, and it’s hardly the only telco that has set up shop selling information about its customers.

All the mobile network operators track users, storing punters’ location for two years, and logging details of calls and downloads. Mostly that’s done for network planning purposes, such as working out where and when people tend to concentrate so as to surround them with phone masts. And police officers can, by law, request access to these databases to track suspects and the recently deceased. Now operators are trying to squeeze revenue from their big data, too.

Last year O2 owner Telefonica created a division specifically tasked with selling customer data, and Vodafone feeds anonymous information to satnav biz TomTom, so it shouldn’t be surprising that EE has outsourced the task to Ipsos MORI.

Supermarkets and shopping centres are always interested in visitor numbers, and what customers are doing – such as what percentage of shoppers are checking price-comparison sites. Councils are interested in the flow of people around city centres, on foot and in cars, while the plod want to know how many people were in a riot and where they went to next.

Not as individuals, of course. Data that specifically identifies Brits is available to the police, through their Single Point of Contact and for a fee. The Sunday Times reckons the police were interested in correlating address and names to the EE data, and one can see why the cops would wish to do that, but for EE to facilitate that would be an illegal breach of privacy – so any such detailed data isn’t handed over.

In a statement to The Register, the operator said:

The suggestion that we sell the personal information of our customers to third parties is misleading to say the least. The information is anonymised and aggregrated, and cannot be used to identify the personal information of individual customers. We would never breach the trust our customers place in us and we always act to comply fully with the Data Protection Act.

Anyone interested in exactly what data operators store should watch this animation (recommended, very interesting SW), from the German politician who successfully extracted all the information about himself from his network operator and put it into a map of his activities. His mobile internet use isn’t included, but even so the picture is quite chilling for the privacy conscious among us.

Ipsis MORI wasn’t trying to sell data on individuals, and what it was selling is an entirely legal commodity even if we’re a little uncomfortable seeing it traded. Our personal habits are already a valuable commodity and mobile operators are late to the market. But they are coming, and bringing ever-more detailed information about us to anyone who’s willing to pay for it.

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Steve Ballmer: The boss who bet his company on Windows 8

  By surreywebmaster | 07/05/2013 - 20:39 | In The News, Technology/Computing
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Steve Ballmer: The boss who bet his company on Windows 8 – and lost as computer giant announces ‘biggest product U-turn since New Coke’

Updated version of operating system will take into account complaints made by users as decision to overhaul the much-maligned operating system has put Bill Gates’s successor under pressure

Steve BallmerIt was, proclaimed Microsoft’s irrepressible salesman Steve Ballmer, a “bet-the-company” moment.

But the wager on Windows 8, a new operating system which would halt the slide in PC sales and challenge Apple’s iPad, has turned sour after the computer giant announced a humiliating U-turn.

In what has been described as the biggest admission of commercial failure for a major product launch since “new Coke” was withdrawn 30 years ago, Microsoft is to overhaul Windows 8, the software update which prompted a backlash from customers who found it impossible to navigate.

Pitched as an operating system for both desktop computers and tablets, Windows 8’s touch-screen interface confused Microsoft’s customers with its interactive “tile”-based start screen and the omission of the brand’s famous “Start” button.

Mr Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO, said he was “betting the company” on the worldwide launch of a range of Windows 8 desktops, laptops, notebooks and the company’s answer to the iPad, the new “Surface” tablet.

However, the Surface has failed to make an impression in the tablet market, and the lack of affordable touch-laptops able to use Windows 8 meant customers were left flailing with an operating system they had little idea how to use.

Despite selling 100 million licences, interest in Windows 8 has flagged and Tammy Reller, head of marketing and finance for the Windows business, announced a retreat, admitting that the software had defeated many users. “The learning curve is definitely real and we need to address it,” she said.

A new update, provisionally called Microsoft Blue, will be rolled out by the end of the year. Analysts expect it to restore the Start button. A “boot-to-desktop” option could bypass the unloved Windows 8 interface altogether. Ms Reller said: “We’ve considered a lot of different scenarios to help traditional PC users move forward as well as making usability that much better on all devices.”

Investors are beginning to ask whether the exuberant Mr Ballmer, 57, who took over as CEO from Bill Gates in 2000, is still the man to take Microsoft forward after allowing rivals to revolutionise the market with touch-based mobile computing devices. Global PC sales slumped by 14 per cent in the first quarter of 2013.

Mr Ballmer should quit now, said Joachim Kempin, a former Microsoft executive who helped to build the Windows business. “Microsoft is going into surface tablets. These tablets are OK products, but nothing really distinguishes them either,” he told the BBC.

Microsoft has alienated its manufacturing partners, Mr Kempin said, noting how Hewlett-Packard and Samsung are now producing tablets for Android, not Windows.

Investors talk of a “lost decade” at Microsoft but if they want Mr Ballmer out, it will require the support of Mr Gates, who remains the largest individual shareholder. Mr Gates hand-picked Mr Ballmer and has supported his attempts to move the company from desktop software to a cloud-based, networked future.

Under Mr Ballmer, Microsoft revenues have nearly tripled from $25.3bn (£16.6bn) in 2001 to $74.3bn in 2012. But the share price has failed to match rival Apple’s soaring stock-value.

The Windows 8 U-turn was inevitable, according to analysts. Richard Doherty, of technology research firm Envisioneering, said: “This is like New Coke, going on for seven months.”

Microsoft will make Windows 8 compatible with smaller, seven and eight inch tablets, which would allow hardware makers to compete against such popular devices as the iPad mini, Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire.

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UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

  By surreywebmaster | 29/04/2013 - 22:52 | Technology/Computing
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Everyone = Silicon Valley ad platforms tech companies

FacebookHave you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?

If so, you’ll probably want to read this, because the rules on who can exploit your work have now changed radically, overnight.

Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by Silicon Valley and radical bureaucrats and academics. The changes are enacted in the sprawling Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Assent last week, and it marks a huge shift in power away from citizens and towards large US corporations.

How so? Previously, and in most of the world today, ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual’s property. That’s enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it’s considered to be a basic human right. What this means in practice is that you can go after somebody who exploits it without your permission – even if pursuing them is cumbersome and expensive.

The UK coalition government’s new law reverses this human right. When last year Instagram attempted to do something similar, it met a furious backlash. But the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has sailed through without most amateurs or semi-professionals even realising the consequences.

The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called “orphan works”, by placing the work into what’s known as “extended collective licensing” schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans – the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organisation – millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.

For the first time anywhere in the world, the Act will permit the widespread commercial exploitation of unidentified work – the user only needs to perform a “diligent search”. But since this is likely to come up with a blank, they can proceed with impunity. The Act states that a user of a work can act as if they are the owner of the work (which should be you) if they’re given permission to do so by the Secretary of State.

The Act also fails to prohibit sub-licensing, meaning that once somebody has your work, they can wholesale it. This gives the green light to a new content-scraping industry, an industry that doesn’t have to pay the originator a penny. Such is the consequence of “rebalancing copyright”, in reality.

What now?

Quite what happens next is not clear, because the Act is merely enabling legislation – the nitty gritty will come in the form of statutory instruments, to be tabled later in the year. Parliament has not voted down a statutory instrument since 1979, so the political process is probably now a formality.

In practice, you’ll have two stark choices to prevent being ripped off: remove your work from the internet entirely, or opt-out by registering it. And registration will be on a work-by-work basis.

“People can now use stuff without your permission,” explained photo rights campaigner Paul Ellis. “To stop that you have to register your work in a registry – but registering stuff is an activity that costs you time and money. So what was your property by default will only remain yours if you take active steps, and absorb the costs, if it is formally registered to you as the owner.”

And right now, Ellis says, there’s only one registry, PLUS. Photographers, including David Bailey, condemned the Coalition for rushing through the legislation before other registries – such as the Copyright Hub – could sort themselves out.

“The mass of the public will never realise they’ve been robbed,” thinks Ellis. The radical free-our-information bureaucrats at the Intellectual Property Office had already attempted to smuggle orphan works rules through via the Digital Economy Act in 2010, but were rebuffed. Thanks to a Google-friendly Conservative-led administration, they’ve now triumphed.

Three other consequences appear possible.

One is a barrage of litigation from UK creators – and overseas owners who find their work Hoovered into extended collective licensing programs. International treaties allow a country to be ostracised and punished. The threat has already been made clear from US writers and photographers, who’ve promised “a firestorm“. Reciprocal royalty arrangements can also be suspended, on the basis of “if you steal our stuff, UK, we won’t pay you”. In addition, a judicial review, based on the premise that the Act gives Minister unconstitutional power over the disposal of private property, is not out of the question.

Secondly, the disappearance of useful material from the internet is likely to accelerate – the exact opposite of what supporters wish for. We recently highlighted the case of an aerial photographer who’s moving work outside the UK, and we’ve heard of several who are taking their photos away from the web, and into lockers. The internet is poorer without a diverse creative economy – because creators need legal certainty of property rights.

And finally, there’s the macroeconomic consequences for the UK economy.

The notorious ‘Google Review’ chaired by Ian Hargreaves failed to undertake adequate impact assessments, a giveaway that even the most rabid “copyright reformers” recognise there isn’t an economic case to be made for taking everyone’s stuff and giving it away.

“There’s value in works, and if anybody can exploit them except the person who creates them, then value is transferred to the exploiter,” explains Ellis. “This is a massive value transfer out of the UK economy to US tech companies.”

Where it will remain, he thinks, because UK tech/media companies – should they appear – almost invariably become US-owned.

Copyright “reformers” of course rarely like to talk about such unpleasant matters – and will steer the conversation away from economic consequences as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the they generally talk using Orwellian euphemisms – like “liberalising” or “rebalancing” copyright. It’s rarely presented as an individual’s ability to go to market being removed. This is what “copyright reform” looks like in practice.

“It’s corporate capitalism,” says Ellis. “Ideally you want to empower individuals to trade, and keep the proceeds of their trade. The UK has just lost that.”

So while the Twitterati and intelligentsia were ranting away about “Big Content”, we’ve just lost the ability to sell our own content. In other words, you’ve just been royally f****d.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

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After two years and millions of pounds, police computer plan is still in limbo

  By surreywebmaster | 26/04/2013 - 09:33 | In The News, Policing - General, Technology/Computing
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With no launch date in sight, company is set to be a costly ‘white elephant’, say critics

Home Sec Theresa MayTheresa May’s attempts to set up a company to oversee police computers are destined to result in an “expensive white elephant”, it was claimed.

Nearly two years after the Home Secretary announced plans for the creation of a firm to help police drive down their information technology bills, no date has been fixed for its launch and no details released of how it will operate. Nor is there any indication of which police forces will sign up to the proposed organisation.

The Independent has learnt, however, that the Home Office has already run up a bill of almost £2m for lawyers’ and consultants’ advice over the company’s launch. The delays have raised doubts within the department over the chances of successfully getting the project off the ground following a long history of bungled Whitehall computer schemes.

Mrs May set out plans in 2011 for a Police ICT company owned and led by police chiefs to reform the “confused, fragmented and expensive” way in which forces use computer systems.

She said the firm would cut the £1.2bn spent by forces on information technology, freeing up chief constables to focus on the front line, and said it was her aim to form the company by spring 2012.

The intention is that it would be fully owned by the recently-elected police and crime commissioners and would sell its services to the 43 English and Welsh forces.

However, a series of parliamentary answers has made clear that little progress has been made, with no information on how many commissioners would need to take part.

But Damian Green, the policing minister, disclosed the Home Office had spent £1.8m on advice from consultants and legal experts over the firm’s formation. It has spent a further £358,000 on “infrastructure costs”.

David Hanson, the shadow policing minister, said: “It has all the signs of becoming an expensive white elephant. While the government has been happy to spend some £2m on consultants’ and legal fees for this company, they have also argued that it’s necessary to cut 15,000 police officers by the next election.”

The sums emerged as the Home Office faces a severe and continuing squeeze on spending. Mrs May has told Chancellor George Osborne that her scope for savings in the next spending round is severely limited.

The episode carries echoes of a succession of Whitehall computer fiascos in recent years.

The previous government spent £12.7bn on a computer programme for the National Health Service which was eventually scrapped, while the programme running Gordon Brown’s tax credit system was plagued with problems, resulting in many delays in payment.

There are also doubts whether the complicated system that will underpin the new Universal Credit, which is rolled out from Monday, will be able to cope.

A Home Office spokesman denied the new company was in crisis. He said: “The system needs reform to make it more efficient and better value for the taxpayer, but we will not repeat the mistakes of past governments in setting up a big ICT white elephant.

“The ICT company will buy computer technology more cheaply and to ensure systems work across forces. Our changes will mean the police can focus on crime-fighting.”

After two years and millions of pounds, police computer plan is still in limbo

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WordPress website targeted by hackers

  By surreywebmaster | 15/04/2013 - 18:21 | In The News, Technology/Computing
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Wordpress websiteWordPress users are advised to change their user names

WordPress has been attacked by a botnet of “tens of thousands” of individual computers since last week, according to server hosters Cloudflare and Hostgator.

The botnet targets WordPress users with the username “admin”, trying thousands of possible passwords.

The attack began a week after WordPress beefed up its security with an optional two-step authentication log-in option.

The site currently powers 64m websites read by 371m people each month.

According to survey website W3Techs, around 17% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress.

“Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use ‘admin’ as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password,” wrote WordPress founder *Matt Mullenweg on his blog.

He also advised adopting two-step authentication, which involves a personalised “secret number” allocated to users in addition to a username and password, and ensuring that the latest version of WordPress is installed.

“Most other advice isn’t great – supposedly this botnet has more than 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP-limiting or login-throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP [address] a second for 24 hours),” Mr Mullenweg added.

Matthew Prince, Chief Executive and co-founder of Cloudflare, said that the aim of the attack may have been to build a stronger botnet.

“One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack,” he wrote in a blog post.

“These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” he added.

Hi-tech crime terms

  • Bot – one of the individual computers in a botnet; bots are also called drones or zombies
  • Botnet – a network of hijacked home computers, typically controlled by a criminal gang
  • Malware – an abbreviation for malicious software ie a virus, trojan or worm that infects a PC
  • DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) – an attack that knocks out a computer by overwhelming it with data; thousands of PCs can take part, hence the “distributed”
  • Drive-by download – a virus or trojan that starts to install as soon as a user visits a particular website
  • IP address – the numerical identifier every machine connected to the net needs to ensure data goes to the right place

*MATT MULLENWEG

is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, and Vanity Fair’s Next Establishment. He’s on Twitter and Facebook.

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PC sales worldwide have tumbled, data from IDC shows

  By surreywebmaster | 11/04/2013 - 08:40 | Technology/Computing
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Microsoft Windows logoIt was hoped that the launch Microsoft’s Window 8 would revitalise PC sales

Global sales of PCs fell 14% in the first three months of the year, the biggest fall since research firm IDC started tracking the industry in 1994.

IDC said 76.3 million units were shipped, a figure that underlines the appeal of tablets and smartphones as alternatives to PCs.

The firm said Microsoft’s latest version of Windows had failed to revitalise the industry.

Recession had also led companies to put back renewal of their PCs, IDC said.

The firm’s vice president, Bob O’Donnell, said: “Unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only didn’t provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market.”

Windows 8 is designed to work well with touch-sensitive screens, but the displays add to the cost of a PC. Together, the changes and higher prices “have made PCs a less attractive alternative to dedicated tablets and other competitive devices,” Mr O’Donnell said.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

IDC also said that, traditionally, companies replaced PCs every three years, but that during the economic downturn this was more likely to be every five years.

“This is horrific news for PCs,” said BGC financial analyst Colin Gillis. “It’s all about mobile computing now.”

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest maker of PCs, saw a 24% fall in shipments in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago.

China’s Lenovo Group, number two in the market, is benefiting from sales to first-time buyers in China and other developing countries. Its sales held steady, IDC said.

PC sales worldwide have tumbled, data from IDC shows

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Bitcoin hits new high before losing $160 in value in one day

  By surreywebmaster | 11/04/2013 - 08:30 | In The News, Technology/Computing
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The digital currency spikes at $266 before plunging to $105 on Wednesday in wild ride possibly linked to Reddit user

A Bitcoin

One Bitcoin. One financial expert compared the interest in Bitcoin to the tulip mania that gripped the Dutch in the 17th century.

Bitcoin, the digital currency, lost more than $160 (£104) in value on Wednesday, just hours after hitting a record high.

The currency hit a new high of $266 before falling to $105 and then bouncing back to $130. The fall is unlikely to put off speculators. Two months ago, a Bitcoin was worth $20.

With Europe racked by economic uncertainty following the banking crisis in Cyprus, there have been fears that a “bubble” is being created with speculators piling into the four-year-old digital currency. But Bitcoin has crashed before only to bounce back. It hit a low of $7 in August 2011 after hitting a high of $32 two months earlier.

Jon Matonis of the Bitcoin Foundation, the currency’s promoter, denied a euro-bubble was being created in an interview with Der Spiegel this week.

“Most transactions are still coming from affluent regions, like the United States and northern Europe. What we are seeing is not a Cyprus bubble,” he said.

Until recently Bitcoin had been a largely obscure currency used by the tech-savvy, libertarians wishing to thumb their noses at central bankers and people involved in more nefarious activities such as online gambling (often illegal in the US) or drug deals.

There are around 11m Bitcoins in circulation, 25 new bitcoins are produced every 10 minutes, and they are traded through online exchanges like Mt.Gox.

Dealing in the currency is volatile as has been the history of the services that allow people to trade in Bitcoins. Mt.Gox has been subject to repeated hacking attacks. Instawallet, a popular service for storing Bitcoins, had to be suspended after it was hacked.

Many financial experts have warned against Bitcoin. Veteran UBS stockbroker Art Cashin has compared the interest in Bitcoin to the tulipmania that led many to financial ruin in the 17th century. But interest in the currency has shot up as the euro has become ever more embattled. The value of a Bitcoin passed the $200 mark for the first time on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s wild ride came as someone gave away thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins on Reddit, the social news site. News blog Business Insider calculated a Reddit user under the name“Bitcoinbillionaire” had given away $13,627.69896 worth of Bitcoins to Reddit users over the day. The mystery donor signed off with a quote from Ron Paul, libertarian politician and one-time would-be presidential candidate: “It’s no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”

Bitcoin hits new high before losing $160 in value in one day

Also: Bitcoin gets a $100 haircut on rollercoaster trading run

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Surrey Police force wastes millions in public money on unused ‘criminal intelligence’ system

  By surreywebmaster | 10/04/2013 - 19:41 | In The News, PCC News, Policing - General, Policing - Surrey, Technology/Computing
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A police force wasted millions of pounds of public money developing a new “criminal intelligence” computer system that will never be used, it was revealed today.

Ideas to develop a one-off computer system for Surrey was supported by the then Chief Constable Bob Quick

Surrey Police spent years working with a private IT firm to create a bespoke, high-tech network which would be used to store criminal records and log crimes so commanders could map trends of offences across the county.

However, the force’s new police commissioner pulled the plug on the doomed multi-million pound project this week after deciding it was “not in best interests of both Surrey Police and the Surrey public” to carry on with the scheme which began six years ago.

The costly blunder comes just months after Surrey Police admitted wasting tens of thousands of pounds on an axed contract to outsource back office jobs to scandal-hit security firm G4S.

An independent investigation was underway today into what had gone wrong with the force’s new IT scheme, which was codenamed Project Siren by Surrey’s commanding officers.

Ideas to develop a one-off computer system for Surrey’s officers was first mooted back in 2005, and was strongly supported by the then Chief Constable Bob Quick.

It was also backed and signed off at the time by the Surrey Police Authority, which was replaced by an elected Police Crime Commissioner (PCC) last November.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds was said to have been spent on IT consultants to outline a high-tech vision for a new system that brought all of the force’s computer records into one software program.

In 2009, the new Chief Constable, Mark Rowley, and the local police authority agreed on a confidential contract with IT giant Memex SAS to develop Project Siren.

However, sources confirmed that, after blowing millions of pounds on the multi-million pound project, senior commanders realised the system would not be able to be integrated with other forces around the country.

The technical burden of developing a new piece of software from scratch also proved too much for the force’s constrained budget when the project began heamorraging public money, insiders said.

Meanwhile, neighbouring forces had invested in new “off-the-shelf” IT programs that proved to be cheaper and actually worked.

Surrey Police’s current Chief Constable Lynne Owens decided enough was enough after she inherited the mess in February last year.

Last November, she asked the force’s new Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Kevin Hurley to swing the axe – and he finally consigned Project Siren to the rubbish bin earlier this week after ordering out his own probe into the fiasco.

A source close to the Commissioner confirmed the amount of money spent on the force’s IT scheme had “ran into millions of pounds”.

The Government’s Police and Crime Panel and independent auditors Grant Thornton have now launched separate inquiries to investigate exactly how much money was wasted on the IT project and get to the bottom of what went wrong.

“My decision to withdraw from the Siren project has not been taken lightly, but I believe that this course of action will ultimately be in the best interests of both Surrey Police and the Surrey public,” commissioner Hurley said in a statement today.

He added: “I hope you can appreciate that a full inquiry into a project of this scale is likely to take some time and that it would not be proper for me to comment further at this stage.”

The disatrous end to the six-year project comes just months after Surrey Police lost tens of thousands of pounds in consultancy fees after it cancelled a joint £1.5bn contract it was about to sign with security company G4S.

The deal for the firm to provide back office support staff to Surrey and West Midlands Police was pulled in the wake of the company’s role in the Olympic security fiasco – resulting in a loss of £160,000 pounds to Surrey’s taxpayers.

“This is yet another big mess Surrey Police have got themselves into,” commented Nick O’Shea, who ran as Surrey’s Liberal Democrat candidate in the recent PCC elections.

Speaking today, he added: “A lot of money and time has been wasted on Project Siren, which frankly was a waste of time from the beginning.

“My perception was that it was not fit for purpose and that if you try and make a bespoke IT system like this, it’s going to cost a fortune.

“They should have been working with other organisations whether in industry or other police forces to get a fit-for-purpose system. Otherwise, you’d end up with 42 different systems across the country.”

The former Surrey County Councillor added: “It seems a dreadful waste of money. Surrey Police Authority was guilty of trying to reinvent the wheel, instead of working with other police forces.

“The blame has to lie with the former Chief Constables and the police authority at the time.”

Project Siren was said to be the “baby” of Surrey’s former Chief Constable Bob Quick, who hit headlines after he left the force in 2008 to become Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations at London’s Metropolitan Police Service.

Quick’s reputation took a hammering in 2009, stemming first from the controversial arrest of Tory frontbencher Damian Green.

The final straw, which led to his resignation from the Met, came when terror raids in the North West had to be brought forward because he was caught on camera exposing sensitive documents as he arrived for a meeting in Downing Street.

He could not be reached for comment about the Project Siren fiasco today/yesterday (Weds).

Reacting to the cancellation of Project Siren, Surrey’s current Deputy Chief Constable Craig Denholm said: “We welcome the decision by the Police and Crime Commissioner.

“The management of information is critical in delivering effective policing.

“Given operational collaboration with other forces in the region, and as the national policing environment has now changed, we must also adapt our plans or risk losing out on the wider benefits.

“The current crime management system remains operational and the decision to withdraw from the Siren project will not impact on day-to-day policing which continues as normal.”

Surrey Police force wastes millions in public money on unused ‘criminal intelligence’ system

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Maggie Thatcher – Another View

  By surreywebmaster | 10/04/2013 - 09:40 | In The News, Technology/Computing
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Maggie Thatcher: The Iron Lady who saved us from drab Post Office mobes

Who loves their fibre broadband? Now you know who to thank

Obituary: Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who worked alongside the world’s first business computer and who privatised the UK’s phone network, has died. She was 87.

When Britain’s Iron Lady came to power in 1979, your average Brit had just one phone, which was fixed to a wall by a wire and connected to a network operated by a national monopoly: the Post Office. If you wanted to buy a phone or install a line, that was the organisation you had to go to.

And that was about to change.

As leader of the ruling Conservative Party, she pledged to slash red tape in the public sector: her mentor and subsequent minister for trade and industry Sir Keith Joseph told her deregulation in the US had liberating effects on the development and availability of technology.

Sir Keith was the architect of Thatcherism. And it was his advice that led to the denationalisation of Blighty’s phone system.

By 1980, the chunk of the Post Office that ran the country’s telephone network was renamed British Telecom.

(This was the same Post Office that, in the 1970s, snubbed one of the world’s first mobile telephones, which was designed by the British Chelmer Institute. The staggering decision to write off the tech, rather than deploy it, cleared the way for the Finns to rule the mobe roost.)

A year later in 1981, Thatcher’s British Telecommunications Act put Blighty’s phone network firmly on the road to privatisation: by 1984, British Telecommunications plc (now just BT plc) was trading shares, running British Telecom’s systems and, crucially, it lost its exclusive ownership of the entire communications market.

From then on, BT bosses had to come up with better technology and services to win customers in the face of fresh competition from private-sector operators – which could offer competing lines, phones and other products.

And lo, Brits can buy wired handsets made by Siemens, Panasonic or NEC; call someone from a field using kit designed by Samsung, Apple, BlackBerry or Nokia; and watch yesterday’s TV and browse El Reg over copper phone lines or Virgin Media’s fibre optic cable, to name a few names. You can read more about BT’s privatisation saga here [PDF].

Kickstarting the startups

It was Thatcher’s love for the private sector that also injected a dose of entrepreneurial spirit into Blighty’s arm: her belief that anyone could achieve anything with the right idea at the right time appealed to many.

Her eventual low interest rates, axed bureaucracy, and low taxes encouraged British firms. The nation’s fledging computer hardware and software makers Acorn, Sage, Sinclair and Amstrad hit their stride in and around Thatcher’s reign.

The 1980s British personal computer market was fiercely fought, turbulent and riddled with rotten luck, which partly explains why we’re not using Core i5-powered Sinclair machines today. But the biggest success was the ARM team that sprang from Acorn; its low-power RISC processor design is today the planet’s most popular embedded processor architecture.

Amstrad founder Lord Alan Sugar, who was one of Thatcher’s favourites, tweeted yesterday:

Allan Sugar Tweet on ThatcherBorn in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, as Margaret Roberts, Thatcher, whose father was a grocer, entered the world of science and technology after leaving school.

She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated in 1947; worked for a plastics company; and (legend has it) helped invent soft ice cream as a food scientist in the laboratory of J Lyons – the catering giant that created the world’s first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO).

She became an MP in 1959, and by the time she rose to the top of the Tory party, she had set her sights on privatising Britain’s shipbuilding and aerospace operations. Ex-premier Harold Macmillan, a leading Conservative, warned she was selling the family silver.

But telecoms was arguably the most successful of Thatcher’s deregulations. Without her personal belief and her change of the laws on regulation and private ownership, Britain’s comms network would have remained a closed market – with no alternative handsets and equipment and no competing communications services to keep the Post Office on its toes.

Blighty’s phone, and ultimately internet, connectivity may well have been in a completely different state without her intervention; we could all be using drab Post Office-issued handsets that attempt to outdo kit from global giants.

Some will counter that deregulation of telecoms and the rise of the computer entrepreneur were inevitable. But it was under Thatcher, who was ousted in 1990, that Britain witnessed its first semiconductor-powered hardware explosion, sowing the seeds for tech startups and the consumption of home electronics by the masses.

See also: To blame Margaret Thatcher for today’s problems is to misunderstand history

Plus: Margaret Thatcher: History of one of the first Right To Buy council houses

‘Exclusive: One of the first council houses sold under Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme has just been purchased for more than 20 times its original value’

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Skype trojan forces Bitcoin mining, security firm warns

  By Robin Crorie | 08/04/2013 - 14:45 | Technology/Computing
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A trojan that can hijack a computer and force it into mining for Bitcoins – the virtual currency – has been spreading via Skype.

Antivirus firm Kaspersky Labs said attackers sent messages in various languages translating to “this my favourite picture of you”. The message included a malicious link which was, at its peak, being accessed more than 2,000 times every hour.

The value of Bitcoin has grown massively in recent weeks. At the time of writing, Bitcoin exchange website Mt Gox has the currency listed as being worth $186 (£121).

CPU abuse

Unlike other currencies, Bitcoins are not issued by a central bank or other centralised authority. Instead users are rewarded in a process called “mining”, in which coins are issued to a user when they solve a complicated mathematical problem using their computer.

The trojan hijacks a victim’s machine and makes it mine for Bitcoins on the attacker’s behalf. The greater the number of machines mining, the quicker coins will be harvested.

“Most of the potential victims live in Italy then Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Ukraine and others,” wrote Dmitry Bestuzhev from Kaspersky Labs in a blog post. The attack “dropper” originates from a server in India, but once installed transmits information back to a control centre in Germany, Mr Bestuzhev wrote.

The trojan is able to carry out many tasks, he added, but taking over computers for Bitcoin mining appears to be its primary function. “It abuses the CPU of infected machines to mine Bitcoins for the criminal. The campaign is quite active. If you see your machine is working hard, using all available CPU resources, you may be infected.”
 

BBC story

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Hire social media snoopers to gather online intelligence, think-tank urges forces

  By surreywebmaster | 02/04/2013 - 10:36 | Policing - General, Technology/Computing
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Police forces should hire social media experts who will act as Twitter and Facebook ‘snoopers’ to collect intelligence, according to think-tank Demos.

In their report, Policing in the Information Age, published today, the think-tank advocate a senior officer be responsible to lead on criminal intelligence in social media with a dedicated central national ‘hub’.

Demos’s Centre for Analysis of Social Media (CASM) suggest that forces need to use social networks more effectively and help police respond to situations like the riots in 2011 where Twitter and Facebook mapped some of the violence.

Jamie Bartlett, Director of CASM at Demos, and co-author of the report said: “Social media has transformed the way we communicate and opened up new opportunities for the police to fight crime and protect the public. While forces have started using social media to communicate with the public, the riots exposed a real blind spot when it comes to the police’s ability to monitor rapidly changing situations using it.”

Steve White, vice-chair of the Police Federation, says the advent and growth of digital social media clearly demonstrates that forces need to adapt to meet the challenges of policing in the 21st century.

He added: “The issue of the collection of intelligence from whatever source should be the responsibility of force intelligence units. These officers should have the skills and training necessary to undertake this task whilst complying with nationally recognised standards. It is imperative that intelligence is handled in a consistent way so that it can be used effectively.”

The report suggests a legal framework setting out how and why police can access social media for intelligence. Social media ‘chiefs’ to coordinate online communication, ensuring staffing to cover accounts 24/7.

Demos argue that a single senior head of social media in forces could facilitate ‘e-neighbourhood watch’ schemes that allow the public to share information and alert the police of suspicious activity.

Mr Bartlett says: “Establishing one central command for monitoring social media intelligence and encouraging local constabularies use social media to work with law-abiding members of the community would go a long way to ensure officers are better equipped to meet the challenges of 21st century policing.

“However, just because something is on social media does not make it a free for all. A clear framework to make sure the way the police use social media is proportionate, accountable, and recognises the right to privacy, is essential if this potential is to be realised.”

Hire social media snoopers to gather online intelligence, think-tank urges forces

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“Young people are just not aware of the constraints, so why not go build a social network, for example?”

  By surreywebmaster | 25/03/2013 - 18:00 | In The News, Technology/Computing
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British teen sells app for millions

A south London schoolboy has become one of the world’s youngest tech millionaires after selling his mobile app to Yahoo!.

Nick D’Aloisio, 17, is the creator of Summly, an iPhone app that condenses<br /> news articles into three key paragraphs that fit a mobile screen.

Nick D’Aloisio, 17, is the creator of Summly, an iPhone app that condenses news articles 

Nick D’Aloisio, 17, developed the app, called Summly, while revising for his mock GCSEs in 2011.

The app, which summarises news stories, will now close and its features will be used in mobile products at Yahoo!. Nick will also start a full-time job at the web giant while he studies for his A-levels.

He said: “I’m hoping to stay [at Yahoo!] as long as it takes to get the technology integrated.

“We were approached a few months ago and what really excited me was their mobile strategy.

“I think this is an amazing opportunity and I didn’t want to miss it.”

Sources familiar with the deal indicated that Nick received almost $30 million for the app, which has been downloaded around one million times since its launch last year.

Yahoo! said in a statement: “We’re excited to share that we’re acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise.”

“At the age of 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight – that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance.”

Nick, who lives with his family in Wimbledon, said he had “boring” plans for the money. “I’m planning to invest it – my parents are in control of it,” he said. “I want to buy a shoulder bag.”

Summly condenses news articles into three key paragraphs that fit onto an iPhone screen. Users can customise the news categories and link to the original article if they like the summary.

A prototype attracted an investment of around $300,000 in November 2011 from Horizons Ventures, the private technology investment company of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing – also a backer of Facebook, Siri and Spotify.

The investment arrived on Nick’s 16th birthday – making him one of the youngest people ever to attract venture capital funding. Other backers include the celebrities Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Yoko Ono.

The funding allowed Nick to develop Summly with experts in London and the Stanford Research Institute.

Nick’s mother, a full-time lawyer, became a director and owns shares on his behalf.

Nick will join Yahoo’s London office, while two Summly employees will join the firm in San Francisco.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, has named mobile technology as a top priority for the company. In January, she said she was focused on technology that will personalize content from the web and deliver it to people on their handheld devices.

Nick, who taught himself to code aged 12, told the Telegraph ahead of the app’s launch last November: “I’m described as a net native, so I was born when the internet was founded and have only known a world with internet.

“Young people are just not aware of the constraints, so why not go build a social network, for example?”

He added: “I was using Google and Bing and there were so many results to scroll through it was really inefficient.

“So I built an algorithm that shared them and trimmed them. Then it just transformed into the idea of: ‘why not just summarise news in general?’.”

Nick D'Aloiso

See: Summly

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Microsoft reports on how often it helps police with their enquiries

  By surreywebmaster | 22/03/2013 - 10:00 | Policing - General, Technology/Computing
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Microsoft LogoPromises half-yearly reviews going forward 

Microsoft has joined the list of companies opening up about its cooperation with THE MAN with its own report on how often it helped out the police last year, and says it’ll issue updates on the situation every six months.

Redmond came in for some stick in January when a coalition of activists, privacy organizations, and journalists called for it to follow the example of Google (and more recently Twitter) in being more open about what information it hands over the police. Of particular concern is the data on Skype, whose privacy or lack of it is worrying many users.

“In recent months, there has been broadening public interest in how often law enforcement agencies request customer data from technology companies and how our industry responds to these requests,” said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith in a blog post. “We seek to build further on the industry’s commitment to transparency by releasing our own data today.”

In 2012 Microsoft received 75,378 law enforcement requests for customer information, spread over 137,424 accounts. Of these Microsoft agreed to help uncover user content in 2.1 per cent of cases, but this data only covers Hotmail/Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365 – with a separate data set for Skype.

Only 11 requests came in from the police about Microsoft’s enterprise customers, with the rest targeting private consumers. Only four of these requests were granted, and only after consultation with the companies involved.

Turkish police were the most common callers for Microsoft’s non-Skype services, with 11,434 requests just beating out the police in the US who filed 11,073. But the US cops got the most support from Redmond, which acceded to over 13 per cent of their enquiries in comparison to less than 1 per cent from the Turks. There were only 14 disclosures of customer content outside the US, in Brazil, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand.

The UK was in third place with 9,226 requests, but the British bobbies got a less than 1 per cent return rate too. But when it comes to Skype requests the Brits asked Redmond more often than anyone else with 1,268 requests out of a global total of 4,713 – but Microsoft handed out no content information for any Skype calls last year, just names and emails of some users.

Microsoft reports on how often it helps police with their enquiries

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Forget pounds and pence and euros and cents – think bitcoins and satoshis

  By surreywebmaster | 22/03/2013 - 09:42 | Technology/Computing
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Never heard of bitcoins?  Can’t say I had until I saw this article in The Register: -

Bitcoin prices spike on Euro woes

bit_coinSpanish citizens hiding their currency under the bed

The well-publicised idea that Cyprus could pinch ten per cent of all local savings accounts to help pay for its government’s budgetary woes seems to have sparked a rush of interest in the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin apps are soaring up the download charts in Spain, of all places, based on BGR reports that the iPhone Bitcoin Gold app cracked the Spanish top-100 to position number 72, while Bitcoin Ticker leapt from the five hundreds to number 52.

Bloomberg quotes ConvergEx strategist Nick Colas as saying “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.” However, he added, it’s only good for small amounts: “The liquidity is just not there in the system for multimillion dollar transactions”.

Zerohedge wrote on Wednesday that “the value of the virtual currency has soared almost 30 percent in the last two days”, from €37 to over €50, with volumes rising as well.

Back in America, Bitcoins are attracting greater regulatory attention, with Ars reporting that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network says Bitcoin exchangers must comply with anti-money-laundering laws.

If enough Euros flow into the crypto-currency, El Reg would expect regulatory notice from Brussels to arrive sooner rather than later.

What is bitcoin?

WeUseCoins

See also: What is Bitcoin? The future digital currency explained

PLUS:  Bitcoin: Seven reasons to be wary

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Police accuse Reuters hack of helping Anonymous hackers

  By surreywebmaster | 15/03/2013 - 10:04 | In The News, Policing - General, Technology/Computing
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‘Social media editor aided Tribune defacement’

The Department of Justice has charged the deputy social media editor of Reuters with helping hackers from Anonymous gain access to the main servers of the Tribune Company in 2010 so that they could deface news sites.

Matthew Keys, 26, is accused of conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer, transmitting information to damage a protected computer, and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer. In the worst case, he could be facing 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines if found guilty.

The DOJ claims Keys met with members of Anonymous in an online forum in December 2010 and gave them a user name and password for servers at KTXL FOX 40, where he had worked as a web editor. This gave them access to Tribune Company servers, and the hackers went on to make changes on the Los Angeles Times website.

According to the indictment, when Keys was told about the hack, he replied, “nice.” He then gave more help to one of the attackers who had been locked out by Tribune system administrators, and “encouraged the Anonymous members to disrupt the website,” the DOJ states.

Reuters, Keys’ current employer, has said that it is investigating the case, but pointed out that the alleged events took place before Keys joined its organization. “Any legal violations, or failures to comply with the company’s own strict set of principles and standards, can result in disciplinary action,” said a spokesman.

The spokesman said that Reuters will make no further comment while the court case is ongoing, while Keys himself says it’s business as usual.

Matthew Keys Twitter

Police accuse Reuters hack of helping Anonymous hackers

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