Top 10 IT news stories of the week: Hitting Belgacom while it's down, and could Universal Credit be in a worse state than realised?
Candid interviews dominate the top 10: David Davis MP, Belgacom's Fabrice Clement and a job centre whistleblower
10. Backbytes: Mad Hungarian plan to tax every gigabyte of data
In a world where we hear of dastardly governments doing quite preposterous things, perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when we heard of the Hungarian government's plan to tax ISPs for every single gigabyte of data that their users download.
Inevitably, the ridiculous tax would be levied at the ISP level, and would be passed on to consumers, who understandably complained - not just on Facebook, they even managed to arrange a sizeable demonstration in the capital, Budapest. According to one estimate, the tax could have raised the equivalent of around £450m (if people didn't change their behaviour) - except the government actually backed down following the demonstration.
While it has been clear to see the impact that online-only companies, like Amazon.com, eBuyer and Ocado, have had on retailers, forcing them to drop prices and grow their own online presence, what many of the well-established retail giants may not have cottoned onto is the amount of information that shoppers can now share, and learn about retailers' dirty little marketing secrets.
This dissemination of information is at the heart of supermarket giants' increasing challenges at the hands of discounters, yet their management don't seem to understand that the game has changed: information is power, and is increasingly being used by consumers against established retailers.
8. Hybrid cloud - the future is open source
While moving to a hybrid cloud model is indeed the path many companies are seriously contemplating, or have actually moved to, many stick to proprietary hybrid cloud services from the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. John Leonard looks at open-source alternatives to those services, such as OpenStack and Docker. Could these give enterprises a more affordable and flexible alternative? Computing's research seems to point in that direction.
7. The Nadella controversy has highlighted an opportunity gap not just a pay gap
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's excruciating foot-in-mouth moment when he suggested that women in the IT industry should stop trying to close the "gender pay gap" and instead "have faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along", provoked much discussion about the so-called pay gap.
Writing for Computing, Suzy Dean, the CEO of a Microsoft Gold Partner in the UK, however, believes that the focus on the pay gap isn't the right issue - it should have been about the opportunity gap between men and women. She backed this up with figures from the likes of Gartner and Harvey Nash on the paucity of female CIOs. She feels that the first step in getting this right is to move on from the Nadella story altogether.
In a surprising, and yet refreshing response to a question from Computing, David Davis MP claimed that only a "small, but significant minority" of MPs in the House of Commons care about the issues of internet privacy and state surveillance raised by the Edward Snowden revelations.
Davis also claimed that Home Secretary Theresa May "was either being mischievous or didn't know what she was talking about" when she described meta-data as just your phone bill. But this, he added was just the way things were among MPs, who are typically in their forties and don't understand a great deal about technology.
To conclude, Davis suggested that our society was run by people with degrees in ‘piss-poor economics' (PPEs). Ouch?
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Top 10 IT news stories of the week: Hitting Belgacom while it's down, and could Universal Credit be in a worse state than realised?
Candid interviews dominate the top 10: David Davis MP, Belgacom's Fabrice Clement and a job centre whistleblower
5. Russia and China to sign cyber-security treaty
Russia and China share one of the world's longest land borders, which has been the source of much diplomatic tension in the past. Nevertheless, Russia and China are close to signing a cyber-security cooperation agreement so that they can conduct "joint cyber-security operations" - whatever that means. Essentially, the treaty could be a reaction to the two countries' position following the Edward Snowden revelations. Both Russia and China have protested to the US about the extent of NSA internet activities, while there has been a breakdown of many of the cyber initiatives involving the US and the two countries.
It isn't the first, and it surely won't be the last whistleblower to explain how the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) Universal Credit debacle is, well, rubbish.
In the words of a jobcentre employee, who was speaking to Channel 4's Dispatches, the project is "completely unworkable, badly designed and already out of date".
The project has been hit by delays, write-downs and extraordinary internal issues since its inception, and the latest revelations signal even more discontent with staff over a project that would supposedly generate £7bn in annual savings.
3. McLaren Mercedes battles cyber attacks by nation states - and staff intent on using Dropbox
Formula-1 racing team McClaren Mercedes's CIO Stuart Birrell has a huge job on his hands, ensuring that his organisation can fend off attacks from unnamed "nation states". According to Birrell, the intellectual property and profile of the company means that it is constantly an attack target. Indeed, he reveals, just four weeks ago there was prolonged firewall probe by a nation state "of Eastern origin".
And because of these kinds of attacks, it must be extremely annoying that many of his staff are still intent on using Dropbox and other unofficial tools to collaborate on high-tech projects. "It's a constant bane of my life," Birrell said. He hopes that cloud collaboration tools from Intralinks has headed-off those staff who would otherwise use Dropbox.
He believes a key issue is that the kids of today, now starting to move into the workplace, are used to sharing their whole lives on the internet. Surely, the latest generation may be daft enough to share their drinking escapades on Facebook, but understand that this stops when it comes to a piece of high-tech intellectual property that could be worth a fortune? According to Birrell, that's not necessarily the case...
2. Why Apple and Samsung could be heading for a fall along with the smartphone market that made them
Computing's Consulting Editor Chris Middleton delves deeper into the sustainability of the smartphone market and finds that the market has a less than certain future even though it may appear to be in permanent upswing. This is backed up by the likes of Nokia, BlackBerry and Motorola all tumbling, and even established giants such as Samsung beginning to struggle. The future could lie with technology and outsourcing companies within the Eastern world, he says.
1. GCHQ cyber-attack cost "several million euros", says Belgacom head of security
If it wasn't bad enough that your company was supposedly attacked by a security agency from a different country, then imagine the subsequent "clean-up" operation costing your firm "several million euros". And if that wasn't enough - how about an additional investment of €15m to beef up the organisations security response as a result?
Well, that all happened to Belgium's national telecom operator, Belgacom, according to the company's head of security and information management, Fabrice Clement. In a surprisingly candid interview, Clement also said that the company first identified the attack in June 2013, but only three months later realised the enormity and sophistication of the attack.
Although the Snowden leaks implicated GCHQ, Clement suggested that the company cannot be sure who was responsible. The criminal investigation is still ongoing.