Government’s piracy policy based on evidence, at last

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

The Government spent much of this morning back-pedalling from its site-blocking plans, with Business Secretary Vince Cable endorsing the Hargreaves’ Review into modernising copyright laws.

It’s generally good news, with the Government accepting sensible recommendations from Professor Ian Hargreaves as well as surprisingly useful advice from Ofcom – format shifting will be legalised (although details on how far that will extend are scarce) and site-blocking will be left to the courts, where it belongs.

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Internet censorship: the slippery slope starts here

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Do you remember good old AOL? The once near ubiquitous, “family-friendly” ISP that only let certain “safe” websites into its walled garden, and practically forbade users to venture any further. Think Steve Jobs crossed with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Well we’re all AOL customers now: or at least, that’s what the Government would like us to be.

A few weeks after Conservative MP Claire Perry tested the waters by suggesting ISPs should apply cinema-style age ratings to pornographic sites, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey has all but made it Government policy (i.e. he told The Sunday Times).

“This is a very serious matter,” he told the newspaper. “I think it’s very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children,” threatening to do so by law if the ISPs don’t get it together, much like the previous Labour Government did over music piracy and the ensuing Digital Economy Act – and look how swimmingly that worked out!

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Is Sir Philip Green the real waste of money?

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

Sir Philip Green is today being praised by the Prime Minister for his “solid” report into the “crazy” levels of spending in Government departments. Green has skipped off his yacht with Kate Moss for just long enough to claim that Whitehall is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds, with IT procurement one of his chief bugbears.

His findings are based on some of the flimsiest research I’ve ever seen.  On page 13 of the report (PDF), for example, he laments the money being wasted on printer cartridges. Some Government departments are paying as much as £398 for printer cartridges, while others are picking them up for only £86 – a 78% difference in price. The horror!

What Green apparently hasn’t noticed is that all printer cartridges aren’t the same. Was that £398 cartridge for the monster A3 laser printer in the Department of Education, while the £86 toner was for the personal A4 laser printer sitting on Andy Coulson’s desk in the Number 10 press office? We don’t know. The report doesn’t state.

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Digital Economy Bill: MPs didn’t know what they were talking about

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Two things spoilt my holiday last week: one was a nasty bout of conjunctivitis, the other was something far more ugly – the passing of the Digital Economy Bill.

Call me an old-fashioned sentimentalist if you will, but when passing laws, shouldn’t the politicians responsible at least have the first clue what they’re talking about? (That is, of course, assuming they turn up to talk about it at all: 236 MPs voted on the bill, yet only a small fraction of that number actually bothered attending the risibly curtailed debates.)

I listened intently to much of the debates. I could do little else given my eyes were gummed together. And while I didn’t expect the vast majority of MPs to be particularly tech savvy, the levels of ignorance on display – even from the Minister for Digital Britain himself – was nothing short of scandalous. They literally didn’t know what they were talking about.

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Tax return system works, um, smoothly

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

After last year’s tax return debacle, which saw the Inland Revenue site collapse when 204,000 people attempted to enter their return on deadline day, it’s reassuring to see that this time it just worked.

Purely for the sake of research, and by no means due to me putting it off for a number of weeks for no particular reason, I found myself going through the various steps between 10.30 and 11.30 last night. And it worked without a hitch.

Perhaps part of the reason is because HMRC has greatly simplified the procedure – for instance, I wasn’t forced to enter all the details of The Guardian when declaring the magnificent £75 I earned for a piece on its website – but perhaps a bigger reason is because the team behind the system has done an excellent job in load testing and simulating.

It’s great to see a company, or in this case public service, learn the lessons from previous problems and rare that they get praise for doing so. Somehow, I doubt HMRC will get as much attention this year as they did last: people love to read, talk and write about failure, whereas success just doesn’t make a good headline.

Which rather reflects life as an IT professional as a whole. Make a mistake, everyone notices. Get something right, nobody seems to give a damn.

Government-commissioned review says Government shouldn’t spend money shocker

Friday, September 12th, 2008

With the Chancellor perfecting his Private Frazer impression (”we’re doomed”), the chances of the Government handing over a fiver, let alone the £5 billion needed to bring fibre to the country’s cabinets, were remote. 

So it will surprise absolutely no-one that a Government-commissioned report into so-called “next-generation access” has reached the heady conclusion that the Government would be best advised to do chuff all. 

“There is little evidence that, in the short term, UK consumers will experience a detriment due to the lack of an extensive NGA network,” concludes the report’s author, former Cable and Wireless boss, Francesco Caio. Perhaps he should try getting out a bit more, because if he ventured even 50 miles outside of his comfy London office and started talking to people on the edges of BT’s rural exchanges, he would have found plenty of homes and businesses that are struggling on sub 1Mb/sec connections.

This very morning, in fact, Cisco released a report that claimed only Japan has the broadband quality to cope with next-generation web apps. The UK fell below the threshhold required for today’s apps, let alone the ones coming round the corner. 

 The case for public funding is debatable; the fact that Britain’s broadband network remains woefully inadequate is indisputable. 

The seven month hitch

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Back in January I decided to chase up a rumour that the Government was planning to radio-tag serious offenders so it could track their movements. So, I did my research, wrote some words and rang the prison’s service to see if anybody fancied having a chat about it – confirm, deny, ignore. Whatever. Seven months later, I got my response.

Seven months… that’s 213 days, 639 meals, five and half million breathes, 1,704 hours of sleep. Empires have fallen quicker than that.

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