September 2008 Archives

We have a multi-track skills market. The staff lucky enough to work for those who participated in the CELRE survey enjoyed increases in line with inflation (RPI) during the year to May 2008 while advertised salaries, as tracked by the equally venerable SSP survey, lagged behind anre are now often lower than for those in post. Meanwhile graduate recruitment programmes have been cancelled and recruitment advertising has fallen sharply.

The Internet is the most concentrated and regulated communications system the world has ever known. Players like Google or Microsoft take a far larger revenue share of the markets within which they operate than Standard Oil, Ma Bell or IBM ever did. Meanwhile over 500 agencies and regulators in the UK alone claim powers to access traffic data or stored content: albeit almost none are capable of securing what they demands.

The loss of the Home Office prisoner mash-up on an unencrypted USB appears to have triggered a long overdue "review" of the national children's database ("the honeypot for pederasts"). Meanwhile the inflexibility of current contracts and the drop in the value of sterling have triggered similarly fundamental reviews of private sector ICT strategies..

The recent Home Office data loss should be put into the perspective of the previously unpublicised loss of a million bank records and the consultation on implementation of the EU Data Retention Directive, plans to collate that which is retained in a central database, the recommendations of papers like "The power of information" and the services already available from Google, let alone those being proposed by Garlik  Phorm and others.