November 2008 Archives

"A Fine Balance", the joint conference of four Knowledge Transfer Networks in Thursday provided an excellent update on the current state of "privacy enhancing technologies". When I introduced the Earl of  Erroll I made the point that the Lord High Constable of Scotland was not only the sole cybersecurity professional in either House of Parliament, he is also the only person genetically cleared to draw a sword in the presence of the monarch

Recession is a time to catch up on maintenance and training. Slump is a time for radical change in order to survive. That means you will need a very different skills mix when recovery comes. But so will everyone else. You will go down in the competition for the new skills. The same is true for UK plc. Part of the national recovery package should be a short order "tax free training" programme to use the opportunity to reskill the existing UK workforce for the 21st century.

Reviews and postponements of big public sector ICT projects are politically popular but are now hitting industry cash flows hard. When spend restarts ministers will almost certainly wish to follow private sector good practice with incremental, rapid payback projects within strategic frameworks. You can help shorten the transition period.

The Committee on Standards in Public Life has just published its latest Survey of public attitudes towards conduct in public life . Do read it, not just the extracts. Then read the Register on e-voting experience in Finland . It is not just the UK that has problems of communication and trust between the politicians and the electorate.

How much difference did the Internet really make to the US election?  And how much of what they did would be illegal in the UK? - for example the massive, but also untraceable, donations to campaign funds raised over the Internet.

The shut down of the Government Gateway after an apparent compromise may influence your response to the NHS consultation on other uses of oatient data, on which I blogged on Friday. It should not. There is whole array of privacy enhancing technologies that can be used to prevent such failures. The problem is not hardware or software. "Its the wetware stupid".