Recent Blog Posts

So we all know that Google Glass is (kind of) available now and it represents one of the most progressive manifestations yet of real 'wearable' technology, right?

When IoT connected fridges send out spam : https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Open-Source-Insider/When-IoT-connected-fridges-send-out-spam #forgerock #IoT #spam ...

Since the discovery of the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, organisations and individuals alike have shown great concern over their data and how best to protect it. With the growing use of smartphones and ...

Five things I've learned about building an innovative technology company1. An idea is nothing without executionIdeas are overrated.

Ever since last year, the 3D printing sensation has been steadily growing, with Gartner predicting that 3D printer sales will double by 2015. This year 3D printing is still a prominent trend, ...

Unless you live in a cave, Victorian style external toilet or Bear Grylls style treehouse in the Outer Hebrides it is safe to say you will have read about the Heartbleed bug.

An obvious "solution" is therefore to offer apprenticeship contracts to those you wish to retain or redeploy, to fill the gaps in their knowledge, as well as to new recurits, and then volunteer to ...

open source extends way beyond the boundaries that you may initially denote to the movement

As I expected we keep finding more and more security vulnerabilities in devices that shouldn't have them: essential control systems that govern the safety of critical infrastructure. The latest ...

Dropped through my door last week was the flyer advertising Infosecurity Europe 2014. The theme is "Security as a business enabler - are you fit for 2014?" It is an unfortunate choice of words, ...

The FDM everywoman in Technology Awards are a celebration of the contribution that women make to technology and more broadly the role they play in business. Recently I was honoured to have been ...

Two London councils have embarked on a scheme to sell IT services for profit after concluding their cost-saving backoffice merger could grab them a big slice of the £144bn local government ...

In today's world of acronyms and jargon, there are increasing references to the Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine (M2M) or a 'steel collar' workforce. It doesn't really matter what you ...

Jevons Paradox: why better technology leads to 'even more' technology

In the distributive trades sector, post & courier firms devote the largest proportion of their turnover to expenditure on IT & telecom. At some 3% this is half as much again as the next ...

It is a very good question. I would be delighted to hear from a reader who knows the answer. If BT has been able to get rates reductions for such exchanges then I would simply say "congratulations ...

This consultation is an opportunity to not only expose current inequities and iniquities but to suggest ways forward that will help pull through investment in alternative networks and end ...

Nesta has published research into Britain's attitudes on innovation and technological change, categorising respondents of its quiz into five personas.

Fusion-io's SQL Server-snuggle: "cut through, not cut throat"

Interesting story last week that two of France's IT service providers have come together in a "friendly" merger that will cut costs and probably more importantly make them more attractive to ...

Watch out...the HMRC is using big data analytics to catch corporate tax avoiders. The taxman is taking advantage of open source Hadoop technology to scour tax returns for compliance. So it is ...

The perpetrators of the Heartbleed bug hack on UK parenting website Mumsnet are to be punished in the most appropriate manner if they are ever apprehended.Mumsnet members will receive a calendar of ...

PCs remain the most common means of accessing IT within an organisation. Despite moves toward VDI, the majority of organisations will still have PC estates that they find difficult to manage.

I have written a few articles recently about how large internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter could be the biggest threat to retail banks for many of their services.Facebook is moving ...

The recommendations made as a result of the publicity for heartbleed do not help rebuild confidence: initially "change your password", the "Change your password, but do not do so until any infected ...

We haven't even managed to get mobile payments up and running successfully and the furthest we've really got with fingerprint technology is being able to unlock our expensive iPhone 5s, but an ...

IT automation company Chef has played its annual PR joker trump card this week and suggested that a new 'power-class' of developers is emerging. NOTE: The firm produces a model for automating IT ...

Public administration organisations are the top spenders on system software with a commitment approaching £600m. Next in line are telecommunication companies with an expenditure of over £400m. ...

This is a guest blog by Sheree Atcheson founder of Women Who Code UK (Belfast and London).

Opening Box to open source

Just finished some testing at test equipment partner Spirent's offices in glamorous Crawley with client Voipex - some fab results on VoIP optimization so watch this space for the forthcoming report ...

The wearable technology trend that is sweeping the world has so far mainly been about health monitors and fitness bands to track your activities. But the SunnyCam is more towards the Google Glass ...

Imperial College, London has officially launched its Data Science Institute, announced last year. And the government has announced £42 funding for the Alan Turing Institute, location to be decided. ...

The exposure of the Heartbleed bug that causes a major security vulnerability in many websites has handed a gift to the anti-open source lobby.One of the most popular claims boasted by the open ...

Never shy of a long product name, TIBCO this week is hanging out the bunting and flags to celebrate the arrival of TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks 6.0 -- a "technology-neutral platform" for data. ...

Portuguese developer event hosts ZX Spectrum and Atari inspired retro coding jam

Management consultancy firms commit almost 5% of their turnover to IT & telecoms spend. The corresponding all UK value is 2%. For larger management consultancies the proportion is over 8% ...

As the web has evolved so have the security products and services that control our use of it. In the early days of the "static web" it was enough to tell us which URLs to avoid because the content ...

If a 35-hour work week and six weeks of paid vacation is not enough reason to move to France, the no email after 18h00 rule is pretty compelling all on its own. A deal signed by tech industry ...

Could cancelling Lovefilm subscriptions be the only blemish on Amazon's almost dreamlike customer services?I recently wrote an article on this blog about Amazon Web Services. The article was about ...

Local councils behind an ambitious public open source software scheme that flourished briefly with boom-time investment under the last government are attempting to revive it under the cost-cutting ...

With Windows XP reaching the end of its days, a lot of people are considering moving onwards and upwards. We've reviewed devices running Windows 8.1 before, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet, and ...

I was one told by someone that It suppliers have an attitude of "any news is good news." What they meant is if a journalist is writing about you in a reputable magazine it is good news even if the ...

Developers are getting their hands dirty inside the mechanics of the cloud to an increasing degree every day.

Small business service provider GoDaddy has teamed up with the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) to expand the awareness of women's contribution to the tech sector and to encourage more participation in ...

Few could doubt that the government's G-Cloud purchasing framework has been a success so far. More than £100m has been spent through it, opening up the market to SMEs and saving taxpayers' money ...

Many IT industry commentators (not least Quocirca) constantly hassle IT managers to align their activities more closely with those of the businesses they serve; to make sure actual requirements are ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog written by Lacey Thoms, a marketing specialist and blogger at Protecode

The problems we have stem from the fact that we are trying to run motorway traffic levels over roads, most of which were not designed to cope with big volumes. The disease of hackers/hacker ...

If sound is not the next (social media) killer app, then surely it could be the next killer application consideration.

Medium sized printing companies outspend all other similar sized manufacturing firms in their outlay on IT & telecom staff. At almost £600k per enterprise it is a third greater than next placed ...

Intel has beefed up its open source single-board computer and cut its price in half.

The launch of the BCS scholarships last year coincided with my decision to re-train as a computing teacher - so it worked out really well for me. Everything lined up at the right time.

Several weeks ago an Australian friend of mine sent me a delightful note pointing out how recent events and media reporting had confirmed some controversial points I had made last year in the ...

The software-defined business cometh

And so the most popular PC operating system of all time reaches the final winter of its years.Windows XP goes out of regular support on 8 April, but it is testament to its enduring success that ...

Technology is changing. The consumerisation of enterprise IT is putting pressure on CIOs to change how they operate.So how do CIOs retain relevance in a world where business executives buy their ...

The Government Digital Service's (GDS) has announced the next round of procurement for the Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP), which will expand the use of a federation of private-sector Identity ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Mark Warren of Perforce Software.

The great and the good among the software application development coding community were invited to Microsoft's Build 2014 conference in San Francisco last night.

Travel agents & tour operators spend £1,000 per employee on telecom services. This is twice the UK norm. Smaller travel business concerns outlay is around £1,400 which is twice the expenditure ...

Oracle appears to be a little riled by the sudden appearance of cloud computing upstart, Workday in London this week.

High performance computing in the cloud will make supercomputing a possibility for companies of all sizes.I have written about the attraction of public clouds such as Amazon Web Services for raw ...

The US Internet CERT organisation warns ISPs about the danger of open NTP servers. The Shadowserver Foundation has found 4.7 million vulnerable servers

Has SkySQL MariaDB pulled off the NoSQL + SQL combo challenge?

Portable mass storage is becoming the norm these days, whether for transporting data or just for a backup you can hide somewhere safe. The G-Drive from G Technology is designed to provide a highly ...

You and your peers should use this review as the starting gun for a stampede to trample under foot as those who stand in the way of giving your business, your local business park and your local ...

VDI can be a daunting task. However, newer approaches to software and desktop management are making life easier.

Many enterprises are turning to a managed print service (MPS) to minimise the headache of managing an often complex and costly print environment. Through device consolidation, optimisation of ...

SAP is a clinical German company with a stoic approach to hard graft and no perceptible sense of humour, right?

Medium sized retailers with 100-999 staff commit £500 per employee on computer services. This is 25% more than their larger counterparts who invest £400. Both, however, have expenditures notably ...

MarkLogic champions 'semantic context' for NoSQL data insight

Is the poor user experience because they are on cheap, unbundled and overloaded crapband, delivering well below the claimed performance? Is it because they are on an elderly and slow PC. Or is it ...

This week I attended Women Who Code's first London meet up which was organised for females wanting to learn web development (Ruby, HTML and CSS).

News reaches Downtime that Code Club‎, a volunteer network that runs after-school groups to teach programming to kids, dropped by Westminster this week to try to pass on some scripting skills to ...

One of the main reasons that I got into computer science is influence from my father - he has previously been a programmer and inspired me to take up the subject at college and then at University.

The firm has recently announced the addition of data-in-motion encryption as a new feature in its Zettaset Orchestrator management and security add-on application for Hadoop.

Hence my comment that Information Security is an unsuitable job for a man and my strong support for plans to organise trips for schoolgirls to visit Bletchley and start preparing for the jobs of ...

The over-used phrase "price war" has rarely had a lot of relevance in the corporate IT market. At best, we may have seen PC or server makers cutting prices by a few percentage points, or more ...

Java 8 has been reengineered with the strength of Project Lambda Expressions.

Oracle's Java coding cognoscenti gathered in the Czech capital of Prague this week to analyse, present and postulate over the arrival of the Java 8 language.

DevOps is a real job now, it's official

So, is the tablet then the new centre of attention?

Wholesalers' expenditure on software development tools is £40 per employee. This is half the national average. For smaller wholesale trading companies, the spend is comparable with the all UK ...

A largish company in Soho has just moved offices and now has a hot desk policy. Only issue is that there aren't enough desks for everyone. The only people guaranteed to have a desk is those with ...

Milton Friedman will be turning in his grave as a report published this week seems to imply that his laissez-faire economic stance doesn't work. The OFT's report into government procurement of IT ...

It had to happen. In the wake of Google's Glass internet-enabled spectacles getting rave reviews from tech geeks (not a great thing for fashion-wear) and noses turned up from fashion geeks (not a ...

As Orson Welles in the Third Man said: "In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."Continuing the film theme, ...

Actifio this week announced it had gained another $100m in funding, adding to a previous round of $107m, and according to Ash Ashutosh, founder and chief executive of Actifio, that pushes its ...

Time for a data centre review? Looking at co-location? If not, maybe you should.

The hardest has been that for the study on how to balance privacy, security, consumer choice and a seamless Internet with the aspirations of suppliers to have global control over data on their ...

The global Internet community now has an opportunity to further strengthen the multistakeholder model. We can ensure the continued evolution of the IANA functions and security of the Internet. And, ...

Companies supplying waste management services spend £50 per employee on customised software. This is notably less than the all UK value of £125. Analyses by size of organisation shows similar ...

It is not just smart TVs that require you to agree to global surveillance by you technology or service provider and those to whom they decide to provide information. Do you care? What are you going ...

Payment methods have been slowly evolving for over the last ten years, from cash, to cheques to cards. Now you can even pay in cheques using a smartphone and use contactless card payment in ...

The NoSQL and relational database camps emerged fighting in 2013

If you want to know how the workplace is changing, look no further than the startling results from a recent survey which showed that 62% of IT contractors claim the lack of "office politics" is ...

It's lonely at the top - or so they say. But that doesn't seem to be the case for IT leaders. A survey by the Cabinet Office has revealed the most satisfied workers in the country. It seems that IT ...

If you haven't already seen, Dame Wendy Hall won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 FDM everywoman awards this week.

Telecoms supplier BT could be asked to account for drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia after connecting a fibre-optic cable to a US military base conducting the strikes.The revelation comes from a ...