Podcast: The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload – Episode 14

With Clare McDonald away on holiday, Downtime Upload regulars Brian McKenna and Caroline Donnelly are joined by Computer Weekly editor-in-chief Bryan Glick to pick over some of the week’s biggest stories.

• The team kick off the episode by casting a critical eye over the technology used by the police officers tasked with investigating the links between law enforcement and organised crime groups in hit BBC crime drama Line of Duty, the series finale of which aired over the bank holiday weekend.
• Technology is often used in the show to enable the characters to make major breakthroughs in the cases they are investigating, but does this ring true with how police forces use technology in real life, the team ponders?
• Huawei was in the news (yet again) this week, after a government inquiry was launched to establish which minister leaked confidential details of the National Security Council’s (NSC) discussions about whether the Chinese networking firm’s kit should be cleared for use in UK 5G networks.
• This probe led to the sacking of defence minister Gavin Williamson, prompting Bryan to observe how the furore surrounding Huawei is as much a political story as it is a technology one.
• Caroline, fresh off the plane from the inaugural OpenStack Foundation-backed Open Infrastructure Summit, shared details of some of the key discussion points that emerged from the show, including how its “open infrastructure push” is progressing.
• This included talk about how the OpenStack Foundation’s efforts to forge closer ties with adjacent open source communities are going, resulting in some surprising admissions from the organisation.
• Along similar lines, Brian caught up with Apache Hadoop co-founder Doug Cutting ahead of this year’s Strata conference in London, and picked his brains on what he makes of the public cloud market’s collective and recent rush to embrace open source technologies.