Zentelligence

Knowing Me – Knowing You

Should we carry a personal identity card? It’s a question that provokes strong feelings in our own society, particularly among those concerned over what they view as the growth of the ‘Big Brother’ govrnment and the decline of personal freedom. In reality, the issue is all about trust. Trusting our government or any government not to abuse a personal identity card scheme, through the uncontrolled and unrestricted joining-up of personal information between different agencies.

Authentication, is of course a pillar of government and has been since the beginning of history Today authentication is also the foundation principle of a wired society. Without strong authentication, knowing that you are, who you say you are, the development of a successful eGovernment programme becomes far more difficult.
I’m writing this somewhere over the Saudi Arabian desert, having just completed an eGovernment fact-finding visit to Kuwait. To be perfectly honest, you might not normally associate the Middle-east with the leading edge of eGovernment development but Kuwait, with only two and a half million people, is implementing projects that we in the UK can learn from.

Kuwaiti citizens, I’m told, generally trust their government, a remarkable thought by European standards. Furthermore, every Kuwaiti has a personal identification number from birth and a photo ID card beyond the age of nine. Around this one identity card and a secondary PIN number, a complete joined-up government system is being developed, which embraces, schools, hospitals, universities, the entire public sector.

If you happen to be a Kuwaiti who has recently left university and wish to apply for a career in the civil service, then the application process is mouse-driven. With remarkable simplicity, a human resources portal, allows you to type in your civil ID number to kick-start a very simple process. The portal conjures up an XML form which immediately cross-references your qualifications from your school or university and your address and a scanned photo from the interior ministry. You may add other details, such previous work experience as being married or not and your contact details and preference for email or SMS. Much like a dating agency, the system then matches your experience to any available vacancies and will inform you by email or SMS of which department to visit and when, for an interview.

Coming soon for the Kuwaitis will be a link into private sector / job centre-type databases, using their ID for financial transactions and Internet banking and a cross-reference link into the police databank, if the nature of the work involved demands a vetting procedure on the part of an employer.
Is this an example of joined-up government in practise, a threat to personal privacy or a benefit to the population? The Minister told me that they no longer suffer from long queues in government departments and the same applies to hospitals, where any doctor has all the visiting patient case-history available on a terminal and can even track a prescription via a pharmacy, informing him where and when the medicine was dispensed to the patient, eliminating any chance of prescription fraud.

Maybe you need a new driving license or your license expires, the system sends you an SMS or an email message to remind you. You then complete the on-line form and receive a tracking number, telling you where to collect your new document and from which numbered dispensing machine in the Ministry. Input the tracking number and the new card appears.

Of course, there’s the darker side to the force of progress, which perhaps wouldn’t be so welcome here. Let’s say that on the way home, you run through a speed camera over the limit. Minutes later, depending on your recorded contact preference, a SMS message arrives telling you what the fine is and how to pay, either via a smartphone or over the Internet. Your license plate and personal ID information have been cross referenced to complete the transaction

I could go on of course but I think you have the idea. The Kuwaiti’s are re-thinking all their processes and radically thinning down the painful process of dealing with government by using reliable authentication, new technologies and the Web to join-up their different government departments.

Back in Britain, identity fraud is rife and if, like me, you watched a recent BBC documentary, then you saw that a false passport or a driving license or national insurance number appears to be commoditized and as freely available as revolver or a packet of smuggled cigarettes. In fact, it seems to be increasingly difficult for our own government to be entirely certain of who anyone is anymore.

For the Kuwaitis, being able to prove that you are, who you say you are, appears to bring real benefits in the shape of thinner government and the rapid evolution of useful, identity-based services. For many of them, government is becoming a useful part of life, rather than a demanding burden that one has to carry at regular intervals.
Just imagine a Britain, where you could easily apply for a parking permit over the Internet or in my own case, avoid the wasted time involved in visiting the local Post Office to get a new tax disk? Of course, this is close to our own vision for 100% egovernment delivery by 2005 but identity remains the missing part of the puzzle and is of course the key to real eGovernment interaction. Quite honestly, I’m quite happy to carry an identity card if it brings us closer to the level of service I have seen in Kuwait.
But one final thought worries me about identity and I said as much to my Kuwaiti hosts. What if the technology evolves to a point where each person’s ID is actually based on their unique genetic identity. This is the strongest possible means of authentication and it has occurred to some of the Kuwaitis I spoke with. What would this mean and how would such sensitive information be cross-references and used?

Are you worried by the identity argument or should we follow Kuwait’s example for an easier life? Let me know.

A Marriage but No Honeymoon

Last year, I very unkindly suggested that Hewlett Packard’s CEO, Carly Fiorina, be forced to watch endless repeats of the classic Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch until she grasped that a merger with Compaq wasn’t the great idea she thought it was.

At first glance, the idea of an arranged marriage between Compaq’s Capellas and HP’s Fiorina, didn’t seem such a bad idea. After all both companies were struggling in the PC space against a highly aggressive Dell and Hewlett Packard had a hugely profitable printing and imaging business. Both companies were looking to leverage the economies of scale that would accompany a merger pooling their portfolios and simultaneously create a giant to squash Dell, rival IBM and partner with Microsoft, Oracle and Intel at the very top of the Enterprise.

As Compaq’s Capellas pointed out, a successful merger would see the industry consolidated down to five major players. The new HP/Compaq, IBM, Sun, Dell and EMC. Two of these, IBM and HP/Compaq would offer business a complete portfolio of products and services while the other three would offer only pieces of the puzzle.

Enterprise customers are increasingly demanding simplicity. They want to deal with fewer suppliers and are no longer keen on proprietary technologies. The world wants industry-standard building blocks these days rather than a mixed bag of liquorice allsorts and both Compaq and Hewlett Packard have recognised that take separately, their own portfolio isn’t enough to guarantee a place in a highly competitive and service oriented future.

What seemed like a good idea for Fiorina wasn’t a great idea in my mind, principally because these kinds of mergers rarely succeed. You only have to look at Compaq and Digital as an example of two cultures in collision. This acquisition arguably crippled Compaq. It lost its nimbleness, took its eye of the ball and let Dell lift swathes of its traditional market from right under its nose. Why should anyone think that a similar exercise with Hewlett Packard should be any more successful even if 15,000 jobs are cut as a result?

Integration takes time and a merger on this scale will be very painful indeed. The problem though, is that it’s to late to turn back. Whether it’s a good idea or not doesn’t matter anymore as both companies have come close to admitting that there is very little future in not merging, a view hardly likely to inspire great business confidence in either Compaq or Hewlett Packard. There’s no denying that both companies have some great products and good people but operationally, one needs to think of them as being like two huge cruise liners attempting to moor against each other in heavy seas. This industry moves extremely quickly and there’s a real danger that while the newly weds are busy setting up home, this new business will lose both momentum and message and opportunities will be lost forever.

I Told you I Was Sick
Spike Milligan

Software as a Service. Does it have a future? A question I’m trying to answer as my Virgin train lurches uncertainly on its way home from a seminar in Birmingham.

You’ve heard the sad story. Once upon a time it was ASP (Applications Service Provision) but nobody really wanted it, understood it or could afford it. Faced with its own obituary, it then became xSP or Managed Services (MSP), fractionally more attractive, as an acronym but hard-pressed to find customers who were prepared to take the risk or believe the promises being made for it.

Today, what was once ASP, is becoming increasingly mixed in with Web Services. Where one starts and another ends, remains a gray area for the analysts. ASP, you remember, started as a really clever way of delivering the popular and heavier, Office-type applications, to a thin client over an Internet or VPN connection. It was really Citrix by another name and explains why the company in conjunction with Microsoft, were seen as the driving forces behind the idea. The trouble of course was at the time, that the communications wasn’t up to the task and the sheer cost of setting up the infrastructure, invariably made applications delivery more expensive for the customer than simply buying software licenses. For the ASPs it was rather like building a new Disney theme park in the Midlands , relying on the rail network, with trains like the one I’m sitting in, to bring the customers, the last mile, to the door. It’s arguably cheaper and more comfortable to fly directly to Florida.

Software as a service is now becoming much more about smart web-enabled applications, as it should have been in the first place. True, the likes of Telewest are now in the business with partners such as 7Global and those big Microsoft Office and messaging applications can be provided by the services such as Blue Yonder. There are however many more examples of true web-enabled applications appearing from ISV’s, my favourite being Equology, the eCommerce development and web hosting service for small businesses which I use for my own web site.

ASP has changed, it’s grown up but very few people have noticed and are even prepared to find out, given the industry’s dismal track record for reliability. In this country, cheap broadband isn’t just good for the home user; it’s likely to have a major impact on the managed service market in the small business sector. Fast reliable access to component applications is going to make companies more confident about the ASP/xSP model.

The future will be one of mixed applications. Some will be local and others will be distributed along ASP lines. Today you don’t think twice over using a resource such as Streetmap.co.uk over the Web and perhaps Office from your company server. Over time, you’ll find yourself mixing and matching applications depending on how frequently they are needed and how heavy the use might be. Some will be more cost effective as ‘Pay per view’ apps, a market that Microsoft is developing through .Net, others will be rented from ASP/xSPs and the remainder will be locally available.

In the end, ASP will be less about technology and more about choice. While the acronym may be tired, the process behind it is gradually creeping into the way we work and before long, we’ll take for granted, an idea that hundreds of millions of wasted vendor marketing money could never achieve.

Pass the Cornflakes

It’s like a hanging set to music, except you just know that there’s no real chance that the condemned man, in this case it’s Microsoft, will ever take the drop.

Microsoft is of course threatening to withdraw Windows, if the States get their way, arguing as they are for a component (middleware) version of the product, which will allow for third-party development and licensing. This is nothing less than a look under Microsoft’s bonnet. Just imagine owning a car but weren’t allowed to look at the engine?

That’s the happy world of Windows and always will be if Microsoft has its way. The alternative, claims Microsoft, is nothing less than anarchy, with thousands of Windows clones washing around, all slightly different and where middleware from Microsoft would be forced to co-exist alongside midddleware from rival companies, such as Sun or even Oracle!

Of course the argument is a little more complex than this but I ask you, do we really care anymore? Does justice make a difference if you have $36 billion in the bank? I very much doubt it and did anyone believe it ever did? At least it will be more difficult in the future for any technology giant to behave again as Microsoft did in the past without being called to account a great deal faster. And anyway, there’s Enron to worry about now.

The last ten years should have taught all of us a lesson. We had Windows and the Internet and the great Dot Com bubble, which burst, leaving many of the people I know out of pocket and wondering where their common sense had gone.

Like Dr Frankenstein, we created the Microsofts' of this world and then looked surprised, when the company used its considerable muscle to build the monopoly that gave us the software we demanded of it.

Now there’s no going back. There’s every sign that tomorrow will be an even more of a Microsoft world than today and like some latter-day Faustus that’ s the bargain we made when we threw out OS/2 in favour of a prettier looking and less reliable Windows. If Governments aren’t strong enough to stand in front of this runaway train we might as well get used to the idea of a software industry being divvied-up between a handful of well-known companies. It’s called commercial Darwinism I suppose.
After all, it’s no different to Kelloggs and the cornflake business. Winner takes all I’m afraid.

Broadband - Who Needs It?

Broadband, who needs it? Well I guess we all do but sensible pricing has been a long time coming. The e-Envoy Andrew Pinder, believes that the conditions are now in place for us to overtake Germany, Europe’s broadband leader very swiftly indeed; a possible 3-1 to come in eighteen months if you prefer a football analogy?

Pinder had been encouraged by the take up of Broadband services in the opening months of the year. Britain has around 400,000 broadband customers, signed up to the cable networks of NTL and Telewest and to the DSL service offered by BT. In contrast, Germany has 2,2 million DSL subscribers half of the user in Europe, so a return match against the beastly Hun is well overdue.

A year ago, I wrote in The Observer, that it if you lived inside the embrace of the M25, it was very easy to imagine that we all shared the same connectivity potential, through the availability of satellite, cable and DSL on a local basis. But travel outside the major cities and the story can be a very different one.

Almost half the population has yet to join the Internet revolution and Government through a number of different, well-funded initiatives is working to solve the different technical and commercial challenges of bringing the Internet to the population in much the same way as the marvel of the telephone spread through the country and changed peoples lives nearly a century ago.

One tricky problem, yet to be properly solved, involves making broadband available in rural areas further North than the leafier parts of Surrey. As the cash-strapped operators, such as BT, don’t see why they should pick up the bill for a service that would struggle to be even vaguely commercially viable, Government has been forced to set aside £30 million to subsidise the expansion of the service to less well-populated areas. This week, the eMinister, Douglas Alexander revealed a number of projects that, with the help of the £30 million, would introduce broadband services to parts of the country, which include Yorkshire, Humberside and parts of the Midlands. This is of course a start, a line in the sand if you like but in real terms, even in a country as small and overcrowded as our own, I’m wondering if £30 million is more of an encouraging political gesture than a practical solution to the problem of broadband Britain.

I can't stand up from falling down..."
Elvis Costello

Thirty-seven holes! – One vulnerability in your software is bad enough but ‘thirty-seven’? It’s almost as if the company in question, was Microsoft not it’s arch-rival Oracle.

You see, once upon a time there was this fabulously opinionated? Software baron called Larry who wished to snatch control of the software industry from his complete opposite, a modest unassuming megalomaniac called Bill. Both men were in the very expensive Enterprise database business and both aimed to be the biggest and the best in a crowded applications market.

Bill was very close to achieving his own dream of world domination but struggled to release software that was anywhere close to 100% proof against the attacks of rats and weasels, This was a serious and on-going worry for many customers and enough to encourage many of them to flock to Larry’s product, which he smugly boasted was "unbreakable" and utterly and completely weasel proof. By coincidence, if you search for "bug" on the Microsoft knowledgebase, it returns twenty-five results.

Unfortunately, Larry in his enthusiasm to put one over on the ghastly swot Bill, may have been telling the kind of fibs a Transport Secretary would have been proud of, because according to the Internet security watchdog CERT, Larry’s "unbreakable" database and application server software lets in the rain and quite possibly thirty-seven weasels too!

Over the last five years or so, many of us in the industry have started taking Larry’s predictions and statements with a pinch of salt. He leads a huge and successful business, one that has the confidence and respect of thousands of customers. When dazzling Larry stands up on stage and bets a million dollars that his software is better than Bill’s or that the Network Computer will kill the PC, you just know it’s all going to go dreadfully pear-shaped on him. Security is another problem altogether because the issue is very much one of trust. Like Larry, you might claim that your box is smarter, faster, cheaper, prettier than the other chap’s but at a time when security of any kind is a principal concern of business or government, making any wildly unsupported claims for the integrity of any mission-critical product is not a good idea, in a world that feels increasingly threatened and vulnerable by the potential for attack on its commercial infrastructure.

Personally, I’m in favour of starting my own “Honest Computing” campaign. It’s an award I’ll make every year to the company whose software does exactly what it says in the box. Unfortunately, after twenty years writing about and reviewing products and technology trends, I doubt that I’ll find anyone to give the award to. It’s all rather like magician, James Randi’s offer of a million dollars to anyone, including Uri Geller, who can demonstrate unequivocal evidence of the paranormal in front of him. Perhaps he and Oracle should get together soon!

Time for a Quick Reality Check

I love Linux, I write about it frequently but ask me to install it and use it in anger and I would be as lost as Jeremy Clarkson on a pair of roller blades.

Last year, Linux finally became respectable and this year, flushed with ambition and support from some of the largest names in the business, it’s in real danger of becoming the universal answer to everything that isn’t Microsoft. That’s not such a bad thing, until you realize that a great many of us, thousands of small businesses throughout the land, still buy our hardware and software from PC World and the very thought of having a sensible conversation about the merits of Linux, let alone being served, makes me break out in a cold sweat.

“Dodgy Web Server, you need Linux mate”. “Know what I mean”?
“Want a cheap Server Appliance then”? “Pick up a Penguin”.

So once more, I’ll climb wearily back into my pulpit and tell anyone who wants to listen that Linux is great but probably not yet ready for you. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s mostly secure and yes, it’s as dull as dishwater to anyone who doesn’t own a wispy beard and a pair of comfy slippers. After all, its principal champion these days is IBM; the Ford Motor Company of the computer world, hell-bent on giving us Linux with all the sex appeal of a Mondeo.

And there you have it. Linux now wears a shirt and tie and is, dare I say it, respectable. But even IBM has yet to find a really clever way of comfortably squeezing the Linux Penguin into a dark blue suit. Rest assured though that IBM is working hard at the problem and to Microsoft’s horror, Linux is starting to chip away at the edges of its very lucrative Server market. On the desktop of course, Microsoft remains in charge. You see, Linux, aside from being a rather good Operating System, represents for many, a lifestyle choice, a quiet protest in an increasingly anodyne world, dominated by a single software super-giant where clever packaging invariably wins over more sentimental principles of Open-Source computing.

If Linux on the client-side just isn’t going to happen outside of niche areas, such as education, the same is true for the smaller Enterprise customer, outside of dabbling with an Apache Web Server. There’s too much pain involved making the thing work. The future for Linux lies increasingly with the evolution of Server Blades and so-called ‘Server Appliances’ and at the end of last year, I warned that the threatened skills crisis facing the industry makes server appliances as much of inevitability as the steady growth of the open-source software movement and the arrival of increasingly cheaper hardware.

As everyone races to join the global networked economy, the demand for component-style simplicity and lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) will continue to drive the industry towards more unsophisticated single-purpose server-appliances. This remains an important part of IBM’s own game plan, to catch the next wave of server consolidation for print, file and Web serving by providing Linux-only configurations for its mainframes and midrange servers that carry a lower price tag than the plain vanilla zSeries or iSeries machines without Linux. The company claims that 11% of the mainframe processing power that was shipped in the fourth quarter of 2001 were dedicated to supporting Linux workloads, so there’s no doubt that Linux now has its foot firmly wedged in the door.

Unfortunately in the industry in which we live and work, as adjectives, cheap and sexy are mutually exclusive. The new Apple iMAC is sexy but not cheap and I have yet to come across a cheap and sexy Linux Server appliance. Companies are choosing to evaluate Linux because Linux can save them money, as in the case of one Canadian insurance giant which reportedly saved $20 million by rolling a single Linux Portal solution out through its fourteen subsidiaries.

If Linux offers us a technology argument, it’s also very much a TCO argument too. Businesses are realizing that computing costs are increasingly unsustainable at present levels. Sexy computing is too expensive in the current economic climate and cheap computing has an attractive ring to it. What interests business now is the ‘install and forget’ Appliance Server, the application being powerful and the underlying Operating System invisible. The argument in fact is moving beyond whether Linux will ever be as good as Solaris or Windows 2000 to a question of how cheaply and reliably an application can run on a Linux box as opposed to some other proprietary OS. But until you can walk into PC World and walk out with a Linux Server-appliance to plug seamlessly into you network, Linux is going to remain firmly in its niche, still not quite powerful enough to win the Enterprise Server battle and too intimidating a prospect for most small businesses to consider.

Silence of the LANs

"Turns... If I help you, Clarice, it will be "turns" with us, too. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things. Not about this case, though – about yourself. Yes or no"?

Ever thought of shredding your email? Try Cyberscrub.

It seems that everyone is worrying about email recently and they have a right to. You could be Ford or Allied Irish Bank or simply paranoid, like me, the Hannibal Lecter of IT, with a taste for good Chianti and raw information scandal.

Like it or not, most companies now need to think pretty seriously about having an email auditing programme (EAP) in place, increasingly squeezed as they are, between flesh-coloured concerns over personal privacy and the risk of corporate liability, a rock and a hard place.

Nobody of course wants to see his or her email auctioned-off to the highest bidder? That is, of course, what happened on eBay, when an auctioneer, using the alias of ‘Cruvdog’ offered 64 pages of personal email between Enron’s former Chairman, Kenneth Lay and it’s CEO Jeffrey Skilling to the highest bidder. In the popular rush for souvenirs eBay has been auctioning anything Enron branded. These include ‘Must Have’s’ such as resignation letters from Enron employees, mouse mats and branded golf balls, raising the whole tacky process into a serious privacy issue that goes well beyond the auditing scandal.

What happens then, if someone steals your mail? Who is responsible and can you protect yourself from the risk?

Fortunately, in the UK, we have the 1998 Data Protection Act, which offers us some protection in law and we have the right to see any personal information that is stored electronically as well as physically, the kind of progressive legislation which can make a Civil Servant's bottom twitch. Unfortunately, if an opportunist like Cruvdog, sniffing around an abandoned Mail Server, manages to find a few interesting scraps with your name attached and then proceeds to auction these from an offshore site, outside of the reach of the Data Protection Registrar, there's not much you can do about it other than protest at the injustice of it all.

There are of course many different examples of content "insecurity". My travels in the Middle-east have revealed that at the most senior and influential levels of government and industry people are using Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to bypass the routine monitoring of local Internet traffic. Osama Bin Laden had one such account and I’ll bet that Mr Arafat does too. It would be naïve to think that Western security services hadn’t spotted this little opportunity a long time ago.

Although such services are allegedly secure, email conversations still have to be kept on file ‘for reasons of national security’. Here, if the Government gets its’ way, every little indiscretion passed over the Internet will be available for seven years, including my innocent chat-room encounters with the fabulous 'Pussycat-1' in Vancouver, which may yet find their way into the Mail on Sunday.

As Bill Gates once discovered to his cost, a hasty email 'one-liner' can return to haunt you in court. A jury can broadly misinterpret even the friendliest expression of business rivalry, such as “Take care of them”, if the company in question subsequently collapses.

One security consultancy, is, I know, itching to sell the Whitehall mandarins an email auditing service and most recently, the very public confrontation between Mr Byers and Mr Sixsmith at the Department of Transport once again has the civil service agonising over their own use of email. You’ll remember the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby in ‘Yes Minister’, arguing that “The Official Secrets Act is there to protect official's secrets’ and the very idea of Open Government and email would have been anathema to him!

There’s a strange irony that people will write and include in an email, indiscretions and images that they would never dream of committing to a letter. Email encourages a feeling of invisibility, a splendid isolation from responsibility, which only exists in the imagination of the user, so remember, that everything you ever type in a message may be stored both locally and remotely and that a touch of paranoia isn’t such an unhealthy condition in a digital society.

The Communication Trap

When does truly pervasive computing become really intrusive computing? For many of us, it’s arrived already, looking at the half dozen or so pieces of assorted and explicit junk mail that have appeared in my mail box during the last thirty minutes.

Every now and then I have to stop for a quick reality check. Very soon, according to the prophets, anything with an electric current passing through it, will have an IP address of its own. This will of course include our microwave oven, the freezer and my electric toothbrush. Humanity is now facing a future which holds the promise of the intelligent frozen chicken.

Embedded or should I say stuffed with a tiny microprocessor and don’t ask me if this involves Java or Windows, this miracle of domestic engineering, will alert your deep freeze as it approaches its ‘Sell-by date’. The freezer, which of course comes complete with its own wireless Internet connection, will then inform you by SMS or by email that your chicken is in need of attention. For many of us, this may prove to be the most interesting email conversation of the day and perhaps Microsoft will even have a monopoly on frozen poultry in the future.

I’ve talked about the concept of ‘tele-presence’ before in Computer Weekly. Through Instant Messaging (IM), wireless and mobile telephony, any sense of privacy is rapidly disappearing. Sometimes it’s not such a bad thing, after all, I tell myself that I need constant access to my email and my mobile phone from anywhere on the planet and Instant Messenger keeps me constantly engaged with my friends and colleagues and of course, the delightful ‘Pussycat-1’, in Vancouver, who I chanced upon while researching on-line dating for another story last week.

The trouble is that I’m becoming an information junkie and I’m not alone. Now that many of us have wireless-connected PDAs like, Palm, Blackberry and PocketPC, meetings in excess of thirty minutes can cause excessive stress and withdrawal symptoms among executives, deprived of their email ‘Fix’. So what happens is a room full of ‘PDA attention deficit disorder’, - the official description - people reading and replying to email and IM on their PDAs and oblivious to the content of the meeting taking place around them.

Today’s constantly connected technology is insidious. Teenagers buried in their SMS messaging, car drivers waving their hands around or people blindly crossing roads using mobile phones. Each one is lost in a different world, which is increasingly hard to escape from. Take the technology forward another five years and the thinning line between the virtual world and the real world will cease to exist in a communications sense. We’ll all be 24*7 and always on. This may bring new benefits we haven’t thought of, such as the intelligent chicken, after all, “It’s always good to talk” but truly pervasive computing on this scale is likely to increase stress levels even further than they are today.

I love the technology but I’m starting to worry whether I love using it too much for my own sanity. I wonder how many people feel the same?

“Moores’ Law of Digital Governance”
(London School of Economics - June 2000)
One to Many Represents a Political Opportunity
Many to One Represents a Constitutional Challenge
Many to Many is Evidence of Subversive Behavior

“Democracy”, said the Greek general Alcibiades, “Is acknowledged folly” and if he had lived another two thousand years, he might have had something to say about the future of eDemocracy as well.

In a progressive sense, government is on the right track this week by allowing an eDemocracy debate in The House of Commons. The idea of course is that British voters, a badly endangered species, should be able to email in their views on new legislation before it is rubber-stamped by an enormous majority and passes on to the statute book

Labour MP Graham Allen is asking parliament to consider expanding its e-democracy programme to allow the public to comment on the small print of new laws, “pre-legislative scrutiny” and the webcasting of special committees, to avoid problems in future. Poor old Sir Humphrey Appleby must be spinning in his grave at the thought of such a thing. Of course two good examples of legislation, which could have benefited might have been the IR35 and the RIP legislation but it’s hard to find anything today, which can smoothly pass into law without encouraging a collective shudder from the rest of us.

My own view mirrors Alcibiades, who got it right before the Athenians shoved him into exile for being a little too good-looking and ambitious. You start allowing the people to decide on the direction of legislation and who knows where it will lead? These days watching Kilroy on television is as close to people get to becoming involved in social issues and the only people who get really involved in politics are the card-carrying zealots and the party-faithful. Take the hunting argument on-line and MP’s will be swamped with email from people who are in favour of spending the weekend annihilating small furry animals, while the rest of us remain at home, eating pizza and watching Neighbours or Match of the Day.

A better idea perhaps, rather than encouraging an email plague from the Countryside Alliance, is to develop the Sky News interactive polling model. It’s very simple, Red button, green button. “Should we invade Iraq”? Answer Yes or No? Do you believe anything Steven Byers says?? Yes or No.

It’s Big Brother all over again, not George Orwell but Channel 4 TV's version and it’s also a great opportunity to start involving the people, you and me, at least in the early stages of legislation, conquering apathy and the digital divide through the medium of television and the six thousand UK-Online centres across the country.

What the politicians forget, is that regardless of class or education, most people have a surprising amount of common sense. Today’s politician is also unlikely to have a strong grasp of classical history and doesn’t realise that democracy was an early form of mass entertainment, which gave the hungry masses a sense of involvement, something that we have very little sense of in this country anymore.

Watching webcasts, it’s useful because it shows willing and cuts through the veil of secrecy that continues to plague our democratic process. My wife, who once used to work as a press officer in Downing Street, tells me that the MOD’s entertainment budget is an official secret!

You should have the right to email your views on legislation in the same way that you should rightfully expect to be able to email your MP. Many don’t like this at all. However, I simply can’t see a process of email consultation really working and I have had experience of this working in practise. It costs money; lots of money, to moderate the incoming message flow and attracts hackers like flies to honey. All that will happen is that government will be swamped and generate even more paperwork that MP’s won’t have time to read.

Much better to do a deal with Sky Television, the BBC and the new local Digital TV pilot projects with the likes DKTV and HomeChoice. Concentrate on the big issues and not the small details. Ask the people what they think, rather than the MPs who simply do as they are told. Press button polling may be the answer, reminding ourselves that we live in a democracy and reflecting your right to express an opinion every now and then. Come the revolution brother and our right to digital democracy....!.

Ever so Politely Mugged

There’s been a great deal of fuss over the last week over the cost of software. What happened of course is that the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) stood-up, ever so politely on its hind legs and bared its teeth at “you know who”, the notorious Thames Valley Park gang, which follows close on the heels of the Treasury and the VAT, in overall ability to sweep-up funds from your business current account.

‘Software’s too expensive’ bleat the editorials and ‘Licensing is a minefield of ambiguity’. Well we know that and last summer’s efforts to coerce even more money out of cash-strapped end-users, encouraged a very tight-lipped British revolution. Businesses complained bitterly to the DTI and Computer Weekly that they were being mugged. Of course no policeman appeared to record the complaint – everyone knew the name of the mugger - but the Minister was suitably indignant and there was a knee-jerk attempt to sweeten the extortionate-sounding licensing exercise that triggered the protest.

Now if you think about it and accept US figures that technology costs represent as much as 60% of a company’s annual spend, then once you’ve covered the cost of the coffee budget, the annual Xmas party, the pension fund and the executive car allowance, there’s very little left to show in the accounts. If Government can pool its resources and allegedly squeeze a sixty million pound saving out of a very well-known software gorilla, then why can’t the rest of us?

The answer of course is that like everything else in this increasingly dysfunctional country of ours, we spend most of our time complaining and very little time doing anything to improve the situation. While the proud French barricade lorries and burn sheep, or is it the other way around, we, as the nation that invented ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Pop Idol’, love to be disappointed and almost expect to be taken advantage of as a birthright; having to pay £110 for a so called TV license, being just one example of chronic apathy in action.

It’s about time that the DTI started consulting with hallowed institutions such as the CBI and the IOD in pursuit of a better deal for British business of all sizes. After all, if the OGC can aggregate the public sector desktop into a single deal which will reportedly save the Treasury 60 million, why can't we come-up with a strong private sector champion, a mixture of ombudsman and Robin Hood-like figure, who might be capable of negotiating a better deal for everyone else?

But that would take cooperation, initiative and dare I say it, even imagination at the highest levels of business, government and industry. There’s more chance of saving the rain forest or getting the trains to run on time I hear you say and sadly, you’re probably right!

Winnie the Poo and the Woozles

On Thursday, I joined Sky News, a laptop and an empty Pringles can on a tour of the city's 'Square Mile'. The mission, to eavesdrop on wireless networks and identify those which had failed to put in place even the most rudimentary protection against any passer-by 'dropping-in' to the network.

This stuff isn't new. I wrote about it in The Observer, well over a year ago and just about every computer publication has warned against 'the flakiness' of the wireless world, wide open as it is to hacker-friendly products such as AirSnort.

Wireless LAN (802.11) technology is increasingly attractive to business. I even have a Cisco Aeronet at home. It's wonderful, no cables and I can browse the web and collect my mail from anywhere in the house or garden. Trouble is, you might ask, have I protected myself by enabling the security? Probably not, I am after all at home and surely, wireless stays within the boundaries of my property? Of course it doesn't you'll tell me and the same applies to the fifty or so Wireless LANS that were picked up during the filming of the Sky News piece. Over sixty per cent of the networks detected were completely unprotected, not using WEP encryption (Wired Equivalent Protocol, not using anything, simply wide open, in principle allowing anyone to piggy-back the network for a free ride or worse, collect the traffic flowing back and forth along the network without anyone being the wiser.

It strikes me from looking at the statistics from today's small trawling exercise that far too many network administrators are taking stupid pills. After all that's happened in the last twelve month and the increasingly pervasive atmosphere of security that surrounds us, why on earth aren't they taking the simplest steps to protect their businesses. I don't know but I vaguely remember telling my small daughter a bedtime story, probably Winnie the Poo, which featured an 'Idiot Trap'. "What's an idiot trap" she asked. "Something to do with rabbit, a Pringles can and wireless networks", should have been my reply.

Oh.. And by the way, Woozles, are a type of weasle found in "Wind in the Willows" and only "Heffalumps" fall into idiot traps or so my readers remind me. Just as importantly, an empty Pringles can acts as a natural collector of wireless LAN signals and I'm told that Cheese and onion flavour works best!

I'm going to have a rant. It's my turn.

I have five PC's. I'm not showing off, I just do.. sorry it's six if you count my daughter's hand-me-down.

In front of me here, in the office are my Dell desktop (Windows XP), My ultra-slim Hewlett Packard laptop also Windows XP and my Apple Powerbook, four years old with MAC-OS 9.5, faster than most and playing my music.

At home, I have another Hewlett Packard, a Pavilion desktop in my study running Windows (ME) and my daughter has a Taiwanese clone, also with Windows (ME).

Finally, in my little retreat by the coast, I have an AMD box with Windows ME and a view of the sea.

Do they all work smoothly? Hell they don't.

Does any one machine work 100% perfectly? No of course not!

I have the machine in my home by the coast that won't access the Internet anymore. God knows why but I think it's something to do with Norton Internet Security and/or Outlook, as it involves "Symproxsvc" and "Msgsvr32" errors. Three re-installations of Windows and Norton don't make me any closer to fixing the problem.

My daughter's machine is simply underpowered for Windows ME and as temperamental as she is, But she's seven, so that's OK.

My desktop at home falls over regularly and spends inordinate amounts of time accessing it's hard disk, although it has more than enough memory. This also collapses from time to time with MSGsvr32 errors or simply hangs when connected to the Web.

Microsoft support have been having fun and games trying to solve the different problems with my Windows XP machines in the office, as I described in an earlier column. Two "roll-backs" and re-installs of MS Messenger seem to have solved the problem, for now at least.

My own theory is that the update process may be part of the problem. Both Windows XP and Windows ME will run automatic updates when connected to the Internet and its hard not to draw the conclusion that strange problems seem to occur most frequently after such an update, MS Messenger being the best example so far this year.

I have no single consistent platform and that's true of the industry in general. There are hundred of different machines and thousands of different configurations for Windows out there in the wild. Being a suspicious sort of person, I'm starting to wonder whether the updates, designed for later, more powerful machines, are having an unforseen impact further down the food chain? It's X-Files stuff of course but sometimes it pays to be paranoid!

Microsoft are very kindly looking at my TSRs, the memory resident programs, like the hated Real Player. Maybe these are the problems but conveniently, the system I'm writing this column on collapsed twice last night while I was talking to the Microsoft support engineer on the case, so at least they have something to go on.

Being paranoid, I suspect that as time goes by, these problems will become more pronounced, as my older systems get older and Windows XP becomes far more of a service than an Operating System. When Windows XP looked at my Hewlett Packard Pavilion as a possible home, it laughed or more accurately, it gave me a number of good reasons why I should stay with Windows ME. I'm afraid, that unless you stay with the leading edge of technology in the Windows world, then like me, you'll find yourself at the bleeding edge of unusual system problems.

Now with luck, I 'll be able to post this before this machine falls over again.

Caveat Emptor is the right expression.

Exchanges, they’re everywhere and it’s what the Internet does best. In fact, b2b and b2c appear to be popping-up and doing very well in areas that you might not have thought of a few years ago.

Take drugs and I mean this quite literally. Maybe you’re a Columbian cocaine baron and you’re expecting a large consignment of the white stuff at the end of next week. Cocaine, like coffee is after all a commodity and you can apparently forward sell your product over the Internet to a potential buyer, as easily as you can put your sister up for sale or should I say bid, on one of the many marriage agency sites that are springing up in certain, less developed parts of the world.

It’s reported that the FBI/DEA are facing a serious challenge tackling b2b drug exchanges. Even if they know where the business is happening, security is now so good that gaining entry to a secure Server outside one’s jurisdiction without the account name and the password is about as easy as hacking into a large bank and getting away with it.

Another type of exchange that is becoming increasingly popular is the dating exchange. Eager to locate a 29-year-old Kylie Minogue-type of my own, I’m experimenting with one of these sites as I write and can see that there are 3,325 women on-line who match my criteria, complete with photos and I can start an on-line flirtation with any one of them with a simple mouse click, if I had the nerve. Unfortunately, I’m married, middle-aged and boring and there’s a serious risk of my wife beating me to death if I did, so for now, I’ll claim I’m only on-line for the research. After all, even at 45 you’re still allowed to dream and it seems that everyone on-line is either quite good-looking or stunning. In a virtual world nobody is overweight and ugly!

Having added my own Adonis-like and irresistible details to this 21st century cattle market, what does worry me, is whether the gorgeous looking Pussycat-1 is truly the brunette in the photo or really Steve, a warm and caring bricklayer from Dagenham. If I want to find out, it will cost me £5.95 for five days membership. Annual 'Gold' membership is of course much more. This is a very clever way of making money and one, very lucrative step beyond Friends Re-United, as your'e tempted to stay on-line and see who's looking at your details at any one moment. It's a little like Hotmail; a virtual presence where you can see who is showing interest in you at any one time and even start an Instant Messenger-style conversation. It's dangerously fascinating!

OK.. I’ll try. Here’s the £5.95 whistling off through the secure payment system. So Pussycat-1, "Does this work for you"? And her reply:

“I just joined a few days ago. I'm increasingly frustrated by the difficulty in meeting men in London. I consider myself to be social, sporty and outgoing but I think we've fragmented so much as a society, living on our own for longer, having better jobs so we can afford a decent standard of living. We give the impression of not needing a partner but I think secretly we're all keen for someone to share our lives with. I think this site in particular is fantastic, very interactive and a friend who met someone through the site recommended it to me. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! So, can I be nosy and ask what paper/mag etc. you're writing for”?

Sorry Pussycat-1 I’m married but single gentlemen, looking for a nice girl, you can find her at www.udate.com

Boot sales are now part of the British landscape and as the population grows beyond its current 43 million surfers (47% of the UK) and broadband starts to make its presence felt, I believe that exchanges will become a growth industry. With products like Equology now available, setting up your own b2b or b2c service is cheap and looks good. There’s no reason why any business should be spending thousands anymore on web development and hosting, when something like Equology can provide the site, the template and all the transactional bells and whistles for £40.00 a month.

If we look forward two or three years ahead, I expect small ‘vertical-market’ exchanges to become almost as popular as boot sales. Examples might be local dating or local drug-dealing but also community-based exchanges through schools and churches and even digital television. Cost remains the driving factor and as the costs of connectivity and development go down, there’s no reason why a town or even a street might not have its own local exchange for domestic items and anything else that lies within our social inventory.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll go on-line and order a half a kilo of Columbian coffee.

Open a Pandora’s Box…
And a Trojan horse jumps out.

Three of the world’s largest software suppliers, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and IBM have reached a compromise licensing arrangements with the Government “ reportedly saving to the public sector purse more £100 million over three years.

As many as two million desktop computers in the civil service could be affected by the three-year arrangement, which has been centrally negotiated by a public sector team led by Peter Gershon at the Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

This aggregation of public sector software needs, involving both central and local government departments, should act as a lesson to the private sector. It’s arguable that after The Health Service and Defence spending, Microsoft licensing has represented one of the public sector’s fastest growing black holes. Before the deal was reached the OGC had forecast that Microsoft’s revised licensing charges of last summer, would cost the public sector an additional £60m a year.

What's interesting about the deal outside of hard bargaining is that Sun Microsystems gets a foot in the door with Star Office and IBM (Through Lotus Development)) is in with a chance for Smartsuite.. a very slim chance! In effect, the Microsoft monopoly looks a little shaky as a consequence of this new policy of aggregation and cost justification.

If my own experience over the last six months is any litmus test of opinion, the public sector in other European countries is starting to question whether software-licensing costs are sustainable, particularly in the poorer countries. As a consequence, I suspect, it was important for Microsoft particularly to be seen to compromise, rather than IBM which is always thought to be happy to see it’s own software edge out its rival, as long as the concessions leaves it with a handful of loose change.
It’s quite possible that, as an example, what has happened in the UK will be followed by government’s elsewhere, in effect, telling Microsoft that handing Microsoft the key to the treasury and allowing it to help itself, just isn’t on the cards anymore, however ‘Special’ the relationship may be.

So with the direction set by government, here’s a radical suggestion, Why don’t the IOD and the CBI get together – God forbid – pool resources and start applying pressure where it hurts in support of cheaper and more sensible software licensing or even cheaper and more sensible software!

I watched the movie ‘Swordfish’ over the weekend. Fast moving, explosive, entertainment at its best, with John Travolta as the flashy TVR driving and amoral genius, ‘Gabriel’ employing super hackers, in a twisting plot involving robbery and murder in the war against terrorism.

Swordfish was of course released early last summer, well before September 11th and yet the plot very nearly suggests that it was inspired by the circumstances surrounding that tragedy. Also, there’s Gabriel himself, as in the ‘Gabriel Principle’, the name I gave to emerging hacker threat to IT security in a Sky News interview in May. An eerie coincidence I thought but then I’m notoriously superstitious.

Hollywood’s hackers may look more like Keanu Reeves rather than teenager Raphael Gray, the welsh wizard ‘Curador’, who found himself in a Swansea court last June for "borrowing" several thousand credit card numbers, including, allegedly, Bill Gates own, from the comfort of his bedroom in some remote valley. You may remember from the news at the time that finding Curador was a challenge for the FBI, as they know rather more about Kabul than they do about Cardiff and have more chance of finding the former on a map although Wales has a growing Afghan population or so I’m told.

Back then to Hollywood, the willing suspension of disbelief and the intricate plot of Swordfish. It appears that cracking a 128Kb crypto key involves building a ‘worm’, a polygonal structure, which is created with much waving of hands and keyboard tapping and which on screen resembles a genetically engineered virus. Of course, once this ‘worm’ is set loose, $9 billion of government money can then be transferred into the bank account(s) of your choice as easily as I can pay my own bills through Barclays Internet banking.

Hollywood does love its hackers even if business doesn’t like the example it sets. Thanks to films like the Matrix and Swordfish, it offers them a kind of glorified, Armani-clad respectability, which encourages all the ‘Wannabe Scrip-kiddies’ to have a go at the first innocent and poorly-protected NT Server they kind find hanging off some neglected corner of a company network.

Amateur Cyberchologist that I am, the truth, I’m afraid to say, is that in most cases, real hacking is a pretty dull activity, invariably performed with sledgehammer-like finesse and with a disproportionately high nuisance factor to business. Should however anyone come up with a ‘worm’ that can efficiently and invisibly redistribute the millions in Gordon Brown's Treasury’s current account, from the Bank of England to numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands do let me know.

It’s like a hanging set to music, except you just know that there’s no real chance that the condemned man, in this case, Microsoft, will ever take the drop.
On Wednesday following 30,000, yes, you read it right first time, 30,000 largely critical comments made about their controversial antitrust settlement by competitors and individuals during the Tunney review process, Microsoft and the US Justice Department have filed a second revised proposed settlement with the court charged with deciding whether it is in the public interest.

The amendments, according to Client Server News the edits “consist of stuff like adding the adjective "unbiased" to the provision requiring Windows to launch other people's middleware. It's supposed to clarify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the trigger points in Windows will be impartial as to whether it's Microsoft or non-Microsoft middleware”.

Meanwhile, in a presumably fruitless attempt to head off the out- for-blood remedy hearing that the nine dissident states are insisting on, Microsoft has also filed a motion asking the court to dismiss their case.

I ask you, do we really care anymore? Does justice make a difference if you have $36 billion in the bank? Of course it doesn’t and why did anyone believe it did. At least though it will be difficult in the future for any technology giant to behave again as Microsoft did in the nineties, without being called to account a great deal faster than it was. And anyway, there’s Enron to worry about now.

The last ten years should have taught all of us a lesson. We had Windows and the Internet and the great Dot Com gold rush, which left most of the people I know out of pocket and wondering where their common sense had gone. Like Dr Frankenstein, we created the Microsofts' of this world and then hid behind the veil of plausible deniability, when Microsoft used its considerable muscle to build the monopoly that gave us the software we were asking of it.

Now there’s no going back. There’s every sign that tomorrow will be an even more of a Microsoft world than today and like some latter-day Faustus that’ s the bargain we made when we threw out OS/2 in favour of Windows. It’s called progress of course and if governments aren’t strong enough to stand in front of this moving train we might as well get used to the idea of the software industry being divvied-up between a handful of well-known companies.

After all, it’s no different to Kellogs in the cornflake business. Winner takes all I’m afraid.