Doing email has the same random gratification built in as playing the slots, with the added excuse that a lot of it is work-related and sending or replying to a lot of email and emptying your inbox feels like you’ve got a lot done. Usually though, you’ve either asked other people to do things or, in my case, confirmed what real work I’ll be doing when I can drag myself away from the inbox. After all, I have email in my pocket most of the time, I have a laptop in the bedroom….

Except. I check email on the go when I’m waiting for a message, or when I’m on a tube and don’t have a book. I use the bedroom laptop for email, LiveJournal (a mix of blog and social network), Web surfing and Spider in equal proportions. I scan the incoming alerts for mail on my main machine and only click into the inbox now and then. Over the weekend or on the road, unless I’m waiting for a reply from a friend or an editor, I ignore my email for a lot of the day. Yes, I get sucked into just getting through my inbox when I should be getting on with work a little too often, but I don’t feel actually addicted.

I do feel that far too many things that ought to have a proper workflow slosh over into email; you could save a lot of time by using SharePoint to store documents that you want people to review or using a self-service portal to book travel or update your detail with HR rather than putting unstructured info in an email that someone else has to transfer into an application later anyway. Automate the bits of the approvals process that currently rely on someone pulling out their BlackBerry on the train to give a routine ‘yes’ and you might be surprised what speeds up in your company.

Just as bad are the cc wars, where cc-ing people is a political chess move; I save it for a very, very few strategic emails myself, but then I don’t work in a department any more.

I agree with Jeremy Burton, the CEO of Serena about a lot of things like business mashups being the future of many line of business applications; they’re the Excel macros of Web 2.0. But, as I was reminded when I was writing a case study on him for an up-coming feature, he’s also the guy who invented no-email Friday when he was running Veritas. It’s good to pace yourself – I like quoting Charmaine Eggbury of RIM, who told me that “the most important button on any BlackBerry is the off button”. If you’re actually addicted and it’s interfering with other work tasks or your personal life, then maybe an enforced break will make you reconsider. I don’t agree that forcing people not to send and read email is realistic in today’s business world. An executive who finds they can get away without email probably has someone else picking up the slack, and last time I saw Jeremy he certainly had his BlackBerry to hand (although connecting to Gmail rather than Exchange as an experiment).

Does email suck up more time than I’d really like? Definitely. Could I give email up for a week and still have any work coming in? Probably not. What I really want it more tools like SNARF and Xobni that let me deal with the key messages without spending time wading through messages that can be filed unread in case I ever need the information in them.

My name’s Mary and I have 1,289 unread messages in my inbox.

It’s still about adding value according to HP’s software and services VP Tom Hogan. He was presenting to a group of 30 IT executives in London the other day and he thought he’d respect the mood of the moment. “I was very intentionally talking about cost reduction and efficiency because of all the uncertainty in the world economy. I wanted to pound the point on how IT can help save money,” he told us. But he’d read the mood wrong for the UK.

“It was interesting how many people said ‘Great, but we really don’t care about that. What we care about is how can we add more value in our line of business, because senior executives are still willing to spend more if they get the value from IT.’ It makes a point in this time of uncertainty. Ten years ago when the world was so unstable, IT would have been in shutdown. Now IT is so key that they’re still thinking about what to do next.”

Will what they do next include buying HP software? Take Mercury and Opsware and the ‘business technology optimisation’ tools that HP has built with them. They’re not tools for doing business with IT; they’re tools for turning IT into a business, for giving the IT department KPIs and scorecards they can track the way other business units do. Investing in IT that does IT might not be top of the shopping list tactically, but a real CIO does strategy these days.

Salesforce recently commissioned a survey of UK CIOs at small companies; Ian Parkes who conducted the research calls CIOs an endangered species. “They’re going to be rebranded as the chief operating officer or even removed. They’ve got to show value add, but they are not able to articulate it from the point view of looking for investment. Too often they do not have sufficient power to do what you would imagine a CIO would do, they are not board members and they don’t have that level of power or credibility within the organization.”

If you want to spend money on IT at the moment, you’re going to have to be able to explain the value and explain it in business terms.

-Mary

It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.

The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.

The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really well, you’re only spending 35% keeping the lights on and if you’re supremely ambitious you want to get that down to 20%; maybe that’s the 7-10% of companies that Tom Hogan guestimates have already got their IT automated.

After all, why should the majority of your budget go on doing the same thing over and over again so that the business can stay where it was last month? You should have the routine automated; it will stop you losing staff to sheer and utter boredom too. But once you plug everything in enough to automate it and track it  - not just in terms of transaction throughput or whether the next laptop you buy will trigger a discount if you buy it from vendor H instead of vendor I but who has a problem, who’s about to have a problem, who’s working on it right now and who has already spent how long fixing what on what annual salary -  you can also start to put a value on it.

The next time you ask for a new server, you can show how much it’s costing to chug along on the old one - and what difference you’ve made with the last budget you were allocated. You can show which SLAs the IT team has met and what that means in cold hard cash. When you get asked to do too much with too little, instead of sucking your teeth like a builder you can say exactly what it will cost to do properly and what they can get for the money they want to spend. You can even tell the business what projects are a bad idea before you plug in a single server.

It’s not rocket science; a good project has high value to the business, a small cost to implement and a low budget requirement. The IT department spends the whole year putting in systems that let the rest of the business evaluate business ideas and existing services in those terms; isn’t it about time you had that for yourself too?
-Simon

Step into the rooms of the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and you’re taking a journey back in time. The whirr of paper tapes signals that the reconstruction of the Second World War Colossus is at work, cracking the same teletype codes it was designed to break at the height of the war.

Now it’s a museum piece, a mix of telephone exchange hardware and ancient valves. Even so, it’s still as fast as many of today’s desktop PCs - at least for the one specific task it was designed to handle. You can download an emulator, ready for most desktop PCs. Only the most recent PCs will be as fast - something that goes a long way to show the power of single-purpose computing hardware.

Code breaking may be the key that gets people in through the door, but it’s the rest of the museum’s collection that keeps ypu there for hours. In the rest of the rooms of the museum you’ll find old friends (and old enemies). Amigas sit next to Atari STs, while BBC Micros are ready for you to type 10 PRINT “HELLO”: GOTO 10 just like the old days. There are still plenty of gaps in the collection, but the biggest one is funding.

That’s why we were there today, to hear IBM and PGP announce that they were donating a hefty sum to the museum’s appeal. It’s still nowhere near enough. A new organisation, the museum doesn’t have the hefty bank balances other museums use to manage cashflow and property. They’d ideally like to raise seven million pounds - enough to cover the museum’s annual running costs from the interest. That’s only a pound or so per PC in the UK - something that’s easily affordable for most individuals and businesses. It’s not much to preserve the heritage of an industry that’s done more for the UK economy over the last few decades than anything else.

PGP and IBM have kickstarted a much-needed appeal - now it’s up to the rest of us (and the rest of the industry) to chip in and make sure that the birthplace of modern computing gets the museum it deserves.

A comment from Wyse popped into my inbox the other day, criticising the government for using desktop PCs instead of thin clients which are “inherently more energy efficient” (surprise surprise).

David Angwin, director of marketing for EMEA, claimed that “thin client computers give users exactly the same applications and performance as a PC and run on as little a tenth of the electricity.” Certainly, Wyse is one of the few thin client manufacturers who can claim to support a wide range of applications; I know one financial company who had to replace the first batch of thin clients they tried with Wyse kit almost within the week because the others couldn’t cope with video clips. But is that power figure the whole story?

Earlier in the year I was talking to Barry Goodall at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He’s spent a lot of time and effort greening the council’s IT and although he’s a big fan of server virtualisation, he has a much less positive view of the green credentials of thin clients after he disproved the figures in a Frauenhofer Institute report on green computing. “The report said we could save million of pounds by using thin clients, so we were quite interested in this! We looked at some of the details and things leapt out at us; in particular the power consumption of PCs was markedly higher than ours - we use Dell desktops.”

He was checking his Dells anyway, because Dell was claiming upgrading to model 745s would save as much energy as changing from CRT to LCD screens. “We have an electricity monitoring gadget from Maplin which I highly recommend: don’t trust anything the manufacturers tell you! It’s very easy and you need to measure it yourself.” His measurements showed the model 745s used the same 60 Watts of power as the Dell kit he already had; Dell’s 45 Watt figure assumed energy management features that weren’t turned on by default. “Energy saving features in the BIOS count for nothing unless you enable hibernation in Windows!”

But 60 Watts or 45, it was still a far cry from the 120 Watts that Frauenhofer was assuming for a desktop PC. That’s what you’d expect from a top-end home machine with a high-power graphics card for gaming; business desktops are rather more frugal.

That wasn’t the only place he felt the sums didn’t add up. “Although the report said in the text that they had accounted for PCs being turned on maybe ten hours a day, terminal servers are typically running 24/7. If you tot up the number of hours people work out of the year, even though it feels like you work all the hours God sends, it’s actually about 2,200 and the figures in their tables hadn’t taken that into account. When we plugged in the correct figures they supported the opposite arguments; with the number of clients per server they assumed, it was more expensive in terms of CO2 than a typical fat client environment. Thin client can be more energy efficient but you need to be clever and turn some servers off when demand is low; you have to be monitoring the workload so you can turn some servers off overnight and come the morning, start turning them back on again - though you’re running a little bit of a risk that maybe one or two servers won’t start up and you’ll struggle a little.”

When I talked to Jon Stewart at Cisco about security trends recently, he slipped in a few network arguments (as you’d expect from a network company). “I have a feeling [that] what you’re going to end up seeing is very thin, light application suites that are endpoint based and a very rich experience using massive network build out. It’s already started to happen; definitely BT has gone down this route. You’re basically saying the end point is going to matter less at a computational level. The display and the keyboard and the system that you interact with, is the most valuable. Think about Lufthansa going to wireless on their planes, they’re trying to solve the inability to do work when you’re mobile. Everything about handset mobility, you’re trying to solve work when you’re mobile. But each time it happens, less and less computational necessity exists on the device - you’re just getting the service on the device.”

But do we care less and less about devices? Again, you’d expect Steve Ballmer to favour the PC, but he told his audience at the Partner Conference that actually, all the devices that are getting attention are fat (we just need to make them easy too). “It’s ironic, people talk a lot about whether people want thin clients. And I don’t deny people want reduced cost, and complexity of management. I think we’re all hearing that from our customers. But people don’t want to really give up the richness and capabilities of a rich client. We even see that in phones. What’s going on in phones today? Phones are actually getting richer. That’s what Windows Mobile is, that’s what the iPhone is, that’s what Symbian is, that’s what Android is: all of these things are getting richer, and Windows PCs will be the richest, most capable device that most people ever own.”

Chatting with Peter Biddle, ex of Microsoft and now at UK enterprise social networking startup Trampoline, he suggested that as usual, what matters is both the device and the network. “Think about it; when did you last do any useful work without being online?”
-Mary

I’m guessing that most of you  have already emailed your MEPs with a message roundly condemning the stealth attempts to pass legislation that will allow media companies to disconnect ordinary people from the Internet permanently just for the suspicion that they may be filesharing.

If you haven’t may I join my voice to those urging you to do so? It won’t take long (thanks to the folk at MySociety.org) and it will help preserve your rights online as well as saving the small and medium sized ISPs that do so much to keep Internet access prices competitive. It’s that last bit that’s key to IT professionals - the measures that the legislation proposes are too expensive and complex for most ISPs to implement, which will mean you’ll be left dealing with with just BT and Virgin for your business internet access - and I can guarantee that your monthly connectivity bills won’t go down as a result…

Here’s my letter. Don’t send exactly the same one - it’s your thoughts and words that matter:

I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; not only that, but they are an attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member. The European Parliament has already voted against them - they should not be passed by hiding them inside other important and much needed legislation.

Not only are they disproportionate, putting the onus on ISPs to detect and implement the measures required by the amendments is both an unfair measure and technically unfeasable. Many UK ISPs are small or medium sized businesses, and do not have the funds required to invest in wholesale tracking of their users’ actions. The amount of work required to implement these measures is large, and the techniques complex. The only organisations able to do this will be the incumbent carriers, reinforcing what is a de facto monopoly by putting small ISPs out of business.

There is, in fact, no way of identifying the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic in the manner described in the amendments. Many users use the same tools that are used to download copyright violations to install Linux, or get updates from Microsoft. If the tools proposed by the legislation aren’t perfect these innocent users will be tarred with the same brush as anyone violating copyrights. Even if it is possible to determine the type of data being accessed, it’s impossible to determine the actual state of the rights associated with it, or the intentions of the rights holders.

Innocent users also face the risk of having their home networks hijacked by third parties without their knowledge - and losing access as a result of third party actions. I’m more technically aware than most people, but it still took several weeks for me to find that someone elsewhere in my street was using filesharing software over my wireless network. Most home users don’t have access to the tools or the skills to find and identify these situations, yet the proposed legislation will make them liable for whatever happens on their home wireless networks.

I’m a technology journalist by trade, but I come from a technical background and helped found one of the UK’s first national ISPs, and also helped build the online presences of many major high street brands. The Internet has provided a boost to the economy, and these measures will reduce access to the Internet and by closing down small ISPs will increase the costs to the very users the European online economy needs.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I’m sorry that I’m sending this message with less than 24 hours to go, but I only found out about this today myself: so please do what you can to prevent these egregious and dangerous measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Bisson

Remember you have a voice and a point of view, and it’s one that deserves to be heard.

–Simon

For years, we’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just for consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.

Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.

Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups.  The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately….  Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.

If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.

“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.

“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”

That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension) were explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?

Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.

It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.

Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.

Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all, good or bad. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?

The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…

One of the highlights of the Future in Review conference is the chance to go to the supercomputing visualization lab at the University of California in San Diego, CalIT2. It’s run by Larry Smarr, who used to run the National Computing Supercomputing Applications where told one of his graduate students, Marc Andreessen,  to write a visual browser for the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee was working on over at CERN. When they showed NCSA Mosaic off, “everybody told us nobody needed it”, he says.

Given how wrong, that turned out to be, it’s worth keeping an eye on what Smarr thinks is important – bandwidth and pixels. Not content with the bandwidth of Internet2, he’s been putting together a multigigabit network connecting universities around the world for sharing data and collaborating over video conferencing. And making video real enough to suspend your disbelief means a lot of pixels; the 60-foot screen in the CalIT2 lecture theatre has four times the resolution of HD, the standard digital cinema will use when the movie theatres work out how to make money from it. To kick off the evening, Smarr invites Microsoft’s Curtis Wong to show off the 12 terabytes of images in the new World Wide Telescope, a map of the sky that zooms from star fields to galaxies to the solar systems coalescing inside them out of dust, fading into infra-red and wavelengths that show more structures.

The 30″ screens on most desks around the lab are dwarfed by the 200 megapixel video wall - eleven rows of five 30″ Dell screens crammed side by side to make one giant display with 100 times the resolution of HD. There are displays that wrap around the edges of a small room, stretching over your head and powered by eight HD projectors, that show us the surface of Mars in 50 million pixels rather than the 2 million pixels from the Word Wide Telescope.
 
It’s not size to prove screens can keep getting bigger; Larry Smarr thinks we need the bigger view. “We’ve artificially limited our brain by this stupid million pixels on a screen and we’ve unblocked that.” So how much more can we see; is there a limit? “Reality! You don’t see everything you think you see - it’s not as simple as pixels. There’s a limit to what you can resolve spatially, above 24 frames per second you don’t really see more. But the brain is capable of absorbing about 1gigabit per second, 24 bits deep 16 million colours. ”

From medical images to satellite maps, there are plenty of images to enjoy at that size. You can see the intricate details inside cancer cells or watch winter spread over the world. You can stand inside a building that exists only as a CAD diagram and walk through lifesize doors to see if the layout works. You can step forward to see the hidden sketch under a Leonardo painting, revealed by infrastructure-red photography and displayed so you can see every line. Or you can watch life-size opera live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, or the opening ceremony of the Nobel prize from Japan and fill like you’re almost there. Every candle flame, every reflection, the brocade patterns on every kimono, the expression on every face.

These are the technologies that are coming to office video conferencing if you have the network bandwidth. Smarr advised HP on developing the Halo system and he’s putting in a Cisco TelePresence room at CalIT2 for academics to use for collaborations. The commodity hardware and open source software that powers the high-resolution screens isn’t as expensive as those. Each screen of what Larry Smarr calls the optiputer - systems connected by optical fibre that make up a worldwide computer system - costs about $2,000. But of course the bandwidth is what really raises the price tag.  Cisco TelePresence needs about 10Gbps; the big screen system is over ten times more.

Security theatre is what security expert Bruce Schneier calls measures designed to make us feel safer that don’t actually make us any safer at all. He discussed the positive effects of this at the RSA conference this week; flying is one of the safest forms of transport and if having to take off your shoes and abandon your bottle of water make you feel that airport security is good enough to catch terrorists and you fly rather than taking a more dangerous method of transport, then the security theatre has made you more secure.

Here’s another paradox. Too much security makes you insecure. If someone in your company is emailing customer information to their Gmail account and copying market forecasts to their laptop and keeping old price lists for months after they’re out of date, it’s more likely that they’re just trying to get their job done on the road than that they’re stealing data to pass to a competitor - and that you didn’t give them a better way to do it. Make it impossible to do my job securely and I’m going to break or bypass your security so I can actually do my job.

The wireless network at the RSA conference was a good example of this. It was secure. Very secure. So secure that without the five pages of instructions I didn’t manage to get connected, and I didn’t meet anyone else at the conference who managed it either. If I’d wanted to hack into the laptops of anyone at the show, I wouldn’t have tried to steal them. I’d have set up an open free wi-fi connection on the show floor and everyone would have connected to that instead, giving me a great opportunity to see anything that didn’t go through a VPN.

Hugh Thompson of People Security has a good grasp of security and security theatre; you’ll have seen him if you watched Hacking Democracy, the documentary about the security problems with voting machines. He closed the conference with a chat show that ranged from a funny song about SQL injection (not a very funny song, but still) to Eric Drew’s tale of having his identity stolen by a lab technician at the hospital where he was being treated for leukemia and tracking the man down himself (a story Drew makes funny in the retelling that would have been a tragedy if he wasn’t in remission).

Thompson had a semi-serious conversation with Bill Cheswick, co-inventor of the firewall. Cheswick jokingly referred to malware as a “denial of spare time attack” that at least means you spend time with the family and friends who ask you to fix their computers. He was also slightly tongue in cheek when he said that he hadn’t used a firewall in a decade because he wants to use a secure computer instead; “it’s that whole crunchy outside, chewy centre thing; now we have much bigger liquid centres and once you’re past the outside you have access to everything.” But Cheswick also had some serious predictions to finish off Thompson’s security cabaret.

• “IPV6 has been three years away for the last 15 years. We’re finally approaching it - so all those firewall rules are going to need redoing. That will be fun…”
• “More attacks are going to come in through the browser so it may not matter so much what that the OS underneath is. You go to the wrong page, or the right page that has the wrong advertising agency - you did the right thing on your site but the other guy got hacked. To deal with that there’s going to be more sandboxes. I want users to be able to do everything online. I want them to run free in a sandbox. I used ASCII email for twenty years. ASCII email is safe but you want to be able click on the pictures.”
• “Computers are going to get better. We’re in the barnstorming era now. We’re going to look back and say ‘remember when you had to be careful about what you clicked on?’”.

Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.

We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.

It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.

It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.

Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.

Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.

Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.

I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.

Vale Sir Arthur.