Tech Weekly podcast: iPhone 4, Like-jacking and searching with Wolfram Alpha
Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur welcome Tom Watson MP in this week's lively Tech Weekly discussion about open data, the newest iPhone announcement from Apple, and the most recent problems plaguing social network Facebook. Watson, who was instrumental in helping the previous Labour government understand the value of opening up its public records, shares his view on the reasons why openness should be valued – and what he had to do to convince his political colleagues. Charles Arthur speaks with Wolfram Alpha creator Conrad Wolfram about one of the potential applications of the government data, and how more like this should be released for the benefit of his service – and of mankind. Charles also reveals the specs of the newest handset in the Apple iPhone lineup, announced on Monday. But how did the leak of a prototype affect the launch? The team also discusses Steve Jobs' visions of the future, and how similar they are to Microsoft. Finally, we hear how to avoid being "likejacked", or scammed by hackers who've taken hold of a new Facebook feature that allows you to share where on the web you've been with your social network friends. Don't forget to ... • Comment below • Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk • Get our Twitter feed for programme updates • Join our Facebook group • See our pics on Flickr /Post your tech pics Aleks Krotoski Charles Arthur Scott Cawley
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Tech Weekly podcast: iPhone 4, Like-jacking and searching with Wolfram Alpha
Government to close Becta
Closure of school IT qango set to save £80m, but 240 staff to lose jobs The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting £80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff – and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology. The move has been made as part of the government's wider programme of cuts worth £6.2bn for 2010-11.
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Government to close Becta
Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
The failures of the database state have been laid bare, but most of the leadership candidates don't see where Labour went wrong The liberty deficit left by the last government – the gap between the freedom enjoyed by UK citizens in 1997 and what was left in 2010 – is not something that Labour has got its head round yet. The candidates in the leadership election talk about reconnecting with the public, but Balls, Burnham and the Milibands simply don't grasp that they have effectively excluded themselves from the only liberal-progressive act in town. Diane Abbott gets it , but the standard male products of the New Labour curia have got a long way to go. One reason they wrote themselves out of the picture appears in a study from the Centre for Technology Policy Research at the LSE, which is summarised by Ian Grant in Computer Weekly this week. The LSE thinktank concludes : "Despite a spend of as much as £21bn (a year) on public sector IT, it is difficult to find any compelling examples of direct productivity gains and improved public services." Much of the money was spent on intrusive databases – last year, I estimated a total of well over £33bn. We were told it was necessary to give up our personal information to allow the joined-up delivery of services. Prospect magazine praised the programme and declared that personal data was like a tax that we owed to the state; that privacy was luxury we could no longer afford in the modern era. Transformational Government , as the programme was known, was driven by a simple faith in operational savings that were entirely theoretical – "an anachronistic and ultimately ineffective approach from which the UK has only recently begun to distance itself". The following are the crucial lines from Ian Grant's report: "Transformational Government [used an] outdated, 20th-century approach of imposed command and control enabled by large central databases. It distracted government from its own policy aspirations and ignored where the technology of the internet age was heading – towards more localised, autonomous, distributed and consumer-responsive services built around common technical standards." In other words, the statism that demanded we give up personal data and submit to the surveillance society not only had few tangible benefits and was a vast waste of money, but was based on decidedly old thinking that was entirely unsuitable to the internet age
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Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
Tech Weekly podcast: A digital election, the JooJoo and Joseph Menn on cybercrime
On this week's programme, we look back on the past 14 days of politics, and the uncomfortable love triangle that unfolded between the three main party leaders. Their allegiances flipped faster than the MP housing market, and we've been watching it all on the web
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Tech Weekly podcast: A digital election, the JooJoo and Joseph Menn on cybercrime
Tech Weekly podcast: Digital candidates, Heather Brooke and Alan Wake
In the podcast this week Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur speak with two parliamentary hopefuls standing on technology platforms: Denny de la Raye , from getavote.org, and Andrew Robinson , from the Pirate Party UK. The team tackle issues of democratic reform and copyright as the political machine accelerates towards the May finishing line. In the wake of this discussion, Aleks speaks with Freedom of Information Act campaigner and investigative journalist Heather Brooke about the process she used to uncover the MPs expenses scandal in 2009. Finally, Keith Stuart meets with Oskari Hakkinen from Remedy Games, and quizzes him about Alan Wake , the Xbox 360 title that's set to reinvent video game narrative. Don't forget to submit your questions for next week's election special, as we drill Labour's Stephen Timms , minister for Digital Britain, the Consevative Party's Jeremy Hunt , shadow secretary of state for culture, media & sport, and Lord Razzal , Liberal Democrat spokesperson for business, enterprise and regulatory reform. Details are here . Don't forget to ... • Comment below • Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk • Get our Twitter feed for programme updates • Join our Facebook group • See our pics on Flickr /Post your tech pics Heather Brooke Aleks Krotoski Charles Arthur Keith Stuart Scott Cawley
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Tech Weekly podcast: Digital candidates, Heather Brooke and Alan Wake
Science Weekly podcast: The science of smell; and a newly discovered human ancestor
Odour enthusiast Will Andrews from Proctor and Gamble's perfume creation team tells us about the science of smells and predicts that future perfumes may remind us of PlayStations and warm electronics. Will also teaches us how to smell like an expert, and conducts a fragrance test live in the studio. Next week he will be giving a lecture on the subject at the Royal Institution in London. In the newsjam, the panel discusses what the outcome of Britain's general election could mean for science , and the discovery of the remains of a possible new species of human ancestor, Australopithecus sediba . The Guardian's science correspondent Ian Sample and the Observer's Robin McKie are on hand to lend their wisdom. Nell Boase is your host while Alok is away. Feel free to post your thoughts below. Join our Facebook group
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Science Weekly podcast: The science of smell; and a newly discovered human ancestor
Government to set up its own cloud computing system
UK cloud computing strategy could save up to £3.2bn a year, says Cabinet Office The government has unveiled a sweeping strategy to create its own internal "cloud computing" system – such as that used by Google, Microsoft and Amazon – as part of a radical plan that it claims could save up to £3.2bn a year from an annual bill of at least £16bn. The key part of the new strategy, outlined by the Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith, will be the concentration of government computing power into a series of about a dozen highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m to build, which will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities. The government will also push for "open source" software to be used more widely among central and local government's 4m desktop computers. That poses an immediate threat to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office applications suite is at present firmly embedded as the standard on PCs in government, such as the NHS, which is one of the largest users in Europe. But John Suffolk, the government's chief information officer, pointed out that cost savings of just £100 per machine would total £400m across government. Unlike Windows, open source operating systems such as Linux have no licensing costs and can be used on as many machines as required. By 2015, the strategy suggests, 80% of central government desktops could be supplied through a "shared utility service" – essentially a cloud service resembling Google Docs, which lets people create documents online for free. The move to a "government cloud" mirrors the system used by Google and other large companies, which put cheap "server" computers into huge data centres to provide computing power on demand which is delivered where it is needed via the internet. That would be provided to government departments and local government, replacing the ageing and inefficient systems used in many of the hundreds of data centres presently used – and frequently run at far below their capacity because they are dedicated to one department. Suffolk said that "as a rule", UK citizens' personal data will not be transported overseas – although he could not rule it out. But security of data, and the data centres, would be a high priority, he said. He did not rule out using Google's or Microsoft's new cloud services: "We will see if they fit our business requirements and personal data requirements," he said. Similarly the new "cloud" system will not include the security services such as MI5 or MI6, which have their own, separate systems. Estimates prepared for the government suggest the "cloud" system could save £900m in their first five years, and £300m annually after that compared to the present structure. The government also wants to build its own "app store" of software to solve frequently-seen problems, by re-using programs that have been written elsewhere and can be re-applied
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Government to set up its own cloud computing system
Digital tills are ringing to the sound of an unreal Christmas | Victor Keegan
Virtual goods are flying off the virtual shelves. It's time we started taking this new market seriously Flirtomatic , a London-based company, claims to have sold 100,000 gifts during the past four weeks in the run-up to Christmas
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Digital tills are ringing to the sound of an unreal Christmas | Victor Keegan
Fujitsu workers to strike
Workers at Japanese giant Fujitsu are to stage a three-day strike in a row over pay, jobs and pensions, it was announced today. Unite said its members will walk out on 12, 13 and 16 November following an overwhelming vote in favour of industrial action
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Fujitsu workers to strike
Computer hacker Gary McKinnon loses fight to stand trial in UK
McKinnon refused supreme court appeal against extradition to US on charges of breaking into military networks Computer hacker Gary McKinnon lost his long battle to stand trial in the UK today when he was refused permission to appeal to the supreme court against extradition to the US on charges of breaking into the Pentagon's military networks. The court decided the case did not raise "points of law of general public importance", which are neccessary if a case is to be pursued at the higher level. The decision extinguishes McKinnon's legal options in the UK, but his lawyers said they would now consider applying to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. Giving the court's decision, Lord Justice Stanley Burnton, who heard McKinnon's latest appeal earlier this year with Mr Justice Wilkie, said extradition was "a lawful and proportionate response" to his alleged offending. He said McKinnon would be unlikely to succeed with his claim that extradition would breach his right to a private and family life, under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Nor did the court think that extradition to the US would be a breach of his right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3. McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, said the decision was "devoid of humanity". "No other country in the world would so readily offer its citizens to the US as sacrificial lambs merely to safeguard a 'special political relationship'. "To use my desperately vulnerable son in this way is despicable, immoral and devoid of humanity." McKinnon's solicitor, Karen Todner, said the trial was having a "devastating" effect on the 43-year-old's health. "He is a highly vulnerable man in a very fragile state and this is a huge blow to him and his family," she said. "Why is our government so inhumane as to allow this to happen to someone, particularly someone with Asperger's, a form of autism? This is the wholesale destruction and bullying of a small individual by the United States and now our own government. "Our extradition treaty with the US is unfair and prejudicial to UK citizens and should be repealed or amended immediately." Todner said every further avenue, including the European court, would be explored. Sabina Frediani, campaigns co-ordinator for Liberty, which supported McKinnon's case, said: "Never were justice and the law so out of sync as in the case of Britain's rotten extradition arrangements. People up and down the country are rightly horrified by the way that a vulnerable man has been sold down the river when he should have been protected and tried here at home." She said Liberty would support any appeal to the European court and would work to ensure parliament "faces up to its responsibilities to amend the act"
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Computer hacker Gary McKinnon loses fight to stand trial in UK