podcasts @ComputerWeekly

This is the second part of the Computer Weekly interview with Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research. In the last episode, Frank looked at the cloud infrastructure market. In this interview, Computer Weekly’s Cliff Saran talks to Franks about the development of the personal cloud, a concept which could make operating systems irrelevant.

In the first of a two-part podcast interview, Computer Weekly’s Cliff Saran talks to Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research about his research on the cloud infrastructure market. Frank discusses the maturity of products like Google Application Engine, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. He also covers the distinction between hosted services, outsourced services and cloud-based services.

Paul Fletcher, member of the first team to intercept the LoveBug worm on 4 May 2000 describes how events unfolded on that day and why it landmark event.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) published a http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/topthreats.html report detailing the http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/03/02/240471/rsa-2010-cloud-security-alliance-lists-top-cloud-threats.htm top security risks of cloud computing at the start of RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco.Computer Weekly’s Warwick Ashford spoke to Art Coviello, president of RSA, the security division of EMC, about the significance of the CSA’s report for businesses and security professionals.According to Coviello, all stakeholders have an inter-related role to play in ensuring an effective response to the security challenges outlined in the CSA report.

Computer Weekly went to Station X, Britain’s top secret World War 2 code breaking headquarters, to discover the story behind Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. Senior reporter Ian Grant spoke to cryptographer Captain Jerry Roberts about the origins of Colossus. Roberts worked in the Testery, the part of Station X devoted to cracking Tunny, the code used by Hitler and his top generals. His colleagues included Alan Turing and Bill Tutte, the man responsible for working out how the Germans encrypted their messages. As Roberts makes clear, without Tutte, Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers could never have invented Colossus, the first digital programmable electronic computer, thus laying the foundation for all electronic computers. And as Roberts makes equally clear, Tutte and Flowers have never received popular recognition of their roles as pioneers of the computer age.

Wikinomics became the number one management book of 2007. Don Tapscott’s latest book, Grown-up Digital”, is now available. In this podcast Cliff Saran speaks to him about the internet generation. In Grown-up Digital, Tapscott argues that today’s youngsters have grown-up with the internet and are better suited to working in the digital age than previous generations. But business and governments are lagging behind. “We need to rebuild all our institutions. The corporation is broken. The financial system is broken. We need to change the basic modus operandi of government. Industrial age bureaucracies have been around a hundred years, and were a good idea because we had systems to prevent corruption. Now we have opportunities to move towards networked models, to create public value and change the nature of democracy.”

Integrated IT systems could have prevented the collapse of Barings Bank, says Nick Leeson, the trader who hid £826m in losses that led to the bank’s demise in 1995. Computer Weekly’s Warwick Ashford asked Leeson at a media briefing during RSA Conference 2009 why most financial organisations still lack such systems. Leeson describes the IT systems at Barings as “mishmash” as he answers this and other IT-related questions about how he was able to hide his losses for so long.

Pat Norris was among the programmers who worked on the Apollo 11 mission that sent Neil Amstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon.

Microsoft issues security updates for its products every month, despite the introduction of its Trustworthy Computing initiative to raise security standards in its software. These continual updates, coupled with several unscheduled, emergency updates have led some end users to believe Trustworthy Computing (TwC) is failing. ComputerWeekly’s Warwick Ashford asked Microsoft’s George Stathakopoulos, general manager for Trustworthy Computing security, for an update on a visit to the software company’s headquarters in Redmond.

In this interview, Claire Thwaites, head of Vodafone Foundation and United Nations Foundation Partnership speaks to Cliff Saran about how mobile phones can be used to support mobile health programmes in developing nations. Mobile phones are being used in applications like SMS text alerts to enable patients to adhere to their prescriptions, education programmes to improve health awareness, data collection and training of health care workers.

Janis Sharp, mother of self-confessed hacker Gary McKinnon, speaks frankly, movingly and exclusively to Computer Weekly’s Ian Grant about the struggle to stop his extradition to the US for committing what the Americans claim was the 'greatest military hack of all time'. She explains why she believes her son should be tried in the UK, what effect the events of the past seven years have had on the family, and how his case is attracting growing political support.

The IT service desk is in a great position to identify problem areas relating to IT before other parts of the business are impacted. ASs such, it needs the internal clout to feed back its conclusions to the rest of the business. If this is done right then a change in IT support strategy can help business save costs, and help IT match more closely to what the business needs.

Translating business needs into software outcomes has long been an Achilles heel for the IT industry. Whether the approach has been to write bespoke applications or find a best-fit package, the result is normally an imperfect reflection of what was required. More seriously, the resulting systems are a static reflection of the needs of a particular moment in time. The weakness of this approach comes when a business needs to radically alter the way it operates, whether in response to changing market conditions or simply a desire to reinvent itself. When the systems that supposedly support the business can't be changed in a timely or cost-effective enough way to make that change happen, the business finds itself set in electronic concrete.

Web 2.0 may have emerged from a slow-gathering wave of hype, but it describes a range of business models, ideas, methodologies and computing platforms that represent a sea change in the business world - partly driven by the ways consumers like to communicate and consume. The Web 2.0 economy is no longer about where information or service originates (i.e. who it belongs to) but how easily it can be consumed, personalised and shared by a target community, outside of the strictures of format, date, ownership and hierarchy. Every stream of information means defining a community, and then satisfying its demands with supplementary information and the opportunity for conversation. Social bookmarking services such as Delicious, Digg it, Reddit, Stumbleupon and MyStrands either aggregate feeds or allow users to leave a trail of recommendations for others to follow, use, annotate and expand.

Kelly Dempski, technology research director at Accenture's European technology lab in France tells Warwick Ashford what CIOs need to know about Generation Y - the 'Millennials', web 2.0, social networking, and emerging technologies.

Security researcher Ian Amit was given a keen insight into the working of the cybercriminal world when he found a way into a database of stolen access credentials. Amit, who is the director of security research at Aladdin Knowledge Systems has since drawn up a report on his research. Computer Weekly’s Warwick Ashford spoke to him on his recent visit to London and asked him to highlight some of the findings in the report.

Microsoft is giving away free development tools and server software to start-ups less than three years old. Cliff Saran find out more about the initiative, called BizSpark, from Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president responsible for strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft