Computing's Top 10 tech stories of the week: Rock-star CEOs, an Apple bug and Edward Snowden
Techies behaving badly and Brazilians standing up to bullies. It's all here folks
Even techies let their hair down on a big occasion. And if they don't have any hair left, they are quite prepared, given sufficient lubrication, to demonstrate air guitar skills honed during many years in the back bedroom, or to indulge in other unseemly behaviour. As evidence we give you:
10. The UK IT Industry Awards 2014 - and the winners are...
Computing and the BCS hosted our biggest UK IT Industry Awards ever on Wednesday and thousands of IT professionals showed up to find out who had been voted the top of their field in categories that included CIO, IT team and Business IT innovation of the year.
Sadly, in each category there could be only one winner (or as the evening's compere comedian Rich Hall rather unkindly put it "even if you were highly commended, well done, but you still lost"), but when those winners took to the platform to accept their awards, it was only the strict health and safety regulations at Battersea's Evolution arena, as enforced by burly gentlemen in tight-fitting suits, that prevented us from holding lighters aloft and rushing the stage.
And yes, of course we made full use of the words 'glittering' and 'star-studded' in our write-up.
9. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella praises UK start-ups and digital infrastructures
Like any rock-star midway through a tour, a technology CEO has to remember to big up the town he's in, wherever that might be. But for Microsoft's Satya Nadella it's less "Orpington, you're the best f**ing rock'n'roll town in the whole goddamn universe!", and more "My, you guys are so advanced around here!".
Speaking in London this week, Nadella said: "I've always felt that coming to the UK is an amazing experience. At Microsoft we've always said things should launch first in the UK and succeed there. It's amazing to see the rapid growth when it comes to the cloud, and the growth of the [UK] digital industry."
Like the leader of any band touring to promote its current album, Nadella was careful to mention its ventures in the host country, such as the London Accelerator start-up programme Microsoft's research labs in Cambridge.
And, very much like a band reinventing itself, the Microsoft CEO was determined to focus on the new, repeatedly banging the "cloud first, mobile first" drum, areas in which Microsoft was still wearing flares while others had moved on to skinny jeans.
Make the last song the one they'll remember, they say, and Nadella had clearly learned that lesson as well.
"Technology exists for one reason - it is to help human potential," he proclaimed, as a finale. There was not a dry eye in the house.
8. 'BlackBerry has survived, now we look at growth,' says CEO John Chen
BlackBerry groupies have been pinning their hopes on the star qualities of CEO John Chen, praying that some of the magic he showed at Sybase, which he says made a profit for 60 quarters in a row, will translate into success for an outfit that's lost a lot of fans over the past few years.
To mark his one-year anniversary as head honcho at BB, Chen took to the media stage with a stirring rendition of "I Will Survive".
"We will survive as a company and now I am rather confident," he told Reuters. "We're managing the supply chain, we are managing inventories, we are managing cash, and we have expenses now at a number that is very manageable. BlackBerry has survived; now we have to start looking at growth,"
Sadly, however, Chen's comments came shortly after City Index Group CIO Mike Lear told Computing that the firm has seen a huge drop in demand for its BlackBerry app, with its market share down from 15 per cent to just 0.8 per cent.
Rumours of bad behaviour, a whiff of danger, a rapid and unexpected fall from grace... yes, those IT company CEOs are at it again.
This week's executive bad boy was Shaygan Kheradpir, who until Monday was CEO of networking vendor Juniper. Only installed in his post in January, 11 months was nevertheless sufficient time for Kheradpir to run amok "in connection with a particular negotiation with a customer", burning his boardroom bridges in the process.
What happened, exactly? We may have to wait for the inevitable kiss-and-tell autobiography to find out.
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Computing's Top 10 tech stories of the week: Rock-star CEOs, an Apple bug and Edward Snowden
Techies behaving badly and Brazilians standing up to bullies. It's all here folks
Apple iPhones and iPads, previously believed by users to be relatively impervious to malware, are now at risk from a major security threat.
Security vendor Palo Alto Networks says it has discovered the first example of a serious piece of iOS malware, and that the so-called WireLurker virus has already infected hundreds of thousands of devices in the wild. Not only that, but it transpires the virus can also attack Windows devices.
WireLurker resides in OS X on an Apple computer, and immediately begins monitoring any iOS device (iPhone or iPad) that is connected to the infected system via a USB cable. Worryingly for Apple fans, the device does not have to be jailbroken in order to be infected.
Once WireLurker gets into an iPhone or iPad, Palo Alto says it is "capable of stealing a variety of information from mobile devices it infects", and this is said to include call logs and phonebook contents.
For those worried about lurkers in their wires, Palo Alto has open sourced a project on Github to remove and protect against the malware.
Essentially, big data analytics means being able to stick pretty much any data from any source into a big pot, mix it up, and then cross-match it to find patterns.
It's easy to see how, in the act of melding together silos of data in this way, private information could become public - almost by accident. For example, cross-matching a list of addresses with one of phone numbers, emails, social media feeds, political affiliations, memberships of dubious clubs, travel itineraries and health records could allow almost anyone to build a highly detailed profile of, well, almost anyone.
It is almost too easy to cross ethical boundaries and to break regulations, and the results could be highly damaging to the individual or company involved. Getting the balance right between usefulness of the data and privacy is something of a grey area, but fortunately Guillermo Lafuente of MWR InfoSecurity was on hand this week to explain how to make sure you stay on the side of right.
Last week outsourcing giant Serco announced a profits warning after it was forced to write off the eye-watering sum of £1.5bn. This led to a 30 per cent slump in shares, an announcement that dividend payments would be suspended, and a request that shareholders stump up £550m in a rights issue.
It seems that the public sector has finally grown tired of being bilked billed for services that included the tagging of long-dead prisoners, and that a move to try similar tactics in the private sector have not met with much success.
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Computing's Top 10 tech stories of the week: Rock-star CEOs, an Apple bug and Edward Snowden
Techies behaving badly and Brazilians standing up to bullies. It's all here folks
3. Security-Officer-as-a-Service - what does it mean and who is it for?
Like to travel? Enjoy life on the edge? Can't sing or play an instrument? Well the role of security-officer-as-a-service could be just the thing.
The security-officer-as-a-Service or SOaaS is the latest clumsy acronym to be taking the IT world by storm. Essentially a third-party security officer, you'll be the one that gets going when the going gets tough in client organisations that cannot justify the cost of hiring a full-time CISO.
2. SaaS keeps things simple: an interview with Telefonica CIO Brendan O'Rourke
Arguably, bringing in a specialist security officer when required could be seen as part of the best-of-breed trend that has become something of a mantra in IT departments in recent years. However, Brendan O'Rourke, CIO of Telefonica, is looking to reverse this tide, instead buying cloud services from a single supplier.
"I want single stack if possible. Having an on-premise solution [alongside cloud services] weakens the software-as-a-service [SaaS] premise. A lot of telco systems are pretty standard, so getting them via the cloud in a pay-as-you-use dynamic is great," he tells Computing's editor Stuart Sumner.
No one cares about surveillance by governments and corporations, some would have you believe. It's just sooo boooring, they say.
Tell that to the Germans and Brazilians who are hopping mad at the US for spying on their strategic companies and political leaders, a practice for which the kneejerk defence of "preventing terrorism" is so threadbare that the knee is likely to rip straight through. And tell that to Computing's readers, who made this story the run-away leader in this week's most-read stories.
Eighteen months after the first revelations of what NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies have been up to, with the collusion of the major US tech organisations, this story still has the power to shock that any death metal band would kill for, and its reverberations will be felt for many years to come.
The German and Brazilian governments have re-drafted a UN document to describe the act of collecting metadata from foreign states as a "highly intrusive act", and that such practices "violate the right to privacy and can interfere with the freedom of expression and may contradict the tenets of a democratic society, especially when undertaken on a mass scale". The draft also suggests the UN appoint a special envoy to identify and clarify standards protecting privacy rights. It will be voted on later this month.
Which way will the self-appointed "defenders of the free world" vote, we wonder?