IT Essentials: It never rains but it pours

Forecast is for damp, blustery politicians

IT Essentials: It never rains but it pours

What would a Labour victory mean for UK tech?

I've written a lot recently about the improving weather and dearth of serious news. This week that all changed, when the heavens literally and metaphorically opened to shower us with stories.

The biggest downpour was over Downing Street, where a soaked Sunak announced a general election to the strains of Things Can Only Get Better. The PM, who appears to own neither a jacket, umbrella or £2 million briefing room (with a roof), hit out at Labour and urged the country to "build on the progress we have made."

It's true that UK tech, now valued at over $1 trillion, has grown under the Conservatives. There's been plenty of support for start-ups; the sector finally got a dedicated government department last year; and the government has been taking a refreshingly sensible approach to AI.

On the other hand, there has long been a feeling the sector isn't being listened to: damaging changes to immigration rules, IR35 tax and angel investing thresholds could all have been mitigated if tech entrepreneurs were as welcome in Sunak's Downing Street as they were in the Cameron years.

And the Labour alternative? Surveys suggest the sector welcomes the prospect of a Starmer government, but details are light. The party has put out a handful of fintech policies, promises of faster regulatory approval, revamping DSIT and says it is working on an AI strategy. These are all encouraging moves, but the real meat will be in the manifesto - and we'll have to wait and see for that.

What would be really welcome news is an end to Cabinet reshuffles. Stopping the ministerial churn as a means of reward/punishment would give ministers an opportunity to build working knowledge of their respective areas and keep policy on track. This isn't a uniquely Conservative issue, either: since 1997, the average tenure of a Cabinet minister has been less than two years.

Shower of controversy

Two more weather fronts swept in from the tech conferences on the US west coast and AI summit in South Korea, meeting and merging above the UK to hammer the country with headlines.

Windows Recall bobbed to the top of the flood for most of the week. This AI feature, disabled by default, screenshots your PC every few seconds to give it a "photographic memory" - but doesn't obscure passwords or sensitive information. You can't even filter out certain websites unless you're using Edge.

Clearly this is a massive privacy risk, seems incompatible with GDPR (happy sixth birthday to the regulation, by the way), and gives attackers a new target. Don't get too excited about Recall as a business user just yet, at least until Microsoft has completed several rounds of tweaks.

I've long thought integrating Copilot into Windows was Microsoft's first step towards unlocking an unimaginably large trove of training data: every Windows 11 PC in the world. Windows Recall, although the data is processed locally, seems to be a tentative first step towards that.

Ironically, Microsoft was one of 16 companies to sign a new AI safety commitment this week, at the same time as it and its peers are forcing the technology into every aspect of people's lives.

The AI storm is only just getting started. I hope that you, unlike the Prime Minister, remembered your umbrella.

Penny Horwood has dug deeply into this week's other-other AI news, the Saga of Sam vs ScarJo, with a long read explaining why this story is important for the entire tech industry - not just the celebrity stakeholders.

John Leonard has been at Nutanix .Next in Barcelona, where he's talked to IT leaders at the sharp end of the Broadcom/VMware deal and heard about the company's accelerating moves towards open source.