Posts by mark daly

Way too simplistic

It is true that poor lending by banks to property buyers and businesses was a major cause of the current financial crisis. However, it omits the key fact that the banks would not have managed to generate

the credit to finance the lending bubble if it had not been for all the fancy instruments and derivatives such as CDOs and CDSs that made crap lending appear to be gold plated investments. It was the creation of a shadow banking system hidden in off balance sheet SIVs etc that mad the whole shebang possible and 'evil city traders' definitely did play a key role in creating the monster. Of course, now their chums are desperately trying to rewrite history to omit their role in the whole in the thing.

Ironic that this should appear on the day SSE warned that Britain faces impending power shortages

Lets see how well a digital by default system of government works when the lights go out.

Umm HMRC currently has less than 70,000 employees and are planning to cut another 10,000 before 2015.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/23/tax-revenue-tribunals-staff-billions

Why do they need a license agreement for 90,000 desktops

So how much of my 16 GB tablet will I need to install Windows 8

Ummm. 16 GB.

So it appears that you are going to have to buy a fairly costly tablet just to run this beast.

The interface may have changed but the bloat remains the same

Fantastic. Only another 3 million employers and 25 million employees to go

Lets see how it copes when they all their records start hitting the system once once a month.

Why has the HMRC CIO Steve Lamey not quit ?

Surely Data security is his responsibility as much as Gray's and he has been in his job much longer than the resigning Chairman?

What role did HMRC's IT partner's Capgemini and Fujitsu have in this fiasco ?

Is n't it their responsibility to build systems that are intrinsically secure not just to rely on some civil servant in an office following the correct procedure ?

Lots of unanswered questions.

We can be certain that the cases reaching the attention of the media probably represent only a small proportion of all the potential breaches.

The question is surely not the competence of the terrorists

It really matters little if the attackers were professionals or bumblers if the intent was to kill. What is more an issue is how we let it effect our lives and how willing we should be to give up our liberty to politicians who are claiming that they can 'protect' us from such dangers. I suppose I am a little skeptical of requests from government to be 'vigilant' when it seems to mislay the whereabouts of known terrorism suspects on such a regular basis. My alarm bells also start ringing when the main stream media starts putting out misleading statements suggesting that the modus operandi of the attackers was the same as that deployed by Al Qaida in Iraq when there is really precious little evidence to suggest that is the case. I fear that the recent incidents will be used as yet another ploy to allow the current administration to push through its pet security projects such as ID Cards which in reality will do little to protect us from the current terror threat but will make us less free. No matter what we do in life we can not avoid the inevitability of death so maybe it is time we grew up and started to evaluate the risks of life like adults rather than hoping that 'nanny' will protect us from all misfortunes. Maybe then we might learn how to live as a free people.