Technology networking in the heart of London
Every year the Real Time Club runs a series of dinners with distinguished speakers on current issues of the information age. Dinners are held under the Chatham House rule and robust and well-informed debate is explicitly encouraged.
Real Time Club dinners are open to non-members and everyone is welcome to attend.
Can The UK No Longer Compete In Technology?
The UK is fifth largest economy in the world, yet confidence wanes over our ability to compete other than in financial services, with worries that our remaining R&D, let alone production, back office and content creation centres will emigrate to China and India. The UK once designed and exported products for the world, so where are our Microsofts, Apples, Googles, Yahoos, eBays, Ericssons, Nokias, Sonys, Canons, Symantecs, Dells, …?
IT Security – Solutions or snakeoil?
Security has secrecy, special practices and know-how wired into its make-up so how do we know that the people proposing security solutions and purporting to be experts in the subject know what they are doing? Who sets the security rules for new regulations like Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Would you fly in an aircraft with avionics that had been security reviewed by someone who had learnt about IT security from a book? Would ‘Information Security for Dummies’ allow you to bluff your way through job interviews and pass multiple-choice security examinations? Isn’t security engineering just common-sense and should be treated as just an attribute of mainstream IT? Shouldn’t we stop dividing up the IT industry into specialist sub-domains, or is security special in some way? Getting security right has certainly become a significant issue, with the very infrastructure of countries dependent on IT security. So what does make a good security professional, and how can you separate them from those who would just sell you snake oil?
Faceoff at Facebook
From puberty to senility we are being urged to put our intimate details on-line via services like Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In and Friends Re-United to be trawled by would-be friends, predators, on-line marketeers, anti-piracy lawyers and information aggregators from Garlik to Google. Almost every site we visit wants our personal details and to put spyware on our systems. In parallel we regularly read shock-horror stories over the loss or theft of the contents of centralised databases and are told to keep our own data safe with shredders and anti-malware tools. How do we ensure the application of good systems thinking to produce systems that are fit for purpose, reconciling ease of use and attractiveness with security and privacy that is adequate for the application? And who decides what is “good systems thinking”, “fit for purpose” or “adequate”? And who believes them?
Is BT a Telco?
Phil Dance will speak to the topic ‘Is BT a telco?’, providing insights into the new pathways that are being developed at BT in response to both technology and business changes. Phil has a reputation as an entertaining and provoking speaker and looks forward to discussing with the Real Time Club, in their 40th year, about the seachange that has happened within and without BT over that time and beyond.
Northern Rocked…what price systems failure?
Northern Rock was the first run on a bank in UK for about 20 years. It didn’t fail because the bank of England stepped in to avert it – the last failure was Overend, Gurney and Company which collapsed in 1866. But it was the first run since on-line consumer banking. Who was to blame and what role did the IT systems, website and TV play alongside the irresponsible lending and securitization practices at the bank? Should the FSA and the Bank of England have moved sooner and faster – the evidence was clear enough to cause the share price to fall for 6 months and surely they knew more than the stockmarket. How much are the systems in the USA to blame? How did we manage to import it? What has the cost been and who is paying? How will it all get sorted out? What changes need to be made and does IT have a role in reducing the risks or does it make it more likely to happen again?
The Impact of Computing in the Past and the Future on the Security Community
James Bond may have had all the bad women but “Q” collected all the good stories. Modern computing and communications both have their origins in Intelligence (Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers and their colleagues at Bletchley Park and Dollis Hill). Modern Intelligence often has its origins in Computing.
Dinner to celebrate the Real Time Club’s 40th Anniversary.
On the occasion of the Real Time Club’s 40th anniversary, here an attempt of listing our previous speakers. Apologies for any omissions.
Cryptography: fact; fiction; and Da Vinci
Cryptography has never been as much in the news as in recent years. Books and films on Enigma and Bletchley -some more accurate than others -reached a large audience. But this has been dwarfed by the Da Vinci phenomenon. Incidentally, the book’s heroine, Sophie Neveu, studied cryptography at Royal Holloway – presumably under Professor Fred Piper, though this is not in the book.
At an every-day level, the security of Internet shopping, banking, and cash machines is based, at least in part, on cryptography. In fact this applies to the whole edifice of domestic and international money transmission, banking, finance and trade. At stake is not only the privacy and authenticity of transactions but-and this is at least as important – also the identity of the transacting parties.
The Internet is too important to be hamstrung by morality
Those who created the Internet envisaged global any-to-any communications free of censorship and control, whether by government or business. The majority of the population in nations like the UK, is on-line, but so too is a similar proportion of criminals and subversives. Politicians and pressures groups around the world are therefore demanding that “something” be done to protect the vulnerable and to prevent content of which they disapprove being available to all and sundry over the Internet. The solutions currently on offer range from “Cartels Masquerading as Anarchy” through “Brussels Fudge” to “Big Brother: your window on the world is their window into your mind”. So who should lead the way forward: “the moral majority”, “those who know best”, “the market”, “democratic values” or “no-one”?