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UK government launches review of the sharing economy

2014-10-01T00:51:00.000+01:00

The government has launched a review of the “sharing economy” to evaluate the economic potential and social implications created by people sharing products and services through the web.

The review is intended to look at the impact of services such as Airbnb, which allows people to rent out homes or rooms, or BlaBlaCar, used for car journey sharing.

In his speech to the Conservative Party conference, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne highlighted the need to understand the potential effect of disruptive technologies.

"Every single day new technologies, new companies and new economies are fundamentally shaking up the established way of doing things," he said.

"It’s never been easier for thousands to start their own business in Britain, and reach the whole world. But a single app can appear overnight and disrupt an entire industry.

"It can be exciting – but unsettling too. For this technology brings intense competition that spells rapid decline for any sector, or any country, that fails to keep up. These are big questions that require big answers."

The consultation has been initiated by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and will be led by Debbie Wosskow, CEO of online home-swapping service Love Home Swap.

“Over the next few months I will be exploring the social and economic potential of the sharing economy in the UK, and making recommendations on how this potential can be reached. I will also be considering any risks to consumers, or established businesses outside the sharing economy,” said Wosskow.

“I am keen to hear a wide range of views to feed into my review, including from users and potential users of sharing economy services, businesses operating in the sharing economy, and established businesses that are not part of the sharing economy,” she said.

The consultation will look at existing services such as home or business rentals, transport sharing and personal-time sharing, as well as emerging areas including fashion, food and personal items.

The terms of reference for the review said: “Collaborative businesses such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit are growing the sharing economy – peer-to-peer marketplaces that allow people to share possessions, time and skills. These new and varied business models are attracting significant publicity and investment across a wide range of sectors.”

Wosskow is calling for evidence to be submitted to the consultation before 28 October 2014, and will report on her findings by December.

The sharing economy has already caused controversy in some countries. In the US, hotel firms have complained that Airbnb allows people to avoid paying taxes on renting properties, as well as circumventing the rules and regulations to which they are forced to adhere. Taxi hailing app Uber has led to protests by taxi drivers in London and elsewhere about unlicensed cab drivers unfairly competing with regulated providers.

The UK government hopes that a better understanding of the implications of the sharing economy will help to create an environment that is more attractive for companies launching such services to base themselves in the UK.

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John Lewis invests £100,000 in micro-location startup

2014-10-01T00:11:00.000+01:00

Retailer John Lewis is investing £100,000 in technology startup Localz, which specialises in micro-location technology.

The retailer launched its JLab technology startup incubator earlier this year to find new ways to help customers shop across channels, simplify their lives using the internet of things and to use data for in-store personalisation.

In May, it selected five startups to move into the JLab office space in Level39, each of which received initial funding of £12,500 and mentoring from John Lewis, Risk Capital Partners, the founder of confused.com and Silicon Valley Bank.

After developing their ideas for 12 weeks, the competition came to a head for the startups when they had to pitch their ideas last week.

Of the five finalists, John Lewis chose to trial technology from Localz, which sends promotions to customers' mobile phones according to the part of the store they are in.

"Innovation is at the heart of John Lewis, and JLab, our first tech incubator, has given us a new way to explore the technologies that will change how we all shop in the future," said John Lewis IT director Paul Coby (pictured).

Localz: in-store digital engagement using proximity and iBeacon technologyMusaic: wireless sound system for smart homesSpaceDesigned: online 3D room planningTap2Connect: smart labelling for after-sales careViewsy: in-store digital engagement using sensors to track customer behaviour

Localz plans to invest its winnings in its UK operations and continued technology development. The company is also looking to hire talent to work with its London-based team.

The technology it has created could allow customers to receive specialised offers on their smartphone as they visit different retail departments or help them find their way around the store.

JLab partner Stuart Marks praised the quality of entries and said picking a winner proved difficult.

"I am sure all the companies will go on to become very successful, but there has to be a winner, and in this case we felt Localz has the potential to become a long-term partner to John Lewis and to provide continuous innovation for its customers," he said.

John Lewis has being eyeing up technology startups for some time to keep ahead of the game in the changing landscape of the UK high street.

The retailer works with a wide range of suppliers, from large traditional firms to early-stage startups. It likes to work with startups because they are fresh thinking and have the speed to get things done quickly as you deal with fewer people than larger suppliers.

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BT launches cloud voice service for businesses

2014-09-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

BT Business has expanded its communications offering for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the launch of a cloud-based, business-grade IP voice service, BT Cloud Voice.

The operator said its new service would deliver all the traditional office phone system call features and quality, delivered via a BT Business internet connection, to provide a more flexible and future-proofed offering.

The system includes features such as intelligent call handling, conferencing, recording, desktop-sharing, softphones and smartphone integration.

The service will have three licence options: Basic, the entry-level functional service; Connect, for office-based firms with more demands than simply calling; and Collaborate, for firms with mobile or home workers that want to be able to use features such as audio-conferencing.

Users will receive an IP phone and a BT call plan designed to be shared among multiple users, with minutes to be purchased at the company level. All calls made using the system will run over BT Business’ network, said BT.

Buyers will be able to manage their service through an online portal, allowing companies to tailor and manage their own requirements, and perform a number of self-service functions, including licence management, adding and removing users, and setting call preferences without the need for BT to dispatch engineers.

BT said that, because the services are hosted, this should bring further savings for users by eliminating the need for elaborate maintenance contracts.

Graham Sutherland, BT Business CEO, said that 60% of SMEs in the UK were already using cloud-based applications to some degree, so the introduction of a cloud-based telephony offering could be seen as a natural step for a lot of the firm’s customers.

“BT Cloud Voice is a highly reliable and flexible business communications system and future-proofed solution for SMEs,” he said. “There are no initial hardware costs or engineer visits, and calling plans can be easily shared across the business.

“Our customers expect great value and high-quality products and BT Cloud Voice delivers on both counts,” said Sutherland.

In August, BT Business launched a range of plans aimed at SMEs including free 4G access and unlimited Wi-Fi.

Its latest product launch comes hot on the heels of a number of new communications offerings pitched at the smaller end of the market, and a government drive to encourage small businesses to apply for grants to upgrade their broadband.

Last week TalkTalk Business launched an SME-focused business broadband package that it claimed could save users close to £1,000 when compared to some equivalent BT services.

Virgin Media Business also unveiled a service for small businesses, saying that UK businesses were at risk of losing out to international competition if they scrimped on their communications budget, and courted entrepreneurs by running a fleet of free taxis around major cities and floating its CEO, Peter Kelly, down the Thames in a black cab.

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Microsoft vies with VMware in the virtual machine market

2014-09-30T23:02:00.000+01:00

VMware launched live migration in 2003. Since then, its capabilities have seen many enhancements, but Microsoft is starting to catch up.

Live migration entails moving active virtual machines (VMs) between physical hosts with no service interruption or downtime.

It launched 11 years ago as a landmark development in datacentre infrastructure and is now a crucial part of virtualisation infrastructure software and deployment.

A VM live migration allows administrators to perform maintenance and resolve a problem on a host without affecting users.

Moving active VMs from one hypervisor to another means you can balance the performance and load of hypervisors or, in the case of hardware maintenance, evacuate hypervisors from active VMs. It enables users to conserve resources during non-peak hours by moving VMs to fewer servers. You can also optimise network throughput by running VMs on the same hypervisor. When live migration of VMs appeared in 2003, with VMware’s ESX 2.0, it became popular in the IT community.

Six years after VMware pioneered VM live migration in 2003, Microsoft introduced a similar feature in Hyper-V that was shipped with Windows Server 2008 R2 – the previous version, Quick Migration, in Windows Server 2008 required a short service interruption during migration.

To understand how live migration works, it is important to be aware of the VM’s basic components: storage (the virtual hard disk) and the configuration or state. Storage is often located on a storage area network (SAN) and its configuration runs in a host server’s processor and memory. With the traditional process of a live migration, the VM’s state and configuration is copied from one physical host to another, but the VM’s storage does not move.

Shared nothing live migration is a combination of traditional VM live migration and storage migration

Storage live migration – moving the disks of a VM from one location to another while the VM continues to run on the same physical host – became available in 2006/2007 with ESX 3.0/3.5. VMware’s current offering, vSphere 5.5, vMotion (live migration of VMs) and Storage vMotion (live migration of the virtual disks) are part of the vSphere standard edition. Automatic load-balancing of VMs (distributed resource scheduling, or DRS) is available with vSphere Enterprise, automatic load balancing of disks (Storage DRS) and vSphere Enterprise Plus. Leveraging vMotion requires that ESXi servers are being managed by Virtual Center and that they are compatible (boiling down to compatible CPUs and a couple of minor requirements) with the same physical subnet.

Moving VMs between hypervisors that are not on the same physical network segment is not supported. Administrators need to tag an existing port or create a new VMkernel port for vMotion usage and live migration to be used by with one click in the vSphere Client (either the traditional client or the web client). Using the web client, even live migration of VMs without shared storage is possible (shared-nothing live migration, introduced with vSphere 5.1).

Shared-nothing live migration is a combination of traditional VM live migration and storage migration. The VM’s state and configuration is copied to a destination host and the file system is moved to the destination storage device. To prevent downtime, the VM’s state and storage remain running on the original host and storage location until the copying process is completed.

VMware has improved its live migration capabilities over the years and the application can now leverage multiple network interfaces to speed up live migration. In VMware’s upcoming vSphere 6, rumoured to be launching in March 2015, live migration over longer distances – with higher latencies and between virtual centre instances – is expected to be available.

DRS, which leverages vMotion to balance VM workload between physical hosts, has also been improved in recent product versions. It now boasts rules that take preferences into account and can evacuate hypervisors during non-peak hours to conserve resources using distributed power management (DPM), available with DRS as part of vSphere Enterprise Edition. VMware also updated Storage vMotion in vSphere version 5.0 by moving from a dirty block tracking algorithm to I/O mirroring, improving the performance and reliability of its storage live migration capabilities.

Microsoft introduced the ability to move VMs across Hyper-V hosts with Windows Server 2008 R2. This required VMs to reside on shared storage as part of a cluster. Even then, Hyper-V wasn’t able to move multiple machines simultaneously. However, with Windows Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2, Microsoft continued to gain ground on VMware, introducing additional migration capabilities that put Microsoft more or less on par with VMware when looking at this specific feature.

Since Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V can store VMs on server message block (SMB) file shares, performing live migration on running VMs stored on a central SMB share is now possible between non-clustered and clustered servers, so users can benefit from live migration capabilities without investing in clustering infrastructure. Windows Server 2012 R2’s live migration can also leverage compression, reducing the time needed to perform live migration by 50%, according to Microsoft.

Live migration in Windows Server 2012 R2 can use improvements in the SMB 3.0 protocol too, which accelerate live migration without the VM having to be stored on a SMB 3.0 share. If the customer is using network interfaces that support remote direct memory access (RDMA), the flow of live migration traffic is faster and has less impact on the CPUs of the hosts involved.

Storage live migration was introduced to the Hyper-V feature set with Windows Server 2012. Windows Server 2008 R2 allowed users to move a running VM using traditional live migration, but you had to shut down a VM to move its storage in Windows Server 2008 R2. With the current version of Hyper-V, you can transfer a VM’s backing storage files to a new location with no downtime, a feature that is critical for migrating or updating storage, or when a load redistribution on the storage side is needed.

In their current versions, VMware’s vSphere 5.5 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V support shared-nothing live migration, which makes it possible to simultaneously change the location where the VM is being run as well as the backing storage location for the running VM – a feature that provides additional flexibility, especially in small business environments where centralised storage is not always present.

Microsoft has gained substantial ground in many areas, but experts agree there is still a gap between Hyper-V and VMware vSphere when looking at enterprise-level features. Hyper-V lacks features, such as vSphere Storage DRS, though other features, such as Storage Spaces, offer similar functionalities. But Hyper-V comes in a powerful free version, “Hyper-V Server 2012”, which includes native support for Live Migration of VMs across clustered and non clustered hosts at no extra cost, while VMware’s free hypervisor has limited functionality. Going beyond live migration, both suppliers support replication capabilities, which is easy to set up with VMware vSphere and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Combined with the cloud offerings of the suppliers, VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, users can replicate and failover VMs to their suppliers’ cloud offerings, giving extra options for self-service disaster recovery protection and business continuity.

This was first published in September 2014

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Apple releases Mac OS X patches for Shellshock Bash bug

2014-09-30T22:22:00.000+01:00

Apple has released security updates for its Mac OS X operating system to protect users from the newly reported Shellshock Bash bug affecting all Unix-based computers.

The release comes just days after Apple confirmed that Mac OS X, which is derived from Unix, was vulnerable to the bug, although the company claimed anyone using default Mac settings should be safe.

According to Apple, only users who configured advanced Unix services were at risk, but the company did not name any of the services involved.

Some users resorted to technical workarounds, but now Apple has published automatic updates for the latest versions of OS X.

Patches are available through Software Update for OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion and Lion.

Security experts have warned that the bug in the Bash command prompt software used in OS X and up to 500 million Unix-based computers is being actively exploited.

Researches at security firm FireEye have observed a “significant amount of overtly malicious traffic” using Bash.

This malicious traffic includes malware droppers, reverse shells and backdoors, data exfiltration, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The researchers think it is only a matter of time before attackers exploit the vulnerability to redirect users to malicious hosts, which can result in further compromise.

Attackers have deployed scanners looking for vulnerable machines that have been bombarding networks with traffic since the 25-year-old bug was made public on 24 September.

The Shellshock bug is widely regarded as a bigger threat than the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug because it affects a thousand times more computers and is easily exploited to enable attackers to take full control of the target computer.

The US and UK Computer Emergency Response teams were quick to issue warnings about the Shellshock bug, and urged affected organisations to install software security updates immediately.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has also urged organisations and individuals to make sure their IT systems are up to date.

“This flaw could be allowing criminals to access personal data held on computers or other devices. For businesses, that should be ringing real alarm bells, because they have legal obligations to keep personal information secure,” an ICO spokesperson said.

The biggest threat is to the enterprise because many web servers are run using the Apache system, software which includes the Bash component.

But, while most of the main Linux distributions have rushed to release updates, security experts have raised concerns about Unix-based embedded systems in internet of things (IoT) devices and legacy systems used by many critical national infrastructure suppliers.

Security researchers have warned that, while home users and traditional servers may be able to patch their way out of danger, this solution is not available for many embedded devices and Unix-based industrial control systems.

This also applies to supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) systems commonly used by critical national infrastructure.

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A guide to scale-out NAS: The specialists and startups

2014-09-30T21:48:00.000+01:00

In our recent feature on scale-out NAS, we looked at products from the six biggest storage suppliers.

Here we examine the smaller scale-out NAS suppliers. Some offer systems for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but others are tailored for specialised applications such as high-performance computing (HPC) and virtualisation. All include high-availability features such as redundant drives and other components, along with a range of enterprise-level features such as data deduplication and storage tiering.

Irrespective of organisation size, scale-out NAS makes sense in a world where data volumes are increasing at unpredictable rates, and where paying upfront for large volumes of storage is increasingly viewed as uneconomical. Not only does that tie up capital, it tends to create silos of storage, which in turn increases the amount of data management required – something few businesses, especially those without an extensive IT department, undertake willingly.

Instead, scale-out architectures allow an organisation to buy what it needs when it needs it, so spreading the financial burden. As a result, research firm ESG predicts that by 2015, scale-out NAS will comprise 80% of the NAS market by revenue and 75% by capacity. Like most fields of human activity, there are trends and fashions in storage buying, and the time for scale-out NAS is now.

DataDirect Networks (DDN) aims its products at sectors that create large volumes of data, such as energy, life sciences, cloud and web, and financial services.

The company offers two routes to scale-out NAS: ExaScaler, which is aimed at HPC applications and runs the parallel, open-source Lustre File System; and GridScaler for enterprises, which runs IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS).

GridScaler scales performance by adding file-serving nodes and grows capacity by adding storage appliances, to up to 10,000 NAS clients. It supports policy-based data tiering while retaining a single namespace. Up to 200 servers can be included in a single cluster, with throughput for a single Linux client of up to 4Gbps over Infiniband and 700Mbps over 10GbE.

ExaScaler can support up to 20,000 clients and up to 400 gateway nodes, with throughput for a single Linux client of up to 3.5Gbps over Infiniband and 700Mbps over 10GbE.

Other than that, the differences are mainly in connectivity. GridScaler offers client access over a common internet file system (CIFS) and network file system (NFS), while ExaScaler uses 10GbE and remote direct memory access (RDMA)-enabled Infiniband. Both systems use the same storage appliances at the back end.

Storage configurations start with a single SFA12K appliance, which can scale up to 1,680 SATA, SAS and flash drives with a maximum capacity of 10PB when using 20 enclosures in two 48U racks.

The SFA12K range consists of three appliances: The 12K-20 and 12K-40, which connect to the server over 10GbE or Infiniband,; and the server-less 12K-20E, which packages the server into the box, so reducing server-to-storage latency. Features include advanced data protection features, such as automated storage tiering, snapshots, mirrored volumes and asynchronous replication.

Gridstore offers its systems (pictured) as storage for Hyper-V environments. It aims to reduce the problem of high volumes of random input/output (I/O) generated by hypervisors running multiple virtual machines (VMs), which most storage systems handle poorly.

Gridstore says its systems use virtualisation to re-establish a one-to-one relationship between a VM and its underlying storage, and to manage storage functionality on a per-VM basis rather than per logical unit number (LUN).

Like most fields of human activity, there are trends and fashions in storage buying, and the time for scale-out NAS is now

Capacities start at 4TB per 1U node with a three-node cluster, and can be expanded up to 48TB per node, allowing scalability up to 12PB as nodes are added. The storage systems use erasure coding. A write-back cache on a PCIe card with over 500GB of flash memory boosts throughput.

Gridstore systems are designed for two use cases. The H-Class caters for those that need high throughput, while the C-Class is aimed at those that need more capacity. All offer four 1GbE or two 10GbE ports as options. The GS-H2100-12 provides 12TB SATA and PCIe flash storage, while the capacity nodes – the GS-C2000-04 and GS-2100-12 – provide 4TB and 12TB respectively using SATA disks only, and connect using dual 1GbE ports as standard.

The software supports VM snapshots and live migration of VMs and their associated storage. Other features include VM replication, thin provisioning and data deduplication, plus the ability to prioritise traffic flows for each VM. Appliances are managed and controlled by a Gridstore vController VM.

Following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company offers its ZFS Storage Appliances. The appliances use a combination of mechanical and flash storage, and DRAM and flash for caching to boost performance. They connect using 1GbE, 10GbE and, optionally, 8Gbps and 16Gbps Fibre Channel or Infiniband. Services include compression, data deduplication, cloning and replication. The systems can be accessed by clients using NFS, CIFS, HTTP, WebDav and FTP.

Storage consists of two controller appliances, the ZS3-2 and the ZS3-4, to which disk shelves can be connected. The ZS3-2 scales from 6TB to 1.5PB and allows up to 16 disk shelves to be attached, each with 20 or 24 disks per shelf. It comes with eight 10GbE ports as standard and a maximum port count of 32. The ZS3-4 allows up to 36 disks per shelf and so scales to 3.5PB, and includes eight 1GbE ports as standard and a maximum port count of 40.

Management tools include Dtrace Analytics, which provides fine-grained visibility into disk activity and usage. As you might expect, tools for integration with Oracle databases are also available, including Snap Management for database backup management, a database compression tool and Intelligent Storage Protocol, which provides metadata to help improve storage efficiency.

The SnapScale series consists of clustered NAS running the company's RainCloud operating system (OS) for storage clusters, and is aimed at medium-sized businesses. Capacity can be boosted by adding hard drives or nodes to the cluster, which offers a single namespace and support for file- and block-level access. Protocols include CIFS, NFS and HTTP over 1GbE or 10GbE per node. Features include replication, compression and encryption. Maximum capacity is 512PB.

Each 2U SnapScale X2 unit can house up to 12 SAS drives up to 4TB in size, providing up to 24TB per node with a minimum drive count of four, while the 4U X4 unit scales up to 72TB from its 36-drive maximum.

Within a cluster, files can be distributed and data stripped across nodes for improved throughput. The systems provide high availability through redundancy and will failover in the event of a drive or node failure.

Panasas targets ActivStor at energy, finance, government, life sciences, manufacturing, media and university research, and claims its system combines the benefits of flash performance and SATA economy.

ActivStor runs the company's PanFS parallel file system, and delivers linear scalability from its blade architecture via out-of-band metadata processing and parallel processing of its (triple parity) Raid6+ reads and writes. Maximum per-system throughput is 150Gbps. It uses a combination of director and storage blades to allow users to achieve the required balance between performance and capacity.

The ActivStor 14 scales to 8.12PB with a per-shelf capacity of 80TB SATA and 1.2TB flash drives, providing throughput of 1.6Gbps and 13,550 IOPS per shelf. At the top end, the ActivStor 16 scales to 12.24PB and provides a claimed system throughput of more than 1.3 million IOPS, or more than 13,550 IOPS per shelf. HDD capacity per shelf is 120TB SATA and 2.4TB SSD.

Connectivity is provided by two 10GbE or eight 1GbE ports per shelf over CIFS, NFS or Panasas DirectFlow, a parallel protocol that provides access for Linux clients.

The Q-Series is aimed at high-performance, big data workflows, such as healthcare and life sciences, science and engineering, and media organisations, with its 2U QXS range – one of two product lines within the series – aimed at scalability.

The QXS-1200 and QXS-2400 clusters deliver a maximum capacity of 384TB and 230.4TB from 96 and 192 drives respectively. Each QXS-1200 unit houses up to 12 7,200rpm 4TB NL-SAS drives and is designed to provide economical capacity, while the QXS-2400 provides higher performance from up to 24 10,000rpm 1.2TB SAS drives per unit. The systems connect over 16 16Gbps Fibre Channel ports.

Scalability is provided by 2U expansion units, up to seven of which can be attached per base system, and has the same capacities and drive unit types as the base system. Client systems supported include Windows, Mac and Linux.

The HC3 is aimed at virtualisation consolidation in medium-sized organisations with small IT departments. The systems consist of three collapsed server-and-storage systems that include a licensed hypervisor, and which scale from a single 6TB unit to an eight-unit cluster providing 28.8TB in a single namespace, managed from a single pane of glass. Guest operating systems officially supported by the hypervisor-in-a-box systems include RHEL/CentOS, SuSe Linux Enterprise and most recent versions of Windows.

The range starts with the HC1000, which offers a maximum of 8TB from four 2TB drives, accessible over two 1GbE or 10GbE ports. The HC2000 increases the number of CPU cores by 50% from four to six and provides up to 4.8TB from four 1.2TB 10,000rpm SAS drives – 15,000rpm 600GB drives can be specified as an alternative. Its port count is identical to that of the HC1000.

Double the number of CPU cores are housed in the top-end HC4000, along with eight 10,000rpm 1.2TB drives for a maximum capacity of 9.6TB. It provides a pair of 10GbE ports only. Nodes of different sizes can be accommodated in a single cluster.

This was first published in September 2014

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HMRC promises personal online tax accounts in new digital strategy

2014-09-30T21:10:00.000+01:00

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has launched a digital strategy that will see the creation of personalised online tax accounts for taxpayers and businesses in the next four years.

The plan is HMRC’s contribution to the wider Whitehall drive towards “government as a platform”, which was today endorsed by the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood.

HMRC’s digital strategy, published on the Gov.UK website today, describes a roadmap for developing digital services to improve how taxpayers and businesses engage with the department. While few of the items listed have specific milestones or deadlines, the strategy outlines the key elements expected to be put in place by 2018.

Central to this are personalised digital tax accounts, based on a “multi-channel digital tax platform”. Personal tax accounts will allow users to “file, pay and make changes across all of their taxes, in a single place” based on real-time data.

For example, taxpayers will be able to log in and see tax statements, details about tax codes, file tax returns and make payments online. It will also have a secure personal mailbox facility to allow HMRC to communicate electronically with taxpayers.

Individual tax accounts such as this have not been possible in the past because of the siloed nature of HMRC’s systems – in many cases, IT systems were built around particular taxes, such as PAYE or national insurance, rather than the individual taxpayer.

“All of our customers and the businesses we serve will have access to a personalised online tax account. They’ll be able to file, pay and make changes across all of their taxes, in a single place. Customers will increasingly be able to get what they need from us online,” said the HMRC strategy document published online.

“We will use the data and intelligence we have about our customers to present the personalised service. They will feel that we have a really good understanding of what is going on in their lives. When they deal with us it will be as though we are picking up a conversation where they left off – rather than starting all over again.”

To enable personal online services, work is underway on a multi-channel tax platform including the sort of customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities commonly used by banks and retailers to offer co-ordinated services to customers across several channels.

“We are building a new digital platform with a common infrastructure that links existing and new systems,” said the HMRC strategy document.

“This means we will be more consistent and responsive in the way we provide our services. The platform will be secure, reliable, flexible and scalable, allowing us to develop services quickly. We will be able to manage customer contact flexibly through a range of communication channels including phone, secure messaging and webchat.”

Neither of these new digital services has a specific deadline published for implementation, but the strategy document said it expects to see “active relationships develop with customers through digital tax accounts and assisted digital services”, during 2014 or 2015, along with the “first wave of digital services for individuals and businesses designed to help customers pay the right tax at the right time”.

The document said that by 2018 “dealing with HMRC through personalised, multi-channel digital services [will be] the norm for the majority of customers”.

The strategy said that the move to digital services requires new skills in the department, and a new “culture and mindset” involving “an increasing number of cross-functional service delivery teams”.

“Every customer in the UK will have their own personalised digital tax account, so we can help make it simpler, quicker and easier to pay the right tax at the right time. This will have big implications for our staff, as well as our customers, involving changes to the types of job we will be doing and the skills we will need,” said HMRC.

One of the key dependencies is developing in-house digital development skills – an area HMRC admits is currently limited. The department started a recruitment programme in January to find 50 staff for a new digital centre in Newcastle. The centre was formally opened in late July but HMRC is still advertising for a number of roles.

Most of HMRC’s IT is currently provided under one of Whitehall’s biggest outsourcing deals – the £800m-per-year Aspire contract, with a consortium led by Capgemini with Fujitsu as a key partner.

In July, the National Audit Office (NAO) warned the department that it was taking too long to prepare for the end of the Aspire contract in June 2017. The NAO pointed to serious risks to HMRC’s business if it fails to replace the deal in line with government reforms that mandate moving away from large IT outsourcing arrangements.

Every year HMRC issues 245 million paper forms, sends 200 million outbound letters, receives 73 million customer support phone calls and 70 million items of post. The digital strategy aims to change the mix of interactions to be predominantly digital by 2018.

But the strategy also includes provision for “assisted digital” services for people who are unable or unwilling to transact with HMRC online.

“We know that not everyone is ready or able to use digital services. People have a range of needs so, for example, we’ll need to provide extra support and encouragement for those who need a bit of help, right through to offering different ways for people to get their information into our digital services for those who really can’t do it alone,” said the strategy.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the head of the civil service, wrote in a blog post on Gov.UK this week that he sees “government as a platform” and digital services as a key driver of change in Whitehall.

“Things are changing in the civil service. The changes might be hard to see from outside – you won’t have heard about them on the news – but they are happening,” he said.

“Technology and the internet in particular, are the driving forces. Many in the world of business understood this and adapted to it years ago. The civil service lagged behind. Now we are changing that.”

The HMRC digital strategy is being led by Mark Dearnley, the former CIO of Vodafone, who joined as the organisation’s new chief digital and information officer in October last year.

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Civil service chief endorses 'government as platform' digital strategy

2014-09-30T20:31:00.000+01:00

The head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, has endorsed the government digital strategy, hailing the move to “government as a platform” as a key part of Whitehall reform.

Writing in a blog post, Heywood said the pace of digital change in the civil service is accelerating.

“Things are changing in the civil service. The changes might be hard to see from outside – you won’t have heard about them on the news – but they are happening,” he said.

Heywood discussed a number of elements of the government digital strategy, such as the Gov.UK web publishing platform and work to digitise 25 high-volume government transactions.

He revealed that HP CEO Meg Whitman and her team met with some of Whitehall’s digital leaders and permanent secretaries last week. HP remains the biggest IT supplier to the UK government by revenue, earning about £1.7bn per year – but moves to end big outsourcing deals and bring in smaller and more agile suppliers have threatened HP's dominance.

“The discussion indicated just how significant this agenda is and also – in my view – the good progress we have already made,” said Heywood.

Heywood said the move to “government as a platform” was intended to change Whitehall from “a series of disjointed silos” to “a more unified, efficient service” – echoing closely the words of government digital chief Mike Bracken. In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, Bracken described the move from silos to platforms as a “generational” switch: “That is going to be the bulk of the activity technically in the next parliament,” he said.

Heywood acknowledged the role of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which Bracken leads, and said the digital principles GDS has established need to be applied to policy making, and not just to technology.

“I believe that, thanks to the excellent work of the Government Digital Service and the increasing digital capability within each individual department, the British civil service is already at the cutting edge of applying digital technology to public service delivery. But we now need to take this to the next level, and apply the same principles and techniques in policy design,” he said.

“A huge amount of work has been done already, but we have just scratched the surface of what’s possible. New services will emerge – bespoke, personalised services government couldn’t normally justify spending money on, especially in a tight budgetary environment or services no-one else has even thought of before.”

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Service model driving cyber crime, says Europol report

2014-09-30T19:57:00.000+01:00

The cyber crime support industry is becoming increasingly commercialised, according to a report published by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre.

Specialists in the virtual underground economy are developing products and services for use by other cyber criminals, the Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) report said.

The report’s authors believe this crime-as-a-service business model drives innovation and sophistication, and provides access to a wide range of services that facilitate almost any type of cyber crime.

As a result, the barriers to entry for cyber crime are being lowered to allow those lacking technical expertise - including traditional organised crime groups - to conduct cyber crime.

The report also highlights the abuse of legitimate services and tools such as anonymisation, encryption and virtual currencies, and the abuse of “darknets” for illicit online trade in drugs, weapons, stolen goods, stolen personal and payment card data, forged identity documents and child abuse material.

This hidden internet has become a principal driving force in the evolution of cyber crime and represents a highly complex challenge for law enforcement, the report said.

Criminals are also reducing their risk by operating from jurisdictions outside of the EU, which have outdated legal tools and insufficient response capacities.

"The inherently transnational nature of cyber crime, with its growing commercialisation and sophistication of attack capabilities, is the main trend identified in the IOCTA,” said Rob Wainwright, director or Europol.

“It means issues concerning attribution, the abuse of legitimate services, and inadequate or inconsistent legislation are among the most important challenges facing law enforcement today," he said.

EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the fact that almost anyone can become a cyber criminal is putting ever-increasing pressure on law enforcement authorities.

“We need to use our new knowledge of how organised crime operates online to launch more transnational operations," she said.

Raising awarenessBuilding capacityStandardising practices and proceduresIncreasing international and cross-border cooperationExchanging information and intelligenceDeveloping adequate and harmonised legislationDismantling and disrupting criminal infrastructures behind illicit online services

“We need to ensure that investigations into payment card fraud and online child abuse do not stop at national borders."

The 2014 IOCTA report includes a set of recommendations for law enforcement to address the evolving and trans-national nature of cybercrime in a diverse and flexible manner.

The report will contribute towards the setting of EU priorities for 2015 in tackling cyber attacks, online sexual exploitation and payment fraud as part of serious organised crime.

One of the report’s co-authors, Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey, said that, because modern cybercrime is trans-national by nature, it is vital to take an international view of the threat it poses.

“Europol’s Cybercrime Centre is able to provide a unique perspective on this threat as it has access to data from law enforcement agencies across Europe.

“It should be seen as a vital piece of work that should be read by all policy makers and decision makers involved in combating cybercrime,” he said.

Woodward said that, if agencies fail to mobilise to meet the threats highlighted in the report, organised cybercrime will gain the upper hand.

“However, if agencies work together across borders, then we can use modern technologies to catch criminals, rather giving them a platform for ever more innovative forms of crime,” he said.

The Europol Cybercrime Centre hosts the recently-launched international cyber crime taskforce, which includes the UK as a founding member.

The Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT), which is currently in a six-month pilot, will co-ordinate international investigations with partners targeting key cyber crime threats.

These include underground forums and malware, such as banking Trojans, that have targeted financial sector institutions in Europe, US and elsewhere.

The J-CAT is led by Andy Archibald, deputy director of the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

The taskforce is made up of cyber liaison officers from EU states, non-EU law enforcement partners and the European Cybercrime Centre, and will operate from offices in Europol’s headquarters.

Austria, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US are part of the J-CAT. Australia and Colombia have also committed to the initiative.

J-CAT is the first permanent, multilateral cyber crime taskforce established in Europe to co-ordinate investigations against top cyber-criminal networks.

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Nationwide roll-out of Universal Credit to start in early 2015

2014-09-30T19:27:00.000+01:00

The government is to roll-out a limited version of its controversial Universal Credit welfare reform nationwide, starting in February 2015.

The plan is a dramatic acceleration for availability of the new benefit scheme, which as recently as May had slowed to its lowest adoption rate since soon after it was first launched in April 2013.

The nationwide roll-out will only cover new claims from single jobseekers – the simplest of benefit types – which so far has been offered in just 50 jobcentres, with a further expansion to nearly 100 due by Christmas. There are about 700 jobcentres in the UK, and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said that new claims to legacy (non-Universal Credit) benefits will be stopped nationally for single people by 2016.

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith also announced that the previous project chief, Howard Shiplee, was standing down as director general for Universal Credit, to be replaced as senior responsible owner by Neil Couling, the DWP executive in charge of jobcentres.

Shiplee has been suffering from ill health for some time, and has not been able to work full-time on the project since the start of the year. He is now taking on a “non-executive and advisory role” on the programme. Couling will be the seventh leader of the Universal Credit project since its inception in 2012.

The accelerated roll-out will be using the much-criticised IT system developed for the initial Pathfinder pilot phase of Universal Credit. Some £40m of work on the IT system had to be thrown away after problems in its early stages, and a further £90m will be written off before Universal Credit is fully rolled out to all benefit claimants, due to take place by 2018.

A new digital system is currently being developed by DWP, which will be used to underpin the full roll-out. Testing of this system, designed to cater for all types of benefits, is due to start later this year.

“We are going to accelerate the delivery of Universal Credit from the new year, bringing forward the national rollout through 2015/16 to every single community across Great Britain. Universal Credit is going nationwide. I promise you we are going to finish what we started,” said Duncan Smith.

So far, 26,000 people have applied for Universal Credit – mostly single people, the simplest type of claimant to process. More complex claims, such as couples and families, are being trialled in a limited number of jobcentres.

A National Audit Office report in September last year revealed a catalogue of failures in leadership and project management on Universal Credit, and a culture of secrecy and ignoring warnings within the DWP. Duncan Smith has since repeatedly insisted that the department has learned its lessons from those original problems and that the project is back on track.

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CIO interview: Darrell Sturley, deputy CIO, University of Oxford

2014-09-30T18:50:00.000+01:00

The University of Oxford comprises 38 individual colleges, each full of students and staff with the need to communicate across campuses, and sometimes even across countries.

The university recently announced it will adopt new communications systems to increase the use of bring your own device (BYOD) and collaboration across the educational institution.

Darrell Sturley, deputy CIO at the university, says the project will replace Oxford University’s current systems with managed services.

The university has invested in several new administrative systems over the past five years and, with those investments behind it, now aims to steer focus towards building a new IT infrastructure that reflects the institution’s academic needs.

“This integrated communications project is part of the overall initiative to give our admin staff, researchers, teachers and students more modern ways to communicate,” he says.

The telephone system currently in place at the university is almost 30 years old. Although it still works, the technology does not deliver the functionality that the current generation of students need, and some of the technology has reached end of support.

Rather than replacing the phone system with a new one, the university chose to explore what else was available. It decided to look beyond telephony and consider what else people might find useful, says Sturley.

The university chose OpenScape Voice and OpenScape UC from Unify to provide students with the ability to call from a PC, audio conference, use headsets and instant message to increase collaboration across campuses. This allows them to communicate with staff and other students at no cost over Wi-Fi.

“Until the spring, the story was us knowing we needed to do something different and finding out what that different thing was. Having chosen to work with Unify, we’re now building the equipment,” says Sturley.

The IT team will pilot the system from February 2015, starting with around 250 staff and students, to understand any human, cultural or process issues that may occur during use, rather than just focusing on the technology problems that may arise.

Sturley points out that, as with any IT project, one of the biggest issues will be user acceptance. He says although many will easily adopt the new technology, there are always individuals who struggle with technological change.

“For some people, it will be very natural, as they probably use something like this at home. But for others, it will be quite a departure. It might take those who are used to having a physical phone on their desk a while to get used to this sort of system,” he says.

By the end of the project in 2017, all university staff and students will be integrated into the system. With 28,000 phone lines and approximately 40,000 staff and students, the length of the project is important in ensuring the least disruption possible when implementing and rolling out the new system.

“We could just turn it on and say to everybody, ‘right, there you are guys, get started’, but we felt that was not likely to generate the most benefit and that proper preparation and proper readiness was the way to do this,” he says.

Sturley points out that the need for collaboration and communication has increased, as has the number of devices each student uses. Students will not only have a laptop, but may also have a phone and a tablet device.

The university has ensured the new system will support the main smartphone operating systems – Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

We're very mindful that students require a modern working environment
Darrell Sturley, University of Oxford

“We’re very mindful that students require a modern working environment,” says Sturley. “It is student-led to a certain extent, as they turn up with all kinds of gadgets and devices. This system will allow students to make use of a range of those.”

Oxford University is a collegiate university made up of several buildings, colleges and campuses, and also has a unique teaching system based around personal tutorials.

This dynamic makes communication extremely important, and although the university is very traditional, it is still technologically advanced.

“As well as the tradition and the architectural heritage, we think it’s important that students and staff have access to modern IT systems, and that working here is a 21st century experience,” says Sturley.

“This kind of system can bring us all closer together – it can tie the colleges of Oxford University together as one community.”

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The digital CIO: Motivate the elephant

2014-09-30T18:12:00.000+01:00

One of the permanent features of CIOs' and other IT leaders’ lives is change – how to implement, manage and deliver it.

In my experience, there is a deeply held prejudice among senior business leaders that IT departments block change.

The truth, I feel, is quite otherwise. IT people consider change to be an integral aspect of working with technology. It’s something they actually love and are comfortable with.

What they are less comfortable with is implementing change in a disorderly way, sorting through messy emotional issues, dealing with conflicting and often seemingly illogical beliefs held by business leaders, stakeholders, suppliers, customers and even their own people.

Sadly, that’s what the real world is like. Which is why, as a coach, I find it useful to have a model for change that is more sophisticated than just "make a better business case".

Graduating from Trinity College Cambridge with a degree in English, James Caplin (pictured) wrote professionally for two decades, specialising in corporate videos.

In 2002 he discovered coaching and, with his wife, moved into a house in a run-down area of West London, which prompted him to become a community activist.

Now head of coaching at CIO Development, Caplin leads workshops on communication and transformation.

He serves on several company and charitable boards, and in 2012 was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to his area, now known as Notting Hill.

I have found the model described in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch is highly effective for IT leaders. It is particularly appropriate for driving change where you do not have the direct power to mandate it or the resources to pay for it.

That is the business reality for IT professionals. The IT leader may have a budget to implement change, but that won’t buy the co-operation of everyone affected by the proposed change. The CIO can set the course for their own department, but that won’t ensure everyone co-operates.

Imagine your organisation is an elephant – large, unwieldy and easily spooked.

Your job, as the person driving this change, is to get the elephant – and its rider (the guy sitting on the elephant) – moving in the direction you want it to go.

This image is, for many IT leaders, familiar. They are constantly urging clients, bosses, stakeholders, colleagues, reports, suppliers, users and others to do things – and constantly encountering resistance.

Many IT leaders I work with have an engineering or a similar scientific background – or, at least, a scientific approach. They believe in logic. They also seem to have a deep-seated (and quite touching) belief that logic can change minds.

As historians and lawyers know, people don’t work that way. Belief is deeper than logic. Logic is just an effective and flexible tool. To change minds, to motivate people, you have to work at the belief level.

The example that follows might help illustrate how this works in practice. I recently coached an IT leader who was tasked with leading the roll-out of SAP across multiple European business units.

In its relatively early stages, the project hit a typical real-world problem. The IT leader planned to bring an in-house expert from one country – let’s call it Boduria – who had successfully led the implementation there, to work with a neighbouring country – let’s call it Syldavia – on the implementation.

Unfortunately, the Bodurian business leaders were firmly against the plan. Bodurians had never liked Syldavians. To make matters worse, a Bodurian IT consultant had promised them the earth in an earlier project – and then spectacularly failed to deliver.

My client had tried to convince the Bodurian leaders with logic, but that had not shifted the situation. He had considered rolling over and simply agreeing with the Bodurians, but he knew in his heart of hearts that the project was going to be much more difficult without the expert. He felt stuck.

How could he motivate the elephant? I took the IT leader through the three key principles of the "motivating the elephant" thought process – find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people – asking a series of focused questions:

Find the feeling

Q. What might change the feelings of the Bodurian leadership?

The IT leader quickly came up with a number of suggestions:

Organise a workshop led by the Syldavian expert as she was very persuasive in person.Invite the Bodurian business leadership to get involved in designing the way the Syldavian expert was introduced.Invite her to work for a day a week initially, win the Bodurian IT department’s trust, then increase that to a couple of days a week and – only after that, if by that time the Bodurian business more widely felt comfortable with her – would she start working permanently in Boduria.

Shrink the change

Q. What is the smallest next practical step you could take to move the project forward ?

It would be useful to invite Bodurian leaders to visit Syldavia, meet the business’s leaders there, and hear from trusted third parties how effective this expert was and how easy to work with.

Q. Who should be invited ?

It would pay to get a group of influencers over, not just the leadership.

We delved into this until the IT leader had what he felt was a satisfactory list of people to attend the workshop.

Grow your people

Q. How might the experience of driving this change become part of people's learning?

Since the Bodurian business leaders wanted their own people to become IT experts, the IT leader realised that he could suggest to them that the Syldavian expert might mentor one of their staff, assisting them with that agenda.

We explored this a little further: Who would nominate the person to be mentored? How would the Syldavian expert be involved in this aspect of their work? How would it be supervised?

This exercise helped the IT leader get unstuck. As it turned out, he used all the ideas he had come up with, and the expert was rapidly accepted by the Bodurians.

That, in a nutshell, is why this model, and coaching itself, can be so powerful. It’s inevitable that we all approach the world in the way we are familiar with.

Working with the right coach – which means someone who understands the field you are operating in, is skilled with useful mental models and with whom you click – enables us all to see our familiar worlds from new perspectives, and so generate new ways of functioning.

This enables us and the businesses we lead to benefit from fresh and improved results.

This was first published in September 2014

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Can Lenovo turn around IBM's x86 business and win in the enterprise?

2014-09-30T17:34:00.000+01:00

Lenovo has stated it will turn its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business into a $5bn profitable business within 12 months.

Through the $2.1bn deal – expected to be closed on 1 October 2014 – the Chinese PC giant will take over the global team of the IBM x86 server business, which will be organised under Lenovo’s Enterprise Business Group.

Former IBM server chief Adalio Sanchez – who led the x86 server business at IBM – will become senior vice-president of enterprise systems, reporting to Gerry Smith, Lenovo’s president for the North America region.

Lenovo has big plans for the enterprise market, according to Smith.

"Over time, we will compete vigorously across every sector, using our manufacturing scale and operational excellence to repeat the success we have had with PCs," he said.

Among the areas the company will need to address is the decline in IBM’s x86 server revenue, as a result of its competitors aggressively targeting customers since the deal was announced in January.

As Computer Weekly previously reported, Gartner's figures for the second quarter of 2014 show HP achieved 7.3% year-on-year growth to achieve a 34.7% server revenue share for the three-month period. Meanwhile, IBM saw its server revenue shrink by 14.9% for the same quarter.

The company will also need to address the range of enterprise services it offers to customers globally.

While it has 17 four-hour response centres in the UK, there are only three across the whole of the southern hemisphere, and none in Africa or India. This could be a risk to global businesses that require fast turnaround on their Lenovo servers in these regions.

Commenting on the limited geographic spread of four-hour support contracts, Smith said: "IBM’s services team is the best in the business. Customers will be able to leverage the IBM support structure. The same service they get today, they will get around the globe."

Another issue for datacentre managers is long-term server support contracts, which is far from clear.

While it is possible to buy five years of extended warranties on rival HP ProLiant and Dell PowerEdge x86 server families, head of server and storage at Lenovo UK Tom Goodwin said at a recent briefing: "We will support existing Lenovo ThinkServer and xServers for 18 months."

Clearly this is a gap Lenovo will need to address if it wishes to be successful in the enterprise, where servers may have a lifespan of three years or more.

The general consensus among analysts is Lenovo will repeat the success it had with the 2005 acquisition of the IBM PC business and aggressively grow its marketshare. However, it may be challenged in selling the technical merits of more expensive commodity servers from the IBM x86 server portfolio.

In the Enterprise Workloads on The IBM X6 Portfolio report published earlier this year, IDC analyst Jed Scaramella noted the IBM x86 server platform falls in the higher end of the x86 systems market, which has been traditionally dominated by lower-cost servers.

"Some customers still perceive a price premium with four-socket servers, where much of the rationale on x86 server procurement still centres on capital expenditure," he said.

"IBM will have to demonstrate the operational efficiencies and business benefits that a higher-end x86 system can deliver versus a low-cost volume server."

With Lenovo taking over this product range, it will have to prove these products still justify a premium over its own ThinkServer family.

For competitors such as Dell and HP, this deal could mean stronger competition in SME environments
Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC

With IBM’s team of System x engineers, developers and support personnel moving to Lenovo, analyst TBR said in April that the team – combined with efficiencies and scale – would enable the business to quickly become a credible and competitive force in the datacentre.

"The success of a similar transition between IBM and Lenovo in 2005 suggests the two suppliers will once again drive synergies for the 2014 x86 server transition, resulting in improved acquisition costs, on-going product quality and strong services and support that come together to create increased value for customers," the analyst noted.

Yet its success will depend on how quickly Lenovo is able to win business outside the core Chinese market.

The company will also be taking over IBM’s Flex and x86-based PureFlex integrated systems. Further, it will resell IBM’s entry and mid-range Storwize storage product family, Linear Tape Open (LTO) products, IBM Flash storage arrays and elements of IBM’s system software portfolio, including SmartCloud, General Parallel File System and Platform Computing system.

All of this points to high-end, enterprise computing, with potentially high price tags. This is unless Lenovo can somehow change the dynamics of the enterprise server market dramatically and sell cheap enterprise-class computing.

Arguably, it is in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market which offers the most potential for Lenovo, and most closely fits with the success it has had with ThinkPad laptops, when it acquired the IBM PC business.

In an article covering the announcement of the IBM x86 server acquisition, Europe research manager for servers at IDC Giorgio Nebuloni noted: "For competitors such as Dell and HP, this deal could mean stronger competition in SME environments, where IBM had been less aggressive in the past, especially given that Lenovo has experience in building and growing an acquired business in the form of IBM's PC business."

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ARM enters mainstream datacentre with HP’s ProLiant Moonshot servers

2014-09-30T17:04:00.000+01:00

Low-powered ARM-based products have entered the mainstream enterprise datacentre with server maker HP launching two production-ready ARM-powered servers in its ProLiant Moonshot portfolio.

The first is Moonshot 64-bit server, HP ProLiant m400, based on the AppliedMicro X-Gene SoC (system on a chip) with Linux (Ubuntu) operating system. It is designed to deliver two times the density and four times more web-serving compute and 30% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to Intel’s Xeon-based servers.

The second ARM-based server from HP is the m800 Moonshot server designed for real-time data processing of high volume, complex data, such as fraud detection and purchase pattern analysis. The 32-bit ARM server has Texas Instrument KeyStone-based SOC. It features ARM’s A15 cores and integrated Rapid I/O (input/output) to deliver three times more bandwidth and 90% low latency data throughput.

“ARM has become ready for enterprise datacentres,” said Olivier Frank, HP Moonshot director for Europe. “Customers have been asking HP for a low-power server option and so we have expanded our Moonshot portfolio with ARM-based servers.”

For specific workloads, the ARM architecture optimises a customer’s most critical compute requirement – balanced memory at a lower total cost of ownership.

The new HP Moonshot ARM-based systems will deliver hyperscale, datacentre environments to help customers improve application performance, drive business innovation and deliver breakthrough datacentre economics, according to the server maker.

Frank said the company is investing in ARM technologies for designing production-ready datacentre offerings because it hopes that, in two to three years, ARM will hold between 20 to 30% of the server industry based on industry analyst forecasts.

“It is important to provide a choice so there is no monopolistic market,” he said. “We cannot ignore the growth of ARM-based, end-point devices, which has direct consequences on the datacentre side. ARM architecture is valuable in terms of density and power-efficiency.”

HP’s ARM architecture-based Moonshot servers come just days after the company's server rival Dell said it too is considering working with the Cambridge-based energy-efficient chipmaker. Michael Dell, founder of Dell, told delegates at its Solutions Summit earlier this month that the company may work with Cambridge-based microprocessor firm ARM for its mainstream servers.

Dell said: “If ARM works, really works, and costs less, we will use ARM. As it moves to 64-bit architecture, it becomes more interesting.”

At the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, ARM launched a baseline standard for 64-bit servers, which it hoped will help it encroach on Intel’s traditional territory, powering commodity hardware in the datacentre.

The standard also has the backing of the Linaro Enterprise Group, a consortium of companies supporting the development of open-source software for the ARM architecture, including Facebook and Samsung.

HP, which has a long-standing partnership with high-power, high-throughput x86 provider Intel, has previously released both Intel and AMD-based Moonshot servers. Intel’s low-power offering laptop chip Atom has been used to power the HP low-powered Moonshot server. It is an x86-compatible design, which means it should be capable of running 32-bit server software.

But chipmaker ARM’s work with AMD to deliver SoC processors designed for a new generation of servers and to tackle the biggest problem facing today's datacentres – power and cooling – is making ARM a viable alternative to Intel chips.

Frank said that, as more and more end-point devices such as smartphones and tablets are powered by ARM, it is important to have back-end server hardware based on similar energy-efficient system-on-a-chip SoC technology for maximum efficiencies.

By leveraging energy-efficient system-on-a-chip SoC technology, a dense, converged form-factor and highly flexible fabrics, HP Moonshot can provide high-speed connectivity between cartridges, as well as balanced computing with maximum throughput and memory to improve performance and efficiency, said Frank.

“ARM technologies will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP.

HP is targeting specific workloads such as web caching and has been beta-testing the low-powered Moonshot servers with several users including PayPal and ARM itself.

“We are working with our partner ARM as our end-user testing the new Moonshot servers for its manageability, scalability and portability,” said Frank

PayPal is another customer using the HP ProLiant m800 in its Systems Intelligence project. “Paypal does real-time data analytics, high-performance computing and web caching – all apt use cases for low-powered servers, Frank said.

“The HP ProLiant m800’s combination of ARM and Multicore Digital Signal Processors [DSP] with high-speed, low-latency networking and tiered memory management creates a very energy-efficient, extremely capable parallel processing platform with a familiar Linux interface,” said Ryan Quick, principal architect, Advanced Technology Group, PayPal.

“It’s a truly new approach to bringing scale-out design 'inside the box', and breaks barriers between high performance computing and enterprise technology.”

The extension of Moonshot portfolio with ARM architecture addresses IT demands with a vast pool of processing resources that can be located anywhere, scaled to any workload and available at any time, according to HP.

As power usage of datacentre products is increasingly becoming a priority for enterprises, micro-servers could become more than a device to fill the gap between PCs and servers, experts said.

“Intel shouldn’t be complacent because competitive architecture is very credible and giants such as Google will experiment with the alternative architectures powered by ARM,” according to Gartner analyst Errol Rasit.

The new Moonshot servers are available immediately and pricing will vary based on model and customer configurations.

HP is also extending the reach of the growing ARM ecosystem. The HP ProLiant Moonshot ARM-64 Developer Program, part of the HP AllianceOne program, will enable developers to test and port code stacks and solutions to the ARM architecture. Through this programme, developers can design fully-featured software on an ARM 64-bit system by remotely accessing the Moonshot discovery lab.

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Apple could face record fine in EU tax probe

2014-09-30T16:26:00.000+01:00

Apple could face a record fine running into billions of euros if a European Commission (EC) investigation finds the firm benefited from illegal tax deals with the Irish government.

The EC ordered the probe as part of a wider crackdown on multinational tax avoidance after Apple admitted in May 2013 to sheltering $30bn in international profits in Irish subsidiaries.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook also told a US Senate hearing that Apple had struck a deal with the Irish government in 1980 to limit its domestic taxes there to 2%.

But Apple and the Irish government denied breaking any laws or that Apple benefited from state aid.

Details of the probe are to be published this week, but preliminary findings claim Apple benefited from illicit state aid, reports the Financial Times, citing people involved in the case.

The findings of the EC probe are expected to focus on whether Apple alone benefited from special tax treatment in Ireland.

Depending on the probe’s findings, Apple could face a record fine as the EC has powers to recover illegal state aid to companies for a period of up to ten years.

The fine will depend on whether Apple’s 1980 and subsequent 2007 tax agreements with the Irish government stand up to EC scrutiny.

Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, has denied that Apple agreed to bring move jobs to Ireland in exchange for preferential tax treatment.

“We know that we didn’t do anything that was against the law,” Maestri told the Financial Times.

“We are very confident that through the investigation it will be shown that there was no selective treatment in our favour at any point in time,” he said.

Ireland is the European base of several major technology companies such as Amazon, Facebook, PayPal and Twitter because of its relatively low corporate tax rate of 12.5%.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) this month began efforts to crack down tax avoidance by multinational companies using complex tax structures.

These structures help companies reduce the tax paid on profits by shifting profits to subsidiaries based in tax havens like Ireland.

In June 2013, the UK led efforts to lobby the OECD for international tax rules to be brought up to date for the internet world.

The move followed a call by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for a full investigation of Google’s alleged tax evasion practices in the UK.

The PAC also said it wanted to see multinational companies like Apple, Google and Amazon paying more tax where their customers are located.

G20 leaders subsequently asked the OECD to draw up reforms.

In January 2014, the tech-dominated Digital Economy Group (DEG) called on the OECD to halt reforms.

In an open letter to the OECD, the DEG claimed enterprises using digital communications do not organise their business operations differently as a legal or tax matter.

"We believe that [digital] enterprises operating long-standing business models, subject to established international tax rules, should not become subject to altered rules on the basis that they have adopted more efficient means of operation," the DEG’s letter said.

The 34 OECD nations have since proposed new international measures aimed at forcing companies to report their profits and holdings country-by-country to stop them shielding profits from tax.

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Convenience foods producer tastes success with software-defined datacentre

2014-09-30T15:53:00.000+01:00

Greencore Group – a convenience foods producer catering to Marks & Spencer, Asda, Waitrose, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s – has refreshed its on-premises IT infrastructure with a fully managed software-defined datacentre service to accelerate its plans for expansion.

Greencore's main territory is the UK and the company generates £1.2bn annual revenues and employs 11,000 staff. But it’s main business objectives are to better integrate the businesses it has bought; enhance existing profit margins in the UK; expand into new international markets such as the US; and foray into new channels such as ‘food to go’, said Christopher Smith, the head of infrastructure at Greencore Group.

Speaking at an event titled The New Cloud Economics, organised by enterprise storage provider EMC and managed service provider Adapt, Smith said that the company’s on-premises IT was not capable of helping it achieve its core business objectives.

But the IT team did not want to invest in new hardware infrastructure because of the peaks and troughs and distributed nature of the food business. Greencore shifts 200 million jars of cooking sauces to supermarket shelves and 450 million fresh sandwiches every year. “Our business involves several channels and requires deep logistical planning. IT is absolutely crucial to manage this,” Smith told Computer Weekly. The food provider also shifts three million Christmas cakes. “Christmas cakes are seasonal but it is crucial to deliver it right on time, so we need to provision for more IT resources around Christmas which could remain idle at all other times.”

The IT team assessed its existing on-premises IT. It found that its client IT estate and Citrix IT estate were both managed in-house as was its collaboration tools, local area network (LAN) and telephony infrastructure. “In addition, our datacentre infrastructure was managed by ourselves and was turning out to be expensive,” Smith said.

The IT team wanted to move from this state of affairs to a future IT estate where its client IT, Citrix estates and telephony will be managed services, its collaboration tools will be cloud-based and its complete datacentre infrastructure will be outsourced and managed by a service provider.

“We went through an RFP (request for proposal) process and assessed three service providers, including Fujitsu and Adapt, and picked service provider Adapt’s software-defined datacentre platform based on EMC’s technologies," said Smith. In April 2014, Adapt collaborated with EMC to combine EMC’s datacentre technologies with Adapt’s management and tiered services to optimise customer budgets and outcomes.

Adapt became the first service provider in Europe to use key EMC technologies - VPLEX, VNX2, ViPR, XtremIO, EMC Recoverpoint and Storage Resource Management suite - to build the software-defined datacentre platform.

“As the first service provider in Europe to fully leverage EMC’s software-defined datacentre platform, we are future-proofing our critical infrastructure services and creating the datacentre of the future,” said Adapt chief executive, Stewart Smythe.

A software-defined datacentre is an IT facility where the elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualised and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of the whole infrastructure is automated by software. It can bring a high degree of agility, automation and flexibility to the infrastructure.

Greencore’s IT team picked Office 365 suite as its cloud-based collaboration tool.

The new IT estate, including the cloud and the software-defined datacentre, has been in use for a few months at Greencore, Smith said.

“We are already seeing benefits such as 25% datacentre cost savings, scalability and improved business agility,” Smith said. Other outcomes include lower business risk because of managed IT, and improved disaster recovery features.

“Out IT architecture is a fully-integrated managed service and has a service-oriented approach,” Smith said.

“But most importantly, our technology infrastructure is acquisition-friendly, which was one of our main goals.”

But the benefits do not end there. Smith and his team can predict the increase in operating expenditure during seasonal peaks such as Christmas, because of better IT visibility and DCIM (datacentre infrastructure management tools) used for capacity planning. “We are able to scale quickly during peak business season and scale down later,” Smith said.

But why software-defined datacentre and not public cloud services? One of Greencore’s IT requirements was IT support from the service provider. “We wanted the IT provider to be flexible to accommodate our needs during acquisitions as well as offer 24/7 support services, as we have a very lean IT team,” he said.

“Cloud may be the next step forward.”

“I don’t care about the terminology ‘software-defined datacentre’. If it is something that will bring cost and IT efficiency and work for us, then we are all for it and that’s what it was.”

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Case study: Deutsche Post DHL develops software contract templates to reduce costs

2014-09-30T15:20:00.000+01:00

Deutsche Post DHL has created contract templates to manage software costs in an increasingly complex global operation.

With more than 480,000 employees, its global footprint is larger than most of the major IT suppliers, yet, when it comes to software contracts, even an organisation the size of Deutsche Post DHL needs to tread carefully.

Kamal Patheja, legal director for global licensing at Deutsche Post DHL, has worked as an IT lawyer for 20 years and at Deutsche Post DHL for almost 14 years.

Three years ago, she took on the responsibility for licensing across the Deutsche Post DHL group, a role that was created to tackle the growing complexity of software licensing.

"There is no point having a document with convoluted terminology that nobody understands. Keep it really simple," she says. "I go for plain English and words of one syllable. A software contract should reflect what the business needs."

Patheja says "legal" should not be treated like a box-ticking exercise.

She warned delegates attending the Gartner IT Financial, Procurement & Asset Management Summit in London that if the legal department is not used in the right way, contracts may have hidden terms that could affect software use and the company's ability to operate effectively.

Patheja and her colleague Cathy Hamilton, head of IT licence demand at Deutsche Post DHL, gave a presentation at the event, describing how they collaborated on making sure the company's best interests are being reflected in the software contracts.

Patheja gets involved in contract negotiations right at the start and works alongside Hamilton and IT procurement to negotiate software contracts that meet Deutsche Post DHL's usage requirements.

If you don't get the software licensing contract right from the beginning, you'll run into problems later
Cathy Hamilton, Deutsche Post DHL

"We are seeing the evolution of software in a contractual way, where there is more of a focus on compliance by suppliers, who are looking more closely at how users are actually using the software," she says.

At Deutsche Post DHL, there is a consistent need to look at the contracts more closely to ensure the company is protected from a compliance perspective, she says.

"As an organisation we need to know what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing," she says. "We need to ensure the wording of the contract does not inadvertently limit the use of the software for its intended use."

A supplier may prevent the company from using the software in a particular way, such as site licences or unlimited licence agreements, which may limit site moves when datacentres are being consolidated.

"Either the contract doesn't provide for a specific requirement, it prohibits something, or is silent. It is hard trying to find provisions which are not dealt with in a contract," says Patheja.

Deutsche Post DHL spent seven years deploying software asset management (SAM), understanding the software estate as a key part of managing cost and understanding the renewal of maintenance agreements.

Cathy Hamilton, head of IT licence demand at Deutsche Post DHL, says SAM is not easy as it involves a huge distribution of different products.

In her experience, a lot of SAM discovery tools focus on more recent versions of the software deployed. "Some of our software deployments are not that recent and sometimes these products are not discovered by off-the-shelf discovery tools," she says.

The other challenge with software discovery tools can be their deployment in a secure datacentre environment. As such, Hamilton says you can't just press a button to deploy. "With some discovery solutions, it is necessary to go through a change management process for every single server, and we have many servers," she adds.

From a cost management perspective, she says a major challenge is the support costs for legacy applications and dealing with licensing and support issues connected with virtualisation and end-of-lifecycle technologies.

Software maintenance agreements, for instance, can easily be mismanaged, resulting in unnecessary cost to the business.

"We needed to look at our maintenance agreements," says Hamilton. "Historically, a lot of activities are triggered when the renewal quotation arrives but, by the time the renewal arrives, the notice period for terminating the contract may be too short, which means the company needs to renew maintenance for another year.

"It is critical to proactively manage this process to ensure sufficient time to confirm technical requirements, optimise licence volumes and negotiate the commercial deal."

In evergreen support agreements, there may be a 60-day notice period, which means Deutsche Post DHL risks paying for support on products it no longer uses or plans to stop using.

The template, which was developed by legal, IT and the business, focuses on identifying and customising the contractual terms for Deutsche Post DHL to reflect the manner in which it may wish to use the software, ranging from legal jurisdiction and divestiture to offshore usage, outsourcing and audit rights.

"The licensing terms set out the terms which will support Deutsche Post DHL's technical environment to provide a checklist for our lawyers where we need a particular clause to give the business flexibility," says Patheja.

The company sets the agenda for software audits and, where possible, defines the audit process in the contract, even specifying a blackout period during busy times.

It seeks to agree on the scope and frequency of audits and aims to write into the contract that any licence shortfall would be made good at contract price rather than list price. An escalation process is also included, should Deutsche Post DHL not agree with the outcome of a software audit.

But Patheja stresses that it is not trying to run off with the software company's intellectual property, it just expects a "fair and equitable contract".

She says she tries to understand why the software company wants a particular provision in the contract. "Sometimes the supplier is trying to address a particular issue, and this is why a face-to-face meeting is helpful. We can collaborate and work out something that works for Deutsche Post DHL and works for the supplier," says Patheja.

Hamilton focuses on supplier cost control. "Software licensing agreements are different to buying other things," she says. "The quality of the commercial deal stands and falls by the language of the software licence agreement. If this is not correct, you can end up with a lot of challenges, when you find your project's use of the software is different to what's written in the contact."

If the contract contains ambiguous terminology, which the supplier does not clarify, "you have to be concerned about how this will play out in the future", Hamilton warns. “If you don't get the software licensing contract right from the beginning, you'll run into problems later."

She says the legal templates are not being forced upon suppliers. Instead, Deutsche Post DHL hopes to collaborate with the supplier, to make sure the software contract covers her concerns. Specifics around outsourcing or divestiture may not be a deal-breaker for the supplier, but these are fundamental to the way Deutsche Post DHL operates its businesses. The legal template gives Deutsche Post DHL a baseline to assess and potentially identify missing clauses in the supplier's contract.

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Almost three-quarters of big companies to increase outsourcing

2014-09-30T14:44:00.000+01:00

Almost three quarters of global businesses will increase their investment in outsourced services, according to research by KPMG.

The research also indicates that more firms are taking advantage of global delivery models including functions such as finance, procurement and HR delivered centrally, often offshore.

KPMG's survey found that 72% of big businesses plan to increase outsourcing spending, while 61% said they will increasingly use global shared services for IT and business processes over the next two years, with offshore services accounting for a larger portion of both.

In its report, The State of Services & Outsourcing in 2014: Things Will Never be the Same, carried out with HfS Research, KPMG said that, on average, enterprises plan to increase their offshoring activities by 20% to 30% over the next year.

The report said integrated global services models that incorporate internal shared services and outsourcing are the core focus for most enterprises, with 56% are already increasing investments in centralised functions to manage a mix of service delivery models.

Dave Brown, KPMG's head of global lead, shared services and outsourcing advisory, said outsourcing is at a “crucial juncture between providing genuine value and low-cost staff augmentation.”

He said suppliers today must go beyond providing people to carry out standard business functions.

“Providers need to prove they can do more than basic operations, otherwise outsourcing runs the risk of becoming a staff augmentation model for flexing operations as opposed to a strategic partnership between provider and buyer that can add more skill, technology, and analytical capability for clients.”

Buyers also have to consider where to have services delivered from. The global business service delivery map is changing with a wide choice of locations today.

For example, when pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca decided to reduce the amount of IT it outsources, the company decided to retain the advantages of the offshore delivery model through a captive centre in India. The company is also planning to open delivery centres in Eastern Europe and California.

The recent 2014 Global Services Location Index, from AT Kearney, revealed the best places to outsource services and set up global delivery operations.

Asian countries dominate the management consultancy’s index of the top 50 global locations, with India (1), China (2) and Malaysia (3) making up the top three. Eastern and Central Europe also feature in the index: Bulgaria (9), Poland (11), Romania (18), Hungary (31), Czech Republic (33) and Slovakia (35).

Latin America has two of the top 10 outsourcing locations with Mexico (4), Brazil (8), Chile (13), Costa Rica (24) and Columbia (43) also in the index. The Middle East and North Africa region featured Egypt (10), Tunisia (28), Morocco (34) and Mauritius (36) in the index.

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London innovation centre launches to tackle data challenges

2014-09-30T14:09:00.000+01:00

An innovation and collaboration centre has been launched to develop ideas relating to data and the UK economy.

The Digital Catapult Centre at London’s Kings Cross will provide a modern space in which to showcase and develop ideas when it opens in November.

Part of the Connected Digital Economy Catapult and funded by Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board), the centre will concentrate on four major data challenges: trust and personal data; the internet of things (IoT); building diverse datasets; and reducing licensing friction.

Entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), researchers and corporate organisations will be able to use the space to develop ideas and projects which may drive future economic growth.

The centre will feature state-of-the-art collaboration systems, innovation labs and development spaces. As well as a programme of events and workshops, the centre will run intensive two-week sessions that bring together experts to help small and large businesses develop products or services.

The centre will also home a secondment programme for PhDs and a student fellowship programme organised in collaboration with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC).

Once the first Catapult centre is up and running, the Connected Digital Economy Catapult hopes to open regional centres across the UK.

Neil Crockett, CEO of Connected Digital Economy Catapult, said the UK is full of universities and clusters where people think of great ideas and are given support.

“We want to complement that. We’ll bring people together in collaborative development projects to unlock four challenges in the data value chain to accelerate digital innovators to market,” he said.

Once the first Catapult centre is up and running, the Connected Digital Economy Catapult hopes to open region centres across the UK

The Digital Economy Catapult predicts that it will have generated £365m of economic value by 2018, while helping 10,000 UK organisations.

“Creative collaboration is at the heart of realising data’s true potential and the Digital Catapult Centre is an exciting new addition to the UK innovation landscape,” said David Docherty, non-executive director of Connected Digital Economy Catapult and CEO of the National Centre for Universities and Business.

“It will not only provide a home for digital innovators to connect, but run a series of programmes, secondments and events to actually make this collaboration a reality. This is an exciting time for the UK’s digital industry and the centre is now at the heart of it,” he added.

Bristol City Council, along with the Future Cities Catapult and the Connected Digital Economy Catapult, recently launched an open data initiative to encourage citizens to build services using local data.

The plan was to release 100 civic datasets, which will then be open for citizens to access. The city hopes this will support developers who wish to create new products and services to improve the city using datasets such as traffic management data.

The results of the open data initiative could result in apps to make it easier to get around the city and information on how to reduce waste, save energy and improve air quality.

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Shellshock Bash bug exploitation in full swing, warn researchers

2014-09-30T13:32:00.001+01:00

The exploitation of the Shellshock bug in the Bash software used in many Unix-based computers is in full swing, security researchers have warned.

They have also raised concerns that the bug will be difficult to eradicate in legacy systems used in power plants and other critical national infrastructure.

According to researchers at security firm FireEye, cyber attackers have already moved to exploit the bug and may be conducting initial dry runs in preparation for larger-scale attacks.

“We have observed a significant amount of overtly malicious traffic leveraging Bash, including malware droppers, reverse shells and backdoors, data exfiltration, and distributed denial of service (DDoS),” they said in a blog post.

“Enterprises need to apply patches as soon as possible,” they added.

Some of the suspicious activity appears to be originating from Russia, although there has been activity from all over the world.

The researchers think it is only a matter of time before attackers exploit the vulnerability to redirect users to malicious hosts, which can result in further compromise.

Attackers have deployed scanners looking for vulnerable machines that have been bombarding networks with traffic since the 25-year-old bug was made public on 24 September.

The researchers said the bug is extremely dangerous because of the ease of exploitation, the simplicity of the vulnerability, and the extremely widespread install base of Bash.

“We expect to see significant use of this vulnerability by malicious actors, particularly in automated attacks,” the researchers said.

So far, the common gateway interface (CGI) between a web server and executables that produce dynamic content has received the bulk of the focus from attackers, they said.

However, the researchers have found the reach of the Shellshock bug extends beyond web servers.

Any application that relies on user-controlled data to set operating system-level environment variables and then invokes the shell from that same context can trigger the vulnerability.

This means web applications relying on a specific type of user input can be manipulated to make users vulnerable to attack.

They note the full extent and reach of the Shellshock bug is still unknown, but indications are that almost any type of internet-connected device that uses the Bash shell can be affected.

The researchers warn that while home users and traditional servers may be able to patch their way out of danger, this solution is not available for many embedded devices and Unix-based industrial control systems. This also applies to supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) systems commonly used by critical national infrastructure.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has urged organisations and individuals to make sure their IT systems are up-to-date.

The ICO said businesses need to be aware of this flaw and monitoring what they can do to address it. Ignoring the problem could leave them open to a serious data breach and, ultimately, enforcement action.

However, cyber security expert from Birmingham City University Mick Jackson has warned it will be years before the Shellshock bug is completely eradicated.

“Your PC might be safe, but what about the router you use for your broadband? As likely as not it will use Unix-based software and therefore may be at risk of attack,” he said.

“Even if we feel safe with the computers we own, what about those computers we use but don’t own? Every time we access a website we are effectively using someone else’s computer and we open ourselves up to their vulnerabilities,” he added.

Jackson also said that because millions of websites could be open to the exploitation of the Shellshock bug, the damage it could cause is as yet unknown.

“The only safe prediction is, given the number of computers which are at risk, it will be years before this vulnerability is completely eradicated,” he said.

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Get Free Followers on Twitter 450 Followers/Hour (100% Working)

2012-11-29T07:53:00.000+00:00

Hi all users, want to get twitter follower for your new website ? if yes, then this post if for you. In this post we'll teach you how you can get more than 400 twitter follower within an hour and without any cost. Many autopilot website claim to give best value for money but most of them (95%) are false, they take your money and will run away, today I'm here to give you a comprehensive tut on creation an autopilot by yourself. In this whole tutorial you don't need to worry about anything, because if by some reason it don't work, you'll lose nothing. So lets get started.
2. Verify your email, you'll get 100 points for free.
3. Go to "Add Site" and set the option as mentioned below :

Type : Twitter Followers
Username : Your Twitter username
Total Clicks : Ignore (if you want, you can set it by yourself)
Daily Clicks : Ignore (if you want, you can set it by yourself)
CPC : 2

in Type section choose the Twitter Followers (from dropdown menu), and add your twitter. Offer 2 points per.
4. Now Put a .txt file on your desktop with this code :

VERSION BUILD=7500718 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
SET !ERRORIGNORE YES
URL GOTO=http://addmefast.com
URL GOTO=http://addmefast.com/free_points/youtube_likes.html
TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=TXT:Like
TAB T=2
FRAME F=0
TAG POS=1 TYPE=BUTTON ATTR=ID:watch-like
WAIT SECONDS=2
TAB T=2
TAB T=1
TAB CLOSEALLOTHERS
WAIT SECONDS=4

5. Save it

6. Now If you're on mozilla the iMacros app will be up near the back/forward in the browser. 7. Then it will open a sidebar :8. Then you go to the tab in the sidebar that says "REC" it will be halfway down

9. Click "Load", then open up that text file you saved to desktop,

10. Then click edit, then "Refresh Macro List"

11. Now near the top something will appear that says 'current.iim'

12. Click once on that then go down to play tab... halfway down it will say repeat macro, under max put any number you want then hit "Play (loop)"

Make sure you're logged into a Youtube account, if you don't have a YouTube account, you can simply create one, since the script will be liking youtube videos. You can get up to 900 points an hour, which is 450 followers to you!
TIP : This also works for RTs, Youtube views/likes/subscribes.Note :- Kindly g+1 and Share this post if you like it
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Transfer Blogger to Wordpress without leaving any post

2012-11-29T02:59:00.000+00:00

Hello again,Today I will tell you how to transfer your blog hosted on blogger to wordpress.It is a very easy method and the best thing is no post will be removed :).So I hope you had understand what I am gonna show yo, so let's start.3. Download the whole coding and save it on your desktop.7. Click on blogger. Before clicking make sure yo have logged in into blogger.11. After the completion of the process, just set the authors.12. Open your Wordpress hosted blog to see all your previous posts.1. I recommend you to remove the posts from previous blog otherwise material will become copyrighted.2. There's some type of error in this process that's why yo can import posts only once from on blog, second time posts will be skipped.3. Your previous domain will not be shifted.
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How To Send Fake/Spoof E-Mail Messages ?

2012-11-28T23:53:00.000+00:00

Hi all users, want to send fake e-mail messes to your friends to prank them or to any company or organization to fool or them ? but don't know how to do it. Today we're here to introduce a hacking tool called "E-mail Bomber 2013" by using this tool you can send the spoof e-mails of your choice, by yourself.For example you can send the e-mail from support@microsoft.com or anything you want, all you have to do is to download this tool and follow the steps as instructed below.

1. First of all double click on "Jadens Email Bomber.ext" and execute it.2. Login with the following details

User : Guest
Pass : demopass32

3. Send all the information like fake e-mail, name, subject, message, number of mails and victim's e-mail.4. Now finally click on "BOMB HI!:P" button to start bombarding :)Enjoy.......

Note :- Sending fake messages, e-mail, SMS to anyone is criminal offense you should avoid doing this kind of activity. This tutorials is only for educational purpose, we're not advocating to use it in malicious way.

You may also like to read :

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Retrieve .Mp3 From Music Sites Without Paying a Penny (Free & Secure)

2012-11-28T19:08:00.000+00:00

Hi all users, want to get a song of your choice but got disappointed when it ask for payment or you have money but that sotre doesn't support your payment portal. Now what to do. What if someone tell you that you can get that song/mp3 without paying a single penny, Sounds interesitg. Isn't it ?

So today I will teach you how to obtain MP3 files of any album of you desire from numerous websites using Google Chrome. So lest get started.

Step 1
First of all You need to download Google Chrome and Itunes if you don't already have it.

Step 2
While in Google Chrome, find any site with the album or .mp3 files you want. Usually most music based sites have a JavaScript players embedded onto their site. If you're able to play the selected song on the site you're on, then most likely its possible to rip the song you want from it. Sites such as Billboard or others who hosts their files on other musical sites wont work. In my case, I love Jazz and Instrumentals, so I have chosen a site called Yogurtbox for this example.

Step 3
Once you find the area where your song is located, right click and select Inspect Element. You can also Inspect Element by clicking the little Stack Icon on the upper right part of your browser. Select Tools > Developer Tools and the same panel will show up as shown below :

Now once you're in the Developer Tools panel, you need to scroll over to the Console Tab. Once you're in that area, scroll down slowly. There might be loads of code depending on the method your selected site was created. In my case I got lucky, and found the musical track in less than 20 lines of code.The highlighted Loaded URL which is the data being sent is the link you will be searching for. Once you find this link, open up a new tab and paste this code/link into your browser and press enter. A new page should pop up with the Query player on a blank background. Press play to test your song, if it doesn't plays on its own. Once you do that head back into the top right corner of your browser and select Save page as... You will be prompted to save a file to a location. Name the file anything you want, but I would prefer the actual name of the song. Congrats. You now have the musical file you longed for without having to download any shifty hacking tools. Although that's not it. Because you've downloaded a raw music file it may not contain the properties of the artist inside of it. So in the next process I will show you how to edit your files details, and add album art to it using Itunes.Now you want to open up Itunes, and add the downloaded file to your library. You can do that by going into File > Add File to Library, and then selected your downloaded file and pressing OK. Once your file loads, head over to it inside of Itunes. Now you will right click the selected file, and select Get Info. You will then be prompted with a new box looking like this : Once you're inside of the Info Box, you can select the tabs at the top to input different data that relates to the file you downloaded, such as the Artist, Song Name, Contributing Artists, and so forth.Now that the details are fixed, you want to make the file looks legit. You can do this by adding album artwork to it. Scroll over to the Artwork Tab and select Add. You will be prompted to select an image to it.The image I wanted to use was from the site I retrieved my song from, and is also the album art for that file. Once you've selected your image, press OK. This is how your (My) final outcome looked. Congrats, you've just created a semi-legit piece of Audio without having to spend a penny. You can literally create an entire album and sell it or trade it or do what ever you want using this method. I've saved tons of bucks from it and I wanted to share it here.
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Get Facebook Details via Android Device (TuT)

2012-11-28T14:12:00.000+00:00

Hi all users, Today I'm going to teach you how to gain access to someone's Facebook on your Android device using the FaceNiff app. It is a sniffer, computer software that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network. My girlfriend lives in student accomodation (apartments) and I've used this method countless times, no mad 1337 skills required! Also works with other accounts. :D But I'm going to use Facebook as our example.
Requirements:

1. Your device MUST have ROOT access. I will not explain how to achieve this as it varies depending on your phone. Check out XDA Developers if you need help rooting your phone.

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http://www.xda-developers.com/
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2. You must me on the same network as your slave. (WIFI)

3. Your slave must be currently using Facebook on their computer.

NOTE : This doesn't work if the person is using HTTPS security option for Facebook. :(

All set? Good!

Follow the Steps Below
1. Once you have your device rooted, you need to download the FaceNiff .APK (app installer) You can download it here:

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http://faceniff.ponury.net/
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This is free for the first three accounts you get into, if you want to keep using it, either purchase the app or use Google to find a cracked version. If you download a cracked version, make sure the file is clean! I won't be providing a link to one in case I accidently infect someone. That wouldn't be good! :-/

2. Make sure you have Unknown sources checked on your phone. This allows you to install non-market apps you find online. Follow the path in the codebox below:

Settings\Applications\Unknown sources

3. Move the .APK you just downloaded and install, simples!

4. Connect to the WIFI your slave is using.

5. Open FaceNiff and press the start button up at the top. If it asks you to allow permission for the app, do so.

6. It will now be monitoring activity on the network. If anyone signs into their account, it will show up on your phone! Simply click on them and you will automatically log into their account! Magic!! ;) It might take 2-3 minutes to load up the screen so wait calmly.

Thats it!!

If nothing comes up, user Stealth mode. Some routers try to prevent this type of hack so stealth mode will try to work its way around this.

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