BCS Oxfordshire

Annual Branch Visit

This year’s branch visit was a guided tour including the Gun Shed, the Tank Shed at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham. The tour of the military vehicles and hardware has always been one of the highlights at the prizegiving for our Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition, so we were delighted that branch members have had a chance to see it for themselves.

An added bonus was the visit to the unique collection in the Small Arms Armoury. In a very small space it houses a vast range of small arms from Britain and around the world throughout the ages, mostly in working order and regularly fired.

We started with an introduction to the Brown Bess musket, which was standard equipment in the British army for over 100 years, from the early eighteenth century till it was superseded in the early nineteenth.

We learned why the Brown Bess had a larger bore than the French muskets (so we could use their ammunition but not vice versa), the origins of the phrases "half-cock" and "flash in the pan" and why infantry were not allowed to wear full beards.

How Big Business learned to love Virtual Worlds

For our February meeting, we took a look at virtual worlds and, in particular, Second Life.

IBM has long been recognised as an interested player in virtual worlds. Roo Reynolds (right) told us how a handful of brave IBMers first began a foray into Second Life and other virtual worlds, and how this grass-roots interest became widespread adoption within the company.

See also the article by Karen Price, chief executive of e-skills UK, in the January 31 edition of Computing, on how they have been using Second Life to run events such as virtual careers fairs.

You might also be interested in the April 2008 issue of PCPro which carried an article entitled "Real Trouble in Virtual Worlds".

Identity Fraud – From Criminals to Consumers

We were delighted to welcome Tom Ilube as the speaker for our 2007 Christmas lecture. Tom was CIO of Egg and is now CEO of technology startup Garlik, a new company aimed at increasing consumer awareness of what information about them is publicly available, and helping to prevent identity theft.

This session turned out to be even more topical than we had expected, for several reasons:

1. All the publicity surrounding the recent loss of data at HMRC, and
2. the announcement on 29 November 2007 from The World Economic Forum that Garlik was one of 39 visionary companies selected as their Technology Pioneers 2008.
   If you missed Tom’s talk (and even if you didn’t) you may be interested to watch this interview which was released to mark the WEF announcement.
3. Garlik’s announcement, also on 29 November, of a free service called QDOS which is aimed at getting consumers engaged with their own online digital presence.

Tom explained that many people find it hard to relate to the concept of digital identity. Their eyes glaze over when you try to talk to them about it.

Makers of shredders have capitalised on consumers’ liking for something tangible, and indeed one shredder manufacturer has sponsored security events: unfortunately, people may be tempted to think that their identity is safe just because they have bought a shredder.

Tom told us how relatively easy it was to find out enough information about many individuals to be able to use those details to apply for credit cards and even passports. The task is made even easier by people who are willing readily to disclose personal information and who agree to be "friends" with strangers on social networking sites such as Facebook.

In the identity theft industry, typically, personal information about individuals is collected and sold on to others who make fraudulent use of it. It is hard for law enforcement agencies to proceed against the people who collect information: gathering information from public sources is not illegal per se. If questioned, they can claim they are just doing "market research". However, such information can be sold on, and Tom was therefore able to put a potential value on the information in the CDs "mislaid" by HMRC.

In a lively Q&A session after his talk, Tom explained how Garlik had built a data store which now contains billions of RDF triples which define the relationships between people and their personal data. This technology, he said, scaled much better than conventional relational databases because of the overhead of building and maintaining indices to support efficient queries on any column. Elsewhere on the web, Steve Harris, a software architect at Garlik, has posted that the Garlik store imports at over 70k triples/sec and that’s only just fast enough to keep up with incoming data.

After the meeting, Tom had to hurry away to work on what we now know was the upcoming launch of QDOS, but many attendees repaired to the Lamb and Flag to continue the discussion over the now traditional mince pies and mulled wine.

Joint meeting

Access Grid is an advanced collaboration environment which has been described as "videoconferencing on steroids".

In this Joint Session with Chester & North Wales branch, Michael Daw, Head of the UK Access Grid Support Centre at the University of Manchester, delivered his talk from the Daresbury Lab using live Access Grid video links with the OERC escience building in Oxford, the Rutherford and Appleton Lab and Bangor University.

Slides

Michael’s slides are here.