Last week, Victoria Macdonald, who has covered health and social care for Channel 4 News since 1999, felt that she needed to let everyone know that she does not hate the NHS. This followed online accusations that she did, one nastily linked to her daughter’s treatment for a head injury in an NHS hospital. Continue reading “No NHS criticism please, we’re British?”
Posts
How to DuckDuckGo out of Google’s shared endorsement adverts
If you use Google+ to ‘like’ something (or +1 in Googletalk), you could soon be helping to advertise it. Google is introducing ‘shared endorsements’, through which the adverts on its site and on thousands of others may include the face and comments of Google users. (If you only use Google to search and don’t log in then don’t worry, this doesn’t apply to you.)
As the Register says, “it sounds about as enticing as going to a pub with your pals to discover all they want to talk about is the products they have bought since you last saw them”. However, it is at least possible (and easy – follow the instructions here) to opt-out before this goes live on 11 November – unlike Facebook’s latest anti-privacy move, meaning that all user profiles can be found through a search. Continue reading “How to DuckDuckGo out of Google’s shared endorsement adverts”
Spain’s nationalised heritage paradores: unlikely in Britain, sadly
If you were looking for parts of the economy to nationalise, luxury hotels would probably be low on most people’s lists – and for the last three decades, British governments have mainly privatised, not nationalised, with most of Royal Mail being privatised this week.
Having just spent a week in a different parador – Spain’s nationalised chain of hotels – every night, that’s a bit of a shame. Not because hotel accommodation urgently needs to become part of the public sector, but because it’s difficult to imagine any organisation but a government doing what Spain has done with several paradores: take a fantastic but decrepit old building and make it usable again. Continue reading “Spain’s nationalised heritage paradores: unlikely in Britain, sadly”
e-Borders: still over here, still a mess – article for The Register
Last week, The Register published my review of e-Borders, a government IT scheme that deserves more attention than it gets. Presumably politicians’ wish to sound tough on immigration stands in the way, but the UK’s system for tracking international journeys has big problems that it is hard to see anyone solving. Continue reading “e-Borders: still over here, still a mess – article for The Register”
An independent Scotland’s tough government IT choices for The Register
One year ahead of the referendum, The Register last week published my assessment of the choices an independent Scotland would face on government IT.
It’s a mixed picture. Some sections of the public sector, such as the NHS, education and the emergency service, are already run by Scotland on a devolved basis, and so is their IT. But the UK-wide ones that would need to be unscrambled are also the biggest: HM Revenue and Customs, Department for Work and Pensions and secret (leaving aside Edward Snowden’s cornucopia of stories) surveillance. Continue reading “An independent Scotland’s tough government IT choices for The Register”