Spring Conference 2009

by Paul Lynham FIAP

This year’s Spring Conference was held at the Museum in Docklands, close to Canary Wharf. Mike Ryan, Director General of the IAP, welcomed all the delegates and then introduced Peter Green, Technical Director of the Telegraph Newspaper Group, and a Felllow of the Institution. Peter posed the question “What has the Web done for publishing, especially newspapers and, in particular, advertising”?

Printing three national newspaper editions each day involves a huge amount of work. A typical change is around one third of the 120-150 pages sent to the printers - a twenty minute delay can result in a loss of 80,000 copies sold. So quick and reliable transmission of data is essential. A short video showed how the handling of news at the Telegraph had changed over its 150-year history, particularly since the rise of the Worldwide Web.

Peter went on to describe the different types of media needed to ensure that the Telegraph isn't left behind in today’s quickly changing world.. One way that the Telegraph utilises the Web is to use Google and YouTube to drive traffic back to their site. They also have their own Web offerings including Video and Video Advertising, Games (such as Fantasy Football), a Shopping Channel and Data Selling News and Features are also offered on video.

Peter explained that bandwidth consumption was already approaching the physical limits of materials. While most home users have between 1 and 16 Megabit connections, and businesses may typically use use 100 Megabits, some technologies, such as video streaming can use up to one Gigabit. TV broadcasters, especially the BBC and ITV, use the Internet for TV channels. How much could industry put in the Cloud before their 20 Gigabit switches are overloaded? In the Telegraph's newsrooms alone an average size plate is 3MB and there are four of these for each page (one per colour). Therefore you have 12MB x 120-150 pages, or around 1.7GB.

The Government wants high speed broadband in every home by 2012, but somehow the current limits need to be overcome, and this is going to cost money; the current estimate being £1.8 billion. Prices will have to increase.

Dr Hamid Jahankhani is Associate Dean of the School of Computing, IT and Engineering at the University of East London (UEL). He gave a thumbnail sketch of the university before delivering a very interesting talk on Cyber Crime.

UEL has several campuses, principally in Docklands and Stratford., and now has 21,000 students from over 120 countries, though 56% still come from East London. . The University is proud of its diversity.

Dr Jahankhani pointed out that society is nowadays protected by firewalls rather than firepower, but security depends on everyone. Organised crime grows ever more sophisticated. A billion people use the Internet each day and there has been a mobility evolution as bandwidth has increased. The goals of cyber crime are no different from those of traditional crime, and cyber criminals will use whatever means are available. The difference is that cyber criminals are increasingly remote from their crimes, and victims are often not even aware that a crime has taken place!

The Internet provides an ideal setting for cyber crime. Vast sums of money can be made very quickly. In the early days, computer crime meant simply stealing computers. Today it spans a huge range of fast-evolving offences such as hacking and phishing, or traditional crimes that have simply been updated. Hackers are often more interested in demonstrating their abilities than in committing crime, but organised crime in it for the money and recruits hackers to achieve its goals.

Dr Jahankhani concluded by reviewing Computer Forensics - the science of identifying, extracting, preserving and documenting of computer evidence for legal purposes. He concluded that while researchers are continually refining their filtering and search engines to locate and sort documents from multiple sources, criminals are employing ever more sophisticated anti-forensic techniques to cover their tracks. Cyber crime is a growing problem for e-society despite a plethora of legislation. To be of any use laws need to be recognized by every country and legal system.

Distinguished Fellow, Companion and Member of the Council of the Institution Peter Ashby then introduced his friend, the next speaker Jim Goulding. Jim, a past producer and director of ITV's News at Ten, now running his own production company, had entitled his talk “Manual to Automatic – Computerisation of TV News”.

News at Ten started in 1967 with a 10-week trial. Nearly everything was paper based. Scripts were typed, edited and re-edited using typewriters, before being copied and distributed. Pictures were shot on 16mm film, then transported, developed, cut and edited. The sound was on a separate magnetic tape that had to be synchronised with the pictures. TV cameras were large and cumbersome so positions needed to be carefully rehearsed. Graphics were provided by paper maps or at best "super-animations" (an operator pulling a paper arrow attached to a piece of string for example). Special effects were provided by facilities, such as Peter Snow’s sand table, which could be used with a variety of props such as toy soldiers.

In 1968 colour was introduced, and some limited computerisation in the form of caption generators. By 1978 there were computerised animations. The first real computer system was called ‘Basys’. which Channel 4 Newsroom started using in 1982 (IITN bought the Basys company two years later). By this time magnetic tapes had reduced in size, from 2 inch reel-to-reel eventually to half-inch cassettes, and a company called Odetics had made a computer-controlled machine that could manage up to 100 tapes, with a barcode system to identify them individually.

By the 1990s ITN had realised it needed a system in which 250 clients could view, edit and play news items simultaneously. Sony and Quantel were asked to submit designs. Quantel's system was commissioned in 1999, but it was a further three years before it was fully operational. By 2006 ITN wanted computer control of the entire workflow and went to a company called Avid for this system. It was rolled out in January 2008 firstly for Channel 4, and then to ITN in the following April

The final speaker, Ed Gibson, was introduced by his friend IAP Council Member and Fellow Ian Walker. Ed has had a wide ranging career in law and law enforcement and is currently Microsoft’s Chief Security Adviser for the UK.

Ed surprised members by saying that the UK is particularly attractive to e-criminals because punishments are nowhere near as severe as those in the US. Average life sentences in the UK are only 12 years, and many prisoners are released after only 8 years for good behaviour. In the US, a similar crime would see the criminal in jail for the term of his natural life! Also in the UK the police are neither specially trained nor organised to combat e-crime.

For Windows users, there is an automatic update on the second Tuesday of each month when millions of computers all over the world are updated. This process enables Microsoft to analyse the malware that is present on these machines. It is clear that Botnets are infecting a large percentage of these machines. Trojan downloaders are growing rapidly too, and these can reveal valuable information to the criminal, such as passwords. If you are running Windows (or other OSs), you must keep your software updated or you will be compromised.

Ed pointed out he UK has spam email laws that are among the tightest in the world. Yet it has the highest spam levels! Where do spam emails come from”? Often, we can’t find out because senders hide behind proxy servers. If your computer becomes infected, it could be your machine that they are coming from – after having been hijacked as a spam server! USB flash drives are another problem, making it easy for rogue employees to download a massive amount of their company’s information and walk out of the door with it on their MP3 players!

Ed has a very humorous style, much appreciated by his audience. But he posed serious questions. If e-crime happens to us, to whom do we report it? Individuals can't talk directly to SOCA. A growing concern is the need to educate children to protect themselves when using social networking sites; how to configure privacy settings, for example. Photographs posted by a teenager may have seemed funny at the time, but they will stay in the public domain forever and may well be seen by a prospective employer many years later.

So ended a thought-provoking morning of presentations. Members then made their way downstairs to the Rumstore where a splendid lunch had been prepared. While coffee was being served a member of the Museum staff gave a short talk describing the main pointes of interest to be seen, and members were let loose to explore for themselves.. Those who had to rush off were given two free museum so that they could return to the Museum any time in the next12 months! All in all another very informative, enjoyable and successful conference for the IAP.