Your recent articles (More young would vote by mobile or web  and E-petitions gather support) raise some important points about the way the government engages with citizens.

With the general election fast approaching, improving public engagement, encouraging discussions and communicating with citizens in the way in which they want to be contacted should be the government’s top priority.

At the last general election only 37 per cent of 18-to-24-year olds voted and the fact that a third of young people admitted that they are not planning to vote this year should come as no surprise.

Even less of a shock is the fact that three quarters of these young people have said that they would vote if they could do so through social media or by text. We live in a digital world. As an increasing number of people of all ages embrace mobile technology and social media, the government should be using these direct communication channels to interact with citizens and boost people’s interest in politics. This engagement needs to start at a local level.

With Socitm revealing that 90 per cent of councils restrict access to social media, there is clearly still a long way to go before these direct communication channels are used to their full potential.

Paul Birdman, Telindus

The important sixth pitfall of outsourcing, in addition to the five in the article from Morrison Foerster

(Pitfalls of outsourcing), is the danger of relying on overly simplistic how-to articles for inspiration and guidance when arranging outsourcing contracts.

The feature raises important points, but focuses too much on the outsourcing transaction itself. It emphasises the importance of finding the right capabilities and the need for baselines, and the fact that outsourcing is more than cost savings and relationship management.

However, while these are important, they are also the obvious hurdles to overcome, to the point that they are not the hidden organisational traps that they are made out to be.

Instead, those considering outsourcing should be warned away from an excessive focus on the transaction and contract negotiations – a major cause of outsourcing relationship breakdown – and should concern themselves with fostering genuine understanding between the two parties and managing the associated business change.

Stakeholder engagement and buy-in, primary prerequisites of successful change management, are vital for an outsourcing relationship to flourish, and yet they are are not included in the article.

There is also limited mention of the need to secure and manage innovation and transformation, despite the overwhelming emphasis being placed on these factors by the market.

Outsourcing is not 30 years young, but 30 years old, and there are a wealth of further lessons that have been learned along the way.

Alex Blues, PA Consulting

Your recent blog posting about Novell contains a good deal of misinformation (Can Novell thrive by being a jack of all trades?).

Novell’s acquisition of PlateSpin did not have anything to do with a move into the configuration management database (CMDB) market – nor does VMware have a CMDB, as far as I am aware. PlateSpin does workload management, so this acquisition gave Novell a foothold in the virtualisation space.

The Managed Objects acquisition is what provided Novell with a CMDB product, as well as the other products mentioned. Novell never divested itself of its services arm.

The European subsidiary that Novell divested was a small piece of the Cambridge Technology Partners merger, and Novell still provides services for its customers worldwide.

Name withheld

As more organisations equip their staff with mobile devices such as laptops and iPhones to enable remote working, serious security loopholes are opening up (Data security and remote access).

While it is critically important to provide remote access to information, it is also essential that all sensitive financial and personal data is safeguarded. Failure to extend real-time monitoring to the key systems and applications that these remote devices access – and to ensure that workers are operating within the corporate policy – represents a loss of centralised control.

Without the ability to undertake constant, real-time monitoring – irrespective of employee location or infrastructure design – organisations cannot cost-effectively deliver the flexibility required within a secure and stable environment.

The result is an IT infrastructure at serious risk of security loopholes and non-compliance. Organisations may be delivering greater productivity and meeting objectives for flexible working and improved access to information at the edge of the network, but they risk the financial loss, reputation damage and potential public outcry associated with key data being accessed by the wrong people.

Andrew Heather, Tripwire

I could not believe the letter from “Name withheld”.

I assume that as this person gets to meet and influence university students, he or she is a university employee – a visiting speaker from the IT sector would not get away with deriding their own industry so scathingly.

As someone with almost 30 years’ experience, I for one don’t find IT boring in the slightest. Being unemployed for the past five years has been far more boring. Whoever they are, they need to get out of IT and let someone who wants to work in IT take their place.

Richard Jones

Like Rosalie Marshall, I too have issues with social networking services (Let down by changes to social networking sites). For example, I cannot believe how rudimentary Facebook’s privacy levels are . Everyone is either a friend or not, which is not analogous with real life.

There are very many of my Facebook friends with whom I wish to share my mobile number and my birthday. There are many others with whom I would prefer not to. But I have no choice, it’s either all or none.

Facebook needs an “acquaintance” category with whom you can share some things, but not others.

Marcus Dyson

How lovely to see Google penalising one of its most active YouTube users (Computing blogger banished from YouTube).

This three-strike rule is fundamentally flawed. People capturing the events in their daily lives – especially when attending as many events as Mark does – are bound to capture certain things that may “breach copyright”.

There needs to be some way of taking into account a user’s history and the purpose for which they use YouTube. A black-and-white policy such as this will only end up penalising further innocent users.

Toby Brown

I don’t see what the issue is here (Computing blogger banished from YouTube).

Presumably you’re not allowed to film in the auditorium, like most live events?

And his blog suggests that there were two other copyright claims (one of which he accepts), so why does he expect special treatment? We’re talking Google here – it has to use some method to police copyright infringements.

Kwun Chang

Had Laurent Marteau’s vested interest as chief executive officer of Intego – a supplier of Mac security software – been disclosed, the tone of this article could have been put into context (Mac malware: myth or reality?).

No, Macs are not impervious to attack. No computer that exchanges data with other machines ever is, with or without security software.

Marteau points out that people installing software from dubious sources or using licence cracking (let’s face it, stealing software) are vulnerable to malware. Is anyone surprised by this? Installing codecs from dubious sources, again no surprise that this makes you vulnerable. Responding to unsolicited email – no shock there either.

All these vulnerabilities require nothing more than common sense to avoid and they will always be a problem, even with defensive software in place because all scanners lag behind new viruses and malware, meaning you can lose a lot before they catch up.

In just one paragraph Marteau provides a reason to install protective software: malware delivered via web sites. It is easy to visit sites that, possibly unknown to the site owner, host malware. If you are concerned about this, run a virtual machine with no connections to the host, then use this to surf less trustworthy sites and you will be reasonably secure.

Virus and malware protection is a relatively small part of securing a machine. Anti-virus and anti-malware programs are as open to attack as any other software, and using them can give an even greater false sense of security leading to more of the complacency that Marteau would have us all be concerned about.

Mark Bools

This story shows why you’d have to be crazy as an ordinary citizen to apply to be on the National Identity Register for life (Authorities in the dark over ID card fraud).

If I falsely apply for a card in your name, and it is issued to me, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will permanently fix me with your identity, which, if the scheme succeeds and the IPS squeezes out all other sources of authentication, is a problem for you.

Pilling is discreetly pointing out that by creating the doctrine of the IPS as the single source of truth about citizens, the Home Office has turned identity theft from a vague metaphor covering diverse forms of fraud into a real possibility.

Guy Herbert

general secretary, NO2ID

Matthew Poyiadgi’s article misses the point that the native UK IT talent pool is actually being drained – not re-supplied – by offshoring (Time to dive into the UK’s talent pool).

Offshoring is increasingly being used for pure cost considerations, leaving many highly skilled old pros without jobs and discouraging new entrants into a profession that will only be able to pay Indian-level wages in future if it is to remain competitive.

Contract rates in the UK have plunged and the large pool of skilled eastern European IT staff from new entrant countries to the EU is not being used.

It is difficult to see any solution unless the Indian IT giants decide to increase their presence in Europe and employ mainly European staff. This would increase costs but would also supply more local and culturally aligned expertise.

To add insult to injury, a recent trend is so-called “offshored agile” development. This is a contradiction in terms, as any rapid application development requires constant interaction between users, developers and testers.

Offshored agile development is just traditional development without proper written documentation, at which Indian firms are poor in my experience. This results in a product that cannot be tested in any traditional, independent way, and the client is locked into the development company – an unwise and shortsighted strategy – again purely for short-term cost considerations.

Notwithstanding this, no IT professional has any time for companies that complain about shortages of skilled workers but themselves refuse to pay for the training necessary to update skills.

David Sykes