Could an international version of iPlayer be on the cards? According to media reports, BBC director general Mark Thomson is in negotiations with Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the possibility of hosting long-form BBC content on Google-owned video website, YouTube.

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The London 2012 Olympics could be set to pioneer smart tickets that double up as contactless payment and Oyster cards. Research into a 'cashless' Olympics and the "feasibility of integrating systems for ticketing, ID authentication and transport", is currently being carried out by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post), an independent body that advises MPs on matters of science and technology.

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David Lister has held senior IT roles at Boots, Reuters and RBS. He talks to Nick Heath about why he left RBS and how he will meet the challenges ahead as group CIO for National Grid. Wherever David Lister goes, change almost always follows.

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President Obama on Friday said the US government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions caused by computer or internet attacks and announced that a new cyber security co-ordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. The still-to-be-named co-ordinator will oversee a new bureaucracy tasked with digital infrastructure protection, which had previously been handled by the Department of Homeland Security. "We will ensure that these networks are secure, trustworthy and resilient," Obama said. "We will deter, prevent, detect and defend against attacks and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage."

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Transport for London (TfL) CIO Phil Pavitt has been appointed the new CIO of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). He will take up the £180,000 per year position in September, where he will oversee 1,400 staff and a budget of £1bn, making the HMRC one of the largest IT departments in Europe.

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What's in the works at Westminster City Council? Jo Best speaks to the CIO about the latest trends and projects. After a career in IT and government spanning more than 20 years, Westminster CIO David Wilde doesn't appear to have lost his enthusiasm for the latest IT trends.

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More than a year after appearing on the statute books, the info watchdog's power to fine is not yet operational. Lawyer Grant Campbell urges those involved not to lose momentum. Data losses have provided the UK press with an ongoing stream of stories for more than 18 months now.

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Derbyshire County Council has inked a £5.6m deal with Capgemini. Under the deal, the outsourcer will be responsible for refreshing Derbyshire's tech, replacing its mainframe-based IT systems with SAP.

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Police are in talks with companies about deploying a tool to detect evidence of illegal activity on PCs, aiming for it to be as easy to use as a breathalyser. Officers in the Association of Chief Police Officers' (Acpo) e-crime group are looking into commercial devices that can search text, pictures and computer code on a hard disk for material of interest.

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Police forces in England and Wales are wasting money by failing to collaborate when buying new IT, according to the director general of the CBI. The CBI's Richard Lambert said that the separate nature of the 43 forces has acted as a barrier to productivity growth in areas including IT and shared services.

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Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon hacker and security conferences, was among 16 people sworn in on Friday to the US Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC). The HSAC members will provide recommendations and advice directly to secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

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The UK has dropped sharply in the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) annual 'e-readiness' league table, as the recession harmed many countries' ability to use ICT for social and economic development. The E-readiness rankings 2009: The usage imperative report, published last week, is the ninth in an annual series analysing and ranking countries according to the standard of their ICT infrastructure and the ability of their citizens, businesses and governments to use ICT for their good.

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Emergency services comms company Airwave already has one eye on its Olympics legacy. The company, named earlier this year as a supplier to the London 2012 Olympics, will provide private mobile radio service for all Games venues.

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Gordon Brown is bringing in the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to help open up government data. Brown made the announcement in Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, during a speech on constitutional reform.

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The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has hired itself a new CIO from the ranks of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Josh Ellis, a former regional director of forensic services at the consultancy, is now heading up the SFO's IT department as well as its digital forensics unit, the division tasked with evidence seizure and analysis to support the SFO in its fraud-busting activities.

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Failure to update the ageing IT system that helps manage offenders in the UK is making it difficult for the probation service to protect the public when prisoners are released into the community. Currently, around three-quarters of probation staff use a system known as Crams (Case Recording and Management System), first rolled out in 1995, to keep track of offenders. According to the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) the non-Windows based system, which acts as a central repository for information on offenders, is outdated and awkward to use.

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Airwave CEO talks to silicon.com about the future of emergency services comms, the 2012 Olympics and data question marks O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone may loom large on most people's mobile radar but for the emergency services the name that matters is Airwave: every UK police force uses Airwave's Tetra network for their radio communications and, in the next year, every ambulance trust and Fire & Rescue service will be hooked up to the dedicated emergency services network too.

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Radical public sector spending cuts could spur government into delivering services through citizen-created sites and web 2.0 technology, senior Whitehall figures have revealed. Public service spending will need to fall by £50bn by 2020 according to Alexis Cleveland, director general for transformational government at the Cabinet Office.

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The UK government has awarded the contract for creating the next generation of British passports to secure-document specialist DeLeRue. The Identity and Passport Service on Thursday announced the £400m contract for the passports, which will be available to UK citizens from October 2010. The passports will feature new designs and improved security, including the ability to carry fingerprint biometrics.

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Business intelligence has enjoyed a boom despite the less than healthy state of the global economy. According to analyst house Gartner worldwide revenue for technology related to business intelligence, analytics applications and performance management grew by 22 per cent in 2008.

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Despite a £75m government plan to roll out 25,000 mobile devices to police forces nationwide by 2010, the majority of forces remain unable to take full advantage of mobile tech. According to Jan Berry, the Home Office-appointed independent advocate for reducing police bureaucracy, handheld deployments are failing to live up to expectations.

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"Emergency services are not delivered from an office environment sat behind a desk. They're delivered on the street and not just the high street - they're delivered from remote areas, in extreme conditions, we're mobilised 24/7 365 in all sorts of conditions whether it be weather, storm, flood, snow," Olaf Baars, the deputy chief fire officer and president of civil contingency members association, Bapco, told the Westminster eForum keynote seminar last week. "The expectation is we can operate in all of them." But can they? UK consumers may have a range of UK mobile broadband networks to choose from to fulfil their data needs, the emergency services don't have the same luxury.

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The government's interim Digital Britain report doesn't offer enough help for business, according to a senior Cable & Wireless executive. The final report, due out this week, will set the government's digital agenda for the coming years, tackling subjects including broadband, spectrum distribution and online content. Phil Male, operations director at Cable & Wireless, described the interim report, published in January, as "an opportunity missed".

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The government has said that the Digital Britain report is to be delayed, and has confirmed timing for when Lord Carter will step down. The Digital Britain report, which is expected to recommend greater broadband access for the whole of the UK, was due to be published on Tuesday 16 June.

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All major public sector IT purchases should receive the government CIO's stamp of approval before being signed off, according to the government Digital Britain report. The report, published today, comes after a series of government departments that signed off IT projects then later exceeded their budgets by millions of pounds. These include 20 projects undertaken by the Ministry of Defence that are set to cost £3bn more than originally planned, and a Department for Transport shared services initiative that aimed to save £57m but will now cost the taxpayer £81m.

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has cut £110m from its IT outsourcing spend by consolidating its suppliers. Over the past year the MoJ has reduced its number of suppliers from six to two, according to its annual departmental report for 2008/09.

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Communications minister Lord Carter has said that "substantial savings" can be made in public spending by building a government-wide cloud computing platform. In the government's Digital Britain report published yesterday, Carter said the so-called "G-Cloud" should be created within the next three years, to allow local and central government departments to share centrally hosted applications.

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A government plan to allow the intelligence services to monitor all UK web communications is technologically impossible, according to experts from the London School of Economics. The Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP) calls for internet service providers to record the traffic details of all web communications. They must also present those details to the intelligence services and other public authorities in a way that establishes the links between different pieces of data associated with, for example, an individual's phone, email address or user IDs.

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The Digital Britain report has drawn criticism from politicians and technology experts over its proposals for dealing with fibre rollouts and illegal file-sharing. The report, published on Tuesday, outlines the government's plans for the UK's telecommunications infrastructure and digital economy. Shortly after its publication, Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Party's shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport, called Digital Britain a "colossal disappointment" and lambasted the plan's proposal for a monthly 50p tax on fixed copper lines.

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The Conservatives have urged a group of technology suppliers not to sign contracts for work related to ID cards, as the party will scrap the scheme if it is elected to power. Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the Tories want to remind the five companies that have been selected to bid for contracts to provide ID cards that abandoning the National Identity Scheme is "firm policy" for the party.

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The government was warned back in 2004 that immediate action was needed to fix problems in the £12.7bn programme to revamp NHS IT, official reports have revealed. Fast forward to 2009, and the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is facing a number of difficulties: key projects to digitise patient records are running four years late, two major suppliers have walked away from the NPfIT and the Department of Health CIO has given suppliers six months to speed up delivery of IT systems or risk seeing the NPfIT replaced.

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Cutbacks in technology spending are the wrong remedy for the NHS in an economic downturn, according to a junior minister at the Department of Health. Instead, the NHS should embrace the efficiencies IT can bring, professor Lord Darzi, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the department, told an audience at the NHS Healthcare Innovation Expo in London on Thursday.

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Police data systems should be based on open-source software, according to a senior member of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Ian Readhead, director of information for Acpo, said on Tuesday at a Unisys security event that emergency service data transferral systems should be open source, to help ensure interoperability between them.

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City University London is setting up a centre dedicated to training the next generation of CIOs. The centre will provide short courses and ultimately a Masters-level qualification for mid-career IT professionals looking to develop themselves and acquire the skills to move up the IT ladder.

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Canvas eh? Are we talking painting or boxing here?Neither - it's a broadcast industry initiative around TV over broadband. It was announced in December 2008 and is expected to go live in 2010. What does that mean then?Well the broadcasters BBC and ITV along with telco BT have teamed up to create a platform for bringing on-demand content to the UK's televisions through new broadband-enabled receivers.

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In a series of gateway reviews published between 2002 and 2007, and released to the public for the first time last week, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) set out the difficulties that have faced the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). Of the 31 reviews into different aspects of the programme, nine were given a 'red' status indicating immediate action on the project was needed.

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