Prophet Consulting

Free Enterprise killed by Tony Blairs Labour government by the hand of Dawn Primarolo and the misguided IR35 tax law.

Under IR35 I saw my tax increase to well over 55% on my overall income. With 95% of billed income taxed at PAYE a small IT contract company is at a huge tax disadvantage. Small IT companies have to pay Employer and Employee NI tax, as director/employees they go no sick pay, no holidays, no training. By law they are required to file end of year returns often requiring an expensive accountant.

It just didn't add up any more. Paying 55% tax including double National Insurance for poor services, non-existant NHS dentists, congested roads, underfunded police, not enough prisons, I just had enough. I left the UK and moved to Singapore.

Gordon Brown wonders why tax revenues are down. Its because people are leaving the country in droves. We are fed up with a country where you continually may more for less.

Steve Steve Watts Hull University Moulton School Sunny Side School Chess Computer Contractor Steve Watts Reading Hewlett Packard Alprange Steve Watts ESL British Council Swiss Bank SCB Standard Chartered Bank Hawes Signs unix internet firewalls CURRICULUM VITAE STEVE WATTS Skills Specialist Skills: NetScreen, Firewall-1 NG, Nokia Firewalls, Nortel Contivity, SunScreen, GTA Firewalls, DMZs, VPNs, RADIUS, RSA ACE, TCP/IP , Nessus, Snort, ethereal, Alteon Web Switches, DNS Bind Apache, IIS, MS Proxy Server, Squid, NetCache, Netscape Proxy Server, Volera, Websense, MAILSeeper, PacketShaper, Sendmail, SMTP, POP3, OpenMail, Cisco IOS, F5 BigIP, Majordomo, WiFi 802.1x Languages: C, UNIX Scripts (ksh, csh, sh), PERL, HTML, JavaScript, JAVA Operating Systems: Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT, 2K, XP Qualifications Degree: B.Sc. (Hons) Computer Science 1992 G.C.E. A Levels: Maths, Physics, Computer Science 1988 G.C.E. O Levels: 9 O Levels including English and Maths 1986 Career to date Technical Design Authority Standard Chartered Bank (Jan 01 to date) Security Design Consultancy Worked closely with various wholesale and consumer banking projects to provide assessment of the security risks and design secure solutions based around Group Security Policies and Industry best practices. Liaising with project managers and stakeholders to maintain a high standard of security throughout the project lifecycle. Delivered business projects globally including Singapore, UK, HK, India, Pakistan, Dubai, Malaysia, Korea. taking into account differing security and regulatory restrictions from local monetary authorities. Designed the infrastructure for secure customer facing Internet banking applications such as eBanking, mobile Banking, and high value private client banking. Designed solutions for banking to banking projects such as Swift payments, VISA VAP, Sparrow ATM, EuroNet, migration of ATMs to TCP/IP. Firewall Design Authority Technical design authority for detailed designs of Firewall channels globally throughout the bank. Redesigned the banks legacy multi-site firewall channels with consolidated lower cost dedicated Firewall appliances such as NetScreens. Proactively consolidated perimeter entry points into East and West data centres, utilising high performance split site high availability firewall channels. Introduced real time monitoring and integrated into Remedy support system. Significantly reduced implementation, on going support and maintenance costs. Redesigned internet browsing infrastructure to increase performance using class leading NetCache proxies with intensive processing offloaded to Trend Antivirus and Websense Linux server farms. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Remote Access Designed a global secure VPN remote access solution and deployed at worldwide strategic hub locations to allow remote users to access email and other core business applications remotely via the Internet using secure encrypted 3DES tunnels. Access was provided, using strong two factor SecurID authentication to back end replicated RSA ACE servers. This replaced the banks global Equant remote access solution providing annual savings in excess of $1million US in telecoms costs alone. Additional benefits were granular access control, auditing, and broadband support. Integrated solution with iPass to provide a global ISP for dialup users, at home and whilst roaming the world. During the 2003 SARs outbreak in HK whole offices that were quarantined were able to work from home. Those with Cable Modem and ADSL connections enjoyed near LAN speed access. Extended solution to support smaller remote offices to hub office connectivity significantly reducing international telecoms costs. Internet Security Consultant The British Council (Jun 98 – Dec 01) Firewalls and Internet Security Designed and deployed the Checkpoint Firewall-1 infrastructure at the British Councils main offices in London and Manchester, on secure HP-UX UNIX platforms. Implemented firewall rule bases including network address translation and anti-spoofing. Set-up up Demilitarised Zones to allow the British Council to provide web services such as e-learning securely on the Internet. Specified bastion server builds for UNIX and Windows NT for web and application servers deployed in the DMZs. Provided security consultancy to the Councils 200 overseas office, including penetration testing using tools such as Nessus and nmap. Installed and configured Internet DNS name servers on UNIX servers in DMZs acting as primary and secondary registered Name Servers for several British Council domains. Internet Content Monitoring (Web and Email) Designed and upgraded the British Councils email infrastructure. Deployed MAILSweeper gateways which established very effective controls against spamming, spoofing, relaying, viruses, unacceptable content and unauthorised attachments such as AVI, MPEGs. Provided lexical analysis for banned words and detection of new viruses with no signatures. UNIX Level 3 Support SBC Warburg Bank (Mar 98 – Jun 98) Part of a small team of specialist Level 3 UNIX support consultants responsible for 40 live UNIX OpenMail servers globally delivering email to 100,000 users. Wrote custom directory synchronisation tools using shell scripts and PERL to import and export email directories from the Swiss Bank OpenMail and Lotus Notes email systems as part of the UBS and Swiss bank merger. At SBC’s offices in Chicago upgraded the clustered OpenMail UNIX servers from HP-UX 9 to HP-UX 10. UNIX System Administrator The British Council (Feb 97 – Feb 98) Upgraded the British Council live OpenMail servers from release B.04 to B.05, ensuring a smooth migration and minimal disruption for users. Upgraded UNIX operating systems from HPUX 9 to HPUX 10 and subsequent tuning of the filesystems and kernel. Implemented and supported sendmail and OpenMail, including extensive email routing, address rewriting, internet gateway mapping, body part conversions, request servers, directory synchronisation agreements, fax servers, and customising rules in sendmail.cf configuration file. Software Development Engineer Hewlett Packard Ltd. (Oct 95 – Feb 97) Designed and coded the implementation of the HP OpenMail to Lotus Notes Internet mail gateway in C on HP-UX UNIX platform. Involved writing software to map between Lotus Notes API and core OpenMail code. Successfully ported the completed C code to AIX and Solaris platforms. Developed UNIX shell scripts to perform actions and queries to configure and interrogate OpenMail mail node hosts via HP OpenView. Allowing GUI remote management via HP Openview to a distributed network of OpenMail UNIX hosts. Software Engineer Enterprise Solutions UK Ltd. (Nov 92 - Aug 95) Working at Enterprise Solutions’ head office in Los Angeles ported and compiled X.400 client and server source to various UNIX platforms including SCO, Unixware, AIX and OSF/1. Developed code to customise solutions for major US clients such as AT&T, Wal-Mart and Fed-EX. For the Czech Railways in Prague developed the UNIX messaging solution to interconnect with proprietary third party FAX and Tandem OSI messaging gateways.