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Exclusive BT has halted all compulsory redundancies on the eve of a national ballot for strike action across the group, the telco and union CWU today confirmed. It follows 15 days of strikes waged by a small band of engineers in Openreach.
The unrest was caused by BT's multi-year programme to save £1.5bn in annual operating costs, started in 2018. This involves reducing the workforce by 13,000 and closing 90 per cent of corporate real estate.
The CWU decided in March to hold a UK-wide industrial ballot to test the appetite among unionised workers at BT – and its sub-groups EE and Openreach – to down tools. This would have been the first such action since 1987 and came after CWU said it was unable to resolve disputes with the company.
Virgin Galactic reckons it has dealt with an electromagnetic interference (EMI) problem that aborted a recent test flight just as another technical gremlin rears its head.
The news came during a Q1 investor call following the announcement of a $130m loss, down from the $377m loss for the same time last year.
Mike Moses, Virgin president for Space Missions and Safety, told participants that following the December 2020 abort, in which the rocket motor lost connection and VSS Unity was forced to glide back to a safe landing before getting a chance to trouble space, the team had been working on dealing with EMI introduced by a new flight control computer.
CyberUK 21 Britain is to spend £22m on training African and Indo-Pacific nations to stave off cyber influences from "authoritarian regimes", foreign secretary Dominic Raab said today.
"I'm very pleased to announce that the UK government will invest £22m in new funding to support cyber capacity building in those vulnerable countries," said Raab at the CyberUK conference this morning, making his single policy pledge in the speech.
The Foreign Secretary said the money will go towards "national cyber response teams" mostly in Africa, with the stated intent being "to improve cooperation on cyber investigations" into potentially nation state-backed attacks on companies and digital-dependent infrastructure.
There are two things that typically make Wall Street investment analysts go weak at the knees when it comes to quarterly conference calls with tech execs: expanding cloud services and gory details of cost pruning.
Rackspace delivered both in spades this week but its shares nonetheless took a beating on NASDAQ, plunging by almost 30 per cent after it delivered full-year guidance of $1 earnings per share, lower than the $1.10 consensus expected by analysts. Slowing profit growth spooked them.
Top brass used the Q1 call (transcript here) to talk up the rebranded private cloud portfolio, including a fully managed VMware Cloud service, plus Rackspace Elastic Engineering described by CEO Kevin Jones as "the next iteration of our service blocks".
The open-source Babel JavaScript compiler project is running out of money with big sponsors having pulled out, according to its core team. And its creator yesterday threw a spanner into the works by claiming on Twitter that he believed funds were "misallocated."
Babel compiles modern JavaScript (ECMAScript 2015+) into code that runs on older web browsers. It can also compile JSX (syntax used by the React framework) and TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript. Using Babel is a huge benefit to developers trying to support multiple browsers on multiple platforms. Its GitHub repository has 39,000 stars and has been forked 4,800 times, showing its popularity.
The core team has now said that the project is running out of money, despite sponsorship from Airbnb, Facebook, Salesforce, Gitpod, GatsbyJS, Discord, Elastic, Vercel, and other users.
Fibre Channel hasn't been exciting since storage area networks were young, hot, and pretty. But the protocol is still around, still has devotees, and just got an upgrade.
A seventh generation of Fibre Channel has been in the works for years, with a theoretical speed of 64Gbit/s. But while the likes of Broadcom had delivered 64G Fibre Channel switches in September 2020, according to our sibling site Blocks and Files, putting the update to work was a tad tricky for lack of a host bus adapter (HBA) that could connect a server or array to a seventh-gen switch.
Until yesterday, when Broadcom delivered the HBA for which a very small section of the world has been waiting, and boasted it can now deliver "a complete portfolio of products that enable an end-to-end 64G data path."
5G IoT operator OQ Technology has inked a deal with satellite firm NanoAvionics to build what OQ boss Omar Qaise described as a "flying cell tower in orbit."
Assuming that cell tower had a volume of 30cm x 20cm x 10cm and weighed 6kg.
The 6U satellite is the second mission for NanoAvionics with OQ Technology and will be the latest addition to the latter's Low Earth Orbit constellation. The plan is to provide basic commercial IoT and Machine to Machine (M2M) services, using 5G connectivity, to customers with a focus initially on Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.
NHS Education for Scotland has awarded AWS a £15m contract to host its National Digital Platform, an architecture to share data across the nation's health service.
The education and training body within NHS Scotland said that the platform would be designed to "create and deploy real time data at the point of care", "operate to a predictable architecture to enable new and innovative products to be developed and implemented" as well as "enable the use of data at scale for quality improvement and to support research and innovation", according to a tender notice.
The cloud infrastructure biz is set to host the data platform, including repositories of structured and unstructured clinical data, web services to power web and mobile applications, an integration layer, and web app. The platform is intended to enable the creation and use of information at source and facilitate the interoperability of existing and new healthcare technologies following the publication of the Digital Health and Care Strategy for Scotland in 2018.
Hong Kong’s Legislative Bureau has proposed amendments to local laws that strengthen penalties for doxxing, and empower its Privacy Commissioner to request content removal from platforms and legally enforce compliance.
Doxxing became an issue in Hong Kong after the 2019 introduction of a law that would have made it easier for locals to be tried in Chinese courts. Protests against the law saw activists publish personal information about police and court staff.
From June 2019 until September 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data handled over 4,700 doxxing cases. Of those doxxed, 35 percent where police officers or their family, four percent were public servants and government officials, 30 percent expressed support to the government or the police, and 32 percent voiced opposition to the government or police. Another 1,000 cases have popped up between September 2020 and April 2021.
Column Nearly a decade ago I decided to try my hand as a cryptographer. It went about as well as you might expect. I’d gotten the crazy idea to write a tool that would encrypt Twitter’s direct messages - sent in the clear - so that your private communications would truly be private, visible to no one, including Twitter.
Writing the code turned out to be surprising easy; as I wrote it all in Python, I had libraries to handle the Twitter integration, and the cryptography. I read up a bit on the theory, put the pieces together, and with a bit of debugging “CrypTweet” was up and running.
Next step: sharing my brand-new code with the world, spruiking it as the privacy solution every Twitterer needed.
Think IBM has assembled a massive silo of source code for teaching machine-learning programs about programming.
Dubbed Project CodeNet, the set contains, we're told, 14 million code samples totaling 500 million lines in more than 55 programming languages, from Java, C, and Go to COBOL, Pascal, and FORTRAN. Truth be told, more than three-quarters of it all is in C++ and Python.
This source code wasn't taken from production nor in-development applications: it was collected from entries submitted to two programming contests organized in Japan: Aizu and AtCoder. In these contests, competitors are challenged to write the necessary code to turn a given set of inputs into a set of desired outputs. About half of the samples work as expected, and the rest are labeled as either wrong solutions, non-building, or buggy.
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