Channel

• Upcoming Android privacy changes include ability to blank advertising ID, and 'safety section' in Play store

  New policies give users more control, but ad tracking still on by default
  Tim Anderson Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 15:30 UTC 2

  Google has shared details of upcoming changes to Android including the ability to blank a device's advertising ID, and a new safety section for apps in the Play store.

  The advertising ID is an identifier unique to an Android device which is supplied by Google Play Services. Since every app on that device can retrieve the same ID, it can be used for profiling the user of the device. Users can set an option to "Limit ad tracking", and the API that supplies the advertising ID also indicates whether the user has opted out, but respecting this option is on a trust basis.

  Privacy advocate Max Schrems filed a legal complaint against Google last year, arguing that the advertising ID is personal data and that the option to reset it, which automatically creates a replacement ID, was "like cancelling a contract only under the condition that you sign a new one."

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• NoSQL Couchbase launches schema-like features to take on the transactional databases of the relational world

  Doing both in one system might be 'somewhat elegant' but user experience remains to be seen, analyst says
  Lindsay Clark Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 14:45 UTC

  Couchbase, the NoSQL database beloved of modern applications developers, is trying to build a bridge to the old world with its 7.0 release.

  The latest iteration of the open-source documents store database offers multi-statement SQL transactions and an approach to building schema-like structures into the database, allowing it to support multiple applications from the same data.

  One database industry expert said Couchbase 7.0 would be welcomed by developers wanting to do more with their data in a single system, but whether it could withstand enterprise workloads from multiple applications is not clear.

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• BT says it's trading in line with expectations as revenue slides and pre-tax profit shrinks

  Former state monopoly talks up FTTP build out, as does Virgin Media
  Tim Richardson Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 14:03 UTC 1

  BT's revenues slipped during the three months to the end of June – when French-owned Altice took a 12.1 per cent stake in the business and the telco went some way to resolving an industrial dispute.

  Overall – across its consumer, enterprise, global, and infrastructure businesses – the former state-run monopoly reported revenues of £5.071bn, down 3 per cent year-on-year and trading as expected, BT said.

  Consumer was one of the divisions to grow, up 1 per cent to £2.382bn. BT said this was primarily due to BT Sport subscriptions and higher direct handset sales. "Year-on-year fixed and mobile are down due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19, lower out-of-contract prices, copper price reductions to address back book pricing, and the continued decline of our voice-only customer base and call volume," it said.

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• Red Hat buddies up with Nutanix to provide an escape route from VMware

  'We have customers saying, help us out of this pickle here, can you possibly just support RHEL running on top of AHV?'
  Tim Anderson Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 13:31 UTC

  Red Hat is collaborating with Nutanix to make OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux a fully supported solution on the Nutanix native virtualization platform, AHV.

  The new agreement provides for Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes distribution, to be the Nutanix "preferred choice" for Kubernetes on Nutanix, and for Nutanix HCI to be fully supported by Red Hat for deploying Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift. The Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) will now be certified by Red Hat for RHEL and OpenShift.

  "Nutanix supports several different hypervisors," Red Hat's Ronald Pacheco, director of product management, told us, "They support AHV, VMware ESXi, Hyper-V and they also support Citrix XenServer. We're aware of customers who have been using Nutanix, mostly using ESXi... because Red Hat customers tend to be conservative and they want to make sure they're using a supported hypervisor, but at the same time saying, I'm paying a lot extra... so we have customers saying, help us out of this pickle here, can you possibly just support RHEL running on top of AHV?"

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• NFT or not to NFT: Steve Jobs' first job application auction shows physically unique beats cryptographically unique

  Great, maybe the trend can FOAD now
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 13:01 UTC 14

  A dual-format auction of a physical and digital non-fungible token (NFT) version of a job application penned by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has come to a close – and the physical side has emerged victorious, by an order of magnitude.

  Set up by former ad exec Olly Joshi and launched last week, the auction took a physical piece of history – the 1973 handwritten job application, which Joshi purchased at auction earlier this year with money raised by a collective of 36 of his friends and family – ran it through a scanner and created a cryptographically verified NFT version on the Ethereum blockchain before listing the two side-by-side.

  The idea was to pit NFTs, digital goods whose uniqueness comes from cryptographic signatures placed on a cryptocurrency blockchain but which are otherwise infinitely duplicable, against physical and genuinely unique goods – and to make a little money along the way.

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• Qualcomm's bumper Q3 growth comes with supply constraints warning, but Intel may ride to the rescue

  Company confirms it's investigating adding Chipzilla to multi-source vendor list, alongside TSMC and Samsung
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 12:15 UTC

  Qualcomm's strong financials for the third quarter of 2021 come with a warning. Supply shortages aren't over yet – and the fabless chip maker may be turning to Intel to help meet demand.

  To say Qualcomm's results look healthy is no understatement. The company reported [PDF] $8.06bn in revenue for the quarter ended 27 June, a 65 per cent gain year-on-year driven, CFO Akash Palkhiwala claimed in the company's earnings call, by "revenue diversification" including a shuffling of mobile technologies into the automotive market and "a partial recovery from the impact of COVID in the year-ago period."

  The bulk of the company's revenue came, as always, from parts and IP destined for mobile handsets, which grew 57 per cent year-on-year to $3.863bn – though the biggest growth came from its radio-frequency (RF) front end business, which jumped 114 per cent to $957m. The Internet of Things (IoT) division grew 83 per cent to $1.399bn, while its automotive arm grew by the same amount but remains a relative tiddler at $253m in revenue. Licensing jumped to $1.632bn versus $1.09bn a year ago.

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• Microsoft's new 'power app converging model' hits public preview with Custom Pages

  Aims to heal perplexing split between Canvas and Model-driven apps
  Tim Anderson Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 11:28 UTC 2

  Microsoft's Custom Pages, an effort to converge its two different low-code Power App platforms, are now in public preview - though it is more hybrid than truly converged.

  Principal program manager Adrian Orth said that the preview is a "a big leap forward in the convergence of model-driven apps and canvas apps into a single Power App," though adding that that standalone canvas apps will remain supported.

  Cloud migration has been good for Microsoft's business application business, and in its latest financials, the company noted "Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 49 per cent (up 42 per cent in constant currency)." Power Platform, a low-code application platform which ties into Dynamics as well as other parts of Microsoft's cloud such as SharePoint and Office 365, performed even better.

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• Equiniti wins Northern Ireland Finance Department contract to build land revenue system... 4 years after project proposed

  Now that's agile
  Lindsay Clark Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 10:43 UTC 1

  Northern Ireland's Department of Finance has awarded IT services firm Equiniti a contract worth up to £80m to build a land revenue and benefits system in a procurement four years in the making.

  The department's Land and Property Services requires a "modern digitally-enabled ICT solution" that will help with the assessment and collection of rates for domestic and non-domestic properties, and the administration of various rate reliefs such as Housing Benefit and Disabled Person's Allowance. The system should also manage interfaces with internal and external applications of the agency, such as the Enforcement of Judgments Office.

  According to a contract award notice, the new system needs to be "flexible and adaptable to support new and innovative methods of delivery, future changes and business needs whilst being user friendly, customer-focused and utilising digital self-service platforms."

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• Hard drives at Autonomy offices were destroyed the same month CEO Lynch quit, extradition trial was told

  Court finally hands down written ruling – and it's very bad news for UK exec
  Gareth Corfield Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 10:01 UTC 18

  Analysis Autonomy personnel were instructed to destroy hard drives at the company's offices nearly a year after the buyout of the software bz by HP, a court ruling in ex-CEO Mike Lynch's extradition battle has revealed.

  District Judge Michael Snow ruled last week that Lynch can be extradited to America for trial on 17 criminal charges, sending the case to Home Secretary Priti Patel for rubberstamp approval.

  Westminster Magistrates' Court has now released Judge Snow's full written judgment [PDF], which contained pointed criticisms of Lynch's legal team on top of dismissing all their arguments against extraditing the Autonomy founder.

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• Beige pencil stockists on high alert as 'Colouring Book of Retro Computers' hits the crowdfunding circuit

  YouTuber's project already well past its goal
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 09:15 UTC 19

  Neil Thomas, host of the RMC vintage computing and gaming YouTube channel, is crowdfunding a colouring book of vintage computing hardware.

  Covering the 1970s through to the early 2000s, Thomas's latest nostalgia-grab – following a compact hardback collecting interviews carried out for his YouTube channel – asks backers to keep within the lines as they colour in 30 vintage machines and accessories.

  The book has been developed with Stuart "Stoo" Cambridge, an artist best known for his work at British video game house Sensible Software, with three pages currently complete: a Commodore PET, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and an Apple II – with 27 other systems as yet confirmed.

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• Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

  Guess what? When people find out about the scheme, trust in the NHS falls
  Lindsay Clark Thu 29 Jul 2021 // 08:30 UTC 44

  Around 20 million people in England are in the dark over plans to share their GP medical records with a NHS Digital database, according to a study by not-for-profit consumer watchdog Which?

  In a survey of 1,700 adults in England, Which? found 45 per cent were unaware of proposals for their medical records held by their doctor to be sent to the non-departmental government body under the controversial plan dubbed the biggest data grab in the history of the NHS.

  The proportion unaware of the plans – and therefore their rights to opt out – is equivalent to 20 million people in England and reveals how ineffective the health department has been in informing patients, as required under data protection law.

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