SaaS

• US Congress ponders setting up permanent UFO investigation office

  Nothing to do with little green men, mind, unless they can be defined as state or non-state actors
  Matt Dupuy Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 16:48 UTC 1

  Two intelligence funding appropriation bills currently awaiting approval from the US Congress contain within them sections for the creation of a new office to investigate UFO sightings.

  Interest in UFOs – known as UAPs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in current US defence parlance – has increased over recent months following the preliminary release of an official US government report on UAP incidents in June this year [PDF].

  The report was compiled by a Pentagon-mandated body known as the UAP Task Force after a number of videos featuring US Navy pilots intercepting unidentified objects were leaked in 2017, followed by a New York Times article in December of that year which revealed that the US Department of Defense's secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to investigate UAPs was still running, despite the Pentagon claiming it had been shut down in 2012.

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• Open Source Jobs Report: Explosive cloud growth knocks Linux off top spot for desired skillsets

  455% hike in demand for Kubernetes qualifications causes a stir
  Gareth Halfacree Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 16:03 UTC

  The Linux Foundation and edX's latest annual Open Source Jobs Report highlights an explosion of interest in cloud technologies that has bumped Linux off the skillset top spot for the first time.

  "Much of the world is rebounding from the economically crippling lockdowns of COVID-19, and hiring people with the right skills is proving to be a challenge," Clyde Seepersad, senior veep and general manager for training and certification at the Linux Foundation, claimed in the report's introduction.

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• JEDI contract might be no more, but case should live on, says Oracle: DoD only wants Amazon, Microsoft for new cloud deal

  Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the courtroom
  Richard Speed Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 15:13 UTC 2

  Oracle has asked the US Supreme court not to dismiss its case over the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, despite the US Department of Defense officially axing the $10bn procurement deal.

  "Cases do not become moot simply because a defendant issues a press release claiming to have ceased its misconduct," thundered Oracle in a supplemental brief [PDF] in its action against the DoD, Oracle America, Inc. vs United States, et al, filed last week.

  "The government asserts that the Department of Defense mooted this case by cancelling JEDI, the procurement contract that Oracle has challenged," complained Big Red.

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• Fivetran snags $565m funding round as Snowflake attempts to eat its lunch with in-house data integration tools

  Also buys data replication company HVR for $700m
  Lindsay Clark Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 14:27 UTC

  Automated data integration outfit Fivetran has confirmed a $565m funding round – valuing the company at $5.6bn, roughly the GDP of Montenegro.

  Meanwhile, the 2013-founded company has used some of its startup capital and bought data replication firm HVR, which employs log-based change data capture (CDC) technology, in a cash-and-stock deal worth around $700m.

  The investment arm of web pioneer Marc Andreessen (a16z) led the Fivetran funding round, which also included General Catalyst, CEAS Investments, and Matrix Partners, and takes the total startup capital to $730m to date.

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• UK's Surveillance Commissioner warns of 'ethically fraught' facial recognition tech concerns

  How about being an anonymous face in a crowd? Is that not allowed anymore?
  Tim Richardson Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 13:45 UTC 6

  Facial recognition technology (FRT) may need to be regulated in much the same way as some ethically sensitive medical techniques to ensure there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect people's privacy and freedoms.

  That’s according to Professor Fraser Sampson, the UK Government’s Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), who works with the Home Office overseeing tech-related surveillance in the UK.

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• Fix network printing or keep Windows secure? Admins would rather disable PrintNightmare patch

  'Our >3,000 customers had to print again'
  Tim Anderson Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 13:00 UTC 15

  Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update last week was meant to fix print vulnerabilities in Windows but also broke network printing for many, with some admins disabling security or removing the patch to get it working.

  The problem is complex and first surfaced in January, when Microsoft issued this support note explaining that "a security bypass vulnerability exists in the way the Printer Remote Procedure Call (RPC) binding handles authentication for the remote Winspool interface."

  Microsoft's fix was in two phases, first to add a registry setting to increase the authorization level for remote access to printers and second, to inform admins that "the release transitions into the enforcement phase on September 14, 2021. Enforcement phase enforces the changes to address CVE-2021-1678 by increasing the authorization level without having to set the registry value." That September date was "Patch Tuesday" last week – though some admins were already having issues with network printing caused by Microsoft's other mitigation efforts.

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• Raspberry Pi's trading arm snags £33m investment as flotation rumours sink

  Cash courtesy of Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust, focused on 'the poorest of the poor'
  Gareth Halfacree Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 12:15 UTC 5

  Updated The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has received a £33m investment – putting paid to rumours that the company was looking to float on the stock exchange as a means of funding growth.

  The Raspberry Pi project came to the public's attention back in 2011, and by the time the education-focused single-board computer entered mass production a year later demand was high – so high that its initial production run of 10,000 units sold out in seconds.

  In the years since, the project has gone from strength to strength with increasingly powerful successor devices, a recent foray into microcontrollers designed by its in-house integrated circuit team, variants designed for embedding, and even its first consumer product, the Raspberry Pi 400, which packs the company's single-board computer tech into a keyboard chassis named for Atari's famous family of eight-bit microcomputers.

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• UK Ministry of Defence apologises after Afghan interpreters' personal data exposed in email blunder

  We joke about lethal consequences of failure but this isn't funny
  Gareth Corfield Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 11:30 UTC 25

  The UK's Ministry of Defence has launched an internal investigation after committing the classic CC-instead-of-BCC email error – but with the names and contact details of Afghan interpreters trapped in the Taliban-controlled nation.

  The horrendous data breach took place yesterday, with Defence Secretary Ben Wallace promising an immediate investigation, according to the BBC.

  Included in the breach were profile pictures associated with some email accounts, according to the state-owned broadcaster. The initial email was followed up by a second message urging people who had received the first one to delete it – a way of drawing close attention to an otherwise routine missive.

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• Over 9 months late, England's highways agency launches contract to buy £1bn in IT

  Rebranded org now calling itself National Highways
  Lindsay Clark Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 10:49 UTC 8

  National Highways, the UK government-owned company responsible for roads in England, is planning to spend up to £1bn on tech over the next four years via another framework.

  Formerly known as Highways England, the operation is looking for tech suppliers to support its strategic aims: building, maintaining and improving roads, operating the road network and providing services, such as journey information, to road users.

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• Hybrid learning is a good thing – let’s make it a good thing for everyone

  The pandemic has accelerated innovation and investment
  Eira Hayward Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 10:00 UTC

  Sponsored If you didn’t know what hybrid learning was 18 months ago, you should have a better idea by now. Hybrid learning combines in-person interaction in the classroom with online education and, during the Covid pandemic, has been an invaluable tool in teaching millions of students all round the world.

  The benefits of hybrid learning (sometimes also known as ‘blended learning’), taken with the experience of the pandemic, all point to this learning model entering the education mainstream. Implementation can vary-- some students learning at home simultaneously with others in a classroom, or a teacher in a classroom teaching multiple classrooms and remote locations.

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• Edge computing has a bright future, even if nobody's sure quite what that looks like

  Making sense of blurry lines
  Rupert Goodwins Tue 21 Sep 2021 // 09:15 UTC 7

  Edge computing is easy to sell but hard to define. More a philosophy than any single architecture, edge and cloud are on a spectrum, with the current cloud service model often dependent on in-browser processing, and even the most edgy deployments reliant on central infrastructure.

  The philosophy of edge, as most Reg readers know doubt know, is to push as much processing and compute as close as possible to the points of collection and utilisation.

  If biology is any guide, edge computing is a good evolutionary strategy. The octopus has a central brain, but each tentacle has the ability to analyse its environment, make decisions and react to events. The human gut looks after itself, with roughly the same processing power as a deer, while both eyes and ears do local processing before passing data back. All these natural systems confer efficiency, robustness and flexibility: attributes that IT edge deployments should also expect.

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