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You lot can keep the blinkenlights flashing but you'll have to be TUPEd from BT...

Exclusive BT is outsourcing management of its mainframe estate to IBM in a five-year agreement that kicks off today - but while it may be April Fools' Day, some incumbent staff being TUPEd across to Big Blue aren't laughing.…

Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to "prepare for the worst" and cut spending. From a report: In an open letter to startup founders in India, ten global and local private equity and venture capitalist firms including Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners cautioned that the current changes to the macro environment could make it difficult for a startup to close their next fundraising deal. The firms, which included Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners -- some of the prominent names in India to back early-stage startups -- asked founders to be prepared to not see their startups' jump in the coming rounds and have a 12-18 month runway with what they raise. "Assumptions from bull market financings or even from a few weeks ago do not apply. Many investors will move away from thinking about 'growth at all costs' to 'reasonable growth with a path to profitability.' Adjust your business plan and messaging accordingly," they added. Signs are beginning to emerge that investors are losing appetite to invest in the current scenario. Indian startups participated in 79 deals to raise $496 million in March, down from $2.86 billion that they raised across 104 deals in February and $1.24 billion they raised from 93 deals in January this year, research firm Tracxn told TechCrunch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Web calculator should give you an idea of bog roll, pasta, booze stocks

The UK is in its second week of official coronavirus lockdown, though society has been collectively shitting the bed for much longer – so surely by now we've all suffered the indignity of venturing out to the supermarket only to be faced with barren shelves.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In March, a laid-off customer-service representative for one of the airline companies attended an Amazon.com employee orientation in Dallas. He found himself packed into a room with about 70 other applicants, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder to watch a PowerPoint presentation about what it's like to work for the online retailer. The man, who provided a smartphone photo to document his experience, said the event was exactly like one he attended last year for a seasonal holiday job with Amazon. In other words, there were no special precautions to keep attendees safe from the coronavirus. When the man raised concerns about the crowded conditions, he said an Amazon manager mocked him and a fellow recruit sneered. "They made jokes and told me to leave if I was unhappy," he said, adding that one manager said Amazon's operations were exempt from the rules because the company is considered an essential service. "They didn't care one tiny bit." The former customer rep took the job but still worries about getting sick. Amazon also ignored official social-distancing guidelines at hiring events near Portland, Oregon, and in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to two applicants. A fourth person who attended an Amazon job fair in West Jefferson, Ohio, said she was sent home and asked to return another day because the gathering was too crowded, suggesting precautionary measures are in place at least at some events or Amazon is changing its practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AIM-listed biz says THAT virus meant it has little choice, will seek a buyer

AIM-listed software and managed services outfit K3 is to put its loss-making Microsoft Dynamics reseller division into the hands of administrators amid commercial unpredictability caused by COVID-19.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Four global drinks giants are responsible for more than half a million tons of plastic pollution in six developing countries each year, enough to cover 83 football pitches every day, according to a report. The NGO Tearfund has calculated the greenhouse gas emissions from the open burning of plastic bottles, sachets and cartons produced by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle and Unilever in developing nations, where waste can be mismanaged because people do not have access to collections. Taking a sample of six developing countries, reflecting a spread across the globe, the NGO estimated the burning of plastic packaging put on to the market by the companies creates 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent -- equivalent to the emissions from 2 million cars. Tearfund analyzed the plastic put on the market in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria by the four companies to examine the impact of single use plastic in developing countries. The countries were chosen because they are large developing country markets, spread across three continents. The sachets, bottles, and cartons sold in these countries often end up either being burned or dumped -- creating a pollution problem equivalent to covering 83 football pitches with plastic to 10 centimeters deep each day. The report says: "This massive plastic pollution footprint, while a crisis in and of itself, is also contributing to the climate crisis." "These companies continue to sell billions of products in single-use bottles, sachets and packets in developing countries," says the report. "And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn't properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people's health. Such actions -- with such knowledge -- are morally indefensible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vicarious liability now applies to intentional leaks, top court says

Morrisons supermarket is not liable for the actions of a disgruntled employee who deliberately leaked nearly 100,000 employees' payroll data online, the Supreme Court has ruled.…

With licence fee under threat, where can corporation get the money from?

The BBC has floated the idea of replacing its licence fee with a broadband levy in its submission to a government consultation.…

Authors, publishers unimpressed

The Internet Archive has defended its decision to make its collection of 1.4 million books readily available online, despite most of them still being in copyright, by arguing that public libraries are currently closed.…

Space scientist reveals drive behind solar instrument experiment now approved by NASA

NASA has formally green lit a mission to explore how the Sun whips up solar particle storms – those giant frenzies of charged particles that can frazzle orbiting satellites and destroy electronic systems on Earth.…

Connecting to a port greater than 8192 using a hostname now stalls, possibly

Apple's latest update to macOS Catalina appears to have broken SSH for some users.…

Dan Goodin writes via Ars Technica: For almost three years, OpenWRT -- the open source operating system that powers home routers and other types of embedded systems -- has been vulnerable to remote code-execution attacks because updates were delivered over an unencrypted channel and digital signature verifications are easy to bypass, a researcher said. Security researcher Guido Vranken, however, recently found that updates and installation files were delivered over unencrypted HTTPs connections, which are open to attacks that allow adversaries to completely replace legitimate updates with malicious ones. The researcher also found that it was trivial for attackers with moderate experience to bypass digital-signature checks that verify a downloaded update as the legitimate one offered by OpenWTR maintainers. The combination of those two lapses makes it possible to send a malicious update that vulnerable devices will automatically install. [...] The researcher said that OpenWRT maintainers have released a stopgap solution that partially mitigates the risk the bug poses. The mitigation requires new installations to be "set out from a well-formed list that would not sidestep the hash verification. However, this is not an adequate long-term solution because an attacker can simply provide an older package list that was signed by the OpenWRT maintainers." From there, attackers can use the same exploits they would use on devices that haven't received the mitigation. OpenWRT maintainers didn't immediately respond to questions asking why installation and update files are delivered over HTTP and when a longer-term fix might be available. In the meantime, OpenWRT users should install either version 18.06.7 or 19.07.1, both of which were released in February. These updates provide the stopgap mitigation.

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Also: Satellite comms outfit OneWeb files for Chapter 11

Roundup Welcome to another roundup of the week's rocket-based tomfoolery for space nerds. Let's jump straight into it.…

It's actually another Huawei down the 5G antennas

Stob Your attention please. I bring a message to you, Britain's IT community, from High Command.…

Steady now

A survey of more than 800 organisations has found that 53 per cent are looking to upgrade enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.…

Three secrets of success you need to know, according to Quadrotech

Webcast You merged. You sold a company. You’re migrating to a sovereign data centre. Whatever the reason for your Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration, it can be one of the most important and stressful projects you will ever take on.…

An Australian astrophysicist has been admitted to hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose in an attempt to invent a device that stops people touching their faces during the coronavirus outbreak. The Guardian reports: Dr Daniel Reardon, a research fellow at a Melbourne university, was building a necklace that sounds an alarm on facial contact, when the mishap occurred on Thursday night. The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets. Reardon said he placed two magnets inside his nostrils, and two on the outside. When he removed the magnets from the outside of his nose, the two inside stuck together. Unfortunately, the researcher then attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them. "As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets." Before attending the hospital, Reardon attempted to use pliers to pull them out, but they became magnetized by the magnets inside his nose. At the hospital, a team of two doctors applied an anesthetic spray and manually removed the magnets from Reardon's nose. "Needless to say I am not going to play with the magnets any more," Reardon said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flying a 50-year-old rocket to mark the anniversary of Apollo 13? What could go wrong?

Exclusive Faced with spiralling costs for its Space Launch System (SLS) and pressure to put American boots on the Moon by 2024, NASA is to return the Saturn V to flight.…

$25k from you and $75k from the government buys improved productivity and economic diversity

The Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong has increased the subsidies offered to local business’ technology investments by 50 percent.…

Super-crypto actually normal TLS, lawsuit launched over Facebook API usage, privacy policy rewritten

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sparked security concerns on Tuesday when he shared a screenshot of “the first ever digital Cabinet” on his Twitter feed. It revealed the country’s most senior officials and ministers were using bog-standard Zoom to discuss critical issues facing Blighty.…