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Civil servants get cheat sheet for procuring analytics

The UK government has released a guide to help civil servants figure out how to use and procure data science tools ethically as public opinion on slurping continues to circle the drain.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sophisticated malware, software security breaches, mobile scams -- the list of cybercrime threats is growing. Yet African nations continue to fall short of protecting themselves and must constantly grapple with the impact. A new study from IT services firm Serianu shows the pervasive nature of cybercrime across the continent, affecting businesses, individuals, families, financial institutions, and government agencies. The study shows how weak security architectures, the scarcity of skilled personnel and a lack of awareness and strict regulations have increased vulnerability. Cybercrime cost the continent an estimated $3.5 billion in 2017. The report found more than 90% of African businesses were operating below the cybersecurity "poverty line" -- meaning they couldn't adequately protect themselves against losses. At least 96% of online-related security incidents went unreported and 60% of organizations didn't keep up to date with cybersecurity trends and program updates. (In addition, at least 90% of parents didn't understand what measures to take to protect their children from cyber-bullying.)

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Big Blue's rig with Nvidia grunt looks to be first truly exascale system

Comment IBM's 200 petaFLOPS (200,000 trillion calculations per second) Summit supercomputer was unveiled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last Friday and, scaled up, has proven itself capable of exascale computing in some applications.…

Desperate times at Downing Street

The UK government has given itself a reassuring cuddle this week, asserting that – even if high-profile projects such as Galileo march overseas – international tech firms still love Blighty.…

Cord-cutters swung the court

Analysis Across political divides in the United States there's a common appetite for reining in the country's plutocratic corporate overlords. The country that reveres Mom 'n' Pop businesses is wary when giant businesses combine. But the landmark decision in a US District Court permitting two legacy businesses to merge indicates how hard this is.…

Comets might have seeded the surface over millennia

Ceres contains more carbon-based compounds - the chemical building blocks for life - than previously thought, according to a new study.…

Software-defined networks are getting serious, at scale

Network function virtualization is moderately obscure stuff, seeing as it is mostly intended for the plumbing of carrier networks. But VMware’s new play in the field with what it reckons a proper, 5G-ready effort, is notable for a couple of reasons.…

Kromtech finds malicious code hiding in enterprise upstart's repositories of software

At DockerCon in San Francisco on Wednesday, CEO Steve Singh highlighted security as one of Docker's core principles.…

In an effort to "reduce undesired consequences," Uber is seeking a patent that would use artificial intelligence to separate sober passengers from drunk ones. The pending application details a technology that would be used to spot "uncharacteristic user activity," including passenger location, number of typos entered into the mobile app, and even the angle the smartphone is being held. CNET reports: Uber said it had no immediate plans to implement the technology described in the proposed patent, pointing out the application was filed in 2016. "We are always exploring ways that our technology can help improve the Uber experience for riders and drivers," a spokesperson said. "We file patent applications on many ideas, but not all of them actually become products or features."

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Machine-learning suite ends its sloppy packaging ways after Debian dev roasts Redmond

Microsoft had to emit a hasty update for its R Open analysis tool after developers found the open-source package was not playing nice with some Linux systems.…

We gotta put this in context, cos that's what Microsoft says matters these days

Microsoft has revealed a plan for a slow-moving upgrade of its Office suite’s user interface, with three new elements to start appearing at Office.com and in Office apps in coming months.…

And discover it made a magnet that points 'up'

How to measure a magnetic field that's very long way away, and is very, very weak. An international group of boffins have announced that they figured out how.…

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new piece of software that uses wifi signals to monitor the movements, breathing, and heartbeats of humans on the other side of walls. While the researchers say this new tech could be used in areas like remote healthcare, it could in theory be used in more dystopian applications. Inverse reports: "We actually are tracking 14 different joints on the body [...] the head, the neck, the shoulders, the elbows, the wrists, the hips, the knees, and the feet," Dina Katabi, an electrical engineering and computer science teacher at MIT, said. "So you can get the full stick-figure that is dynamically moving with the individuals that are obstructed from you -- and that's something new that was not possible before." The technology works a little bit like radar, but to teach their neural network how to interpret these granular bits of human activity, the team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) had to create two separate A.I.s: a student and a teacher. [T]he team developed one A.I. program that monitored human movements with a camera, on one side of a wall, and fed that information to their wifi X-ray A.I., called RF-Pose, as it struggled to make sense of the radio waves passing through that wall on the other side. The research builds off of a longstanding project at CSAIL lead by Katabi, which hopes to use this wifi tracking to help passively monitor the elderly and automate any emergency alerts to EMTs and medical professionals if they were to fall or suffer some other injury. For more information, a press release and video about the software are available.

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Giants differ on urgency of fix for exploitable WIM file headers

Cisco's Talos security limb has announced a new Microsoft Windows vulnerability and appears to have gone public because it feels Microsoft isn't taking things seriously.…

Defence outfit Thales gets Azure Stack to drop and give it twenty for military use

Microsoft’s Azure Stack cloud-in-a-box has been adapted for in-field use by the world’s militaries.…

China is establishing an electronic identification system to track cars nationwide, according to a report on WSJ, which cites records and people briefed on the matter. From a report: Under the plan being rolled out July 1, a radio-frequency identification chip for vehicle tracking will be installed on cars when they are registered. Compliance will be voluntary this year but will be made mandatory for new vehicles at the start of 2019, the people said. Authorities have described the plan as a means to improve public security and to help ease worsening traffic congestion, documents show, a major concern in many Chinese cities partly because clogged roads contribute to air pollution. But such a system, implemented in the world's biggest automotive market, with sales of nearly 30 million vehicles a year, will also vastly expand China's surveillance network, experts say. That network already includes widespread use of security cameras, facial recognition technology and internet monitoring.

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Pew! Pew! The whole world is connected, and the Internet is super-dangerous

Eighteen months after acquiring Internet infrastructure outfit Dyn, Oracle has unveiled some of the smarts it bought in the form of an "Internet Intelligence Map".…

'It's like watching your loved one in a coma' sigh heartbroken NASA boffins

Video Time may be up for America's plucky Opportunity rover that has trundled across the surface of Mars for more than 14 years.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Future Mobility Corporation (FMC), the Chinese parent company behind electric car start-up Byton, has placed an order for a paint shop capable of handling 150,000 cars per year, German supplier Duerr said on Wednesday. China's Byton, a newcomer headed by the former head of BMW's i8 program, has already released plans for a premium electric SUV vehicle, the latest in a series of China-backed electric autonomous prototypes. Byton has financial backing from Chinese state-owned carmaker FAW Group and the country's dominant battery producer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL) This is just one of the stories this week relating to China and the electric car industry. MIT Technology Review adds: In a public offering on June 11 in Shenzhen, battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) raised nearly $1 billion to fund ambitious expansion plans, and its stock has been shooting up every day since. Thanks largely to the company's new plants, China will be making 70 percent of the world's electric-vehicle batteries by 2021, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). Just seven years later, CATL has built up the biggest lithium-ion manufacturing facilities in the world, according to BNEF. The company can crank out around 17 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion cells annually, placing it just ahead of Korea's LG Chem, the Tesla and Panasonic partnership, and China's electric-vehicle giant BYD. Flush with capital from its offering, CATL plans to build two new plants and expand existing facilities, pushing its capacity to nearly 90 gigawatt-hours by 2020. [...] Notably, it's the only Chinese battery company so far to line up deals to supply foreign automakers, including BMW, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

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American cable giant offers $65bn for 21st Century Fox

With the massive $85bn merger between AT&T and Time Warner set to finalize, a newly-emboldened Comcast is pushing for a media mega-deal of its own.…