Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

Privacy group shoots legal arrow at Privacy Shield

Privacy Shield, the legal agreement allowing businesses to export Europeans' personal information to the U.S., is under fire.An Irish privacy advocacy group has challenged the adoption of the decision in the EU's second-highest court, Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the case.Privacy Shield entered effect in July, replacing the Safe Harbor framework, which had itself fallen victim to a legal challenge in October 2015. The new agreement supports transatlantic commerce worth US$260 billion, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker has said, and has consequences for many companies offering cloud services to consumers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM is folding SoftLayer into its Bluemix cloud services portfolio

OpenStack users running their workloads on IBM's SoftLayer public cloud infrastructure took it calmly when the company's object storage development lead, Brian Cline, announced that SoftLayer is going away.Cline opened his presentation with the news at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona on Tuesday.But it's not as bad as it sounds. The same services will still be available from the same servers, managed through the same SoftLayer control portal: Only the brand is going away.IBM is going to replace the SoftLayer name with Bluemix, its broader cloud platform, making SoftLayer services just another page in the Bluemix catalog of infrastructure, platform and application services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

London is next in line for Google-backed gigabit Wi-Fi

London is next in line to receive the Link high-speed Wi-Fi service that briefly brought high-speed porn to the streets of New York.Intersection, the company behind LinkNYC, is partnering with British telecommunications operator BT and outdoor advertising company Primesight to deliver the service in London. Intersection is partly funded by Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google's parent Alphabet.Next year, BT will replace 100 of its phone booths with the LinkUK pillars, delivering gigabit Wi-Fi, free phone calls, and local information services on built-in Android tablets. The companies aim to install up to 750 of the hotspots across the UK in the coming years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Not robocop, but robojudge? AI learns to rule in human rights cases

An artificial intelligence system designed to predict the outcomes of cases at the European Court of Human Rights would side with the human judges 79 percent of the time.Researchers at University College London and the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S., described the system in a paper published Monday by the Peer Journal of Computer Science."We formulated a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights," wrote the paper's authors, Nikolaos Aletras, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro and Vasileios Lampos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French surveillance law is unconstitutional after all, highest court says

The French Constitutional Council has taken another look at a new security law it waved through in July 2015, and found it wanting.A key clause of last year's Surveillance Law essentially allowed security agencies to monitor and control wireless communications without the usual oversight applied to wiretapping operations.This is unconstitutional as the lack of oversight is likely to result in a disproportionate invasion of privacy, the council ruled Friday. It was responding to a complaint filed by La Quadrature du Net (LQDN), an association campaigning for online rights, the ISP French Data Network (FDN) and the Federation of Non-Profit ISPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French surveillance law is unconstitutional after all, highest court says

The French Constitutional Council has taken another look at a new security law it waved through in July 2015, and found it wanting.A key clause of last year's Surveillance Law essentially allowed security agencies to monitor and control wireless communications without the usual oversight applied to wiretapping operations.This is unconstitutional as the lack of oversight is likely to result in a disproportionate invasion of privacy, the council ruled Friday. It was responding to a complaint filed by La Quadrature du Net (LQDN), an association campaigning for online rights, the ISP French Data Network (FDN) and the Federation of Non-Profit ISPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bankers plan to give Corda blockchain code to Hyperledger project

Corda, a distributed ledger platform developed by a finance industry consortium, will go open source next month when its developers donate the code to the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project.The move was reported by Reuters on Thursday and the story subsequently reposted to the websites of Corda backer R3 and the Hyperledger Project.A distributed ledger, sometimes referred to as a blockchain, is a database shared across a number of servers and that relies on a consensus among those servers to guarantee its integrity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wipro is buying cloud consultant Appirio for $500M

It's India meets Indianapolis: Bangalore-based consulting firm Wipro is buying Appirio for US$500 million to bulk up its cloud applications business.With more resources behind it, cloud services vendor Appirio will be in a better position to fight back against big consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte, which "have garnered disproportionate market share" in the cloud services market in recent years, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin wrote in a blog post explaining the deal.Appirio, based in Indianapolis, offers a range of cloud applications integration services, many of them built around Salesforce.com -- a logical fit since it grew out of Salesforce's AppExchange startup incubator. The 10-year-old company also partners with Workday, Google and Amazon Web Services, and numbers Facebook, eBay and Coca-Cola among its customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s $1.4B antitrust verdict should be reviewed, top EU judge says

Intel's hope of recovering a record antitrust fine have improved with a recommendation from a top European Union judge on Thursday that the case be reviewed.The company paid the €1.06 billion (then US$1.4 billion) fine in 2009 after the European Commission found it guilty of abusing its dominant position in the market for x86 processors. Since then, it has been seeking to have the judgment overturned, first by the EU's General Court and then, since 2014, by the EU's highest legal authority, the Court of Justice.The CJEU heard that appeal in June, and now Advocate General Nils Wahl has issued his recommendation to the court. The opinions of the court's advocates general are not binding, but it often follows them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BBC eyes worldwide expansion for tiny educational computer

A new educational foundation hopes to introduce children worldwide to coding, using a tiny single-board computer that has changed the way coding is taught in schools across the U.K.You may have already heard of the Raspberry Pi, a US $35 computer the size of a credit card that, with the addition of a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, can stand in for a desktop machine.But this isn't about that. It's about the U.K.'s other single-board educational computer, the micro:bit.The micro:bit is smaller and cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, and it has a built-in keyboard and display, albeit consisting of just two pushbuttons and 25 red LEDs arranged in a five-by-five grid. It was developed for the U.K.'s national broadcaster, the BBC, which gave a million of them to British schools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK spy agencies illegally collected data for years, court rules

The U.K.'s spy agencies breached the European Convention on Human Rights for years by secretly collecting almost everything about British citizens' communications except their content, a U.K. court has ruled.However, now that the U.K. government has admitted what it is doing, the collection is legal, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Monday.It has yet to rule on the issue of proportionality, or whether the agencies' actions were reasonable given the threat they sought to counter.Responding to a June 2015 complaint by campaign group Privacy International, the tribunal said the secret intelligence agencies had breached the ECHR for years because of the way they gathered bulk communications data (BCD) and bulk personal data (BPD).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK spy agencies illegally collected data for years, court rules

The U.K.'s spy agencies breached the European Convention on Human Rights for years by secretly collecting almost everything about British citizens' communications except their content, a U.K. court has ruled.However, now that the U.K. government has admitted what it is doing, the collection is legal, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Monday.It has yet to rule on the issue of proportionality, or whether the agencies' actions were reasonable given the threat they sought to counter.Responding to a June 2015 complaint by campaign group Privacy International, the tribunal said the secret intelligence agencies had breached the ECHR for years because of the way they gathered bulk communications data (BCD) and bulk personal data (BPD).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

British navy sends robots to sea in military exercise

The Royal Navy is testing just how much robot craft can do by themselves in military exercises off the British coast.Operation Unmanned Warrior 16 is a chance for allied nations and the defense industry to show off their latest maritime autonomous systems, as part of a broader military exercise called Joint Warrior."Fire and forget" torpedoes capable of homing in on the noise emitted by a target -- then sinking it -- have been around since World War II, but the systems involved in this exercise are less offensive.More than 50 craft are taking part this week, including uncrewed helicopters and underwater vehicles, and an autonomous rigid inflatable boat (RIB). They will perform tasks such as surveillance, intelligence-gathering and mine countermeasures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

British navy sends robots to sea in military exercise

The Royal Navy is testing just how much robot craft can do by themselves in military exercises off the British coast.Operation Unmanned Warrior 16 is a chance for allied nations and the defense industry to show off their latest maritime autonomous systems, as part of a broader military exercise called Joint Warrior."Fire and forget" torpedoes capable of homing in on the noise emitted by a target -- then sinking it -- have been around since World War II, but the systems involved in this exercise are less offensive.More than 50 craft are taking part this week, including uncrewed helicopters and underwater vehicles, and an autonomous rigid inflatable boat (RIB). They will perform tasks such as surveillance, intelligence-gathering and mine countermeasures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers want UK to set example on transparency in AI decision making

British lawmakers want more transparency and less bias in decision-making -- not their own, of course, but in decisions made by AI systems.As more and more software systems and connected devices employ artificial intelligence technologies to make decisions for their owners, the lawmakers want to know what's behind their thinking. The U.K. Parliament's Science and Technology Committee has been studying the need for more regulation in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.Recent advances in AI technology raise a host of social, ethical and legal questions, the committee's members said in a report published Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French software developer sues Apple, seeking improvements in iOS browser

Software developer Nexedi is so keen to see Apple improve the rendering engine in its iPhone browser that it's filed suit against the company in a French court.Nexedi develops cross-platform business apps in HTML5 that can run unchanged on Windows, Linux, and Android.On Apple's iOS, however, it runs into a problem: The browser rendering engine on iOS, WebKit, doesn't have the same HTML5 capabilities as the rendering engines used on other platforms.Among the HTML5 capabilities missing in the iOS version of WebKit are access to APIs for vibration, ambient light detection, battery status, notifications, filesystem access and the WebRTC videoconferencing protocol, according to a copy of Nexedi's lawsuit seen by the IDG News Service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU privacy watchdogs have questions about Yahoo’s secret email scanning

European Union privacy watchdogs are concerned by reports that Yahoo has been secretly scanning its users' email at the request of U.S. intelligence services."It goes far beyond what is acceptable," said Johannes Caspar, Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Hamburg, Germany.Reuters reported on Tuesday that Yahoo had built a system for U.S. government agencies to search all of its users' incoming emails. Other tech companies were quick to distance themselves, saying they would have challenged any such request in court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU privacy watchdogs have questions about Yahoo’s secret email scanning

European Union privacy watchdogs are concerned by reports that Yahoo has been secretly scanning its users' email at the request of U.S. intelligence services."It goes far beyond what is acceptable," said Johannes Caspar, Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Hamburg, Germany.Reuters reported on Tuesday that Yahoo had built a system for U.S. government agencies to search all of its users' incoming emails. Other tech companies were quick to distance themselves, saying they would have challenged any such request in court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung to buy Viv Labs to challenge Google Assistant

Samsung Electronics has agreed to buy Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence startup created by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham.You may not have heard of Kittlaus, Cheyer or Brigham, but if you own an iPhone you've probably spoken with one of their creations, Siri. Apple bought their first startup, a spinoff from SRI International, in 2010. A couple of years later, they left to create Viv.Samsung's move into AI could be seen as a reaction to Google's launch of a new AI assistant on its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones on Tuesday.Like Google Assistant, Viv is designed to answer natural language queries by integrating with a variety of web services. But where Google already has a range of in-house services -- Maps, Gmail, search -- from which to gather context, Viv aims to build an open ecosystem. Many of the useful functions will be delivered by third party developers, a model similar to the one Amazon.com is pursuing for its Echo devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fujitsu considers selling its PC business to Lenovo

Lenovo may be about to grow its share of the shrinking PC business again: Japanese IT conglomerate Fujitsu is considering selling its PC manufacturing business, and Lenovo may be the buyer, Fujitsu said Thursday.As part of a strategy to focus on core activities, in February Fujitsu spun out its PC business as an independent operating unit. Such spin-outs are usually a prelude to a sale.On Wednesday, Japanese media reported that the company was in talks to sell the PC business to Lenovo."These reports are not based on any official announcement made by Fujitsu," the company said Thursday, adding that it "is currently considering various possibilities, including what is being reported, but a decision has not yet been made."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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