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Submission + - UK government department running on VME operating system installed in 1974 (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: The UK government's Department for Work and Pensions is on the hunt for a new £135,000-a-year CTO, with part of their annual budget of £1 billion and responsibility for DWP's "digital transformation" to oversee the migration of the department's legacy systems which are still run on Fujitsu mainframes using the VME operating system installed in 1974.

Job spec emphasises a "track record of transitioning a large enterprise from ageing mainframe technologies to next generation web, social, mobile cloud, Big Data and deep learning technologies".

Submission + - UK council to send obese people 'motivational' texts telling them to use stairs (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Stoke-on-Trent City Council is sending texts to obese people in the area to help motivate them to lose weight.

Examples of the texts sent include 'aim to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables each day', 'aim to eat regular meals and keep a check on snacks and drinks' and 'maybe walk to the shops or use the stairs more often'.

Over 100,000 people in the region are overweight or obese, the council said, and the texts are for those who are aged at least 18, have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or over and who have proactively signed up to receive the motivational messages.

They will be sent daily texts, a weekly questionnaire and a follow-up questionnaire. A sample of 500 recipients will also have a telephone interview. All this, plus the licence for the tele-health text service is equal to £10,000. The costs of obesity for the local NHS in terms of increased levels of disability and disease are £50 million a year.

#idle

Submission + - Japan to tax sales of content downloaded from abroad (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Japan is planning to tax sales of foreign online content such as e-books, apps and downloaded music by late 2015.

Japanese who purchase electronic content from foreign firms like Amazon.com through overseas servers don't have to pay consumption tax, currently at 5% but slated to rise to 8% in April. That has made foreign content cheaper than apps, MP3 downloads, software, and e-books distributed domestically.

Physical products purchased from abroad are hit with consumption tax when they clear customs in Japan, but no such levy exists for online goods.

The government plans to close the loophole and make foreign vendors selling consumer goods register with tax authorities and pay the tax. Japanese corporations that buy foreign electronic content such as business software, however, will have to pay the tax directly to the Japanese tax authorities, Nikkei Asian Review reported this morning.

Submission + - EU parliament says Prism part of US econ/polit espionage and not anti-terrorism (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: EU politicians said that they doubt data collection by the US National Security Agency has been purely for the fight against terrorism.

In a draft report from the European Parliament's civil liberties committee, published yesterday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) say that it is "very doubtful that data collection of such magnitude is only guided by the fight against terrorism," and that there may be other motives such as political and economic espionage.

The document urges EU countries to take legal action against the breach of their sovereignty perpetrated through such mass surveillance programmes.

Submission + - Munich open source switch 'completed successfully' (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Munich's switch to open source software has been successfully completed, with the vast majority of the public administration's users now running its own version of Linux, city officials said today.

In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options.

Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said.

Submission + - Self-driving cars to be on roads of Swedish capital Gothenburg by 2017 (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Volvo is starting a pilot project that aims to have 100 self-driving cars on Swedish public roads around the city of Gothenburg by 2017.

The project is called "Drive Me" and is a joint initiative between the Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg, Volvo said Monday. Together they will make an effort to eliminate deadly car crashes in Sweden, said Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo Car Group.

In the next few years, Volvo will develop its Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) in its XC90 model. The goal is to have the first self-driving cars available to 100 consumers by 2017, Coelingh said. They will be able let their cars navigate about 50 typical commuter arteries that include motorway conditions and frequent traffic jams in and around Gothenburg, the country's second largest city.

Submission + - Got Malware? Get a Hammer! (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by FuzzNugget
FuzzNugget writes: After the Economic Development Administration (EDA) was alerted by the DHS to a possible malware infection, they took extraordinary measures. Fearing a targeted attack by a nation-state, they shut down their entire IT operations, isolating their network from the outside world, disabling their email services and leaving their regional offices high and dry, unable to access the centrally-stored databases.

A security contractor ultimately declared the systems largely clean, finding only six computers infected with untargeted, garden-variety malware and easily repaired by reimaging. But that wasn't enough for the EDA: taking gross incompetence to a whole new level, they proceeded to physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment, including uninfected systems, printers, cameras, keyboards and mice.

After the destruction was halted — only because they ran out of money to continue smashing up perfectly good hardware — they had racked up a total of $2.3 million in service costs, temporary infrastructure acquisitions and equipment destruction.

Submission + - Jon 'Maddog' Hall on Project Cauã and a server in every highrise (techworld.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Project Cauã, the Free and Open Source Software and Hardware (FOSSH) project conceived by Linux International executive director Jon “Maddog” Hall to make it possible for people to make a living as a systems administrator, is set to launch in Brazil next month.

The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America.

Hall explained that Sao Paolo in Brazil is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere and has about twelve times the population density of New York City. As a result, there are a lot of people living and working in very tall buildings.

Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely.

“In effect it’s kind of like creating a private cloud for every building,” Hall told Techworld.
Data Storage

Submission + - Boeing 787s to create half a terabyte of data per flight (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Virgin Atlantic is preparing for a significant increase in data as it embraces the Internet of Things, with a new fleet of highly connected planes each expected to create over half a terabyte of data per flight.

IT director David Bulman said: "The latest planes we are getting, the Boeing 787s, are incredibly connected. Literally every piece of that plane has an internet connection, from the engines, to the flaps, to the landing gear.

"If there is a problem with one of the engines we will know before it lands to make sure that we have the parts there. It is getting to the point where each different part of the plane is telling us what it is doing as the flight is going on.

"We can get upwards of half a terabyte of data from a single flight from all of the different devices which are internet connected."
Network

Submission + - You Can Navigate Between Any Two Websites In 19 Clicks or Fewer (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A study done by a Hungarian physicist found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 19 clicks. 'Distributed across the entire web, though, are a minority of pages—search engines, indexes and aggregators—that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. These nodes serve as the "Kevin Bacons" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 19 clicks. Barabási credits this “small world” of the web to human nature—the fact that we tend to group into communities, whether in real life or the virtual world. The pages of the web aren’t linked randomly, he says: They’re organized in an interconnected hierarchy of organizational themes, including region, country and subject area. Interestingly, this means that no matter how large the web grows, the same interconnectedness will rule.'
Open Source

Submission + - Python Trademark Filer Ignorant Of Python? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
WebMink
WebMink writes: "Is it possible that the CEO of the company that's trying to file a trademark on "Python" was unaware of Python's importance as a programming technology? That's what he claims — despite running a hosting company that's trying to break into cloud computing, where Python is used extensively. Still, he also regards the Python Software Foundation as a hostile American company and thinks that getting attention from half the world's geeks is a DDoS..."
Privacy

Submission + - EU Data Protection proposal taken word for word from US lobbyists (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Computerworld UK open enterprise blogger Glyn Moody looks at the proposed EU directive on Data Protection — and how some of the proposed amendments seem to be cut and pasted directly from the American Chamber of Commerce — that well-known European organisation...

You might ask, Glyn writes, who are these MEPs representing — some 500 million EU citizens that pay their salary or a bunch of extremely rich US companies intent on taking away our privacy?
Education

Submission + - Microsoft wants computer science taught in UK primary schools (computerworlduk.com) 3

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: As the UK prepares to shake up the way computer science is taught in schools, Redmond is warning that the UK risks falling behind other countries in the race to develop and nurture computing talent, if "we don’t ensure that all children learn about computer science in primary schools".

With 100,000 unfilled IT jobs but only 30,500 computer science graduates in the UK last year, MS believes: "By formally introducing children to computer science basics at primary school, we stand a far greater chance of increasing the numbers taking the subject through to degree level and ultimately the world of work."
Networking

Submission + - Internet connection crucial to everyday life, German federal court rules (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Internet access is as crucial to everyday life as having a phone connection and the loss of connectivity is deserving of financial compensation, the German Federal Court of Justice has ruled.

Because having an internet connection is so significant for a large part of the German population, a customer whose service provider failed to provide connectivity between December 2008 and February 2009 is entitled to compensation, the court ruled today.

"It is the first time the court ruled that an internet connection is as important a commodity as having a phone," said court spokeswoman Dietlind Weinland.

The court, however, denied the plaintiff's request of €50 a day for his fax machine not working.
Open Source

Submission + - Make government software open source, German parliamentary committee advises (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Germany should change a law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source, a German parliamentary committee has advised.

German public administrations currently are not allowed to give away goods, including software, said Jimmy Schulz, a member of Parliament and chairman of the Interoperability, Standards and Free Software Project Group. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community, he said.

"This is a clear disadvantage because it cuts off all benefits obtained from free software, such as being cost-efficient and state-of-the-art," he said.

Besides a recommendation that the government should explore whether the law can be changed for software, the group also called for the use of open standards in order to make sure that everybody can have access to important information, Schulz said. "We also called for public administrations in general to make sure that new software is created as platform independent as possible," he added.

While the project group is not in favour of giving priority to one type of software over another, it said in its recommendation to the Parliament earlier this week that free and open source software could be a viable alternative to proprietary software.

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