69032969
submission
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".
56332061
submission
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
55422675
submission
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.
55151289
submission
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.
54249511
submission
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.
53784725
submission
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.
47545757
submission
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.
43845585
submission
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."
43112837
submission
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?
42734657
submission
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."
42532537
submission
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.
42257357
submission
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.
42031873
submission
Qedward writes:
The Norwegian Ministry of Finance seems to be taking a bit of stick at the moment. It wants all the existing cash registers in the country thrown out and replaced with new ones.
Not surprisingly, this massive upgrade is not popular. But it is apparently being pushed through in an attempt to prevent cash registers' figures being massaged downwards in use so as to reduce tax.
The Norwegian association of tax auditors said:
'The source code must be opened'
'Without source code it is not possible to determine whether or "hidden" functionality exists or not. Just knowing that the tax authorities have access to the source code of the application, will reduce the effort to implement hidden functionality in the software'
41867775
submission
Qedward writes:
Software developed by the FBI and Ernst & Young has revealed the most common words used in email conversations among employees engaged in corporate fraud.
The software, which was developed using the knowledge gained from real life corporate fraud investigations, pinpoints and tracks common fraud phrases like "cover up", "write off", "failed investment", "off the books", "nobody will find out" and "grey area".
Expressions such as "special fees" and "friendly payments" are most common in bribery cases, while fears of getting caught are shown in phrases such as "no inspection" and "do not volunteer information".
The top fraud words and phrases in email conversations:
Cover up
Write off
Illegal
Failed investment
Nobody will find out
Grey area
They owe it to me
Do not volunteer information
Not ethical
Off the books
39793355
submission
Qedward writes:
A high court judge has ruled that companies do not have a general claim of ownership of the content contained in staff emails.
The decision creates a potential legal minefield for the terms of staff contracts and an administrative nightmare for IT teams running email servers, back up and storage.
The judge ruled businesses do not have an "enforceable proprietary claim" to staff email content unless that content can be considered to be confidential information belonging to a business, unless business copyright applies to the content, or unless the business has a contractual right of ownership over the content.
Ruling in the case involving Fairstar Heavy Transport and its former chief executive, Justice Edwards-Stewart said: "I can find no practical basis for holding that there should be property in the content of an email, even if I thought that it was otherwise open to me to do so.
"To the extent that people require protection against the misuse of information contained in emails, in my judgment satisfactory protection is provided under English law either by the equitable jurisdiction to which I have referred in relation to confidential information (or by contract, where there is one) or, where applicable, the law of copyright.
"There are no compelling practical reasons that support the existence of a proprietary right — indeed, practical considerations militate against it."
Justice Edwards-Stuart added it was "quite impractical and unrealistic" to determine that ownership of the content of emails either belongs exclusively to the creator or the recipient of an email.
