Recent Blog Posts

This is contributed post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Max Gilbert in his capacity as software developer at Preston UK based web design agency Blue Wren - a firm that builds ...

As the edge of network disappears, it is time to look for alternative approaches than those such as firewalls. It is time to look at securing data at the point of creation through managing ...

We have read a lot about the issue of women in technology lately, since the publication of a dubious “manifesto” by a male Google employee, postulating that women may be biologically unsuited to a ...

The FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards 2018, partnered with TechUK, is now open for nominations. Everywoman’s eighth annual women in tech event is searching for inspirational people who are ...

It has emerged we may have spent more than the past decade creating complicated, unmemorable passwords and changing them every few months for absolutely no reason. Bill Burr, the author of the ...

If there's one technical expression likely to induce nausea in most industry watchers it is (arguably) digital (or user) experience. Sometime even written as User eXperience (UX), this term is ...

Industry commentators love to talk about why so many of us think we dislike management consultants. Surely hiring a consultant means that, internally, something has failed and a firm needs advice, ...

European telco industry needs to get on the SD WAN bus, and work closely with the auto industry.

Enterprise identity form Okta is staging its annual Oktane user, customer, partner and Okta developer conference in Las Vegas later this August 2017 - hashtag #Oktane17. Okta is an authentication ...

This is contributed post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Max Gilbert in his capacity as software developer at Preston UK based web design agency Blue Wren - a firm that builds ...

With just days before the English Premier League (EPL) kicks off, legions of football fans in Singapore can once again cheer for their favourite teams in pubs and homes across the city-state. The ...

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has established a mission which centres around what it calls 'sustaining and integrating' open source technologies to orchestrate containers as part of ...

Clearly we are going through the phase in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology where rationality and reasoned debate are replaced by science-fiction scaremongering and ...

This is a guest blog post, in which Jody Cleworth, CEO of MTI [Marine Transport International], explains why blockchain is, in his view, good for businesses in the real economy, including the ...

It's Friday (okay  this is the Internet and this is here forever, but it's Friday at the time of writing)... and that means we all wish we could take the day off, work a four-day week (or less ...

This is a guest blog post by Jane Zavalishina, CEO, Yandex Data Factory Well-established enterprises like retailers or manufacturing companies now have an abundance of data at their disposal. ...

UK-based cloud datacentre and comms firm Node4 gets a clean bill of health this month by virtue of its new NHS Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) compliance rating. Developers working on ...

During the conference call on Apple’s third-quarter earnings, CEO Tim Cook touched on the company’s decision to pull out VPN (virtual private network) apps from its China app store. The reason: ...

Previously on Downtime, we saw Mark Zuckerberg rule out AI’s potential for disaster with all the casual oblivion of a scientist in the opening part of a film of that very genre. Elon Musk, as ...

In this guest post Jess Wade from Imperial College London describes her experience at an event designed to encourage millennials to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and maths ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Mat Mathews in his capacity as co-founder and VP of product management at Plexxi -- the firm is a specialist in converged ...

This is a guest blog post by Larry Augustin, CEO, Sugar CRM The way we engage with technology is changing constantly and there’s hardly a day that goes by where we don’t hear about Artifical ...

Embedded analytics firm Jinfonet Software has hit the 14.5 version release of its JReport product. Developer focused from the start, the message to programmers from the J-loving Marylanders behind ...

There's an uprising in the Middle East, but this time it's no Arab Spring... or if it is, it is a new beginning for the software application developers native to the region. The Arabic-speaking ...

As a central bank, industry developer and regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) relies on a broad set of transactional, behavioural and social media data to craft policies and drive ...

The general election has passed by, new ministers are in place, and so the Government Digital Service (GDS) is coming back out of its shell. As it embarks on a new parliamentary cycle, GDS is a ...

Open source languages company ActiveState has hit beta on its commercially supported Ruby distribution. Ruby is an open source interpreted object-oriented programming language designed to be ...

Some surprisingly vapid musings on the future of artificial intelligence (AI), live streamed by Mark Zuckerberg whilst smoking some brisket in his back garden, have been brushed aside by Elon Musk, ...

The UK ICO hardly ever issues fines for data leaks and when it does, the fine involved is rarely anywhere near the maximum it could be.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have been widely embraced as a key means of engineering the mechanics of the new interconnected service-based cloud-centric components-rich software ...

The openSUSE Project has released openSUSE Leap 42.3. With this release we can see that the community version is now more closely aligned with the 'shared core' of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 ...

Data engineering departments and their corresponding software application development shops have got the message regarding the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by now, right? ...

The is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Brian Dawson in his capacity as DevOps evangelist at CloudBees -- CloudBees describes itself as the 'hub' of enterprise ...

Build once, deploy everywhere. We've heard it all before haven't we? Discussion now surfaces on a 'new' type of application. One that is being the progressive web app (or PWA, if you must). So what ...

Ask business leaders to state which industry they feel is being most disrupted by the digital revolution, and they are likely to list sectors such as retail, media, music, movies, entertainment, ...

Over a quarter of Aussies are now ready to use an internet-connected device, like a virtual assistant or connected fridge to make payments on their behalf, according to a new YouGov study ...

Supply chain automation company Sonatype produces what it calls its Software Supply Chain Report every year (now in its third) in an attempt to highlights alleged 'risks' lurking within open source ...

There's on old saying in communications - when you have no news, do a survey. As contrived, manipulated and affected as these things typically are, the Computer Weekly Developer Blog now has ...

An office building in Washington DC has lost its Knightscope K5 security robot after it obliviously face planted into the premises’ water fountain centrepiece. It’s the most ambitious television ...

Not exactly labelled as open source, but free nonetheless... API specialist Postman is offering its Postman 5.0 version with many of its paid Pro-version features now free for limited-quantity ...

The current surge of fake news is driven by the generation of clicks (worthwhile and/or genuine or not) in support of pay-per-click advertising models.

To Shenzhen, China, where tech entrepreneur Zhao Shuping has had cold water poured on his business after his sharing economy start-up Sharing E Umbrella rented 300,000 umbrellas to damp locals, and ...

This is a guest blogpost by Yasmeen Ahmad, director of Think Big Analytics, Teradata. In recent years, the hype of big data has fuelled board and executive level awareness of the value to be gained ...

GitHub is asking for feedback and collaboration from its user community in updating its Terms of Service and other site policies.  The web-based version control and data hosting organisation is ...

Belgium-based research institute IMEC has developed a platform that uses silicon photonics in high-speed optical links to support the growing bandwidth needs of cloud datacentres. According to ...

This is a guest blogpost by Michael Corcoran, Chief Marketing Officer at Information Builders In less than a year the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force, updating and ...

The Alpine Linux distribution is described as 'minimal' and best suited for 'power users'. Originally created by Gentoo, the project is now wholly independent and, as such, it is self-hosting. ...

Organisations need to plan for effective operational intelligence. This may involve the sharing of datasets between different organisations as well as identifying and sourcing external datasets. An ...

This is a guest post written for the Computer Weekly Developer Network by Muyiwa Olu Olu holds the position of software developer (and a 'full stack' developer, at that) for independent car buying ...

We are deluged with regulation, legislation and opinion on data protection and privacy these days, in a digital world where personal data is proliferating almost beyond control. Enterprises are ...

Despite the conjecture spouted about the usefulness of artificial intelligence (AI), what’s been sorely lacking (as far as Downtime is concerned) is that one killer use case that really captures ...

HTTP accelerator company Varnish and Content Delivery Network (CDN) vendor Akamai are teaming up to launch the Akamai Connector for Varnish. Why is this (potentially) interesting? Well, the ...

As IT attack surfaces are extended through the proliferation of IoT devices, organisations need to make sure their security systems are co-ordinated for the challenge. This is especially true for ...

Open source database company MariaDB Corporation has moved to iteration MariaDB TX 2.0. This now available version of the transactional database product has new server-specific MariaDB Server and ...

On July 11th Quocirca will be presenting new analysis of recent fines imposed by the ICO under the UK Data Protection Act. There will also be advice on how to help avoid future penalties from ...

As one of Southeast Asia’s “tiger cub” economies, Thailand has seen tremendous growth in the past three decades. Driven by its export-focused growth strategy, particularly in automobiles, ...

Organisations need to balance innovation and business improvement with good governance and efficient use of IT budgets and resources. But this is not easy. Plenty of people right across the ...

The issues of fake news are not new and democracy has always been a fragile flower, not a vigorous weed.

Oracle is open sourcing some (arguably) tasty container tools for software application development professionals and the operations staff that work with them. The database company has responded to ...

Boys and older trolls are elbowing girls and older women off the Internet, just as they used to elbow them off computers in schools in the 1980s. During the first, and most successful, campaign to ...

A keynote starting at 5:30 pm, are these people insane? No it turns out they're not and Nutanix isn't - this is the way of things these days and you can do a whole afternoon's sessions beforehand ...

I feel a little sorry for Caroline Nokes, announced this week as the latest minister responsible for digital government - the third to take on that mantle in less than a year. She’s clearly a ...

Keen to cement a reputation for its work in the enterprise cloud space, ‘webscale’ hypervisor computing specialist Nutanix has formed a new alliance with Google to build and operate hybrid clouds ...

Enterprise cloud company Nutanix staged its .NEXT 2017 USA conference and exhibition this week in the 'national harbor' (drop the U) area of Washington DC on the fringes of the Maryland-Virginia ...

More than 70 vendors will be involved in the NVMe flash market by 2020 and the market will be worth $57 billion. Meanwhile, nearly 40% of all-flash arrays will be based on NVMe drives by 2020. ...

With a tech-savvy population and a smartphone penetration rate of 150%, Singapore’s adoption of digital payments is abysmal. Cash is still king in the city-state, especially in the heartlands where ...

Anglia Ruskin University invited Ahead in the Clouds along to their recent boot camp to lead a two-way discussion with its Datacentre Leadership and Management students about how to address the ...

Tech ambassador Detective Dot, created by Bright Little Labs, is a member of the Children's Intelligence Agency - but how can the CIA be used as a platform to engage kids with Stem?  I attended a ...

The fear of your children being tracked by pederasts using snapchat Spyware is overtaking "Tory Cuts" as a topic of Parent-Teacher conversation.

Founded in Nuremberg (but now parent-owned by Micro Focus) under the name Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development)... German softwarehause SUSE is keeping the 'systems' ...

As we all know, software and artificial intelligence is going to run the world and make all the decisions on our behalf, probably starting from a week next Tuesday. Downtime has long felt it is our ...

London's InfoSecurity conference and exhibition is now mercifully behind us, for another year. But has the balance between hardware and software centric security provisioning been fully addressed ...

The 2001 prediction of a collapse of confidence in the veracity of anything on-line is now happening and will continue until trustworthy technologies are routinely deployed.

Serverless computing is making a lot of headlines, but it has limitations, drawbacks and provisos. Before any developer team (or indeed, more likely, any DevOps team) considers widespread adoption ...

The tensions over privacy, surveillance, data sharing and civil liability between "ordinary humans" and those promoting big data business models could be used to politicians to take the heat out of ...

This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Pascal Desmarets in his capacity as founder and CEO of Hackolade -- the company's software combines the 'comfort ...

When one is confronted by a criminal or terrorist demanding a ransom in exchange for a loved one who has been held hostage, the general rule of thumb is not to pay up and go to the police. That’s ...

It’s been over a year since US robotics designer David Hanson made Sophia an internet phenomenon with a video in which he accidentally prompts her to agree to destroy all humans. The UK got a ...

Let’s not beat about the bush because we already know that software runs the world – and that this means that every company is now a software company. So resounding is this truth that we must now ...

Software needs to go to the bathroom and make sure it has a clean and open backend. This is the mandate and call to arms now being laid down by open source document-oriented data model database ...

The impact that bad-bots are having on financial services organisations and how they can be mitigated is covered in Quocirca’s latest e-book in its Cyber-Security Threat Series.

MongoDB staged its 2017 user, developer, customer and partner showcase convention in the US city of Chicago this June. Essentially open source at the backbone, MongoDB is a database company built ...

The word ‘investment’ is often put next to IT spending and budgets in order to make the costs sound palatable. Organisations want a ‘return on investment’, many try to measure it and some even ...

In one throwaway line, largely ignored among the wider Brexit comments in his Mansion House speech today (20 June 2017), chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond exposed the true scale of the ...

This is a guest blogpost by Ian Watson, CEO of Altia-ABM. It reflects his experience and judgement. Specialist financial analysis software is now a crucial tool in the investigation and prosecution ...

Inspect-a-Gadget heads to London Tech Week to meet UMA, a conversational AI chatbot for the workplace. “It’s good to talk,” assured Bob Hoskins in the famous ’90s ads. The campaign - credited with ...

The data driven enterprise needs APIs to interconnect its applications and ease-of-use to ensure broad access to data

While British Airways counts the cost of its May bank holiday system outage - £80m and growing so far – much of the datacentre industry has listened to the supposed cause of “human error” and ...

In this guest post Shirley Wood, training and support director at education technology solutions organisation, Jisc, looks at the positive efforts being made to encourage more women into tech While ...

Dries Buytaert is the founder and project lead of Drupal an open source platform for building websites used by 2% of the world's websites with 35,000 active contributors. Buytaert is ...

It is time to take a different view of the politics of left and right. We sinisters (from Leonardo  da Vinci to Bill Gates) have always been in the forefront of change, cutting through the defences ...

Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF). The firm comes in with gold member status confirmed from the start. Cloud Foundry's mantra is ‘ubiquitous and flexible’ cloud computing. ...

Do human resources (HR) software application developers build 'healthy' applications? This is the question. To be clearer - we talk about 'application health' all the time in terms of a piece of ...

Do Human Resources (HR) software application developers build 'healthy' applications? This is the question. To be clearer... we talk about 'application health' all the time in terms of a piece of ...

More countries are rushing to make their cities smarter, by driving the use of technology – though that may not always be fully appreciated by citizens. Take Singapore, one of the poster boys for ...

Among those ever present first world problems is how to keep your phone charged - especially if you are out on the razz. The University of the West of England may have just the answer. It has ...

Digital intelligence company New Relic has added extra functions to its eponymously named Digital Intelligence Platform. The company has brought forward what it calls a so-called Health Map. ...

This is a guest blogpost by Ciaran Dynes, senior vice president of Product, Talend. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a bit like Brexit for some: you secretly hoped the day was never ...

Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary is making a costly mistake by ruling out in-flight Wi-Fi, argues iPass' Patricia Hume. It’s just under a year since the United Nations declared that internet access ...

Open source (and enterprise commercial) software operations company Puppet has rolled out its 2017 'state of DevOps report' resulting from a survey of some 3,200 technical professionals. The ...