News

Database management

• November 07, 2024 07 Nov'24

  Interview: Petra Molnar, author of ‘The walls have eyes’

  Refugee lawyer and author Petra Molnar speaks to Computer Weekly about the extreme violence people on the move face at borders across the world, and how increasingly hostile anti-immigrant politics is being enabled and reinforced by a ‘lucrative ...

• November 06, 2024 06 Nov'24

  Snowflake brings AI to data for Australian businesses

  At the Sydney leg of the Snowflake World Tour, the company showcased how its platform simplifies data management, reduces costs and drives AI adoption for Australian businesses

• October 22, 2024 22 Oct'24

  Dell CTO: Enterprise AI poised to take off in 2025

  After a period of experimentation, the building blocks are in place for wider enterprise adoption of AI, says Dell Technologies’ global CTO, John Roese

• October 21, 2024 21 Oct'24

  Techcombank’s tech investments set to fuel record profit

  The Vietnam bank is targeting $1bn in profit in 2024 while maintaining a flat headcount and reducing physical branches, thanks to its investments in artificial intelligence and a data engine

• October 01, 2024 01 Oct'24

  APAC organisations embrace generative AI

  Study reveals a surge in GenAI adoption across APAC, with businesses looking to train their own models, likely to address specific regional needs and market dynamics

• September 18, 2024 18 Sep'24

  M1 ditches 70% of legacy systems in cloud transformation drive

  Singapore telco M1 is switching off 70% of its legacy systems by the end of 2024 and leveraging Salesforce to offer more personalised services

• September 12, 2024 12 Sep'24

  Data sharing for immigration raids ferments hostility to migrants

  Data sharing between public and private bodies for the purposes of carrying out immigration raids helps to prop up the UK’s hostile environment by instilling an atmosphere of fear and deterring migrants from accessing public services

• September 04, 2024 04 Sep'24

  Retailers question using live facial recognition for shoplifting

  Retailers praise benefits of retrospective over live facial recognition in dealing with shoplifting, but stress there are ongoing concerns around the ethical, legal and safety implications of using the technology in stores

• September 03, 2024 03 Sep'24

  Chief data officers highlight data integrity woes

  In a report from the company co-founded by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, CDOs discuss the challenges of artificial intelligence and using increasing amounts of personal data

• August 21, 2024 21 Aug'24

  QiStor flashes key-value storage software for hardware acceleration

  US-based startup will develop storage software allied with FPGA chips to allow data storage to bypass spinning disk era block addressing to speed performance and cut energy use

• August 14, 2024 14 Aug'24

  Newcastle City Council swaps out Oracle Java for Azul

  Changes to Oracle’s Java licensing meant the council no longer received free security patches

• August 14, 2024 14 Aug'24

  Leeds Teaching Hospitals deploys patient records and data sharing on Azure

  In-house patient records system has been migrated to the Microsoft public cloud, opening up the potential for greater data sharing

• August 13, 2024 13 Aug'24

  Oracle Exadata Exascale: Big architecture shift for small workloads

  Exascale is multitenant architecture for Oracle Database that promises performance equal to dedicated infrastructure and savings compared with existing products, with AI workloads in mind

• July 30, 2024 30 Jul'24

  How India is driving road safety with technology

  Traffic departments, law enforcers and new-tech players are betting on technology tools such as AI-powered drones and mobile apps to improve road safety across India

• July 25, 2024 25 Jul'24

  India bolsters digital agriculture and space tech in Budget 2024

  India will extend its digital public infrastructure to the agriculture sector and set up a venture capital fund for space startups, among other tech initiatives in its latest Budget

• July 12, 2024 12 Jul'24

  AT&T loses ‘nearly all’ phone records in Snowflake breach

  Hackers have stolen records of virtually every call made by AT&T's customers during a six-month period in 2022, after compromising the US telco's Snowflake data environment

• June 25, 2024 25 Jun'24

  TDCX and Supa team up on data labelling

  TDCX has teamed up with data labelling firm Supa to speed up data labelling with up to 98% accuracy using the human-in-the-loop approach

• June 13, 2024 13 Jun'24

  AI’s environmental cost could outweigh sustainability benefits

  Artificial intelligence can help organisations manage and mitigate their environmental impacts in a number of ways, but the highly polluting nature of the technology could outweigh its other sustainability benefits if not dealt with

• June 07, 2024 07 Jun'24

  European data chief prepares bid to get UK to join EU digital single market

  Data initiative Gaia-X is trying to plug the UK into a planned digital European single market, as the EU seeks to extend the reach of vast and controversial data laws over global supply chains

• June 05, 2024 05 Jun'24

  How Dataiku is supporting ‘everyday AI’

  Dataiku president Krish Venkataraman outlines what it takes for enterprises to scale and govern their use of artificial intelligence while making the technology accessible across their business

• May 29, 2024 29 May'24

  Storebrand divests from IBM over supply of biometrics to Israel

  Norwegian asset manager Storebrand’s decision to divest from IBM comes amid growing scrutiny of the role technology companies play in Israel’s human rights abuses

• May 20, 2024 20 May'24

  DataStax launches on-premise GenAI in ‘hyper-converged’ format

  NoSQL database specialist adds generative AI for datacentre deployments where cloud is a no-no for cost, security or compliance reasons, with a focus on vector storage

• May 15, 2024 15 May'24

  Google ups ante in GenAI with Gemini enhancements

  Google has updated Gemini 1.5 Pro with a two-million-token context window and debuted a smaller, lightweight model optimised for high-frequency, specialised tasks

• May 14, 2024 14 May'24

  NetApp upgrades AFF all-flash as it targets AI storage

  New AFF arrays offer performance boost for artificial intelligence, while NetApp trumpets its advantages as a provider of sustainable and intelligent infrastructure for all kinds of workloads

• May 01, 2024 01 May'24

  Google Cloud accelerates asteroid discovery for US-based non-profit

  Google Cloud opens up about the work it is doing with a US-based planetary science non-profit to help map the solar system

• April 16, 2024 16 Apr'24

  CW Innovation Awards: Gleaning data insights with AI

  Hong Kong-based Citic Telecom CPC has built a data platform that leverages large language models to generate insights and speed up data retrieval and analysis

• April 11, 2024 11 Apr'24

  Government dismisses Lords’ concerns over facial recognition

  UK government is claiming police forces’ use of live facial recognition is comprehensively covered by existing laws, in response to a Lords investigation that found police lacked a clear legal basis to deploy it

• April 10, 2024 10 Apr'24

  Google Cloud debuts agent builder to ease GenAI adoption

  Vertex AI Agent Builder is touted to enable developers with different levels of expertise to build conversational AI agents grounded in enterprise data

• April 09, 2024 09 Apr'24

  Google Cloud embeds Gemini across product portfolio

  Google Cloud’s Gemini model will power a slew of AI assistant capabilities across its portfolio to bring the benefits of generative AI to developers and enterprise users

• April 09, 2024 09 Apr'24

  Public worried by police and companies sharing biometric data

  More than half of the British public do not feel comfortable with police forces sharing biometric data with the private sector, including facial recognition images, to tackle crimes such as shoplifting

• April 09, 2024 09 Apr'24

  Government struggles to upgrade legacy IT systems, says PAC chair

  In her annual report, Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier calls legacy IT one of government’s ‘big nasties’ and says money urgently needs to be spent to fix the situation

• March 20, 2024 20 Mar'24

  Oracle Cloud: A discussion about public cloud, dedicated regions and Alloy

  We speak to Oracle cloud chief technical architect Pradeep Vincent about cloud deployment scenarios

• March 20, 2024 20 Mar'24

  How Vast Data is simplifying data infrastructure

  Vast Data CEO Renen Hallak explains how the company’s unified data platform that combines storage, database and compute capabilities into a single technology stack can improve the efficiency of analytics and artificial intelligence workloads

• March 18, 2024 18 Mar'24

  Spring Budget risks funding legally questionable police tech

  Open legal questions around how UK police are using facial recognition and cloud technology could undermine the £230m investment committed in the Spring Budget to “time and money-saving technology” for police

• March 04, 2024 04 Mar'24

  How ANZ organisations can address challenges in AI adoption

  Pure Storage's global CTO Alex McMullan discusses the data and sustainability challenges in artificial intelligence adoption, which can be addressed by centralising datasets and focusing on data quality and management

• February 14, 2024 14 Feb'24

  Met Police to scrap and replace ‘racist’ Gangs Violence Matrix

  A database used by the Metropolitan Police to identify and track people linked with gang violence is being decommissioned and replaced. The decision follows a long-running controversy over its discriminatory impacts on young black people, but ...

• February 09, 2024 09 Feb'24

  Amazon defends facial-recognition tech sale to FBI despite moratorium

  The FBI has confirmed it is using Amazon’s Rekognition image and video analysis software, but Amazon says it is ‘false’ to suggest this violates the company’s self-imposed moratorium on selling facial-recognition technology to US police

• February 06, 2024 06 Feb'24

  UK government responds to AI whitepaper consultation

  The UK government is considering introducing binding legal requirements for companies developing the most powerful AI systems, and has outlined a range of funding to realise the ambitions of its ‘pro-innovation’ framework for artificial intelligence

• January 26, 2024 26 Jan'24

  GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright

  AI firm Anthropic hits out at copyright lawsuit filed by music publishers, claiming the content ingested into its models falls under ‘fair use’ and that any licensing regime would be too complex and costly

• January 15, 2024 15 Jan'24

  British Library catalogues back online after ransomware attack

  The British Library has restored online access to its main catalogue of nearly 40 million items on a limited basis as it continues the long and arduous process of recovering from a ransomware attack

• January 15, 2024 15 Jan'24

  How legal disclosure failures disrupted the Post Office Horizon inquiry

  From overly narrow search terms, overzealous deduplication of documents and failed email migrations, poor management of legal discovery has delayed justice for postmasters in the Horizon inquiry  

• January 12, 2024 12 Jan'24

  UK government seeks public views on impacts of AI-generated porn

  The government’s Pornography Review will look in part at the use of AI throughout the industry to generate sexually explicit content without people’s consent

• December 28, 2023 28 Dec'23

  Top 10 ANZ IT stories of 2023

  We recap the top 10 stories in Australia and New Zealand, including the innovations and challenges that organisations in the region have faced over the past year

• December 27, 2023 27 Dec'23

  Top 10 police technology stories of 2023

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 police technology stories of 2023

• December 15, 2023 15 Dec'23

  Police defend facial recognition target selection to Lords

  Senior police officers confirm to Lords committee that facial recognition watchlist image selection is based on crime categories attached to people’s photos, rather than a context-specific assessment of the threat presented by a given individual

• November 24, 2023 24 Nov'23

  UK police plan national roll-out of facial-recognition phone app

  UK police chiefs plan to expand use of facial-recognition technology through a nationwide roll-out of mobile-based tools and increases in retrospective facial-recognition, but oversight problems persist

• November 23, 2023 23 Nov'23

  DWP to surveil bank accounts of benefit claimants for fraud

  The UK government has outlined how it plans to tackle benefit fraud by giving the Department for Work and Pensions new powers compelling banks to collect and share data on claimants’ bank accounts

• November 16, 2023 16 Nov'23

  Outgoing police tech watchdog warns of declining oversight

  The outgoing biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales discusses police deployment of powerful new surveillance technologies, and the declining state of oversight in this area

• November 16, 2023 16 Nov'23

  Cancer Research UK uses AWS for payments and trial search function

  Charity Cancer Research UK has been using AWS to make its donations platform more scalable, as well as making it easier for patients to find clinical trials

• November 07, 2023 07 Nov'23

  AI Safety Summit review

  Computer Weekly takes stock of the UK government’s AI Safety Summit and the differing perspectives around its success