News

Database management

• December 10, 2024 10 Dec'24

  UK police continue to hold millions of custody images unlawfully

  Annual report from the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner of England and Wales highlights the ongoing and unlawful retention millions of custody images of innocent people never charged with a crime by police

• December 10, 2024 10 Dec'24

  DWP ‘fairness analysis’ reveals bias in AI fraud detection system

  Information about people’s age, disability, marital status and nationality influences decisions to investigate benefit claims for fraud, but the Department for Work and Pensions says there are ‘no immediate concerns of unfair treatment’

• December 03, 2024 03 Dec'24

  F1 heightens fan experiences with the power of Salesforce

  Learn how the technical teams behind Formula One are using Salesforce’s tools to enhance fan activation and engagement at 24 races across the world, and how they are bringing AI into play with Agentforce capabilities

• November 29, 2024 29 Nov'24

  Swedish authorities urged to discontinue AI welfare system

  Amnesty International is calling on Sweden’s social insurance agency to immediately discontinue its machine learning-based welfare system, following an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Svenska Dagbladet that found it to be discriminatory

• November 27, 2024 27 Nov'24

  Barings Law plans to sue Microsoft and Google over AI training data

  Microsoft and Google are using people’s personal data without proper consent to train artificial intelligence models, alleges Barings Law, as it prepares to launch a legal challenge against the tech giants

• November 25, 2024 25 Nov'24

  Metropolitan Police officer dismissed for unlawfully accessing Sarah Everard files

  Over 100 Met Police officers and staff have been investigated for accessing sensitive data related to the Sarah Everard case, leading to the dismissal of a Roads and Transport officer who accessed the information while off-duty

• November 22, 2024 22 Nov'24

  IT and business leaders face big gap in understanding of data priorities

  There appears to be a gap between what business leaders want to do with artificial intelligence and the IT capabilities of their organisation

• November 20, 2024 20 Nov'24

  ORG urges ICO to revise public sector enforcement approach

  The Open Rights Group is urging the Information Commissioner’s Office to revise its light touch approach to public sector data protection issues, arguing that its experimental policy of limiting its enforcement actions to reprimands and notices, ...

• November 20, 2024 20 Nov'24

  Post Office project taking control of Horizon data from Fujitsu as part of messy split

  The Post Office will no longer rely on Fujitsu for Horizon data past and present once cloud migration project is complete, in a major uncoupling of the 30-year relationship

• November 18, 2024 18 Nov'24

  Denmark’s AI-powered welfare system fuels mass surveillance

  Research reveals the automated tools used to flag individuals for benefit fraud violate individuals’ privacy and risk discriminating against marginalised groups

• November 14, 2024 14 Nov'24

  MPs hold first ever debate on live facial recognition

  MPs have held an open debate on police use of live facial recognition technology for the first time since it was initially deployed by the Met Police in August 2016

• November 12, 2024 12 Nov'24

  Police cloud project raises data protection concerns despite legal reforms

  Ongoing data protection issues with the use of hyperscale public cloud infrastructure by UK police could complicate the ambitions of nine forces to move their common records management system into the cloud

• November 11, 2024 11 Nov'24

  Fresh concerns over NHS England registries procurement

  Clinicians and technologists behind a number of medical devices registries being brought together by NHS England on a new common platform have accused the health service of flouting public sector procurement regulations

• 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