Virgin Galactic cleared to fly again after a spell on Federal Aviation Administration’s naughty step

The Ministry of Defence has published a data strategy that calls on the British armed forces to make better use of its “enduring strategic asset” – by spying on social media and dobbing in dissenters to local councils.

In a move bound to fuel tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, the MoD’s Data Strategy for Defence document published this week says the military ought to be carrying out “Automated scanning of social media platforms” to detect “change in population sentiment.”

“Decision making is enhanced by local surveillance of groups of interest,” notes the strategy document, adding that spying on irritated citizens’ Facebook rants helps “local authorities” impose “heightened readiness measures”.

Security specialist ESET’s latest Threat Report warns of a massive increase in attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) endpoints – and new activity from the Nobelium gang against European government organisations.

ESET’s figures show attacks on RDP servers having gone up 103.9 per cent since its T1 report in June – it publishes three a year – representing a total of 55 billion detected brute-force attacks, thanks in no small part to a campaign focused on Spanish targets.

“It seemed in T1 2021 that the growth of RDP attack attempts would be slowing down,” ESET security awareness specialist Ondrej Kubovič told The Register.

UK government has awarded contracts for £3.6bn to secure management consultancy services for IT strategy, software spending and hardware investments, among a flood of other advisory categories.

Mammoth accounting and consultancy firm Accenture is one of the big winners in the tendering round, which dates back to 2019, racking up a maximum of £2.6bn in government contracts.

The contract award notice describes nine lots under the Management Consultancy Framework Three (MCF3) deal put together by the Cabinet Office through the Crown Commercial Service, its buying agency that takes a 1 per cent commission on all the money spent via agreements it organises.

Amazon Web Services has made it possible to use its home-baked, Arm-powered Graviton2 CPUs with its Lambda serverless functions.

The server-renter on Wednesday slipped out news that Gravitons are an option alongside its x86 offerings from Intel and AMD.

It will come as no surprise that AWS reckons its own silicon slays on price – the company claims Graviton2 can deliver “up to 19 percent better performance at 20 percent lower cost”.

Sponsored The speed of progress in genomics over recent years has been breathtaking – but it wouldn’t have been possible without advances in storage technology.

Try to print out a human genome and you’ll end up with a tower of A4 paper 300 feet high. Yet while the first human genome took six years to sequence, that same process now takes less than 24 hours, making personalized medicine a reality.

Needless to say, that means a massive amount of processing power, and storage to match. And the tech pros making this happen must tackle the same problems around data movement, management and processing, as any other data manager.

Computer scientists at DeepMind and the University of Exeter in England teamed up with meteorologists from the Met Office to build an AI model capable of predicting whether it will rain up to 90 minutes beforehand.

Traditional forecasting methods rely on solving complex equations that take into account various weather conditions, such as air pressure, moisture, and the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere. The trouble is, at least in Blighty, these systems tend to predict what lies in store for us whole days or weeks ahead.

Deep-learning models are better suited for making more near-term forecasts – such as within the next couple of hours – according to a paper published by the aforementioned boffins in Nature on Wednesday. There are advantages to using AI algorithms; they don’t have to solve thermodynamic equations and are less computationally intensive than other predictive techniques.

China’s authorities have called for internet companies to create a governance system for their algorithms.

A set of guiding opinions on algorithms, issued overnight by nine government agencies, explains that algorithms play a big role in disseminating information online and enabling growth of the digital economy. But the guiding opinions also point out that algorithms employed online can also impact society, and financial markets.

China therefore wants to regulate them to make sure it sees only upside.

Google says it’s still up for making Intel’s latest Ice Lake data-center processors available in its public cloud service.

The chips, officially known as third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, will offer a 30 per cent boost in price-performance terms over the previous generation Xeons in the ad giant’s cloud, Google claimed on Wednesday.

The 10nm chips will be offered in N2 compute engine virtual machines, which can be set up for things like web serving and back-office applications. The closely related N2D VM is offered with rival 7nm AMD second-generation Epyc silicon. The N2 right now uses Intel’s 14nm second-generation Xeon Scalable Processors code-named Cascade Lake.

Entities using the name and iconography of Anonymous (EUTNAIOA) claim to have leaked server disk images extracted from Epik – the controversial US outfit that has provided services to far-right orgs such as the Oath Keepers and Gab, provided a home to social-network-for-internet-outcasts Parler, and hosted hate-hole 8chan.

Epik made a virtue of providing such services. In a blog post defending its decision to operate Gab’s domain name after GoDaddy declined to do so, Epik CEO Rob Monster argued it was a free speech issue, and said deplatforming companies is both censorship and a violation of inalienable rights.

EUTNAIOA earlier leaked 180GB of data it said it siphoned from Epik servers, plenty of it detailing the activities of far-right groups such as The Proud Boys and the ridiculous QAnon mob. This included personally identifiable information, domain ownership records, account credentials and SSH keys, internal Git repos, payment histories, and more.

The US Food and Drug Administration this month authorized the first AI-powered tool designed to help healthcare physicians diagnose prostate cancer.

Paige, a startup spun out of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), a research institution in New York City, was granted approval to officially tout its computer-vision software known as Paige Prostate. This neural network scans images of cells and predicts whether or not they are cancerous for doctors to consider.

“Pathologists examine biopsies of tissue suspected for diseases, such as prostate cancer, every day. Identifying areas of concern on the biopsy image can help pathologists make a diagnosis that informs the appropriate treatment,” said Tim Stenzel, director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

YouTube says it will remove anti-vaccine videos from its service and has already blocked the channels operated by several widely viewed anti-vaccine advocates.

“Vaccines in particular have been a source of fierce debate over the years, despite consistent guidance from health authorities about their effectiveness,” the super-corporation said in a blog post.

“Today, we’re expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.”