This live blog is now closed.Tell us: have you been affected by the Microsoft outage?Microsoft struggles to fix huge outage affecting Outlook and TeamsWhat happened and when will it be fixed?There are plenty of essential services that remain unaffected by the outage, which is largely impacting email systems.The Australian Medical Association said it has so far not received any reports that hospitals or clinics are impacted.Impact is largely restricted to the sending and receiving of email.Western Australia, along with jurisdictions around the world, is being impacted by a global Microsoft outage. We are receiving updates from the Commonwealth who are working with Microsoft at the most senior levels to resolve. Microsoft are prioritising life, safety and Government services. Continue reading...
US commerce secretary faces sack as questions emerge over senior Trump officials’ knowledge of alleged Chinese spy’s ties to Jensen HuangUS politics – live updatesThe US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is facing growing pressure over his apparent lack of action over the Nvidia spying scandal as other Trump administration officials publicly raise questions over his decisions.Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, blamed Lutnick’s commerce department for the fact the US had not imposed export restrictions on certain Nvidia chips to China. Continue reading...
Kurt Gödel left 1,009 pages of densely written text – much of it in an obsolete shorthand – which is now said to contain hundreds of proved theoremsThe Austrian logician Kurt Gödel was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. His two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, transformed mathematics and paved the way for the digital age.After his seminal results of the 1930s, Gödel published only a few papers. His unpublished work, however, runs to tens of thousands of pages, and is of great interest to historians of science. Continue reading...
With suppliers focused on ensuring their own product lines are quantum-secure, end-users with diverse estates still can't afford to sleep on quantum security.
As more processes become automated by AI, business leaders are taking greater responsibility for the tech their teams are using, as one head of HR explains
Italian prosecution against mafia group collapses after judge throws out intercept evidence from police hacking of the Sky ECC cryptophone network
Eccentric and overhyped, Tesla’s Cybertruck became a stand-in for Elon Musk during his ascent in the Republican party. It will join the ranks of other vehicles symbolic of their eras – for better or for worseThree days after a historic blue tsunami changed America’s political landscape, Elon Musk announced Tesla would end production of its hulking Cybertruck next year.Was it a coincidence? Maybe. Musk said the move was “to make room for increased Cybercab production”, referring to Tesla’s Robotaxi. But the combined circumstances felt highly appropriate: it was the end of an era. Continue reading...
The Microsoft 365 suite provides everything from office productivity to cyber security tools. Should organisations rethink their Microsoft strategy?
Government-instigated investigation into system will report too late to be included in January miscarriage of justice appeal
The global degradation of service impacting many Microsoft functions means admins may be less able to keep corporate IT security safe
As governments adopt AI, workers are gaining ground in how it’s used and securing safeguards against its harmsIn the shadow of Silicon Valley, workers for the city of Oakland, California, worry the region will deploy AI systems that could increase surveillance and inaccurately evaluate their performance. Pushing for protections to ensure workers won’t be laid off or disciplined by AI, their union overwhelmingly voted on 22 October to authorize a strike, with 94.1% in favor.“We just want the city administration to really be intentional about how it’s engaging with AI products,” said Julian Ware, an Oakland spatial data administrator and member of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21. “Sometimes with a fancy new toy, it actually costs more, it’s more difficult to implement and the results are not as good.” Continue reading...
Embattled Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang has resigned amid a sex scandal involving an alleged Chinese spy
Exclusive: The Guardian revealed 29 hospital trusts were not or hardly using the controversial patient data techNHS England has deleted a claim from its website stating 137 hospital trusts are benefiting from Palantir’s AI health data system after the Guardian revealed 29 of them were not using all or most of the controversial technology.Health bosses had published a list of all the NHS bodies “live” with and “realising benefits” from the AI-powered federated data platform (FDP), a system set up to improve patient outcomes, boost operating theatre efficiency and speed up bed discharges. But after 29 trusts said it was either not live or they were not using any of its applications, the original list of hospitals appears to have been taken down. Continue reading...
It is built of wood, resembles an Ikea and its power is totally renewable. Plus, it was built with the local community in mind. Is this facility in Falun the best datacentre in the world?‘It was pretty cool, when they were building it. It looked like a very large Ikea,” says John Wernvik, of EcoDataCenter. He is giving me a tour of their facility in Falun, Sweden, which could lay claim to being the world’s greenest datacentre – although to many, that is a contradiction in terms.One difference is immediately visible: this datacentre is made out of wood. Huge panels of cross-laminated timber arrived at the site pre-cut, and were assembled by crane according to instructions, like flatpack furniture. Aesthetically, this section of the datacentre is more like an Ikea before the fit-out, a cavernous, echoey, immaculately clean hangar. The wood is not EcoDataCenter’s only claim to sustainability; it is more than just cosmetic, says Wernvik, the company’s chief external relations and sustainability officer. “Compared with a traditional datacentre built with steel and concrete, we lower the embodied carbon of the full structure by three times.” With a complex the size of a football pitch, that is a lot of wood, but, says Wernvik, “the amount of timber one of our datacentres uses takes the Swedish forest about 10 to 15 minutes to grow back”. Continue reading...
We speak to Gartner's Akif Khan about the need for organisations to reassess employee cyber training and agentic AI identity and access management
Inspectors find some officers acted on potential matches from retrospective searches without making enough checksPolice officers risk arresting innocent people, especially from ethnic minorities, if they treat inaccurate facial recognition data as evidence, an official report has found.Although the technology can help fight crime, the report found it is beset by errors and biases, and operators do not always realise they must make further inquiries to verify the data. Continue reading...